Another day another mine

One of 3 to look through

No diamonds here:(

After picking up our mail, in keeping up with the mines we have visited, to day we visited the only one of it’s kind in the entire world today. A public access diamond mine, where finders keepers. YUP you keep what you find. They say it’s best to go after a rain…… Hopefully today will be a good day. Our original plan had been to spend a week near Crater of Diamonds State Park, Murfreesboro AR. However with the mishap with the coach described in the last post and our canceled reservation, we only got to hunt the one day. It was fun but a LOT of work, kinda like finding a needle in a haystack, or a plowed field in this case.

There are 2 basic way to find diamonds, walk the ground, 37 1/2 acres of plowed ground, looking for sparkles or shovel dirt and rocks in a bucket and run it through a screen sieve, it kinda reminded me of something like panning for gold.  Like gold the diamonds are heavy so the settle to the bottom of the screen, flip the screen upside down and the heavier stuff is on top, nothing big jumped out at us at the washing station, using a spoon we did scrape off a small baggies of possible candidates along with some sand. We’ll let it dry and give the haul the once over with a magnifying glass, if we have anything it will be very small.

We traipsed around in the muck, mostly gravel and sand with some clay tossed in, for about 4 1/2 hours I don’t think we found anything worth mentioning:(

We spooned off a baggy of hopefulness, dried it out on 3 paper plates, went through that and saved a dozen or so small clear-ish rocks that sadly I’m sure is just quartz.

We heard that on Saturday 5 diamonds were found. 3 from people walking the ground and 2 by sieving. I believe on average 2 diamonds are found a day. Weather permitting they try to plow the ground about once a month.

We may try to stay a month near the park in the fall…………. Hoping for good luck then.

And for a lil bit of trivia, I haven’t tracked one down yet but if you look at an Arkansas quarter, it has a diamond on the back, we met the lady today who found the diamond used as the model on the back

http://www.craterofdiamondsstatepark.com