A state park in Arkansas lets anyone dig for diamonds and keep what they find. This year, a visitor found a 6-carat yellow diamond that an appraiser says could be worth around $250,000.
Unironically Arkansas has some really cool geology. The state geologist mailed me a bunch of rocks to study for my undergrad senior thesis project for my geology degree - world class samples of very rare, cool igneous rocks. I've still never been to Arkansas but my senior thesis is now in the state geology library there!
I would say because a lot of people don’t think highly of Arkansas. I’ve lived in the Midwest/plains my whole life and always thought Arkansas was dry, poor, racist. and dirty and not pretty. My partner and I went to hot springs NP for Christmas and were blown away by how beautiful Arkansas was! When we tell people they are also surprised. So I don’t know if it is ironic but these were just our thoughts of Arkansas
It really is, especially if you have kids under 12. They're generally closer to the ground and have better eyesight and what kid doesn't like treasure hunting and playing in the mud.
Fossil hunting in northern Michigan and the UP (Upper Peninsula) might also be fun, by that same metric. I love finding petoskeys and other fossils and interesting stones.
We opted to go digging at a nearby crystal mine instead based on reviews that your chances of actually finding anything at the diamond park were extremely slim. We had a blast digging in the mud and found some very beautiful large intact clear crystals.
I was talking to a hippie at a bluegrass festival in Arkansas years ago and he told me he dug up crystals and traded them at shows for drugs/food. I told him that is like something out of a video game, he was on acid and I think his brain exploded
We went in May and it was fun, but the heat and sun were pretty punishing. You definitely want to go with plenty of water and a pop-up shade of some sort.
Yeah a bunch of us went camping there last spring and it wasnt til we were set up that we realized the nearest booze selling place was like a two hour round trip
In the boozy west (minus Utah but okay maybe Utah if nobody is looking), there's not really any dry counties but sometimes you're 2+ hours away from any town so preparation is important.
Oh no not him. No joke thats one of my movies that always comes to mind when I think horror movie.
So fascinating that it scares me in the context of the circumstances of what happens just everyday ordinary average thing that can happen to anybody anywhere at any time kind of thing.
No setup no spooky backstory it just unravels as you go along, I love that think its called psychologigal horror I guess. Wolf creek if anyone is wondering what the movie is its pretty good.
The first time we took a motorcycle trip down there we stayed in Harrison. Knew nothing about the area, the hotels were cheap, and it was close to the good roads.
The second time we went down there we stayed in Branson.
It's funny how these things turn up so frequently and usually at the same time of year....a bit like the Loch Ness Monster always tends to show up around February ;)
They have mountains but not sheer, snow topped mountains like in the picture. The topography in the photo is not the kind of thing you see in Arkansas. Arkansas mountains are all below tree line and not that sheer. If they were sheer, it would be sandstone cliffs, not like the large granite cliffs shown in the picture.
Reminds me. I grew up in the Rocky Mountains and visited Virginia as a kid. We went to the Blue Ridge Mountains and I kept asking where the mountains were, these are just hills!
Yep, I've been through the Ozarks a number of times. While they meet the technical definition of mountains, I guess I've never really seen them as such. The tallest point in Arkansas is, what, 2,700'? That's barely a hill on the west side of the US.
I guess it all kind of depends on perspective. Also, the Ozarks don't look anything like the range in the background of that picture.
Tons is a stretch. I am from there. Half the state is flatter than a pancake. And the tallest mountain is less than 3000 ft (or less than 915 m). Murfreesboro, where the Crater of Diamonds State Park is located, is not in the Ozark or Ouachita Mountains. And none of the (very small) mountains in Arkansas have significant prominence. You can't see them from far away like this. And they certainly aren't snowcapped.
I went there twice once as a kid and once as an adult.
As a kid it was a fun camping trip, I liked digging in the dirt and learning some local history.
When I went as an adult it was sad. The area where you sieve was full of grown adults taking up multiple tables desperately looking through the dirt while yelling at there wives and kids.it was like those videos you see of old people in casinos glued to the slots machines.
