WET SHIFTING LIKE A BEAST | Sampling, Identifying, Testing Gravel | Crater of Diamonds

life's like a diamond you just got to dig it hello my fellow miners prospectors and rock counters welcome back to another video from the crater diamond state park this is going to be more of a learning video we're going to study the different types of gravel walk around the field and just look for gravel that's been concentrated piled up in areas we're going to work the low spots let you all have an idea of what the gravel can look like and just we're gonna do stuff like that in this video just try to find gravel worth digging that can very well contain diamonds if you'd like to see more videos like this be sure and drop a thumbs up i'd appreciate it all right let's get started we'll be set up at the south wash so to get material from the south wash which is which is right there we could go to the east drain or we could go to the west drain i have never found a diamond on the west drain may get a little bit of material from the pig pen which is just near the west drain it's just below the south wash a good friend of mine named shirley strawn she's a fourth generation diamond miner she knows a lot about this place and that's one of her favorite spots because it's one of the lowest spots here at the crater of diamonds so you got to think all that material is going to wash down to that area that's why shirley really likes to dig down there the diamonds are so beautiful in that pig pen area i'll probably go down there as well since it's not far it's just right below this washed station right here and you'll be in the pig pen i'm gonna get set up right here go get my buggies out of my cage get my buckets filled with gravel and i also i'm on a short time frame i have six hours to get the buckets get get them washed we're gonna try to get ten buckets done in six hours get everything centered up so it's definitely gonna be a rush rush day and hopefully find something very valuable so i'll be set up here at the south wash i'm going to head over to the west drain which over canary hill there'll be a drain on the other side of that small pavilion and cages and also go down here and get a few buckets of the pig pen see we can get out of that because there's been some really nice diamonds found shirley strong loves that area and it just kind of wants me to it just makes me want to get down there and get some of that material this is where i started when i first came out here i started here right here in this field in all this area and i didn't know what i was doing and i spent four years of wasted time but now i have an idea okay i'll be taking 12 buckets today need my shovel missing something what i love about my new screens you can clean your shovel off with them [Music] okay now we're ready okay here's canary hill and right over there is the west drain okay i'll leave my wagon here and now you just kind of take a bucket or two and a shovel and walk around this west drain and look for some gravel laying around scoop it up okay here's the west drain you can see down here we have a lot of gravel just laying there waiting for somebody to scoop up check out all that gravel so this is definitely a good spot but we're not going to be digging really deep down like that all we're gonna do is scrape like this right here [Applause] and just get that amount off the top a couple inches put that in your bucket and you'll go ahead and do that to all of this that you can see we'll come over here a little bit of gravel in the water but not much they've been working on it pretty good here's some gravel that's what i'll be doing is focusing on this area just kind of scrape the top if i just get two maybe three buckets right here we'll move on to another spot all right so i probably got a bucket out of that spot right there you can see where i dug into it a couple inches and that's all we're gonna do a lot of gravel yet to get i'm gonna come over here and see what i can get out of this water like a lot of stuff built up down here you get down in the water here you just just gravel everywhere okay got some more to put in that bucket we'll probably be good enough down here we'll move on somewhere else but i'm going to work on getting i'm going to work on getting this gravel in the water a lot of times the diamonds you know they're hydrophobic they do not like water water cannot penetrate a diamond so when it rains the diamonds try to swim up out of the water up along the edge of the water you know like over here it's not a bad idea to scrape right here in the middle as well but you got a good chance of working these sides as well to get your diamond since the diamonds do not like water they try to float away and get out of it [Applause] so okay that's full let's go and get that other bucket put some of that material in here we'll get out of here go down the pig pin get a couple buckets yeah it's just about half full way get these buckets filled up pretty good since it's the last day i'll be working okay that's cool all right we got a couple buckets out of the west drain now we're gonna move on to the pig pen get a couple buckets out of that move over to the south trench get a few buckets out of that probably go down the snake pit get a couple buckets out of that go to the east drain get a couple bucks out of that and i'll be ready to go home so that's worked out okay i'm gonna dump these two buckets off from the west drain and take my wagon on down to the pig pen grab a couple buckets and maybe where that person is those people are and those furrows might pay out then we'll probably get a buck or two from the new trench well the south trench is not new and maybe a bucket or two out of the snake pit in the east drain and we have at least six more hours so star shreveport this was found in the pig pen you can pause that and read it if you'd like to that's where we're at we're going to get a few buckets from down here hopefully get a diamond bigger in that one all right so i'm over here prospecting looking for something to dig up there's just all kinds of gravel in here but the thing about this area there's so much of this right here of that fine fine material which you really don't want that there's a lot of it down here so you want to try to avoid scooping that up and just focus on getting the gravel which i'm not seeing a whole lot over here but that's the thing you got to walk around and find it it's just not going to be everywhere here's a nice little stretch of gravel but it's a lot of bigger rocks i'm looking for the smaller maybe that's why i never found a diamond here because just not a whole lot of gravel but they're here okay i'm gonna do some prospecting and see if i can find some gravel to dig up catch back with everybody in a few all