How To Actually Find Your Own Rockhounding Location

welcome back to the icebox everybody we are having a very chilly morning out here in the shop so i wanted to uh share with you a video that i actually made a while ago for the members portion of the channel you know a thing that you often hear repeated by people is find your own rock hounding spot but they don't actually ever really tell you how how exactly can you go about doing that it's just uh almost like a auto response from these people um so i wanted to share with you a tool that you can use um it does cost some money but it's a tool that you can use to get started today in your local area for finding interesting places to possibly go rock hound at um stuff that's not going to be in a lot of books on and on um so uh you know like i said uh this was originally made for the members portion of the page so um you know if you uh like this kind of content uh consider joining the channel um you know we're doing a lot of more in-depth uh videos there stuff where we really dig deep into subjects on like you're gonna find anywhere else so uh with that said um you know i appreciate it uh enjoy enjoy the video in today's video i wanted to share with you an important resource that i use for finding my own rock hounding spots you know that's something you always hear go find your own spots but nobody really tells you much as far as how so what you're looking at right here is gaia gps and i'm going to be talking about their premium service so i pay 40 a year for this now this is something that you can use on your desktop computer for doing research on rockhounding spots and then sync that with your phone so that you have these maps out in the field so what you're looking at here is wyoming and well yeah mostly wyoming you can see right down here in uh the bottom right ish part of your screen there is a cheyenne and on and on so you have a lot of different useful layers and databases that you can access through their premium service so for example right here in the granite mountains you can see these little like uh little crosses of picks these are mines and it's just that easy to click on it and as you can see here uh it has the one that we happen to click on is uranium and then you know it'll also have other information as well let's find a different one here and uh okay so the goat mountain area um the commodity was iron it was a surface operation as opposed to an underground operation and then you can see here though you have other materials that are found there so let's uh let's pick some of these we can how about this goat mountain area let's just zoom in on this and i'll show you something so i have a couple of layers turned on here that are really important now if you want to go explore some of these different mines you're going to want some of this information it's certainly slow to uh populate here i don't exactly have the fastest internet but as you can see here we're starting to see uh private and public lands borders pop up on here and you can just see the number of mines that you could potentially explore and well you can see here the roads as well now this is really important you do not want to be getting onto private property when you're exploring these mines and you can literally just click some of these and see what is out there now generally as you can see as i click around an area is going to be mostly one commodity like right here these are a lot of different uranium mines now of course if you're looking for a specific type of rock or mineral knowing where those occur and what they occur with example magnesium and serpentonite go hand in hand and this is something we could be talking about in future videos as well but as we uh start to scroll around here you can see that oh this lazy yk ranch as an example i can click on this and i can actually get all of their information as you can see on the left hand side of the screen so let's say there is a place that you wanted to go rock counting or some land that you wanted to explore how do you go about finding who owns that i mean yeah you can go to public records um use some of those county websites but this is so much easier you could write these people a letter and be like can i come metal detect on your property can i come look at the rocks on your property things things like that um and you know as you start to zoom around here you can see like this is all this yellow here this is all blm right there uh we have the wyoming state of wyoming owns that little parcel right there an extremely useful tool we have lots of really useful layers in here you can see right now i have private land public lands mine's mineral resources turned on and then the gaia topo some of the other ones that you're going to find to be really useful especially if you live in the western u.s is going to be the snow map we're going to zoom out here and i'll show you so you can start to see now where you have snow on the ground which is also a really critical tool if you want to go rock counting to know what is going to be covered up what's going to be frozen ground so that's an important one that you get to have access to you also have the bedrock layer so now we're going to be layering over our map a stratigraphic guide so all of these different colors are going to be a different type of rock that is going to be on the surface so depending on where you're at you know you can just click click around and see what you have what you would be standing on top of you can do an amazing amount of research about a rock hounding location or just places in general that you might want to go check out with with this tool i absolutely recommend it it's far superior to some of the other apps that are out there such as onyx onyx you have to buy the app state by state or nationwide this is forty dollars a year so it's a screaming good deal in my opinion and i absolutely recommend it you can download maps offline to your phone you can see air quality you can see cellular phone coverage like for me uh i'm a verizon customer so what's populating now over the top of this now some of these layers they don't always interact well but you can see here now i can see where i would have verizon light coverage it's it's a pretty pretty handy handy tool here and you can change the opacity of these layers you can change how they're stacking so i can just click to turn them off i can be like i don't like how that bedrock looks so i can lower the overlay and you can really start to stack toppo and satellite extremely useful tool well i think this has started to drag on just a little bit oh um one more thing that i wanted to show you okay so when you click um these little mine things you'll see an information link and we'll pop this open right here we'll open this up in a new tab and this will be the usgs data on it you can then continue your research through the deposit ids that it gives you this is going to tell you all kinds of useful information about that mine i hope you found this to be a useful video and good luck with your accounting and feel free to reach out if you ever need a hand with anything thanks you

Channel: Currently Rockhounding

Views: 12,120

Rating: 4.98 out of 5

Keywords: Rockhounding, CurrentlyRockhounding, NW Rockhounding, Northwest Rockhounding, Rockhounding The West, Rockhound, Geology, How to Rockhound, How to find Rockhounding Locations, Gaia GPS, Rock Hunting, Rockhounding Location, Where to Rockhound

Id: bBB4vvMj3Co

Length: 9min 9sec (549 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 16 2020