Prospecting for Diamonds – Crater of Diamonds State Park, Murfreesboro, Arkansas [October 10-11. 2017]

Hoping for diamonds

In the Southwest corner of Arkansas is an eroded volcano.  Millenia ago, the volcano erupted shooting all sorts of volcano debris into the air, including diamonds.  Much of the debris fell back into the crater filling it up.  After its discovery in 1906, the area was mined commercially, now it is a state park where you can go to sift for diamonds yourself.  The best part?  You get to keep what you find.  The worst part?  A find is not guaranteed.  But who cares, the looking is most of the fun.  Right!

Our fancy prospecting gear in front of part of the plowed crater field

The crater is a 37-acre plowed field.  Plowing turns over the dirt to help uncover diamonds.  Most of the diamonds found are pretty tiny, the size of a match head.  They come in white, yellow and brown colors.

The washing pavilion

We rented our screens, shovel, bucket and wagon and headed out.  There are three ways to prospect for diamonds.  You can walk around looking at the ground, and when you see a sparkler, you pick it up.  Actually, this was how the diamonds were initially discovered.  We bored pretty quickly with this method, and moved on to method number two.

You swish water through the screens rinsing away the dirt

You sit on the ground, dig up a bunch of dirt and sift it through a screen.  If you are lucky, your diamond will pop out.  We mostly got pieces of jasper, a semi-precious stone the comes in lots of pretty colors.

Carefully invert the screen

At this point, we decided to attend Diamond Mining class with the park ranger.  Ah, method number three looked like it had potential.  We filled our buckets with dirt and went to the nearest washing pavilion.  The pavilions have long tanks of water.  You wash the dirt off of the stones through a screen and then a smaller screen, using a rock, tap, rotate method, that shifts the heavier diamonds to the center of the smallest screen.  Then you invert the contents of the screen onto the table, and look for your diamonds.

Your diamonds would be in the light colored gravel in the center.  This was one of our neighbor's, ours never looked this good.

We didn’t actually ever find a diamond, but we sure had fun looking.  The folks around the washing pavilion were fun to be with.  Many were families with elementary age children.  There were rock hounds who take this more seriously.  One, an 83 year old woman, was more than happy to help us look for diamonds in our gravel.  Everyone had the expectation of striking it rich.  Someone did get a tiny diamond that day (it doesn’t happen every day), but not from our group of new friends.  We had a wonderful time anyway.

A definite MUST to visit

If you are considering visiting Crater of Diamonds State Park, and like to camp, it has a campground that is superior to any state park campground we have ever visited.