right i'm pretty much in the pig pen you've got a sluice back here if you wanted to bring some classifiers you can have water or if you need to fill up your wash tub you can bring it down here and you got water but yeah you know here's what we're looking for is more of a something like that but we just need more of it and i'm just not seeing it down here and times a ticking so i need to hurry up and find something to put in the buckets and this right here is pretty much the lowest point at the crater of diamonds that and the snake pit is pretty hard to determine which one's lower but they're both at the south end it's all uphill from here and everything heavy comes down this way this is a really good spot it's been looked over a lot though god damn it okay i've been working in this area right here i've been scraping what little gravel i've seen there's just so much silt it's just not cool so i'm going to try to work on getting a another bucket over here it's thin picking for sure and then i'll head over to the south trench which is just straight through the trees definitely get some buckets over there we'll definitely get our two buckets out of that then we'll move over to the snake pit and to me when it's a really hard rain this over here is gushing with water and this over here is gushing with water you can still see the water coming down so there's a lot of heavies through this whole stretch through that channel right there i'm just gonna work on scraping that about two inches now get that bucket filled headed down to the south trench get a couple buckets down here and move over to the snake pit all right so we're at the south trench the gravel has thinned out since i was here last but there's still plenty to get you see right here nice trail of gravel you can chase i'm gonna walk around in the south trench check out this huge chunk of timber this really long timber i've just dug up probably a 10 foot piece of wood that's crazy that's why they call this the artifact side all right i got two buckets out of the south trench let's move over to the snake pit and get two buckets from there all right now we're making our way into the snake pit there's the start of it you might remember that video some of you may have seen the video from the snake pit this time we're gonna work our way all the way to the very end by the out of bounds signs and get some material from that that's a really low end it's not as low as the pig pin but this is definitely a lower end at the diamond mine which can contain a lot of diamonds somebody made a crater at the crater i wonder who done that okay i've made my way to the very end of the snake pit and the diamond mine boundary and i've been digging around in this spot and seeing a lot of good gravel but i'm gonna have to dig a little bit to get to it there's so much silt covering all this i can't just scrape it like we're doing so i'm going to dig down a little bit to the gravel scoop it up and move on up to the east drain get some of that material i think we got four more buckets to gather then we'll be ready to wash getting down to about five hours to go all right just got a bucket from all of that gravel lots of gravel in there okay let's get one more bucket they move up a little bit and get it okay so i just got a bucket out of this area right here and it's just down in the low spot so it's going to be loaded with heavies which could contain diamonds that's what it looks like all right let's go get a few more buckets and start washing all right we got eight buckets hauled up gonna go get four more and get them out of the east drain i'm just down from the straw wagner shovel in the east drain and what i'll be doing here is just scraping everything in the water that i can get and then a lot of this stuff right here is just like gold bigger rocks bigger nuggets bigger rocks bigger diamonds so you may want to do your buckets three quarters down here because this is all concentrated material with large rocks so the buckets are extremely heavy a full bucket is around 80 pounds or more i got a bucket of the material in the water i'm going to work on getting some of this material that has got pushed out diamonds are hydrophobic just like gold they do not like water water cannot penetrate a diamond so when it's raining the diamonds are trying to swim out of the water so it's not a bad idea to work up here on the sides as well these rocks you can just throw out of the way you know this is all pushed up from the last rain so nobody has dug in this good thing there's not really any regulars anymore because they just if there was they would have saw this and there's been people down here all week digging gotta love that sound [Applause] lots of gravel i have to come back over here now you scoop up them big rocks floating your bucket then grab it and tap it and throw it out okay that's cool i'm gonna get the last two buckets in this spot because i have a really good feeling over here yeah i'm going to get these other two buckets right up in here that's our 12 buckets we'll head up there to the south wash and get them knocked out hopefully in an hour or two okay so anytime you're down in this drain and there's water flowing you just don't want to get a shovel and then tilt it like that and all that water drains out all your diamonds just drained out like i say the diamonds don't like to be wet or floating or trying to get out of that stuff so it's always a good idea to scoop it i'll keep your shovel level never get your material on for it like that you'll lose everything and you really want your bucket to be right here beside you when you go to make the scoop you don't lose any material the less material you lose the better you don't want it all to pour out i mean this thing is loaded with gravel guys check that out but i'm going to keep on working on this right here really good we got one more bucket to go that'll be 12 buckets still in the east drain and while we're here i was going to show you that it's not a bad idea to check these little small cliffs that drop down before the water because there's a lot of good gravel normally just right where it's dropped off and you always want to make sure there's just not a big tailing pile from somebody last week and it just that fell down so always kind of make sure there's a lot of small gravel big rocks because if they worked it there wouldn't be much of that small stuff all right last four let's go get them washed up i'll probably do each area at a time from the east drain this is the south trench over the far end of the snake pit this is the south trench this right here will be the pigpen and that's the west drain all right let's get them worked okay time to wet sift like a beast that's how i do it here's the first bucket top screen of the