Finders Keepers Diamond Digging!

Every adventure starts with hope, enthusiasm and a little bit of craziness thrown in. Crater of the Diamonds State Park in Arkansas fills so many of my personal quirky needs.  It’s a finders keepers volcanic crater with real diamonds hidden somewhere in 37 acres of mostly gravel and clay soil.  Hopeful diamond hunters can bring their own equipment or rent equipment at the park to aid them in their hunt. 

We showed up with two five-gallon buckets, a shovel, a gardening-type hoe, black rubber boots, a recent thrift store find and the most important requirement, humor.  Imagine a huge area with many people, just like us, hoping to strike it rich by digging painstakingly through wet piles of rock and gravel. Honestly, the clay seemed like it would be perfect to create pottery for a survival scenario and I did consider it for a few minutes.  Mark started digging with the shovel immediately making a sizable hole throwing the gravel/dirt into one of our buckets.  He then toted it all to the screening station and came back covered in mud, but found no diamonds. 

I used another technique where I dug through the soil brushing off the rocks as I went mostly sitting on my five-gallon bucket. At first, I thought I could just look for anything shiny until I realized fool’s gold or pyrite was plentiful in the area.  The instructional video at the park told us that diamonds would be shiny and smooth, unlike any other rocks in the area. Actually, a diamond weighing over seven carats was found in January of this year.

However, after a couple of hours of digging, sifting and examining every piece of gravel carefully, the humor of the search wore thin and we trekked back to our vehicle mostly empty handed except for a couple of rocks, one heart-shaped that I imagine could be turned into a necklace with a rock tumbler (which I’ve always wanted) and some leather cord.  Overall, it was a beautiful, sunny day and a worthwhile adventure for a small town girl from Nebraska and my partner in adventures, Mark.