Three grids, and an assessor who is allowed to rewrite your description. Here is what the legal description on your deed, lease or division order is actually telling you, and where to check it for free.
Colorado uses plss on three meridians, plus land grants in the south. Three grids, and an assessor who is allowed to rewrite your description.
A principal meridian and its base line are the origin of a rectangular survey. Township and range numbers count outward from that origin, which means the same township and range numbers repeat under every meridian. The meridian is the part of the description that says which grid you are on.
Ute Meridian townships were run by the Three Mile Method, designed in 1880 to produce 40 acre tracts quickly for the Uncompahgre Utes. Surveyors ran three extra east to west lines per section and set all sixteenth corners along the section perimeter. When a lost corner is being re-established there, the rule is single proportion from the nearest found corners east and west within the section, not north and south. That is a real documented departure from ordinary PLSS retracement.
Large grants exist in several southern Colorado counties, the Sangre de Cristo being the best known. The Colorado Assessors' Reference Library states these are described today by metes and bounds, with subdivisions inside them described either by metes and bounds or by rectangular survey. Worth noting that the Reference Library calls nearly all of them Spanish land grants as a naming convention, while the Sangre de Cristo grant was itself made in the Mexican era.
Colorado is the one state on our list where an assessor may lawfully rewrite a legal description into condensed form. Statute lets the assessor identify property by section, or part of a section, township and range, and a condensed description drops words while keeping the principal meridian, township, range, section and acreage. So the tax record and the deed record can describe the same parcel in visibly different language. Do not treat that mismatch as a title defect before you have read the deed.
Deeds are with the county Clerk and Recorders. Colorado has no free statewide deed portal.
What it covers, how many net mineral acres it actually is, and whether anything is producing on it. Free, no obligation, and the answer does not change if you never sell anything to us. We do this every day and it usually takes us an hour.
Ask a Landman Get a Free ValuationCompiled from BLM, state land offices, state archives and statute, current as of 2026-08. Berlin Royalties is a mineral buyer and a landman shop in Tulsa, not a law firm or a licensed surveyor. Nothing here is a boundary opinion, and a description that matters to a transaction should be run by a title attorney or a licensed surveyor in the state where the land sits.