west drain nice chunk of torch almost peed my pants so yeah it looks pretty good there's some red jasper a little bit of red kind of light red we want that dark red like this better a small piece of conglomerate and it's hard to tell where this material came from they've mixed it all up this could have come from the east drain we don't know if they've been stirred up for so many years okay here's the second bucket out of the west drain got another small quartz but no diamond on the top screen no three carat today time to move on to the pig pen buckets we've got tasty hair to do let's see what the pig pen looks like all right let's scrape the west drain bottom screen like i always do and yeah not too great a little bit of spinel see some quartz here but yeah not all like we always see in some other spots i'm going gonna put my screens to the test i got one bucket of the pig pen we're gonna go ahead and dump the other bucket and see if it'll wash two buckets at once pray my elbow survives all right here's the second bucket going on going in the mud see the pig pen is just full of silt no tailings dropping from the old mining companies for some reason there's been some big diamonds found in that area [Music] [Music] hmm [Applause] all the silt nice chunk of quartz there's some more forts he's a huge chocolate calcite and the bottom is full [Music] very full not a good idea one backward at a time they can hold it maybe if your name is dozer you can handle two buckets at once [Music] not bmi especially two buckets of the pigpen that's just too much silt that's what all this is just that bounce helps so much of that get out of there it's pretty much gone it's all gone right here all right two buckets done probably eight minutes all right i got six buckets to go i'm just about out of time i have two and a half hours to get six buckets washed get it all centered clean up my cage pack up my tent so i may have to finish working the centers at the house okay the next two is going to be from the south trench and then we have six more to go the snake pit and the east drain eight total all right so on the second bucket from the south trench i hit a gravel layer so you just loaded with gravel and when i was digging into it i could tell it was a layer that was exposed i went ahead and checked that out that is awesome maybe agate it's so cool ah slippery maybe again lots of good stuff on the top screen hopefully the bottom's got a diamond all right i was able to get the 12 buckets washed before they close i have about one hour to get out of here go back to my camp get my tent rolled up get everything packed up make the five hour drive back to home and we'll look at centers i'll see you all at the house all right here's the last flip of the west drain looks really good get about 15 20 buckets of that or more you'll get a diamond some people get lucky and get a diamond in just a few buckets i'll go over all of this on the tray in my shop might find one okay there's the re-flip so you can just scoop up that little bit right there and do it again and do it again you know you're getting everything all right just made the flips from the pig pen two buckets and check out all these heavy minerals it's just loaded with i them can't believe how much that was in this stuff and this is the lowest end of the crater of diamonds for sure it's just loaded let me know if you see a diamond okay here's the re-flip of those two centers and as you can see we have lots of heavies yet so i'll scoop all that up and probably work this again maybe two more times just to get everything and i'm focusing on just getting the heavies as you can see in this pan right here take a look at the pan and it's just white because i'm just barely scraping the center putting it in the pan and reworking this barely scraping that i'm not trying to get any of this anything over here the next time you do it will come over here it'll keep working its way to the center that way you're just looking at more heavies a lot more heavies which means diamonds okay so i'm picking around at my center yes you can pick at your center you just don't pick at other people's centers all right here's the third flip meaning the second re-flip i've redone this i have worked this three different times and check out that center it's starting to thin out so i'll probably scoop that up do it one more time and call it good and i have a nice amount of heavies only [Music] all right these two flips here are from the east drain and the snake pit um when you work that area there's so much concentrate for me to get all that out the door in one day i had to center it up which gave me about a half a little under a half a bucket and here's the center from the snake pit and the east drain together just loaded with indicators lots of calcite and quartz you know it's not the best but we've got some spinel mixed in there the black shiny rock i see some hematite a piece of magnetite okay let's take a look at the other one and here's the other center get closer looks like it has a few more darker indicators like hematite and magnet magnetite spinel and i have just a little bit left in the bucket so yeah that's the snake pit and the east drain all right went ahead and got that other material worked and centered looks really good here's the other one lots of hematite in that one and you know the east drain and the snake pit it's all pretty much the same material so i mixed it up and here is the third center just loaded as well all right it's time to take all this material and go over everything on the tray all right here's all the material dried ready to go over on the tray over here we have the pig pen material and then this would be the west grain notes you will definitely get diamonds because they're so much heavier than a diamond in the little small green rock which we'll hopefully come across here in this video is chromium dioxide and it's even heavier than the garnets so now i need to go get a sample from fugus bank beatty's hill the far far north what i call it the north drain oh and there's a few other spots out in the field that don't really have names they're just kind of out there so we'll hit several more spots up get two buckets get that diamond

Channel: Diamond Miner Ivins

Views: 17,359

Rating: 4.9495797 out of 5

Keywords: mining, dig, mine, digging, diamonds, gravel, diamond ore, prospecting, rockhounding, wuartz, crystals, amethyst, new, age, video, searching, mining diamomds, prospecting diamonds, gemstones, heavy minerals, crater of diamonds, state park mine, arkansas diamonds, flawless diamonds, arkansas state park mine, searching for diamonds, how to find diamonds, finding gravel

Id: UQ2k9WEX45k

Length: 44min 25sec (2665 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 07 2020