Rachel Mower

Rachel came to rockhounding through geology. She had taken a couple of community college courses, started recognising minerals in road cuts on long drives, and eventually made her first trip out to the Quartzsite area on a long weekend. She knew, vaguely, that BLM land was open to casual collecting. What she didn't understand yet was that "BLM land" in an area like Quartzsite is not a single homogeneous open space — it's a patchwork of open ground, active mining claims, placer claims, and lode claims that all look identical from the road.

On that first trip she collected a few pounds of material from a wash, drove back to the staging area, and another collector told her she had been in a claimed area. Technically that made what she had collected unpermitted. She walked back and put it down.

After that she spent a long time learning how the federal claim system works — how to look up claims in BLM's Mineral & Land Records System (MLRS, which replaced the old LR2000 database), how to identify the claim boundaries using the township and range system and PLSS data, and what the actual federal casual-use allowance covers (43 CFR § 8365.1-5 allows "reasonable amounts" for personal use on genuinely open BLM land, with the actual figure set by each BLM state office, and it does not apply to claimed ground at all).

She now researches specific rockhounding locations by starting with the MLRS claim layer, identifying which parcels are claim-free, checking the applicable land-use plan for any special restrictions, and then looking at access. She contributes guides here for locations she has personally verified through that process.

The Southwest is her main area, but she has also worked on sites in the Pacific Northwest and Montana.