A couple weekends ago we took Daisy down to Crater of Diamonds State Park for a camping/strike-it-rich trip. Summer has calmed down a bit. It was merely near 100 degrees instead of well over 100 degrees. We rented the Full Monty Prospectors Kit, which consisted of a bucket, a shovel and three screens. I’ve lived in Arkansas for over 30 years and had never been to one of the states biggest claims to fame. There are many ways to hunt for the diamonds. All of them rely on a vast amount of luck. I tried the squat-and-shake technique.
Gina tried the in-your-face technique. I don’t have any pictures of Abby’s technique because she was ready to call it quits after the walk across the hot field. She did very little digging.
We took some of our dirt up to the giant water trough to try the wet method of diamond discovery. It worked no better than the dry method. We booked out of there after about 30 minutes. All in all we spent about an hour searching for diamonds.
The next day we hit the Ka-do-ha Indian Village on the outskirts of Murfreesboro. It’s a private museum/tourist trap whose claim to fame is several excavated Indian burial mounds. The holes have these little signs that explain what you’re looking at, except most of the writing on the signs has just about faded away. The bones in the bottom aren’t real. They are facsimiles of the bones that were found. The real bones were supposedly reburied somewhere else.
Ka-do-ha Indian Village is also home to the World’s Biggest Diamond.