Rockhound Resource

Rockhound Resource – A Rockhound’s Worst Online Resource!
By Currently Rockhounding

This article and video have been a long time coming for me. Over the years I have seen the website rockhoundresource.com grow in popularity, and be shared and promoted as a valuable resource for the general rockhounding community, but the truth couldn’t be further from that when you look into what the site actually is in detail.

Rockhounding Resource is a website that claims to have rockhounding location information for all 50 states. The locations include GPS coordinates and maps with all locations shown.

At its core this is a marketing site that uses inaccurate, outdated, and unverified information about rockhounding locations to get you to visit the website so they can show you ads and do affiliate marketing. More effort has gone into the marketing on the website than the actual content.

In the disclaimer on the site, the site’s author and creator, Mike Rhea, admits that he has not been to any of the locations he tells other people to visit and he doesn’t actually know if you can collect at said locations. Yet, he still lists them on the website as a place to visit.

The disclaimer used on many of his pages.

The disclaimer might have the website creator and author legally covered and protected from liability but it still doesn’t make it morally or ethically correct to put out such blatantly poor information. The website lists locations by GPS coordinates. There is a clear implication of preciseness with GPS coordinates; the coordinates point to an exact location. If this is meant to be “a guide to get you started”, using GPS coordinates provides a false implies accuracy and knowledge where there is none, in the case of this website.

Many times I have also seen just the Google map that he uses shared as a stand alone link, which is separate from his website. This means anyone accessing the map in that way is not being shown the disclaimer.

At the time writing, his Washington state map has over 470,000 views. How many of these viewers acted on this information given here and were mislead by it? Even if it was 0.25% that’s still over 1000 people for this Washington state alone.

In the video below I go in-depth how you can verify property records yourself so that you are never sent some place you shouldn’t go.

Below are all of the locations listed on the Washington map on Rockhound Resource. I checked the property records, of as of November 2022 and the results of private versus public property are listed below. For more information about property records, please watch the video above.

It’s not really as simple as saying what is public and what is private since not all public lands are open to rock collecting but here is the break down of the list below from his website:

Private: 43
Public: 27
Public but NPS governed so rockhounding not allowed: 4
Public but location is in water without access: 4
Both Private & Colville Confederated Tribes: 2
Public but located in the ocean: 1
Public but on the side of I-5: 1
Fee permitted access: 1
Yakima Training Center Military Reservation: 1
Unknown: 1

(The formatting of this table might look compressed on some mobile devices. Switching to landscape mode or a computer will fix it.)

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48.780966, -117.654436
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47.607679, -124.375181
48.139289, -123.133892
48.161209, -123.709422
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48.070646, -124.286030
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48.157809, -124.673123
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Private
Public
NPS governed rockhounding not allowed
Private
Private
Private
Private
Fee permitted access
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Public
Private
Public
Private
Private & Colville Confederated Tribes
Public
Private
Private & Colville Confederated Tribes
Private
Private
Private
Public
Public
Yakima Military Reservation
Private
Private
Private
Private
Public
Public
Public
Unknown
Public but location is in water without access
Public
Private
Private
Public but location is in water without access
Public
Public
Public
Public
Private
Private
Public
Private
Private
Public
Private
Public
Private
Public
Public but location is in water without access
Private
Public but on the side of I-5
Public but location is in water without access
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Private
Public
Public
Public
Public
Public
NPS governed rockhounding not allowed
Private
Public
NPS governed rockhounding not allowed
Public
Public but located in the ocean
NPS governed rockhounding not allowed
Public
Public

I think it’s fair to assume that the same level of accuracy you see on the Washington map exists across all of the other state maps. In the video I go in depth into where many of these locations originated from. There is some information that can be used, but the way that the information is presented is inaccurate, deceitful, and at worst, dangerous.

You really need to go the extra mile to verify anything you read on this website since the majority of it is false or misleading.