Fun fact, it’s just a few dollars to dig, and people find some every year. Another fun fact: if you’re there, you’re also in Arkansas, and you have other problems.
Arkansas actually has a number of really cool geological sites. I did my undergrad thesis on a formation there. I've still never actually been to the state lol, the AR geological survey mailed me rocks.
If you have kids 10 and younger, it's actually pretty fun. Your odds of finding anything good are dismal, but the kids get excited and have a fun time.
If you don't have kids though, you'll have more fun digging in your own backyard.
It WAS awesome. Then everyone from California and Texas moved there for cheap living which made everything more expensive. And over the last decade or so Walmart has turned Bentonville into basically a company town.
NWA is still better off than the rest of AR, but everything looks when better compared to shit.
Ah, a classic tale. Doesn’t matter how small or BFE nowheresville somewhere is, someone will blame California and Texas for all their problems (that they themselves caused).
Yeah I didn’t know anything about that area when I flew in to fayetteville and had to drive to springfield, the 2 hour drive actually being pretty was a welcomed shock 😂
Jack is there weekly and has found a ton before this diamond, he will definitely find a ton more. He also a really nice guy, met him at a party and he was passing out Arkansas sourced selenite to all the guests! I prefer hunting quartz in the woods though, the diamond mine is just a giant mud field.
If he can afford to spend the rest of his life doing something he enjoys I'd say he's doing alright. The real diamonds was the meticulously sifting through dirt to find diamonds all along.
"At 6.03 carats (roughly the size of a gumdrop), Pearadin’s stone is the fourth-largest yellow diamond found at the site since it became a state park in 1972. To pull something this large out of the dirt is a "needle in a haystack" event. Pearadin himself had already found over 300 diamonds over 13 years of digging before striking this jackpot."
Your quote sent me on a goose chase. I got curious about what 13 years of diamond hunting and 300+ discoveries actually translates to in terms of hourly earnings. And the numbers are... interesting.
First, a few things I found "digging" into this -
Apparently, this guy was so committed to diamond hunting that he actually moved to Murfreesboro, Arkansas, to be closer to the park. He also acknowledged that the hobby hadn't been financially profitable before this discovery.
But here's the kicker: he's planning to split the proceeds of this diamond with another guy who helped collect the gravel.
So that$250K is potentially $125K for him. And that's assuming the diamond actually sells for $250K, which isn't guaranteed.
Now, I couldn't find anything documenting exactly how many hours he's spent digging, or how much he's earned selling his previous diamonds. But we can do some back-of-the-napkin math.
Assuming 13 years of digging:
5 hours/week: 3,380 hours = $37/hour
10 hours/week: 6,760 hours = $18.49/hour
20 hours/week: 13,520 hours = $9.25/hour
That's his share of the big jackpot alone, before taxes, equipment, admission fees, travel, and other expenses.
Of course, there are those 300+ other diamonds. Let's hypothetically value them at $200 apiece, because any ither notable findings weren't mentioned in his interviews or newspapers. That's another $60K, bringing his lifetime gross earnings to $185K.
At 10 hours a week, that works out to $27.37/hour. Over THIRTEEN years. And that's including what might be his once-in-a-lifetime jackpot!
To put that into perspective, someone working a $20/hour part-time job for 10 hours a week over the same period would have earned $135,200, with considerably less digging involved. And probably better odds of actually getting paid.
Obviously, the guy loves what he does, and there's nothing wrong with spending time on something you enjoy. Not everything needs to be monetized. But I find it fascinating how these stories are framed as incredible financial windfalls when the return on time invested might be remarkably ordinary.
13 years of hunting for diamonds, only to discover that the real treasure was a part-time job with no guaranteed paycheck;
The diamonds very rarely sell for nearly as much as they try to say either, like when this was first being talked about the diamond was considered to be worth half a million to a million and is already down to 1/4 like the town the diamond mine is in the stores are full of diamonds that will never sell at the prices they're listed for
If you enjoyed that and you drive through Nevada at all, try to stop in Ely for a day or so. There's a free area called Garnet Hill where you can go and mine for garnets. You're mostly smashing rocks/boulders but you'll definitely find stones that way.
