Crater of Diamonds State Park

Caleb was excited about going to this state park. Who wouldn't want to visit the only public diamond-producing area in the world? More than 400 diamonds are found every year on average including the biggest diamond ever found in the US, The 1924 Uncle Sam diamond of 40.23 carats! There have been many other notable diamonds such as the 1998 Strawn-Wagner Diamond. It is a 1.09 carat diamond described as a "flawless 0/0/0 perfect diamond" by the American Gem Society.

We drove into the Crater of Diamonds State Park at dusk and found our spot for the RV. Starlink doesn't work well here with all the trees. Michael drove up a few feet with Asher on the roof with Starlink, but the connection only got worse. Fortunately, it was good enough for Michael to get his work done for the week. 

It was sunny, but really, really cold. It went below freezing on some nights. I read from the book "Peter Nimble" a couple of nights. On the other nights, we watched "The Mysterious Benedict Society," "SuperNatural," "Limitless," "Shang Chi and the Legend of the 10 Rings," and "Zooptopia" (what do you call a camel with 3 humps?... Pregnant. Hahahh!). 

With such a bad connection, we went to the library on Tuesday and Thursday for Grammar Class with Nana! We have done this a few times on our RV trip.

On Wednesday, we went to hunt for diamonds! For the five of us to get tickets to hunt and to rent 2 sifters was $52.00. We took our items and walked out to the field. There are 3 strategies. One is to just walk around and look at the surface for something shiny. Then there is dry sifting with dry dirt and then wet sifting with a water trough. Since it had just rained, dry sifting was not an option.

We looked around. There is a lot of dirt. We filled up our containers with it and brought it to one of two shelters with water troughs. We went to the closest one, since wet dirt is awfully heavy. The wagons and handled buckets that people brought or rented did look really useful.

In the pictures below, the kids are working really hard to help, but the water was so very, very cold. Big thick rubber gloves were key. We had a couple of sad little gloves. We just suffered through it. It was discouraging to see so much dirt. Every time we thought we found a diamond, we put it in our Ziplock bag. We collected a lot of quartz, calcite, lamproite and jasper (there are over thirty colors) all of these are very common in the field.

       

                          

The kids did a little sifting and Michael didn't even try once he saw our red and hurting hands. It didn't take long for the kids to go and start doing cartwheels and playing in the dirt.

    

The sifting just really didn't seem to work. A guy came over with his own saruca and it made a real difference. It seemed like all our effort was a waste. I heard that someone just used their saruca to sift all the dirt from the bottom of a trough and they found 2 diamonds. The saruca would move all the heaviest rocks to the bottom center of the saruca and then once you flip it over there is a circle of white stones. He scooped out the center and put all of that into his bag to spread out and inspect it later at home. He said that it is too hard to inspect it here while everything is wet. He told me of another guy that found a diamond earlier. I went over and inspected his newest yellow diamond and his collection of others that he had found. There were definitely some rock hounds that take off work and stay days or weeks at a time and do this every day. 

By Friday, Asher and I were ready to try it again. We went on a date to the diamond field. This time we bought one sifter and one saruca. I eventually got a little circle of white rocks when I turned it over! We brought the sifted dirt home and spread it out in 5 containers to dry. We also looked around and inspected the surface of the field more than last time; the water was so cold and we needed to let our fingers thaw. 

The next day, we inspected all of our sifted dirt. We had a lot of calcium carbonate, which is what is in chalk, but we had 2 that were promising diamonds. After we packed up the RV, Asher and I ran to get them checked out and... we had a quartz and a white jasper. We also threw in some "probably nots" and they were just hematite. We were not sad for long; we had to run back to the RV to travel to Baxter Springs, Kansas.