2026 Edition · Text current as of 4 August 2026 · Desktop scouting workbook included, no extra cost

You Drove Two Hours. You Came Home With a Bucket of Gravel.

It usually isn't luck, and it usually isn't the site. Nobody ever taught you how to read the ground before you park. Ninety-six numbered field entries that fix that, starting with next Saturday.

No coordinates. No site list. No claim that anybody here has stood on your ground.

The Land Check — the free companion PDF — The Land Check
(free)

The Rockhound's Compass — Find Your Own Ground — The book

The Field Card Deck — twelve print-and-laminate cards — The Field Card Deck
(optional · $9)

The Rockhound's Compass — the complete field system

The book · 13 chapters, 96 numbered field entries, three appendices and a real index — $29
Bonus 1 · Your County, Not Mine — the desktop scouting workbook, 11 worksheets — $9
Bonus 2 · The Tailgate Checklist — print it, keep it in the glovebox — $3

Those three are sections of one 319-page PDF, not three separate files. The prices beside them are what each is worth on its own; you pay once.

$41$24 — everything, one PDF

Yes, add The Field Card Deck — $9 Twelve print-and-laminate cards for the calls you make with wet hands and no signal: the one-minute field key, the heft baselines, the streak table, and the four land questions in the order you have to ask them. Same checkout, same PDF delivery.

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Read the full table of contents before you buy ↓

What This Book Isn't — and Why That's the Product

Three things this book refuses to do. Each one is a decision, not an omission, and each one is the reason it will still be useful in 2030.

It is not a site list.

Every site printed in every guidebook on your shelf sits inside a mapped rock unit. That unit does not stop at the pull-out where somebody could park — it outcrops across far more ground than that, often hundreds of square miles, and nobody has walked all of it. The state geologic map that shows you the rest of it costs nothing. This book teaches you to find the rest.

It is not from someone claiming to have been there.

There is no résumé on this page because there is no résumé to print. Every fact in the book is attributed to a source you can reach for free — the Handbook of Mineralogy, hosted free by the Mineralogical Society of America; the Code of Federal Regulations by section; USGS, BLM, NPS — and Appendix C lists every one of them with the date we checked it, closing with a printed list of what we could not verify.

It does not expire the way a coordinate does.

A pull-out gets posted, claimed, bought or picked clean, and the book that sent you there has no way to tell you. A lava-flow contact does not move. Neither does the fact that agate has no density for a river to sort by.

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Sound Familiar?

You're doing the obvious things right. So why does the bucket keep coming home full of gravel?

The Six-Foot Hole

You dug all day at the site everyone digs — in the hole beside the hole beside the hole — and what was at the bottom had been dropped there by somebody else. It isn't bad luck. It's arithmetic: a site is famous because you can park at it, so everyone works the same twenty yards.

→ Chapter 11 · Picked-Over Ground: Working a Site a Hundred People Have Already Worked

The Coordinate That Was Somebody's Driveway

Two hours out on a published point, and you arrive at a fence, a posted sign, or the wrong half of the state — and the book that put you there is the one you paid for. Guidebook sites have been documented, in the reviews of those guidebooks, as landing on private ground. You have no way to check them, so you stop trusting all of it.

→ Chapter 1 · Six Tests for a Rockhounding Source, and This Book Under All Six · Chapter 12 · Whose Dirt Is This

"Just Find Your Own Stuff"

You asked where, and you got silence, or you got told. It is the most resented sentence in this hobby — and it is, annoyingly, the correct instruction. It is useless only because almost nobody attaches a procedure to it, and a procedure can be written down and handed to a stranger.

→ Chapter 2 · Nobody Has to Hand You Coordinates

Mystery Rocks

There is a bag in the garage with exactly that written on it in marker. You have been picking rocks up for decades and you still cannot name most of them, and nobody ever showed you the words — waxy, greasy, vitreous, conchoidal — as anything other than definitions.

