The Rockhound's Compass is a digital product: a single PDF of 319 pages containing the thirteen chapters, Bonus 1 (Your County, Not Mine, the eleven-worksheet desktop scouting workbook, with its own cover), Bonus 2 (The Tailgate Checklist, laid out to print black-ink, with the land, permission and heat notices on the reverse), Appendices A, B and C, and an index. It is delivered by email and from a download page immediately after purchase, at $24. No physical product will be shipped.
The Field Card Deck is an optional companion purchase at $9: twelve print-and-laminate cards in a separate print-ready PDF of 19 pages, delivered the same way. The Land Check is a free PDF of 19 pages given in exchange for an email address, and it costs nothing at any point.
Your purchase grants you a personal, non-transferable license to read and print the PDF for your own use, including printing the bonus worksheets and the cards as many times as you like for yourself. You may not resell, redistribute, or publicly share the files.
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 mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com within 60 days from the address you used at checkout and we will refund every cent. No forms, no questions, no hard feelings. You keep the PDF.
The same 60 days apply to The Field Card Deck if you added it at checkout. If the twelve cards do not survive one printing and one trip in your bucket, or if they tell you nothing the book did not, write to the same address and we refund the $9 with the rest. You keep those files too.
This is educational material about recreational rockhounding. It was researched and written with the assistance of AI tools from published sources rather than from anyone's personal field record; every mineralogical constant, regulation and figure in it carries the source it came from and a tag saying how well we could check it — Verified where we read the primary source ourselves, Sourced where we could only reach it second-hand, Contested where the authorities disagree. Appendix C lists every source with the date, and closes with a printed list of what we could not verify at all.
It names no place as somewhere to go and gives no coordinates. A handful of places do appear in it, and only as examples of a kind of deposit, as mapped rock units, or as ground the law treats differently — never with a route, a pull-out or a coordinate. It makes no claim that anyone associated with it has stood on the ground you intend to walk. It teaches a method for reading ground. It does not promise that you will find anything: what is under any particular piece of ground depends on geology, season, water, who got there before you and luck, and no book controls any of that.
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.
This book is general information, not legal advice. Land status, agency rules, state law and mining claims change, and they change without telling you. Nothing here creates a right to collect anywhere. Before you dig or remove anything, confirm the current rule with the office that manages that specific ground — the BLM field office, the ranger district, the state agency, or the landowner. Every regulation cited in this book carries the date we checked it and the reference you need to check it yourself.
You alone are responsible for knowing where you are standing and what the rule is there on the day you are standing there. That includes identifying the agency that manages the surface rather than reading the word on the sign, checking whether an active mining claim covers the ground, staying inside the quantity the managing agency applies — BLM's own published guidance gives 25 pounds per person per day plus one piece, and 250 pounds per year, and the fact that the codified figure sits in the petrified wood rule at 43 CFR 3622.4 rather than in the rock and mineral rule at 43 CFR 8365.1-5 is not a defence anyone has ever won — obtaining the landowner's permission on private land — surface rights and mineral rights are severable in the United States and are frequently held by different parties, so permission to walk the ground is not automatically permission to take minerals out of it — and observing the rules of any tribal land your route crosses, which is sovereign territory with its own law and its own permitting. Collecting rocks, minerals and fossils is prohibited in units of the National Park System, and violations carry criminal penalties.
Rockhounding is a field activity with real hazards, and the book treats them as such: it tells you to work the dump and never enter old workings, to wear eye protection actually rated for impact, and to plan for heat and for having no cell coverage. Those chapters are instructions to read before your first trip, not a substitute for your own judgement. You are responsible for your own safety and for the safety of anyone with you. Mysteries Group LLC is not liable for injuries, losses, fines, citations, prosecutions, property damage or other damages arising from your rockhounding activity or from your use of this material.
Questions about these terms: mysteriesmediallc@gmail.com.