Metal Detecting in Wyoming

1. The rule, in full

Wyoming – Chapter 1, Section 14(c), State Parks and Historic Sites rules

Read from the rule document served by the Wyoming Secretary of State's administrative rules system, rules.wyo.gov, State Parks & Cultural Resources Department, program "State Parks & Historic Sites", Chapter 1 "Rules and Regulations", effective 5 August 2026, reference number 024.0002.1.08052026, document generated 8 October 2026. Checked 8 Oct 2026.

THREE CITATIONS IN THIS ENTRY WERE STALE. Corrected 8 Oct 2026

The quoted text below is unchanged and still exact. What was wrong was everything around it.

A chapter was replaced under us, the detector language survived the replacement verbatim, and the section it sits in moved by one. That is the worst combination for an entry that pins section numbers: nothing in the quotation looked wrong.

Operative text, Chapter 1, Section 14(c):

"(c) The use of any mineral or metal detecting device at a state historic or archeological site is prohibited, except for official use. The use of any mineral or metal detecting device at a state park or recreation area is prohibited without written permission of the superintendent."

And Section 14(a), which this entry did not have at all:

"(a) Without prior permission of the superintendent, the disturbance, damage, or removal of any building, sign, equipment, monument, or other structure, or of any animal or plant matter, nest, nesting site, soil, rock, mineral, fossil, historic or prehistoric artifact or feature is prohibited. EXCEPTION: Lawful activities authorized under this chapter are permitted."

So Wyoming separates the sweep from the dig in the same section: (c) governs the device, (a) governs disturbing the soil, and both route to the superintendent.

A third provision, Section 6(d):

"(d) The digging or leveling of ground at any campsite is prohibited."

Flat, with no permission route, and campsites are where a detectorist is most likely to be working casually.

Determination: department-administered park land only. Does NOT reach municipal parks.

Two different rules in one subsection, and the page must not merge them:

• State historic or archeological site: flat prohibition. No permission route at all, "except for official use". This is the strictest single provision found in any state so far.
• State park or recreation area: superintendent's written permission. Status is therefore split – prohibited at historic and archaeological sites, permit_required elsewhere on park land. A single controlled value would be wrong either way, and the quotation carries the distinction. The statute was checked for municipal reach and does not have it. W.S. 36-1-114:

"Before any excavation on any prehistoric ruins, pictographs, hieroglyphics, or any other ancient markings, or writing or archaeological and paleontological deposits in the state of Wyoming on any state or federal lands, shall be undertaken, a permit shall first be obtained from the state board of land commissioners."

"[S]tate or federal lands" – counties and municipalities are not named, so Wyoming stays out of the political-subdivision set.

The penalties, quoted rather than summarised, added 7 Oct 2026

Read from Wyoming Statutes title 36 as published by the Wyoming Legislature, wyoleg.gov/statutes/compress/title36.pdf, 326,115 characters extracted and parsed locally; sections 36-1-114, 36-1-115 and 36-1-116 read in full. Checked 7 Oct 2026.

The Secretary of State's reply arrived 8 Oct 2026 and corrected how this project had been searching. The rules system does work; it was being queried wrongly. The advanced search at rules.wyo.gov/Search.aspx?mode=4 filters by agency, not by keyword, and the two relevant programs under State Parks & Cultural Resources are "State Park and Historic Site Usage" and "State Parks & Historic Sites". Searching the keyword "Park" misses both.

And wyoleg.gov/ARules/ is not the Secretary of State's at all – it is the Legislative Service Office's path. That is why she could not explain the uniform 11,430-byte stub it returns for every filename: a different body publishes it. METHODOLOGY 11g has been corrected accordingly; the rule is not "test each path on the host" but "identify which body publishes each layer".

The statutes did not need the reply. Wyoming's administrative rules are the thing that is blocked – wyoleg.gov/ARules/ answers every filename with the same 11,430-byte HTML page, and rules.wyo.gov's search returns nothing. The statutes are a different path on the same host and they serve a clean PDF. Worth recording generally: a publisher being blocked for one body of law does not mean it is blocked for another, and the two were never tested separately here.

36-1-115, the companion to the permit requirement:

"No person shall remove from the state of Wyoming any part of any such ruins or deposit except with the consent of the state board of land commissioners. Said board may require, as a condition to such consent, that such portion of such relics, materials, or deposit as said board shall require, shall forever remain the property of the state of Wyoming."

36-1-116(a), the general penalty and the forfeiture:

"Except as provided by subsections (d) and (e) of this section, any person violating any of the provisions of this act shall be guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be fined not less than twenty-five dollars ($25.00) or more than one hundred dollars ($100.00), or imprisoned in the county jail not more than six (6) months, or by both fine and imprisonment, and shall forfeit to the state all articles and materials discovered by or through his efforts."

