Crater of Diamonds State Park

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Monday, June 29 (Crater of Diamonds State Park):
We left around 8am for the one hour or so drive to Crate of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro, Arkansas. Along the way and even more so when we entered Murfreesboro, both Manoli and I wondered about how little traffic there was on the road and how deserted Murfreesboro seemed. Could the Crater of Diamonds State Park be less popular for some reason than we’d expected, or are we still in this economy doldrum? Well, all that changed as we turned the last corner on the park road and spotted the parking lot. Still not even 9:30am and there were at least dozens of cars in the lot! The park also has a small water park which was already getting busy. After reading the signs and watching a video about diamond searching in the park, we bought our tickets at $7.00 each and headed down to the tool rental place. Although we had to make a $60 deposit on the tools, we paid only $12.00 to rent a set of 3 screens, a bucket, and a miner’s shovel. Not bad. Armed with our equipment, two bottles of water and our hats, we headed into the field… literally. The mining field is about 37 acres of tilled soil I think, with two “washing areas” and a few covered picnic tables. Instead of the sluices of running water we used at Mason’s Mine, they had large metal tubs of water that unfortunately got muddy as all get out in no time at all. The park employees and the video explain to you that there are three ways to search for diamonds in the park. First of all, you can do a surface search, where you walk along the tilled furrows just looking for diamonds. Believe or not, most of the larger diamonds were found using this technique. Yesterday, a young guy found a nice-sized diamond, stuck in the bottom of his shoe when he went to the clean up area to hose off before leaving! The second way to find diamonds is to dig up and sift thru the dirt for them. We tried this method a good part of the day. The third method is to sieve thru dirt using the wash basins. This last method may be the best way to find the smaller stones, but it is messing and a lot of work! I tried it a couple of times and wouldn’t recommend it. Unfortunately, we spent the whole day until almost 5pm, except for a short lunch break, but didn’t find a thing. There have been some great finds there, including the best (a 1.09 D color flawless) and one of the biggest (the 40 carat Uncle Sam) diamonds ever found anywhere! We stopped at Wal-Mart on the way home to return our DVD and pick up some fresh fruit and cottage cheese for dinner. After working in the sun all day, neither of us felt like eating much. We rented a movie from the KOA (Twilight) to watch while eating dinner. Tomorrow is the end of our vacation, as we make the long trek home to Pensacola. We both enjoyed our long vacation, had some great times together, and seen a lot of cool things, both natural and manmade. Again, I hope everyone following us along the way, or reading this later have garnered some enjoyment also, and we hope to see you again next year, when we head to Peru to do the 4-day Inca Trail hike to Macchu Pichu.

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