April 4 – Washing Dirt
While we’re waiting for Spring to arrive up north so we can head that way, we are exploring a little bit south. We finally decided to head to Crater of Diamonds State Park in southern Arkansas. With high hopes of finding a diamond as big as the Ritz we donned our work clothes and shoes, went through the Diamond Discovery Center, watched the video and rented the tools. At least it was a sunny day to walk in the mud, scoop buckets of clay soil and proceed to wash it in large troughs of cool, muddy water. After almost 3 hours of getting wet and muddy washing buckets of dirt down to a few handfuls of tiny grains of gravel we gave up. We took Mavrik for a hike and decided that the beauty of the Little Missouri River area was the real “diamond in the rough”.
Everyone is so optimistic when they enter the Diamond Discovery Center!
We took turns washing the dirt! The barren plowed field in the background has probably been washed several times over in the last century!
No, not diamonds, just crystals at an abandoned campsite at Crystal Campground in the Ouachita National Forest.