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Digging for Diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- arwhatever 5y agoI often wanted to go do this as a child growing up in Arkansas. In hindsight, each time I would bring it up my parents would have something of an "oh shit, anything but that!" reaction and would quickly distract me with some other activity or suggestion, and to date I've never been. I'm certain that to them, the suggestion was essentially to drive several hours out and back to play in the dirt. (this article is well-written and quite interesting, btw)
- keanebean86 5y agoI grew up in Arkansas too. I've went digging twice. Once as a kid and again in my early 20s. Funny enough I woke up with horrible back pain the second time and was basically worthless the whole day. My wife hated the whole ordeal so we've not been back.
- ajmadesc 5y ago> I grew up in Arkansas too There are dozens of us!
- 7thaccount 5y agoArkansas is covered in pretty rocks.
- up_o 5y agoI'm pleasantly surprised to see four of us in one HN thread. I'm moving back this fall (been career building for the past 7 years out of state).
- seigando 5y agoWent when I was pretty young. I remember finding tiny pieces of glass on the ground that we took to get inspected to find out that it was, in fact, glass and not diamond.
- exhilaration 5y agoHa, when I was 9 or 10 I took some coal to a jeweler because I was convinced it was some exotic and valuable stone. I still have no idea what I was thinking.
- ajmadesc 5y agoWent there for a school field trip around the age of green. They did you a favor, I hated it then!
- mikewarot 5y agoI grew up in Indiana, and went with a friend on a road trip back in the 1980s. I remember it as a hot dusty field where you dig with your friends, all get tired, and end up buying some quartz crystals at a rock shop on the way home.
- teruakohatu 5y agoThere many videos on Youtube by hobbiests who frequent the park. It is back breaking work. The park rangers rightly prevent any modern, or even hobbiest, mining automation. > was encouraged to keep the stone in its rough form—no polishing, no cutting. “It’s a beautiful chocolate diamond,” Kinard says. “It’s a nine-carat diamond. Those are very rare, and very hard to come by. It might not be worth very much. Diamonds are not rare, are not particularly beautiful when uncut. The valuable diamonds are the diamonds that can be cut to produce a flawless gem.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> The valuable diamonds are the diamonds that can be cut to produce a flawless gem. Though note that those aren't rare either. A diamond has no resale value; jewelers already have all the diamonds they're allowed to sell.
- cm2012 5y agoYou can't resell diamonds at retail price of course, but diamonds are in fact priced by the market at wholesale. The DeBeers monopoly, if there ever was one, is decades old. Source: Worked at a diamond wholesaler for years, sat next to the owner as he bought, measured, evaluated diamonds.
- StrictDabbler 5y agoIt's funny that the narrative for years was "DeBeers cornered the market to create fictional high prices." I believed it myself. Most right-thinking people outside the diamond industry did. With Russian and Canadian mines coming online over the past two decades it's become clear that they cornered the market to keep prices stable. Volatility has gone through the roof but diamonds haven't become genuinely cheap. In retrospect this should have been obvious. Cornering the market completely for 80 years would have been impossible if diamonds weren't still pretty rare. It makes me wonder what other myths I have kicking around my head.
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- ezzaf 5y agoVisitation numbers from the article: "Despite the challenges and restrictions of the COVID pandemic, 129,218 people traveled to Crater of Diamonds in 2020 for what was a record-breaking year, with more than 80 carats of diamonds unearthed" At $10 a visit the entrance fees add up to a lot more than the value of diamonds found. Kind of like a lottery, but more interactive.
- adolph 5y ago$1.3m is not a large budget for an operation supporting ~350 people/day.
- vb6sp6 5y agoYes but that is only the door charge. If you want tools, that's extra. And water is $3 dollars. And that piece of quartz is $9 at the gift shop, etc
- lostlogin 5y agoAwfully close to the old saying “during a gold rush, sell shovels” This citation the first Google hit: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018438 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19018438
- bombcar 5y agoThree of those and two sticks and you can make a pickax.
- tonetheman 5y agoIn the summer I have been there and it is miserable. You are standing in dirt in the heat... in the open. And I never found anything. But it is an interesting place. There is a moment when I looked up and stared at the dirt field and thought. There is a volcano underneath us... I am standing in a crater. It is fun but work.
