Metal Detecting in California

1. The rule, in full

California – 14 CCR 4307 / 4326, and per-unit superintendent orders

California has no single statewide metal detector ban, and that is now established from the regulations rather than inferred: "detector" occurs zero times across 14 CCR 4302 to 4331, the range that contains every resource and conduct section of the state park system rules. So do "detecting" and "geophysical". Three layers, and the third is what makes the second bite.

Read from the Office of Administrative Law's answer to a records request, 8 Oct 2026: a PDF of 14 CCR 4307 and 4326 as printed, covering CCR pages 14:3-2 to 14:3-5, Register 2022 No. 41 (10-14-2022). See the transcription caveat below, which matters when checking these quotations.

1. Resource protection, applying across the state park system. Three sections, and this entry previously mislabelled one of them.

14 CCR 4307, "Geological Features": "(a) No person shall destroy, disturb, mutilate, or remove earth, sand, gravel, oil, minerals, rocks, paleontological features, or features of caves. (b) Rockhounding may be permitted as defined in Section 4301(v)."

14 CCR 4308, "Archaeological Features": "No person shall remove, injure, disfigure, deface, or destroy any object of archaeological, or historical interest or value."

14 CCR 4309, "Special Permits": "The Department may grant a permit to remove, treat, disturb, or destroy plants or animals or geological, historical, archaeological or paleontological materials; and any person who has been properly granted such a permit shall to that extent not be liable for prosecution for violation of the foregoing."

Correction, 8 Oct 2026. This entry described 4326 as "disturbing or removing archaeological or historic features". That is 4308. 4326 is something else and something more useful:

14 CCR 4326, "Violation of Posted Orders or Special Use, Special Event, Film or Collection Permit": "No person shall (a) violate any provision of an order posted pursuant to the provisions of section 4301(i) hereof including, but not limited to, prohibited areas, use periods, no alcoholic beverage areas, no smoking areas and no parking areas, where posted in accordance with 4301(q), or, (b) violate any provision or restriction of a Special Use, Special Event, Film or Collection permit issued pursuant to these regulations."

So 4326 is the enforcement hook for layer 2, not a resource provision at all. It is what turns a superintendent's posted order into an offence. The two-layer structure this entry already described was right; the bridge between the layers was missing, and 4326 is it. 4307 covers the digging; 4308 covers taking an object of historical interest; 4309 is the permit route; 4326 makes a posted detector ban enforceable.

Not read: 4301(i), (q) and (v), which 4307(b) and 4326(a) depend on for the posting mechanism and the rockhounding definition. OAL sent the two sections asked for. Recorded as unread rather than summarised.

2. Per-unit superintendent orders prohibiting detectors outright in named units. Example, Order No. 690-039-2023, Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park:

"No person shall possess a metal detector or other geophysical discovery device, or use a metal detector or other geophysical discovery techniques to locate or recover subsurface objects or features within Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park."

Exempt when transporting but not using the device in a vehicle on a public road. Authority cited: Public Resources Code 5003 and 5008, and 14 CCR 4301(i), 4307, 4308 and 4326.

Determination: California State Park System units only. Does NOT reach municipal parks.

Consequence for the directory: California cannot carry a single state-land answer. The state entry must say the rule is per-unit, because a reader told "allowed in designated areas" would be wrong at Marshall Gold, Folsom Lake and Auburn SRA, where possession alone is prohibited.

Transcription caveat: these quotations came from an OCR

The PDF supplied by OAL is a scan with no text layer – three pages, two extractable characters. The text above was recovered by optical character recognition at 400 dpi, with the two-column page split into columns first because a single-column pass interleaved the sections and produced nonsense.

So a reader comparing our wording against the printed Thomson Reuters volume is comparing against an OCR, not against a transcription from the document. The section numbers, headings and structure are legible and confident. Short function words and punctuation are the parts OCR degrades first. If a word here matters to a decision, check the printed volume.

This is recorded on the page rather than only in working notes because the project's premise is verbatim quotation, and a quotation whose provenance is OCR is a different kind of claim from one parsed out of a text PDF.

California has no official free electronic publication of its regulations

The Office of Administrative Law answered all four questions put to it, and the answer is worse than this project assumed.