→ Chapter 9 · Reading It Wet · Chapter 10 · Before You Cut It

It Only Shows on the Inside

Every guide identifies agate by its banding. The banding is inside the rock. You are standing in a creek with a wet, dirty cobble in your hand and no way to decide, and nobody is cutting cobbles in half on a gravel bar.

→ Chapter 10 · Before You Cut It — What an Agate Looks Like From the Outside, Still Dirty

Am I Even Allowed to Be Here?

BLM, Forest Service, Wilderness, Monument, Park, state land, somebody's claim, somebody's ranch. The people explaining it online correct each other in the comments, and the ones doing the correcting are not sure either. Mineral trespass is not a parking ticket.

→ Chapter 12 · Whose Dirt Is This — BLM, Forest Service, Park, Monument, State Land, Somebody's Claim, Somebody's Ranch

Learning what agate is takes an afternoon. Learning where to stand is the whole hobby.

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13 Chapters. 96 Numbered Field Entries. 319 Pages.

Every entry has a name as well as a number, because a named procedure is the thing you repeat to somebody at a tailgate. Every chapter opens with what it decides, carries a Different rock, different rules box keyed to what is under your boots, names its own failure mode in a section called How this fails, and closes with Check me — the sources behind it, by name and by the date we checked them.

Chapter 7 — The River Is Not Concentrating Your Agate. It Is Destroying Everything Else.

The physics correction the whole shelf gets wrong. Agate has a specific gravity of about 2.6 — the same as every other pebble in the bar — so the river does not sort it. It destroys everything softer around it instead, which means you read gravel composition, not gravel position, and the productive window sits well downstream of the source. Then the other half: garnet, sapphire, zircon and cassiterite genuinely do sort by density, and for those the crevice-and-inside-bend playbook is exactly right. Two targets, two physics, two search patterns, and you decide which one you are running before you step onto the gravel.

Chapter 12 — Whose Dirt Is This.

Twelve numbered entries, four questions in a fixed order, every rule with its section number and the date we checked it — including the one figure everybody quotes and almost nobody attributes correctly. Utah, Arizona, Texas and Oregon worked as examples of how differently four states behave.

Chapter 9 — Reading It Wet.

Eleven field tests you can settle in under a minute per rock, with a free quartz pebble as the only hardness anchor you can trust at exactly 7 — and the most-printed hardness test in the hobby, which stopped working in 1982 and which you can disprove on a kitchen scale.

A desert gravel bar at low water, the inside bend stripped down to cobbles — Chapter 7 is about which part of this bar is worth your morning — and why it is probably not the part you were taught to work.

1 · Six Tests for a Rockhounding Source, and This Book Under All Six — six named tests you can run on any book, video, app or forum post before it costs you a tank of fuel, and this book put through all six in the same chapter.
2 · Nobody Has to Hand You Coordinates — the six-step desktop procedure that turns one published occurrence into a map of everywhere else that same rock reaches the surface, run entirely on free federal and state data.
3 · What the Rock Needed — Why Agate Sits in the Top of a Lava Flow — which few metres of a lava field are worth your morning, how to pick out the flow contact from a hillside that all looks like the same black rock, and how to read a hole in the rock to tell whether silica ever came through.
4 · Geodes Are Not Thundereggs, and Treating Them the Same Breaks Both — why the one test everybody knows works on one of them and is meaningless on the other, and how to sort a bucket of round rocks by the rock they came out of.
5 · Follow the Schorl Uphill — Pegmatite Pockets, and the Second Address Nobody Checks — the heavy, worthless black rod nobody picks up that tells you a pegmatite is upslope, and the second rock, not a pegmatite at all, that holds the same minerals and that almost nobody walks.
6 · Three Minerals That Tell You What Rock You Are Standing On — garnet as a group rather than a mineral, the three-mineral association that pays for itself, and the mineral that identifies itself by giving two different hardness answers and being right both times.
7 · The River Is Not Concentrating Your Agate — It Is Destroying Everything Else — durability sorting against density sorting, the black sand line as your marker, and the distance window that decides where on the bar you spend the day.
8 · Float, Contacts, and the Line Where the Float Stops — how to turn one loose piece into a direction and one printed boundary into a route, and the single line on a free map worth a whole day of walking.
9 · Reading It Wet — The Field Tests That Work, and the Ones Every Guide Still Prints Wrong — eleven numbered tests, run in an order that eliminates, on a surface that is telling the truth, with an anchor whose hardness you actually know.
10 · Before You Cut It — What an Agate Looks Like From the Outside, Still Dirty — nine named entries for judging a wet, dirty cobble standing up, and a plain account of where each one stops working.
11 · Picked-Over Ground — Working a Site a Hundred People Have Already Worked — five kinds of ground the crowd never touches, one rule about which side of a nodule you strike, one season worth planning around, and an honest test for ground that really is finished.
12 · Whose Dirt Is This — BLM, Forest Service, Park, Monument, State Land, Somebody's Claim, Somebody's Ranch — the four questions in order, a free claim check you run yourself, and the list of ground where the answer stays no.
13 · Getting Out Intact — The Dump Rule, the Two-Ends Day, and the Gear That Is a Waste of Money — one rule that never bends, four habits that cost nothing, and a short list of what not to spend your money on.