36-1-116(d), the felony, and it is more severe than this page previously said:

"Any person who, for monetary gain or for commercial or any other purpose, removes any archeological or paleontological artifacts in violation of W.S. 36-1-114 or 36-1-115 with a cumulative value in excess of five hundred ($500.00), shall be guilty of a felony and upon conviction shall be fined up to ten thousand dollars ($10,000.00), imprisoned for up to ten (10) years, or both."

36-1-116(e), for rock art specifically:

"Any person who breaks, breaks off, cracks, carves upon, writes, or otherwise marks upon or in any manner destroys, mutilates, injures, defaces, removes, displaces, mars or harms petroglyphs, pictographs or historic inscriptions without consent of the state board of land commissioners is guilty of a misdemeanor and shall be fined not more than seven hundred fifty dollars ($750.00), imprisoned for not more than six (6) months, or both."

Four things the quotations settle that the summary did not.

• The felony ceiling is ten years and $10,000, not merely "a felony". This page previously gave the threshold and the label without the exposure, which understated Wyoming as badly as any post this project has corrected.
• "Or any other purpose" makes the commercial limb effectively unlimited. The subsection reads as though it targets commercial looting, and the phrase "or for commercial or any other purpose" removes that limit. Any removal over the threshold is within it.
• "Cumulative value" aggregates. It is not $500 per object. A season of small finds can cross it.
• The forfeiture under (a) is not confined to the offending item: "all articles and materials discovered by or through his efforts." And the permission authority is a third body. 36-1-114's permit comes from the state board of land commissioners, not from State Parks and Cultural Resources, whose Chapter I rules govern detector use. A Wyoming detectorist on state land can therefore be dealing with two separate authorities depending on what they are doing and where. What it does NOT reach. 36-1-114 turns on excavation of prehistoric ruins, markings or archaeological and paleontological deposits, and 36-1-116(d) on removing archeological or paleontological artifacts in violation of 114 or 115. Detecting is not mentioned anywhere in title 36, and recovering a modern coin from state park ground is not excavation of a prehistoric deposit. The parks rule in Chapter I is what governs that. Currency caveat RESOLVED, 20 Sep 2026. The text above was first read from the rules as filed on wyoleg.gov, which carried a 2008 date, and was flagged because rules.wyo.gov – the Secretary of State's current repository – is an ASP.NET postback application whose document endpoints returned empty bodies. It has now been checked against the current rules published by the agency itself: "Park Rules and Regs", Chapter 1, Rules and Regulations, effective 16 November 2021, downloaded from wyoparks.wyo.gov and parsed locally. Section 15(c) is word-for-word identical to the 2008 text. So is the Section 4(f) definition of "Park land". The two-part split – flat prohibition at state historic and archeological sites, superintendent's written permission elsewhere – survives unchanged. Worth recording why this was chased rather than accepted: Montana is the cautionary case on this exact page, where an entire rule series was repealed wholesale in 2023 while every secondary source still cited the old numbers. An 18-year-old filed version with no positive signal of change is not evidence of no change. Here the check came back clean; the point is that it was cheap and it could have come back otherwise. Sources: wyoparks.wyo.gov Park-Rules-and-Regs.pdf (eff. 16 Nov 2021), parsed locally; wyoleg.gov ARULES AR08-036Parks; wyoleg.gov statutes title 36. Checked 20 Sep 2026.

2. Cities in Wyoming that publish a rule

No city in Wyoming publishes a metal detecting rule we can quote. Of the 11 cities we checked, 6 had pages on the city’s own site that we found and read, and none of those sets out a rule. For the remaining 5 we could not locate a municipal source, so nothing is claimed about them either way.

This is a finding, not a queue. It is also not proof that no rule exists: a city that posts its rules on a noticeboard, or in a document our searches do not surface, looks exactly the same from here.

3. County rules

No county check has been run for Wyoming. That is not a finding that Wyoming’s counties publish no rules. It means the question was never asked here, and this directory does not assert an answer it has not looked for. The county sweep covered 21 states; Wyoming was not one of them.

4. Cities checked - no published rule

11 cities in Wyoming were checked and have no published rule on this page. Of those, 11 returned no rule, and 0 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 11 were checked on 13 September 2026, in one sweep, so that date applies to every row.

5. Clubs in Wyoming

5 in our directory for Wyoming - 4 verified against their own website or group, 1 we could not verify. Verified means we opened the link and read it. All Wyoming clubs on the club directory, with meeting nights and contacts where we have them.

• Casper, WY Chapter Of The GPAA. – Casper Wyoming Gold prospectors Association - caspergpaa.org · Casper · verified
• GOLD MEMBERS – Wyoming Mining Association - wyomingmining.org/gold-members · verified
• Gold Prospectors Of Wyoming - Facebook group · verified
• Wyoming Prospectors - wpagold.com · Facebook page · verified
• Cheyenne Chapter GPAA - could not verify

6. Land this page does not cover

This page answers for Wyoming 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.