Mineral sites · Claims · Terrain
Every recorded mineral site in America — and who owns the rocks on it.
You have driven three hours to a pin that turned out to be a gravel pit, a cornfield, or someone’s active claim. Paydirt is the map that tells you before you go, and it works with no signal.
164,738 curated sites 579,528 live claims 58,326 anomalies 0 gravel pits
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Built for the drive out
Six layers answering the questions that decide whether a trip is worth taking — all of them bundled on the phone, none of them behind a login.
Thirty percent of the federal mineral database is sand, gravel and crushed stone. Those 91,143 records were deleted before a line of app code existed, along with the duplicates the USGS left behind when it merged its legacy archives.
What remains is what you would actually drive to — filterable by material, searchable by name, and stored on the phone, so a dead bar of signal changes nothing.
A mining claim usually does not close the ground to entry. You can be standing somewhere perfectly legal and be stealing the moment you pick something up — and claim holders do prosecute.
Paydirt asks the BLM live where you are standing, and carries a bundled join of 579,528 active and 79,957 closed claims against every site. Nineteen percent of them sit inside a live claim. Lapsed ground gets flagged too: somebody paid to hold those minerals once.
Everyone ships public-versus-private. Nobody ships what you are allowed to do there. Press and hold any ground and Paydirt names the managing agency and quotes its published limits — the BLM ceiling of twenty-five pounds a day plus one piece, the outright National Park prohibition, the separate regime that governs metal detecting.
Reported as a sourced observation with the date it was checked, never as permission.
Hillshade is computed on the phone from elevation tiles, so the light is a control rather than a picture. The dial is radial: the ring is the horizon, the handle is the sun, and the radius is its altitude.
Terrain re-shades in about twenty milliseconds a pass on an A18 — roughly fifty updates a second under your thumb. Benches, tailings, old roadbeds and drainages surface as the light rakes across them.
Historic USGS topographic sheets, fetched by quadrangle with a year picker running oldest first, cropped to their own neatline and draped over the live map.
They carry shafts, adits, tramways and settlements that a modern basemap has long since dropped — which is exactly where the ground worth walking tends to be.
Ore bodies leak. Mobile elements disperse into stream sediment in a halo far wider than the deposit, so prospectors hunt the halo and walk toward the source.
Paydirt carries 58,326 anomalous samples across twelve pathfinder elements — arsenic, antimony, mercury, bismuth, tellurium, molybdenum and more — each judged against its own quadrangle rather than the whole country, because a national threshold just draws you a map of laboratories.
Also in the box
Straight answers
The app says all of this to your face, so the website should too.
Paydirt runs on iPhone and iPad, works offline, and asks for nothing before you use it.