• The official publication of the California Code of Regulations is the hard copy published by Thomson Reuters.
• The online CCR is hosted by Westlaw. There is no bulk download and no free access provision.
• OAL's position is that the online content "should mirror" the hard copy. That last word is the one to notice. "Should mirror" is not "is identical to", and OAL does not undertake that it is. This is a stronger case than New Jersey's. New Jersey's position is that its freely available online code is unofficial – a variant where a free text exists and carries a disclaimer. California's is that the official version is paper, and the only electronic version is a commercial host's. There is no free official electronic text of California's regulations to read, which means rule 11's standard – the current consolidated code – cannot be met for California by any route this project can take without buying the volume. Recorded in METHODOLOGY under rule 11 as variant B, the sharpest instance. Sources: Office of Administrative Law, answer to a records request, 8 Oct 2026, supplying 14 CCR 4307 and 4326 as printed (Register 2022 No. 41, 10-14-2022) and confirming the publication position above; parks.ca.gov superintendent order 690-039-2023. Previously checked 19 Sep 2026.

2. Cities in California that publish a rule

1 city in California publishes a rule we can quote, out of 375 checked.

Of the 375 checked, 199 had pages on the city’s own site that we found and read. For the other 176 we could not locate a municipal source, so nothing is claimed about them either way.

3. County rules

County rules exist in California, and they govern county land only. 12 county rules surfaced while checking cities in this state. Each was read and then set aside, because a county park rule does not answer whether a city park allows detecting, and it is not the state rule either. They are listed because their existence is the useful fact: if you are in a county park, a separate rule probably applies to you.

0 of these 12 name their county in the text that was read; the rest name only “county park” or “county parks”, so the source is given instead of a county name. A county is never inferred from a web address.

4. Cities checked - no published rule

374 cities in California were checked and have no published rule on this page. Of those, 362 returned no rule, and 12 did return something that has not been published – mostly rules that turned out to govern county land, which are in the county section above. A city here is not a city where detecting is allowed. It is a city whose own published material did not answer the question.

All 374 were checked on 13 September 2026, in one sweep, so that date applies to every row. 4 have no municipal site recorded and are shown without a link rather than dropped, because dropping them would understate what was checked.

5. Land this page does not cover

This page answers for California state land, and for city and county land where the state rule reaches it. Several other kinds of ground are not covered here, and naming them is more honest than letting a reader assume the page is complete.

Tribal land. This directory does not cover it, and will not.

There are 574 federally recognised tribal nations. Each is a sovereign jurisdiction with its own law, its own permitting, its own enforcement and its own cultural-resource provisions, and none of them is answered by a state's code or by any federal rule quoted on these pages. A one-line instruction to "get tribal permission" would be worse than this paragraph, because it implies one process and one authority where there are 574. If you are on or near tribal land, the governing law is that nation's, and the place to ask is that nation's own offices. Nothing on this page applies there.

BLM land is covered, partly, in its own place. The Bureau of Land Management holds about 245 million acres and the federal rule names metal detectors and permits them, which is the opposite of the national park rule. See BLM land: the detector is named, and permitted. That page covers the base regulation; it does not yet cover the supplementary rules individual BLM State Directors issue for particular field offices.

Named and not examined. These are recorded so their absence is visible rather than silent. No claim is made about any of them:

• Military withdrawn land, including ranges and training areas.
• Bureau of Reclamation land, which surrounds a great many reservoirs.
• Water district and irrigation district land.
• Wilderness, Wilderness Study Areas and National Conservation Areas, which carry designations of their own. And one general point about signs. The commonest piece of reasoning in this subject is "there was no sign, so it was allowed." Arizona's State Land Department answers it in writing, in condition 2 of its own Recreational Permit terms:

"You will comply with all laws, rules, regulations and ordinances. Posting is not required for these provisions to be enforceable."

That is Arizona's sentence about Arizona's provisions and this directory does not present it as the law of any other state. But the proposition it states is the one to carry: nothing read for this project makes a published rule's enforceability depend on a sign at the boundary. Where posting does matter, a specific provision says so, and that provision is quoted on the page where it occurs.