Appendix A · The One-Minute Field Key — Chapter 9 compressed to the length you can read with a wet rock in the other hand, in the order the tests are worth running.

Appendix B · Going Out at Sixty-Five, and Going Out Alone — clubs and field trips, what a day actually weighs, how to do the field parts with less crouching, and an honest section for the reader who follows this hobby without being able to get out at all.

Appendix C · Check Me — The Words, the Sources, and the Free Tools — the vocabulary, every source behind every number with the address to go and check it, and the list of what we could not verify.

A real index, built on the words you look up with the stone in your hand — amygdale, cleavage, float, leaverite, MTRS, overburden, patented, rind, streak, thunderegg, vug.

Read the Full Table of Contents

Six Tests for a Rockhounding Source, and This Book Under All Six
Nobody Has to Hand You Coordinates
What the Rock Needed — Why Agate Sits in the Top of a Lava Flow
Geodes Are Not Thundereggs, and Treating Them the Same Breaks Both
Follow the Schorl Uphill — Pegmatite Pockets, and the Second Address Nobody Checks
Three Minerals That Tell You What Rock You Are Standing On
The River Is Not Concentrating Your Agate — It Is Destroying Everything Else
Float, Contacts, and the Line Where the Float Stops
Reading It Wet — The Field Tests That Work, and the Ones Every Guide Still Prints Wrong
Before You Cut It — What an Agate Looks Like From the Outside, Still Dirty
Picked-Over Ground — Working a Site a Hundred People Have Already Worked
Whose Dirt Is This — BLM, Forest Service, Park, Monument, State Land, Somebody's Claim, Somebody's Ranch
Getting Out Intact — The Dump Rule, the Two-Ends Day, and the Gear That Is a Waste of Money

Included in the same file

Bonus 1 · Your County, Not Mine — A Desktop Scouting Workbook
Bonus 2 · The Tailgate Checklist

Back matter

Appendix A · The One-Minute Field Key
Appendix B · Going Out at Sixty-Five, and Going Out Alone
Appendix C · Check Me — The Words, the Sources, and the Free Tools
Index · By chapter and by named entry rather than by page number, so a reprint cannot break it

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Your County, Not Mine — A Desktop Scouting Workbook

The book teaches you to read ground. The workbook is where you do it — on your county, with your map, and the output is your shortlist, not ours.

Eleven worksheets, thirty-seven pages inside the file, with its own cover. You work them at a kitchen table with a pencil before you spend a dollar: what has already been reported here → find the rock unit, which is the whole point → your lithology sheet → everywhere else that unit outcrops → who manages the surface and what that office says → turn your pin into Meridian, Township, Range and Section → is it claimed → can you get to it, and where does water cut it → the phone call, scripted → rank them, then go → the next four counties.