I have a feeling posts like this is the reason they allow people to keep what they find, there for sure will be some sort of seasonal rush to go there just incase you can find 250k and keep it xD
I always like those Pawn Shop shows where the expert will appraise the item in front of the owner, say $4000. The expert leaves then the store owner says, I’ll give you $800 for it.
That's how pawn shops work. They resell what they buy. No pawn shop is going to give you the actual appraised value of an item, and anyone who goes into a pawn shop expecting that is a dolt.
I mean, people understand they need to make a profit. They just think the offer is going to be closer to the actual value. Well... some people straight up ask for the full value, but they're dolts, yeah...
Crater of Diamonds State Park in Murfreesboro, Arkansas, is a former open-pit diamond mine. It became a state park in 1972, and the rule is finders keepers: visitors have found more than 37,000 diamonds there since. It's one of only two known primary diamond deposits in the US.
This year, Navy reservist Jack Pearadin found a 6.03-carat yellow diamond, the biggest found at the park in 2026, and caught the moment on a TikTok livestream: "Holy crap, we got a big one!" He named it the "American Dream" and plans to split the profits with the friend who helped him dig.
Pearadin says collectors told him it could be worth over $1 million, but an experienced appraiser told the AP it's more likely worth about a quarter of that, and a certified gem appraiser said high-quality six-carat yellow diamonds from the park can sell for around $250,000.
Most diamonds found there are tiny, around a quarter carat. The biggest ever, the 40.23-carat "Uncle Sam," was found in 1924, before it became a park.
As a geologist I would be so conflicted. Like finding a specimen like that would be a crowning achievement! But I also have a mortgage and student loans, so not selling it would probably also get to me.
Jack Pearadin is the first to admit that his diamond-hunting hobby hasn’t paid off, despite sifting rocks for more than a dozen years.
But earlier this year, the Navy reservist and his friend shoveled a six-carat diamond from a field in Arkansas where he’s found over 300 gems so far. And this one is like nothing he’s dug up before — Pearadin claims collectors have told him it could be worth $1 million.
At least one experienced appraiser told The Associated Press that a diamond of such size and quality could be worth a fourth of that — still an impressive find.
“Oh my God! Oh my God!” Pearadin said as he livestreamed the discovery on TikTok. “Holy crap, we got a big one!” he yelled after rinsing gravel from a bucket and then flipping the pile onto a table to expose the shiny facets of a 6.03-carat diamond.
Roughly the size of a fingernail, it’s the largest diamond found this year at Crater of Diamonds State Park. More than 37,000 diamonds have been discovered since the former open-pit diamond mine became part of a state park in 1972.
The park charges a $15 entry fee to fill a 5-gallon bucket with rocks, and people can keep any gemstones they find. Most are small and worth maybe a few hundred dollars. The largest diamond ever unearthed in the United States, a 40.23-carat stone called the Uncle Sam, was found at the park in 1924.
Pearadin, originally from Missouri, has been trying his luck at the park since 2013, even moving to nearby Murfreesboro to support his hobby — “I love it that much,” he told The Associated Press. He’s sold most of his diamonds online.
Most of the 400 to 800 diamonds found at the park annually weigh about a quarter of a carat, according to park interpreter Sarah Bivens. But there have been some bigger ones, said park assistant superintendent Waymon Cox: In 2020 a 9-carat diamond was found by an Arkansas bank manager, and in 2024 a French man unearthed a 7-carat diamond.
Diamonds are crystallized under tremendous pressure and heat deep inside the Earth and then thrust to the surface through volcanic activity before they’re scattered by water or wind. These natural diamonds are often cloudy and oddly shaped, and lose about 25% of their weight as they’re cut and polished into what a jeweler would sell, according to Nathan Renfro, senior manager at the Gemological Institute of America.
