Nature’s bounty is always a rewarding experience when you’re visiting one of the nation’s many parks, but one tourist destination can be particularly lucrative for visitors: an Arkansas gem park that lets people keep whatever valuable stones they find. In the recent case of a father-daughter duo, that turned out to be a 2.03-carat diamond.
Crater of Diamonds State Park is the only open-to-the-public diamond deposit in the world, and it’s an area that has proven fruitful for visitors in the past, including a teenager who sold a 3.85 carat yellow diamond she found at the park for $20,000 in 2014.
This time around, park officials said it took less than an hour for the twosome to spot the gem on the side of a plowed furrow in the park last week. They’d never been there before, but decided to travel there from Washington state after searching the Internet for “places to find gems.”
Park Interpreter Betty Coors says that the family’s find “has proven, once again, that it is possible to find large, beautiful diamonds while surface searching. This is an example of a diamond that all park visitors dream of taking home.”
The park’s press release notes that larger diamonds can sometimes end up on top of the search area.
“Diamonds are a bit heavy for their size, and when rain washes dirt away, they are sometimes exposed to the surface,” the park explains. “When the sun comes out, they sparkle and are easier to spot.”
The two say they’re planning on keeping their gem, but haven’t settled on what to do with it yet.
“My dad and I have always loved to hunt for gems; we’ve dug for sapphires and garnets and always search for agates when we’re on the Washington coast. Naturally, we had always wanted to go to Arkansas to dig for diamonds,” the daughter said. “As much as we have talked about the trip and planned it out, I think we’re still kind of in shock that we found something as big and beautiful as our ‘Lucky Diamond.’ “
by Mary Beth Quirk via Consumerist
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