Crater of Diamonds State Park Info?

[bigscoop]

Thinking of making Crater of Diamonds State Park one of my destinations for next year's adventure so I'm trying to gather all the info I can on the place and the equipment and the process ahead of time. All experience and advice greatly appreciated. Thanks!

PS: Will probably schedule this trip sometime in April of May?

 

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[rrhobdy]

Hey Jason... You can pan at Crater of Diamonds... but use a saruca instead of a gold pan. It is much more efficient for panning diamonds. A gold pan will work also, but much slower. You ought to try panning for diamonds in the Poudres River and it's tributaries (think the State Line District) in the National Forest area in Colorado. There is also the Iron Mountain District in Wyoming, and several other areas you can try for diamonds in Wyoming. Heck of a lot closer for you than driving all the way to Arkansas.

 

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[huntsman53]

Thanks for all this great info, especially to Huntsman! A trip to the mine has always been high on my bucket list (inadvertent pun). Question: If there on a cloudy day, do you think a very powerful hand held LED flashlight could highlight any ground hugging diamonds?

I believe you need a powerful UV Light to highlight Diamonds but doubt that it would work very well on a sunny day. You might try on a cloudy day. The Park opens well after daylight and closes well before dark, so after (nighttime) hours searching is out of the question. Besides, there are a lot of Rattlesnakes in the area, so you don't want to be searching when a snake blends in with all the other ground colors.

On another note, they harvested Diamonds off the coast of South Africa and may still do, with conveyor belts covered with some type of grease. They would pull up dredge buckets full of rocks, gems and boulders and after sifting to a certain level, the material is/was fed onto the conveyor belt. As the conveyor belt traveled to the upside down side, everything but the Diamonds would usually fall off. The material left over when it made the turn to come back up, was usually all Diamonds which were then scrapped off the conveyor belt by workers. I would image a portable system could be built to use at the Crater of Diamonds State Park but it has to run off manual labor.


Frank