Stilbites plus a really pretty pet wood!
Ethics in rockhounding is more than just picking up litter, not making rockstacks and filling in your holes. Petrified wood is free to collect from BLM land in my state, but cannot be collected for sale or trade and has a yearly limit of 250 lbs per person. Stilbite crystals like these are common, and are also free to collect, but cannot be sold without a claim. Both these things are marketable, worth money. I could profit off this.
I could sell them and no one would ever know I was, in essence, stealing rock from my state unless I told them. No one knows where I go, is watching over my shoulder, is mapping my routes behind me to make sure I'm being honest about what I find and where. Even the landowner I work for wouldn't know what I found in their land unless I told them. And while material provenance is a really big deal, no one in lapidary hobby or crystal collecting asks to see proof of legality.
Ethics in rockhounding is also self-policing my own behavior with rock and crystal. It's me returning profits from private-land material to the landowner, under our current arrangement, and is me spending several hundred dollars to set up a legal small mining claim with my county and state before I sell public-land material. I am not getting into anyone else's business about where they get their rock and what they do with it, but I'm doing everything in my power to play by my state's rules for my business, even when no one would ever know. Profiting off a public resource without the proper permitting and paying my dues would be theft, and a form of capitalism at its absolute worst.
I still haven't decided if I'm going to claim the stilbite. I may or may not look into that for next year, depending on how much material is there and if I think I can break even! We'll see.
