On the way home from Little Rock, we took a detour and stopped at an Arkansas state park, Crater of Diamonds State Park. This is the only place in the world where the public can search for diamonds.
The search area is a big field of dirt. You can bring your own equipment, like the professional diamond diggers we saw getting out of their trucks, or you can rent some there. Having no clue what we were doing, we rented the basic set, and bought a little spade and rake.
When we decided to do make this stop, I think we were all envisioning finding lots of lovely gems quickly and easily in some nice dirt. Silly us. While people do find diamonds (according to the board, 2 were found the day prior to our visit), its relatively rare and take a lot of work and patience (and maybe a splash of luck.)
We picked a spot and started scooping up some dirt. Brad used the boxes to sort through it, then threw the searched dirt into a bucket, to avoid searching it again.
In the end, we left with a little bag full of nice looking rocks and chips of something or other. I think it will be a while before we go back, but at least we can say we've been there!
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