In Arizona, the question isn't whether rockhounding is legal. It's who owns the ground under your feet, and in Arizona that changes every few miles. Less than a fifth of the state is private land. The rest is split between federal agencies, more than 9 million acres of State Trust Land, and the lands of 22 federally recognized tribes. Each owner has its own answer, and they range from "take 25 pounds a day, no permit" to "a class 2 misdemeanor for pocketing one pebble."
The open ground is Bureau of Land Management land, and there's a lot of it. BLM Arizona publishes its own definition of the "reasonable amount" the federal rule allows: 25 pounds a day and 250 pounds a year per person. That's why the Quartzsite desert, the Black Hills Rockhound Area near Safford, Alamo Lake and the Vulture Mine district near Wickenburg are the state's classic collecting grounds. The national forests allow collecting too, but with a lower daily amount, as the Lynx Creek page explains. And at Petrified Forest National Park, the state's most famous rock locality, you can't take anything at all. That's the national park rule explained in our 36 CFR 2.1 guide. The federal framework behind all of this is covered in our BLM personal-use collecting guide.
