My Crater of Diamonds State Park Trip

Murfreesboro, Arkansas
It’s hot and humid and your clothes are plastered to your body with sweat. The park is busy for a Wednesday. Everywhere you look around the 36-acre plowed field there is someone bent over, shoveling the reddish brown dirt into five gallon buckets. There is a water park and a hiking trail and a restaurant. But you aren’t staggering with your own bucket toward a muddy trough filled with dark water to do things you can do anywhere. No, your here for the same reason as everyone else. You want a diamond. And make it a big one.
Crater of Diamonds State Park used to be a working mine, which usually means everything worth taking already has been taken. But not here. The commercial mines all failed, even though an average of 600 diamonds a year are found now.
The biggest diamond on record is The Uncle Sam. Found in 1924 and weighing in at 40.23 carats before it was cut, it is the largest diamond ever found in the United States. It was still 12.42 carats after it was cut twice and made into an emerald-cut gem. Maybe the next 40 carat stone will be named after you.
It isn’t going to be easy. No wheels and no machines can be used to mine the park. That means buckets, shovels and sifting screens with various sized gaps in the mesh. For 43 dollars you can rent a five gallon bucket, two screens and a shovel. This is not as bad as it sounds as most of the money, 40 dollars, is just a deposit to keep you from running off with their bucket.
They have a free video that details the finer points of shifting dirt down to finer and finer particles that can then be flipped with a bit of practice to get the heavier bits, like diamonds, on top. This is dirty work, don’t wear clothes and shoes you would mind tossing once you are done mining. A pocket knife is also useful when testing that shinny bit of rock to see how hard it is.
You get to the water trough and watch as a few of the other ‘miners’ go about the business of sorting their dirt. Everyone has a look of intense concentration as they splash and shake their screens filled with dirt. You start off with two screens, one with large gaps nested on top of one with small gaps. You get the soil wet and shake, the idea being that the smaller, heavier items will fall to the bottom.
I found that my chosen bits of dirt just became large wet clumps. I noticed that the more serious prospectors had their dirt sifted down to a pretty fine grade before they moved to the water. While we are washing our dirt, the horn sounded meaning someone found a diamond. I heard someone say that it was 1.27 carets, someone else said it was 1.4. We all nod and frown in deep thought. How big is a 1.27 or 1.4 caret diamond? Bigger than anything we are finding, but not big enough for the record books. Then we hear that it was a little old lady who found the diamond laying on the ground. Maybe it’s time to change tactics and walk the fields for a while.
There are a lot families. The smaller kids up to their knees in the mud next to the water troughs. The larger kids trying to beat each other on how deep a hole they can dig. “Ours is about eight feet deep.” One lanky teen proudly proclaimed as he swung a long handled shove over his shoulder.
The field is filled with furrows and holes, the furrows are made plowing the field from time to time to turn over the soil. The holes are made by the prospectors. Most are small, less than a foot wide and often only a few inches deep as the desire to move to a ‘better’ spot is almost overwhelming. There are a lot of rocks in the field. Rocks that range in size from tiny flakes of shiny pyrite to small boulders made of jasper. You can take anything you find out of the park, but since you can’t use wheels, the large rocks are here for the long haul. Or so I thought until I checked out of my motel the next morning. Right outside my room was a pickup truck with a bed full of jasper stones about the size of basketballs. Of course, I’m not sure what I would do with these stones, even if I did have the energy to haul them out of the park.
After a few hours under the sun, hauling loads of dirt to the washing station, and finding, well, not much, you give up. You have found a few interesting rocks that you are taking home with you, so that the trip is not a total loss. But you’ll have to wait till next time to find your diamond.
The curious thing about the people that find diamonds, is that they don’t run out and sell them. Most of the people that I have seen with diamonds from the park still carry them around in the small plastic display boxes that the park puts them in. I met one such man at a rock shop the day after I was at the park.
“What you need to do is get two people,” The man who has found two diamonds tells me. “Then you both walk the field with the sun to your back. As soon as one of you spots something shinny, you have the other person go forward and check it out. If you try to move toward it, you’ll loose it. That’s how I found my diamonds.”
Oh, now he tells me.