Digging for Diamonds at Crater of Diamonds

 Thursday, April 28, 2022

Hi Blog!

Before we started our RV adventures we had a bucket list of place we wanted to go and things we wanted to do. The list including all of the National Parks, Alaska, Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta, Quartzsite, Betty's RV Park, Newfoundland and Arkansas' Crater of Diamonds, just to name a few. In the past 10 years, we've managed to hit most of them. Some of them, we even visited twice! However, we kept missing the Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas. Until now..

Crater of Diamonds is a 911-acre Arkansas State Park. The park features a 37 acre plowed field on top of an old volcanic lava tube. The park is the only diamond-producing site in the world where the public can search for diamonds at their original volcanic source. The policy here is "finders, keepers," meaning the diamonds you find are yours to keep!

We did a fair bit of research before we came. We knew the best way to find diamonds would be to search out gravel washed out by recent rains. The gravel would have to be shoveled into buckets and taken to a wash station where we would screen it and wash it. Most folks are satisfied with searching their findings at the park. However, the Craterheads, those who make repeated forays to the park, bring their gravel home to dry to make searching for tiny little diamonds easier. The park allows folks to bring home one 5 gallon bucket of washed gravel.

On the way to the park, we stopped at Murfreesboro Hardware in order to pick up some rubber gloves, a trowel and a two gallon bucket. The gentleman who checked us out was a Craterhead. He was more than happy to show us the tiny little diamonds he had found over the years. To give you an idea of just how small these diamonds can be, here is a picture of some samples we saw in the Visitor's Center.

Now, that doesn't mean there haven't been some big finds over the years. The largest diamond ever found was called the Uncle Sam Diamond and it was over 40 carats.  While the Strawn-Wagner Diamond was only 3 carats, it remains the most perfect diamond the American Gem Society (AGS) ever certified in its laboratory. Graded the perfect grade of O/O/O (Ideal cut/D color/Flawless), or "Triple Zero," it is the highest grade a diamond can achieve. A diamond this perfect is so rare that most jewelers and gemologists never see one during their career. It's stories like this that keep the Craterheads coming back week after week.

The Visitor Center has an interesting display on the history of diamond mining on the property. The first diamonds were discovered in 1906. The land was sold to a commercial mining company. Over the years various businesses tried to make a profit, but couldn't compete with cheaper sources of diamonds. Arkansas purchased the property in 1972 and made it a state park.

After checking out the displays in the Visitor Center. We went over to the equipment rental building and rented our screen box and two 5 gallon buckets. We studied the diamond search area map and made our plan to find a nice gravel filled area to dig.

The Crater of Diamonds volcanic pipe is over 95 million years old. The deeply sourced lamproite magma, from the upper mantle, brought the diamonds to the surface. The diamonds had crystallized in the cratonic root of the continent long before and were carried by the magma as it rose to the surface. 

Here is our first look at the crater. It didn't look like an old volcano. It looked more like a farmer's field.

The park service plows the crater surface to loosen the dirt and make the diamonds easier to find.

Over 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed at the Crater of Diamonds. The location of the most famous diamond finds are marked with historical shovels.

Once we reached the search area, we filled our buckets with gravel and took them over to the wash station. The screen box is made of two sections. The top screen catches all the big rocks, If you find a diamond in this box you struck it rich.

You are more likely to find one in the finer gravel trapped in the second screen box. This is the gravel we planned to bring home with us to dry and sort at our leisure.

Once you are done examining your findings, the old gravel is tossed out and the plow spreads it out across the back area of the wash station.

While folks come for the diamonds, you can also find amethyst, garnet, jasper, agate, quartz, and other rocks and minerals. We did a quick look to see if anything looked diamond-like and set it aside. We found a few tiny shiny bits which we asked the park service gemologist to identify. Unfortunately, they were just quartz, glass and calcite.

Because mining equipment of the early period usually included bottom screens with mesh larger than 1/16 inch, thousands of small diamonds were allowed to pass through. The bulk of these ended up in drainage cuts of varying depths all over the search field and in the big natural drains on the east and west edges of the diamond-bearing section of the volcanic deposit. In recent decades, those small diamonds have been the bread-and-butter of recreational diamond digging. 

After cleaning four 5 gallon buckets, we had filled our 2 gallon bucket with fine, sifted gravel to take home. We took a break for lunch and then decided to stretch our legs by doing a little surface searching. When the sun is bright, it is possible to find diamonds just laying out in the field.

While we didn't spot any diamonds, we did find some old mining equipment.

There is even an old mine shaft building still standing from when the property was operated as a commercial mine. The shaft went down 65 feet but was abandoned when it didn't produce any more diamonds than the surface strip mining.

After a nice walk around the search area, we decided to head home with our bucket. On our drive over to the park, we noticed a sign for Footsies Beer & Wine. We never realized that, in Arkansas, 34 of the 75 counties are dry.

Once we got back to the RV Park, it was time to clean up our gravel and lay it out to dry. We told our friends, Jane and Kim, that if we found any diamonds, we would add them to the rocks we've been collecting for them for the past two years.

 

Here is Kathy sticking her shovel into the bucket of sifted gravel for the first time.  Maybe a diamond will show up in the shovelful of gravel!

Well, what do you know.  We scored two HUGE ones.  We hope Kim and Jane like these little beauties!

One item we did pick up on our way home was a saruca. This round, bowl-shaped screen has very fine mesh and is used to resift gravel. Most folks use a tub or barrel. We had an entire lake.

Once the gravel was cleaned, we covered our picnic table with a tarp and turned the washed gravel out to dry.

By Friday afternoon, the gravel was completely dry. We began the slow process of looking carefully through it and collecting anything that remotely looked diamond-like. Ruby was eager to help. Just like the Paul Simon song, she had diamonds on the soles of her paws!

We wish we could tell you for certain that we found a diamond. We have a small bag of shiny bits. One of them could be a diamond. However, the drive back to Crater of Diamonds State Park is about an hour and we're not sure we want to drive two hours to have them tell us all we have are quartz bits. We will put our bits in a souvenir case and call it an adventure. Check one more off the bucket list!