It opens by running the entire method on one real county in public, printing what each free tool actually returned. That county was chosen by arithmetic for having nothing reported in it, we have never set foot in it, and the run ends the way an honest desktop run ends — with questions for an office, not with a place to go.

"There's nothing in my state" is almost always a search problem, not a geology problem.

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Every Number in This Book Has an Address

There is no author photograph on this page and no list of years in the field, because there is nothing honest to put there. What there is instead is this.

Mineral constants come from the Handbook of Mineralogy (Anthony, Bideaux, Bladh & Nichols; the compilation is hosted free by the Mineralogical Society of America) rather than from gemstone websites — and where the popular sites disagree with it, the book prints the discrepancy and explains which number is which.
Regulations are cited by section, with the date each was checked — 43 CFR 8365.1-5, 43 CFR 3622.4, 36 CFR 228.62, 36 CFR 2.1(a)(1)(iv), 30 U.S.C. 611 and 612, 43 CFR Part 49, 16 U.S.C. 470ee. Where the written rule and the agency's own published guidance disagree, you get both positions printed instead of the tidier one.
Every claim that could go either way carries a tag. Verified means we read the primary source ourselves. Sourced means a credible secondary source, named where it appears. Contested means the sources genuinely disagree, and you get both.
Appendix C prints what we could not verify. Not as a disclaimer — as a list. The Oregon sunstone poundage limit we could not confirm, so no weight limit is printed. The federal stream-gauge workflow we could not verify to the standard of the rest of the book, so the river chapter gives you the season criterion without a look-up procedure. Tribal permitting: the principle only, because we will not improvise a process. Those gaps stayed gaps instead of becoming confident sentences.

The edition carries its revision date on the cover — 4 August 2026 — and when the rules move, the edition moves. We would rather be caught than trusted.

An old mine dump below a collapsed adit on a forested slope — Chapter 13 has one rule that never bends: work the dump, never enter the workings.

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Questions People Ask Before They Buy

Is this a physical book? What exactly do I get?

One PDF, 319 pages, delivered to your email immediately after checkout. That single file contains the book, the 11-worksheet scouting workbook with its own cover, the printable tailgate checklist, three appendices and a real index. Three named pieces, one file in your inbox — we would rather say that plainly here than have you count the attachments and wonder. If you add the Field Card Deck at checkout, it arrives as a second file in the same email: twelve cards, nineteen pages.

Does it tell me where to go?

No, and that is the point rather than a gap. It teaches you to work out where to go, in your own county, from free public maps and free federal data. Every published coordinate you can buy today is already being driven to by everyone else who bought that book, and some of those coordinates land on private property. The ground you work out for yourself is not on anybody's list.

I already watch rockhounding videos every week. What does a book add?

Keep watching — that is where you see the thing, and seeing it is the part a page cannot do for you. What a video cannot do is stand at your tailgate, in your county, on a Tuesday night, while you work out whether that outcrop is worth a tank of fuel and whether you are allowed to pick anything up when you get there. That is a procedure you run, not a thing you watch. And Chapter 1 gives you six named tests for judging any source in this hobby — a book, a video, an app, a forum post — with this book run through all six in the same chapter, so you can grade us with the same tool.

I have been rockhounding for thirty years. Is there anything here for me?

Three things you can check before you decide. What a river actually does to agate, as opposed to what placer logic borrowed from gold prospecting says it does. Where the 25-pounds-a-day figure is really codified, and why that matters. And why the penny test stopped working in 1982, which you can settle on a kitchen scale. If all three are already familiar to you, ask for the refund and keep the file.

Does it work in my state?

It is built on rock types rather than on places, so it works wherever those rocks are, which is everywhere. The legal chapter covers the federal agencies in full and then works Utah, Arizona, Texas and Oregon as examples of how incompatible four state regimes can be — one sells a permit with poundage limits, its neighbour offers no collecting permit at all, and you can cross between them on a county road without seeing a sign.

Is it about identifying specimens or valuing them?

