[Rockhounds] Where you can actually hunt for diamonds and gemstones across the US

[Kreigh Tomaszewski]

Last week, a Parisian tourist on a US road trip
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/travel/2024/01/26/arkansas-crater-of-diamonds-park-french-tourist/>
stopped
off at Arkansas's Crater of Diamonds State Park
<https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/crater-diamonds-state-park> –
where visitors pay $15 per day to search for naturally formed gems
glistening in the dirt. After a long, hard day of digging and picking, he
looked down and spotted a glistening 7.46-carat diamond
<https://www.cnn.com/2024/01/27/travel/arkansas-diamond-state-park-trnd/index.html>that,
depending on its clarity and other factors, could be worth thousands, or
even tens of thousands of dollars. As is the case with dozens of pay-to-dig
gemstone sites across the United States, it was "finders, keepers".

The lucky explorer named his jewel the "Carine Diamond" after his fiancée,
and while it was a rare victory – the eighth-largest such stone found there
– it's not *too *unusual to bring home a diamond
<https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-64972005>, according to
prospectors Frank and Kyndall Stallings. The husband-and-wife team have
been digging for crystals and writing a blog called That Camping Couple
<https://thatcampingcouple.com/blog/> across the United States since 2020.

In the past three and a half years, the Stallings have found 11 diamonds of
their own in Arkansas, as well as turquoise in Nevada, garnet in Idaho,
crystals in upstate New York, syenites in Michigan and emeralds and
sapphires in North Carolina. Modern prospectors (or fossickers, as they're
known in the UK) might keep these treasures, use them in jewelry or – in
the Stallings' case – sell their finds to social media followers in
live-streamed events on Facebook and Instagram.

Some locations require diggers to rent their equipment on site; other mines
welcome visitors to bring their own gear. "It's physically demanding,"
Frank Stallings told BBC Travel, "but it is very easy, in a lot of
locations, to be successful if you're willing to put in the work."

Here are six places across the US where you can pick up a sledgehammer and
chisel and try your luck.

https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240131-digging-for-diamonds-where-you-can-actually-hunt-gemstones-across-the-us