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 rockhounding 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 rockhound 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this was originally made for the members portion of the page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 unlike 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 rockhounding 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 uh 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 serpentinite 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 rockhounding 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, mines/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 US, 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 rockhounding.
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 rockhounding locations
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 onX. onX you have to buy the app state by state or nationwide.
This is 40 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 topo 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 rockhounding and feel free to reach out if you ever need a hand with anything.
Thanks.