Digging for Diamonds at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas
Crater of Diamonds State Park is the only open-source diamond mine in the country. For a small fee, diggers can pay to play their odds in the dirt where the biggest and most valuable U.S. diamonds—like the million-dollar Esperanza Diamond—were discovered.
Deep in southwest Arkansas is a state park that charges visitors $10 to search for gems that can be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I f you have the good fortune to live long enough, it is a physiological fact that you only turn 40 once, though the ink of that fact can get smudged slightly if you’re an identical triplet, one of three daughters who arrived into the world within two minutes of each other. What is already a milestone birthday becomes even more significant.
In any event, it was for this very reason that Angelica Lopez and her two sisters, Monica and Veronica, decided to do something novel to mark their fourth decade on Earth. Unlike their 30th birthday, which they’d celebrated by sipping slushy, brain-numbingly cold margaritas poolside in Cancun, on September 15, 2019, they were standing in an Arkansas state park, a sun-baked dirt field bumping 37.5 acres out before them. Trowels and shovels in hand, they took turns turning over the ground and inspecting it for diamonds, lifting up their sunglasses to squint closer at what could be.
Alas, it wasn’t; neither Angelica nor Monica nor Veronica found any diamonds that day. But it was not a wash, this visit, says Angelica, a financial advisor living in Detroit, who was thrilled to be doing something different than she’d ever done. “In the States, we as travelers tend to get enamored with big attractions like the Grand Canyon or Mount Rushmore,” she says. “But there are cool little places like this all over our country that people just don’t know about.”