Renfro said the U.S. has only two known primary deposits of diamonds — places where columns of once-molten volcanic rock have reached the surface — Crater of Diamonds and Colorado’s Kelsey Lake, where the land was reclaimed after a commercial mining operation went out of business years ago.
Today, that leaves the Arkansas park as one of the only places in the world where anyone can hunt for diamonds and take their finds with them.
“It’s a pretty remarkable operation that that’s available to the public,” Renfro said. “Most diamond mines are super high security.”
A typical .17-carat diamond from the park can sell for around $700, said certified gem appraiser Laura Stanley in Little Rock. But a high-quality six-carat yellow diamond from the park can sell for about $250,000, she said, partly because of their origin.
“They are their own entity,” Stanley said. “It’s the only place in America where you can go find your own diamond and you can’t compare that to a diamond from anywhere else.”
The Uncle Sam crystal was cut and polished into a 12.42-carat diamond gifted to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where it’s on view in the “Great American Diamonds” exhibit.
Pearadin named his latest and biggest find the “American Dream.”
“It’s just this massive, gorgeous yellow diamond,” Pearadin said. He plans to split the profits with fellow gem hunter Michael Schumacher of Wisconsin, who helped fill the bucket that held the stone, and open his own crystal mine
Saw this info posted on another comment. Posting what I replied there -
Your quote sent me on a goose chase. I got curious about what 13 years of diamond hunting and 300+ discoveries actually translates to in terms of hourly earnings. And the numbers are... interesting.
First, a few things I found "digging" into this -
Apparently, this guy was so committed to diamond hunting that he actually moved to Murfreesboro, Arkansas, to be closer to the park. He also acknowledged that the hobby hadn't been financially profitable before this discovery.
But here's the kicker: he's planning to split the proceeds of this diamond with another guy who helped collect the gravel.
So that$250K is potentially $125K for him. And that's assuming the diamond actually sells for $250K, which isn't guaranteed.
Now, I couldn't find anything documenting exactly how many hours he's spent digging, or how much he's earned selling his previous diamonds. But we can do some back-of-the-napkin math.
Assuming 13 years of digging:
5 hours/week: 3,380 hours = $37/hour
10 hours/week: 6,760 hours = $18.49/hour
20 hours/week: 13,520 hours = $9.25/hour
That's his share of the big jackpot alone, before taxes, equipment, admission fees, travel, and other expenses.
Of course, there are those 300+ other diamonds. Let's hypothetically value them at $200 apiece, because any ither notable findings weren't mentioned in his interviews or newspapers. That's another $60K, bringing his lifetime gross earnings to $185K.
At 10 hours a week, that works out to $27.37/hour. Over THIRTEEN years. And that's including what might be his once-in-a-lifetime jackpot!
To put that into perspective, someone working a $20/hour part-time job for 10 hours a week over the same period would have earned $135,200, with considerably less digging involved. And probably better odds of actually getting paid.
Obviously, the guy loves what he does, and there's nothing wrong with spending time on something you enjoy. Not everything needs to be monetized. But I find it fascinating how these stories are framed as incredible financial windfalls when the return on time invested might be remarkably ordinary.
13 years of hunting for diamonds, only to discover that the real treasure was a part-time job with no guaranteed paycheck;
That second to last paragraph is honestly one of the most important parts. If he had fun doing it, that takes away 90% of that work math. I might spend 40 hours a week playing videos games ans watching shows with nothing financially to show for it. Obviously he got incredibly lucky, but if it's a hobby then comparing it to a real job doesn't make any sense. Its like he loved playing games and one day got an item drop worth 250K. Amazing bonus really.
Took my kids there for a couple of days. They had fun digging in the dirt. Sifted a bunch of stuff. Didn't find anything worthwhile. They had fun, but definitely a one and done for us.
Went there once when I was 14, my mom found a diamond that was about the size of a sesame seed and I found some potato sized chunks of jasper! I'd love to go back and take my kids!
Having been at this park earlier this year, it's a lot of hard work for a small chance of finding a diamond. It seemed fun before have but after 2 hours everyone in my group was happy to quit. Maybe in the winter it's better in cooler weather. The reason this park exists is because there are not enough diamond to make it profitable to mine commercially.
