Success Finding Diamonds at the Crater of Diamonds State Park

hi everybody I'm solemn in the Arkansas diamond miner and I'm here at the crater Diamond State Park and today I'm going to show you what I do to find diamonds it's not the only way maybe not the best way but this is what I've done and I've found a few diamonds so we'll go inside and get started today we're going to try and find the right material to work and process to look for diamonds so we're going to walk around a little bit and I'll show you a little bit of what we look for I'm already out here in the mind as you can see that is the north end of the search field that is the west direction and this is the south direction and this is basically all diamond bearing so we just need to get out there and find the right stuff to process so this is the diamond search field this is the south end of the east drain and you can see that it's plowed into furrows so a lot of times what we'll do is we'll go and look through these furrows and find areas where water has concentrated some of the heavier gravels like this right here and you're basically looking for alluvial deposits of gravel you can scoop that up and that should be where some of the heavier materials have settled and within that will be diamonds so I'm going to walk around and look for a lot of that material in one spot you'll also see other places where the streams have run across several furrows and created alluvial fans that are just a little bit bigger it's been several weeks since we've had any rain so it is going to be difficult to find a pretty good supply of gravel but I've got a few places I can check so this is the north area of the search field it's kind of bottom side of the North Area give you an idea where we're at there's the old mineshaft building so one of the interesting things in this area is the stream that runs through and it will actually pile up quite a bit of gravel it's the only drainage on this very top end and what I'm looking for is where the gravel has been piled up in an alluvial fan so a good example this part of the alluvial fan has been pretty well cleaned up somebody's coming here and scooped a lot of this out but there's still quite a bit of gravel that's actually been piled up by the water we've recently had over a foot of rain about a month and a half ago and this gravel is still piled from that rain event created a lot of runoff okay so this is right about the middle of the search field and I think I've found some material that I'm going to work today this is a little bit of an alluvial fan from this little drainage right here see this is some piled up gravel there's not a lot of big rock in it but it is concentrated so my tactic will be to gather this material it's already somewhat concentrated and then I will actually bring water closer to this area so that I don't have to carry a material to the water because I can carry less water here instead of more material to the wash stations nearest wash station that is the north wash pavilion so we are kind of right in the middle of the search area and that's the east drain so looks like this is where I'm gonna set up camp today okay so first order of business once I have found the material that I want to run I start setting up my shade area because it is blistering hot out here at times and I will put buckets throughout the material that I plan to scoop up and I always set up just as close as I can set up to my material so there's my camp got a chair and a hose and some water buckets so I'm going to scoop this material into these buckets and I'll have it close and I will probably get water from the wash pavilion so that's not too far to carry a few buckets of water and then I can start wet sifting think we'll have good luck with this today [Music] [Music] [Music] and the next step is to take the top in the bottom screen the average size of the diamond is supposed to be about the size of a match head so most of them will go through the top screen the material I'm gathering doesn't have a lot of clay or anything like that so what is left behind is usually just the larger stones and this is if you have a large diamond this is where you'll find it probably I would say close to 2 carats maybe larger will be in this to the center by using a side-to-side motion to move material [Applause] and work to the center is to lift the screen so you can actually see the heavy material and what you're left with will be a pretty good Center kind of a bull's-eye of your heaviest minerals so that was actually on the very bottom and by working the side-to-side motion two directions you move all of those to one central spot and that is what I will scoop out and take home if you have a diamond that's where it will be somewhere in that bullseye gallon bucket full centers that I've been scooping out but I wanted to show you a little bit more in depth how I actually flip this screen over because it's actually kind of important so I've centered this up in my water and I've actually drained most of the water out of it so this is the end result once I have flipped my screen and you can see I've got a little bit better of a center right there I've got a lot more heavy than what I started with my material is getting a little bit better I was a little bit disappointed in it at first the first couple screens I did did not have many centers I think you can actually see a nail in that one so you kind of want to be careful there are nails and some glass out here so if you're only here for say a day and you're wet sifting you'll want to let this dry so everything else can dry off and it'll become dull but a diamond will still be shiny even when it dries and there'll be a lot easier to spot once this Center has dried off so this is dried off a little bit and I don't see anything immediately that I would think as a diamond of course the diamond could actually be underneath some of this stuff so I always always always take searched again I just try and make sure that I've got everything that looks handy sometimes I have to dig a little deeper if I see anything that's almost back up to the top of the original screen but that's okay you can carry out a five gallon bucket and for one person that's a lot of work in one day so I don't worry about taking too much material I'll flatten my pile back out pack it down just a little bit it's time for the next screen okay so it's about the end of the day and we have finished it up here did not quite get a five-gallon bucket full of concentrated centers but what I did was when I started running out of time and I still had more material to run I just didn't concentrate it I washed the gravel and put it right into the bucket because the rule says one five-gallon bucket per person per day of washed gravel can leave with you from the mic so I'm not so worried about concentrating it my main focus when I come out here is to find already concentrated gravels in you know basically by alluvial fans or anything in the furrows where it's been concentrated by rain washing you know all the silt away and leaving gravel behind in each one of these little furrows however I can find gravel that's already concentrated that's what I like to use to run my material and I concentrate that even further and my goal is to get through as much of that in one day as possible so and in the last five trips I've made out here I've found three diamonds and I still have some gravel and to go through and of course now I'll have this bucket to go through I'll take them home get under some good light get it dried and it actually is is better if you can actually dry it and go through it outside because of course the sunlight makes them it just seems like there are a lot shinier in sunlight versus white you know from any kind of light bulb or anything like that so this bucket is going to go home with me at some point I'll be posting a video of making a sorting tray that you can use to kind of help you see anything that's got more shine than the rest of the stuff around it

Channel: The Arkansas Diamond Miner

Views: 50,493

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Keywords: Crater of Diamonds State park, Crater of diamonds, Arkansas diamond mine, Finding diamonds, Diamond crater state park, How to find diamonds, Diamond hunting in Arkansas, Diamond hunting, Arkansas diamond park, Diamond park Arkansas, The Arkansas diamond miner, Crater diamond state park, Murfreesboro Arkansas, Arkansas diamond state park, Diamond mining in Arkansas, Crater of diamonds state park finds, Diamond state park Arkansas Rock hounding, Gem hunting

Id: 7YvLHJSWkjM

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 21 2019