- pfdietz 5y agoMica peridotites, the same rocks as occur in some of the diamond pipes of South Africa, can be found in kimberlite dikes in upstate New York. If you take the trail up Cascadilla Gorge on the south side of the Cornell campus in Ithaca, you can see one of these, intruded into the Devonian sedimentary rocks. No diamonds have ever been found in these dikes, but maybe you could be first! Be sure to get permission before breaking out your rock hammer. https://www.academia.edu/19688604/Kimberlitic_Rocks_of_Central_New_York https://www.academia.edu/19688604/Kimberlitic_Rocks_of_Centr...
- gamegoblin 5y agoI am from Arkansas and have been here many times. As a little boy who liked to dig, it's great fun. However, I highly recommend to anyone to instead check out the nearby dig-your-own quartz crystal mines in the town of Mount Ida. You are pretty much 100% guaranteed to find some decent sized quartz, whereas finding a diamond in Crater of Diamonds is much, much more rare.
- waterheater 5y agoAny recommendation of Avant versus Wegner?
- artificialLimbs 5y agoA close friend of mine worked at Wegners and highly recommends them. You might also try Ron Coleman’s in the Hot Springs Village/Jessieville area.
- JohnJamesRambo 5y agoThank you for this comment, I think I will try that. My girlfriend is a huge fan of gems and rocks and she would love this.
- LargeWu 5y agoNice. I've always wanted to go to Crater of Diamonds, not so much to actually find a diamond as much as I just like the process of finding things like that. Kind of like looking for agates on Lake Superior's North Shore. Finding crystals is just as good in my book, might have to give that a shot.
- GongOfFour 5y agoJust as an aside, growing up in Texas I internalized a dim view of western Arkansas and eastern Oklahoma primarily due to cultural reasons. A few years ago my family and I took a vacation to a cabin in the Ouachita Mountains which is just north of this state park and I couldn't believe how beautiful that country is. The Ozarks are the crown jewel of that region but the Ouachita range from western AR to eastern OK is absolutely stunning in its own right. It reminds me of the times I've been to West Virginia, beautiful and remote and, in some ways (good and bad), apart from time and, for me, unfairly written off by my own biases. I felt a little pang of regret that I had lived for so long only 4-5 hours from such a beautiful place and was just only now discovering it.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 5y agoBelieve it or not, just because mainstream media likes to paint most of the conservative parts of the US as evil places of hate, they very much are not. They just tend to be poorer/not as industrialized.
- grumpitron 5y agoThis seems to be an unnecessary political diatribe that has no relevance to the parent comment.
- planetafro 5y agoRelevant username
- halfmatthalfcat 5y agoThe entire first sentence of the parent comment is alluding to the cultural (read: political) state of the area, in their opinion. People are allowed to respond to that.
- semanticist 5y agoThat only works if you read the comment to be meaning that people in Texas - Texas, mind - consider 'conservative states' as being 'evil places of hate'. I think that the 'cultural reasons' they're referring to are probably more likely to be stereotypes around those areas being home to backwards inbred hill people who marry each other's cousins at gunpoint, have two teeth remaining, use outhouses, etc, etc. Every group needs some other group to look down on, I guess.
- shireboy 5y agoWent with kids not long ago. They enjoyed it for several hours. It was hard work - you dig, then slug your dirt up to a trough where you sift it. You can also just walk and look for shiny things. Lots of tips on YouTube, but we never found any.
- ecshafer 5y agoThere is a similar operation in New York, in the Herkimer Diamond mines, spend $12-15 and they give you a hammer, you go out into the rocky pits and hit some rocks and find some (almost worthless) diamonds. Fun enough as a kid.
- pfdietz 5y agoThe so-called "Herkimer Diamonds" are actually quartz crystals.
- trhway 5y agono gold or diamonds in my childhood, amber did the trick though. From dirt cheap to mildly expensive, yet you'll never leave empty. Some people do it as business, some just as occasional hobby. It seems that any meaningful private commercial operation of digging, selling and jewelry producing is still mostly illegal today as it was back then in USSR, yet it have been a pretty booming business in Russia and Ukraine (and probably Poland, though can't say anything about amber legal regime there). Today's "Amber rush" in Ukraine https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-21/illegal-amber-mining-creating-environmental-disaster-in-ukraine/11745470 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-01-21/illegal-amber-mining-...
- exabrial 5y agoFew hours drive from me. Staff was friendly. I didn't find anything with about a two hour search, but it was fun. While you're in Arkansas, rent a mountain bike near Eureka Springs or Bentonville and go shredding.