Its just meant to be a fun little thing to do for tourists while you are in that area. If you are going in with strong expectations to get rich then you are doing it wrong. But you never know, you may get lucky.
The diamond fields were of great interest to De Beers after the discovery, not to put into production, but to supress the exploration and production. The FBI got involved in the 1940's and 50's due to De Beers' reputation for running a tight international cartel that artificially restricted the supply and controlled the price of diamonds. They were finally taken to court in 1994 and ended in 2004 when De Beers plead guilty in a federal court to the price-fixing charges and paid a $10 million criminal fine. Some speculated that De Beers stiffled the mine's chance to go into production, but modern exploration of the district has proven that the economics don't exist.
Go dig in that dirt field if you want. Been there. My cousin kept finding pebbles and calling them diamonds for 5 hours while we got blasted by the sun. Not as interesting as you’d think. Btw the pics are not from the crater of diamonds lol
I went there once, didn't find a diamond, but perhaps had an even rarer experience.
While my mom and I were on vacation in Arkansas from Wisconsin, we went to this park. While we were looking around, we ended up seeing one of my elementary school classmates and his dad. Two kids, from the same elementary school, 700 miles away, happened to be in the same park on the same day at the same time. Absolutely crazy. Kicked off a lifelong love of serendipity. I call coincidence the miracle of science. Something so infinitesimally unlikely, and yet here it is.
As an Arkansan I'll just say have fun digging in the dirt for 5 hours and not finding anything but more dirt lol, it's much more fun to go crystal digging because you'll probably actually find some shiny things
Crater of Diamonds State Park allows you to take one five gallon bucket of dirt home per person per day. The smart people don’t just load up a bucket with dirt, diamond prospectors use a special type of mining pan/sifter/screen system called a ‘saruca’ which you use to concentrate the heaviest minerals down to the bottom of the finest screen. Then you flip the saruca onto a table (like making an upside-down cake) and you’ll have a small circle of heavy minerals in the center which have been concentrated by shaking and rotating the saruca in water (it’s physics!). The veteran prospectors that spend every day at the park don’t bother checking the saruca while they’re at the park, they just scoop out the centers and dump it into their bucket, then they take the bucket of concentrate home and sift it again at their own leisure. If you have more people in your group then you can take more buckets of concentrate home. Some of the regulars have special arrangements with the park where they have their own private sifting stations set up, but there are also two large sheltered sifting stations on either side of the diamond field.
I’ve taken three trips to Crater of Diamonds over the years, and I hope to make it back out there someday soon. Arkansas has some of the best State Park accommodations in the country, you can get a camp site at Crater of Diamonds (good luck as it’s usually booked more than a year out) or at any of the surrounding State Parks, and all of their State Park campsites are outfitted with hot shower rooms and clean water spigots. It gets hot and humid as fuck in that part of the country, and the diamond field is NOT small. The biggest struggle is finding good pockets of gravel among all the grey clay, the clay is absolutely horrendous. That diamond field used to be owned by a private mining company, but they closed it down after their operation was no longer profitable and the state took it over and turned it into a State Park. What that means is that your chances of finding a diamond are VERY low, but your chances will improve somewhat if you can learn to identify the small ones. Larger diamonds are much easier to identify, but small ones can easily be mistaken for quartz or calcite which is abundant in that part of the country. I have found some very pretty quartz crystals there, but still no diamond as far as I can tell. Still, it’s a fun way to spend a day just make sure you take lots of water and food because you definitely won’t find a diamond if you aren’t willing to put your back into it.
The real kicker is that the gates are situated at the highest point elevation-wise, and a five gallon bucket of concentrated gravel is NOT light, they typically weigh more than 50lbs when full, and the more concentrated the gravel the heavier the bucket. So when you’re ready to leave at the end of the day you’ve gotta hike across the diamond field, uphill the whole way, with a 50lb+ bucket of concentrate. Most people do it once or twice and then decide that diamond mining is not for them lmao.
