Sooo close to my claim but not close enough. so either need more claims or to wait for them to come closer. That being said I have tried to load the images/files into google earth and Qgis and cant figure it out.. maybe need more coffee.

Yep, I've played around with the LiDAR data. There are a variety of products there, and the gov't is slowly adding more data and processing existing datasets into products. The products need to be loaded into a GIS (like QGIS or ArcGIS). They can be processed in QGIS using a toolbox set called LAStools. It's pretty technical, I haven't gotten super far with the raw data. Would love to see a good tutorial thread or set of how-to links if anyone out there is processing this data using Q!