This book does not value specimens and does not tell you what anything is worth. It is about finding material and identifying it in the field. Where it talks about quality, it means translucency, pattern, integrity and size — not price. If you want a valuation, take the specimen to a qualified appraiser.

What do I actually need to buy to use it?

Less than you think, and the book says so before it recommends anything. The most useful hardness reference in it is a quartz pebble, which is free and is exactly 7. Chapter 13 closes with a list of five things not to spend your money on, including one popular light that is a different product from the one people think they are buying.

Who wrote it, and won't the rules go out of date?

The Rockhound's Compass is written from published sources rather than from anyone's personal field record, with AI assistance, and every source is named in Appendix C along with what we could not verify. That is the whole claim, and it is the reason the book names no site it has not been to. As for going stale: the geology will not. The legal chapter carries the date it was checked and the section number for every rule, so you can re-check any of it in a minute, and the edition is dated on the cover so you always know what you are holding.

What if it isn't for me?

The Own Ground Guarantee. Read the book. Run the workbook on your own county. If you can't stand at your tailgate and say why this ground and not that ground — and whether you're allowed to pick anything up — email us within 60 days at the address on your receipt and we'll refund every cent. No forms, no questions, no hard feelings. You keep the PDF.

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The Land Check

Four questions that tell you whether you can legally pick it up — and how to answer all four in twenty minutes, for free.

Who manages that surface. Whether an active mining claim sits on it. What that specific unit's own rule says. And what the state says, because state land is not federal land and the federal rules do not apply to it.

Nineteen pages, step by step at the kitchen table, with the free federal tools named by the task rather than by the button — because agencies redesign viewers faster than they change regulations — and the Step 0 skill that makes the claim search work, turning a pin on a map into Meridian, Township, Range and Section, which is what the search actually eats. Every regulation in it carries the date it was checked and the reference you need to check it yourself.

It will not tell you where to go. It tells you whether you are allowed to be there, which is the question nobody in this hobby answers for free.

No cost, no card. One email with the PDF, then three short ones over the following nine days — the ground people actually dig, one entry from the book you can check on a kitchen scale, and a plain account of who the book is not for. Unsubscribe in one click.

You Drove Two Hours. You Came Home With a Bucket of Gravel.

What This Book Isn't — and Why That's the Product

It is not a site list.

It is not from someone claiming to have been there.

It does not expire the way a coordinate does.

Sound Familiar?

The Six-Foot Hole

The Coordinate That Was Somebody's Driveway

"Just Find Your Own Stuff"

Mystery Rocks

It Only Shows on the Inside

Am I Even Allowed to Be Here?

13 Chapters. 96 Numbered Field Entries. 319 Pages.

Chapter 7 — The River Is Not Concentrating Your Agate. It Is Destroying Everything Else.

Chapter 12 — Whose Dirt Is This.

Chapter 9 — Reading It Wet.

Included in the same file

Back matter

Your County, Not Mine — A Desktop Scouting Workbook

The Tailgate Checklist

Three Pieces. One File. One Price.

Every Number in This Book Has an Address

Questions People Ask Before They Buy

Is this a physical book? What exactly do I get?

Does it tell me where to go?

I already watch rockhounding videos every week. What does a book add?

I have been rockhounding for thirty years. Is there anything here for me?

Does it work in my state?

Is it about identifying specimens or valuing them?

What do I actually need to buy to use it?

Who wrote it, and won't the rules go out of date?

What if it isn't for me?

Stop Driving to Somebody Else's Coordinates.

The Land Check

The Rockhound's Compass	13 chapters · 96 numbered field entries · three appendices and a real index	$29
Your County, Not Mine	The desktop scouting workbook · its own cover · 11 worksheets, thirty-seven pages · your county, your shortlist	$9
The Tailgate Checklist	Print it black-ink and fold it into the glovebox · the pre-drive and pre-dig sequence, ending in the go / no-go line, with the notices on the reverse	$3
Total		$41
Today		$24 — everything, one PDF