Some people really take the idea of “overinflated value” too far in their own noggins. They are very overinflated due to marketing, yep. In an apocalypse, it’s just a shiny rock, true. That’s true of a lot of things. An item of overinflated value having no value is a dumb thought.
Or that gem-grade diamonds are not the same as industrial diamonds and are, in fact, pretty rare. Or anything about this at all, other than what he's read on reddit about the supposed diamon scam.
Diamonds aren’t rare, but in-tact large single diamonds are incredibly rare. Most diamonds are tiny and valueless, but value of a diamond per carat scales exponentially with size. A 1ct natural diamond (after cutting) is worth a couple thousand max, but a 6ct diamond (after cutting) could be worth hundreds of thousands or millions.
Diamonds in general as a raw material are pretty common, but there is scarcity of diamonds that are clear/high quality enough to meet customer demand and expectation for jewelry (about 5-10% of all mined diamonds meet those clarity and size requirements in general, with an even smaller percentage of those meeting highest clarity standards).
The ones that don’t are used for industrial purposes. Of course even with the other category, lab-grown is so good at this point that needing a “real” diamond for those purposes is all marketing and cultural momentum.
Sorry this is reddit. Best I can do is snap judgement for anyone who likes diamond jewelry and upvotes for anyone who comments "a ring pop is all I need" or similar.
As a geologist, most of the precious gemstones are pretty boring when it comes to chemistry and mineralogical properties. Diamond is just carbon, rubies and sapphires are just slightly dirty aluminum oxide. Definitely nothing exciting.
Emerald is pretty cool though. A beryllium based cyclosilicate!
Diamond being pure carbon is the exact opposite of boring. It's the only native element that's a proper gemstone (other than maybe sulfur but it's so brittle and soft that it hardly counts), one of the few gems that possess true adamantine luster, and its superlative hardness is a testament to the extraordinary nature of carbon as an element.
Studying organic chemistry in college gave me a new appreciation for how amazing carbon is and I treasure my diamond ring as a perfect example of the thing that makes all life possible every day.
I do love emeralds too and I even have two small emerald-cut red beryls. My dream one day is a ring with all of the beryl varieties channel-set next to each other.
You could say this about any consumer good. Things have value because society says they do. Have diamond companies manipulated the supply and ballooned the cost? Yes. But calling diamonds “valueless common stones” is a bit disingenuous.
Diamond as part of the whole engagement thing sure but they aren’t valueless and are used in many different applications besides just jewelry. This is a knee jerk reaction to something I think you are greatly misinformed on.
A lot of other applications don't require super perfect looking diamonds, it just needs to be the same material even if its dark brown, a diamond is a diamond in that respect.
Yeah dude that's most things. Everything in this world is valueless until someone or something has a need for it. Then a value is determined based on its supply and the intensity of its demand. There is no such thing as inherent value. Things aren't created with some monetary value assigned to it from the ether.
Lab diamond and natural diamonds are both priced completely differently and are considered different commodities despite being chemically identical. Large gem quality natural diamonds are very rare and still very valuable
You're just explaining the artificial inflation that I mentioned. They're considered different commodities purely to keep the empires built on the rarity of the gemstone from collapsing, because like you said, they are identical to the atomic level.
It's not just artificial inflation. The de beers company has done it on a massive scale but a sizable diamond with high clarity is legitimately a rare geological anomaly. They are legitimately atomically identical but natural diamonds hold and retain value completely differently than lab diamonds
You're conflating artificial price inflation with genuine geological scarcity. Both can exist simultaneously. De Beers historically manipulated diamond prices, but that doesn't make large, high-quality natural diamonds any less rare. Lab diamonds are chemically identical, but their production can be scaled, whereas natural diamond supply is geologically constrained. That's why they have different supply dynamics and secondary markets. I'm explaining how the market works, not defending its pricing.
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u/TheEndOfNether 12h ago
I went there for a weekend. didn't find any diamonds but there's a ton of very pretty agate and jasper