Crater of Diamonds State Park and Hot Springs National Park
April 18, 2024
After the eclipse, we moved to the Doctors Creek Unit of Cooper Lake State Park in Cooper, Texas, for several days. It was beautiful springtime between the intermittently stormy and wet weather, and we enjoyed hikes around the park.
On Saturday, April 13, we drove to Murfreesboro, Arkansas, stopping in Paris, Texas, to see the Eiffel Tower and its distinctive red cowboy hat on top!
In Murfreesboro, we toured the Ko-Da-Ha Indian Village, which has a museum, partially excavated mounds, and even a “salted” field to search for crystals, arrowheads, and gems. It was fun to poke about the field and find a few sparkly crystals.
We camped several nights at the Army Corp of Engineers park at Lake Greeson, just 8 miles from Crater of Diamonds State Park.
On Sunday, we went to Crater of Diamonds State Park, where I’d purchased admission tickets online ages ago, to search the diamond field. We walked the tilled areas and talked to other diamond hunters for several hours before bumping into a couple of SKPs from Benson who shared where they rented their equipment.
On our way back to camp, we rented equipment from Crystal Towne for the next day, which we picked up first thing Monday morning. Larry strapped the wagon to the rear steps, and we were off! For several hours, Larry dug the heavy wet clay and gravel from the drainage area, hauled it up to the wash area, and used screens in the water to sort out the larger rocks.
The man across the wash station from us makes regular pilgrimages here and gold prospecting. He entertained us with his adventures as Larry consolidated eight buckets into one bucket of concentrates.
After lunch, we returned to Crystal Towne, where Kirsten helped Larry become proficient with the Saruca screen.
This screen has to be shaken and rotated in a certain way to have all the “heavies” (where the diamonds are) into the center bottom, which is the center top, when expertly flipped over.
Larry ended up with 2-quart ziplock bags of centers to sort later for small diamonds. It was a surprising amount of work, and two days was a good sampling for us. Is there a diamond in these little rocks?
On Tuesday, we drove about an hour to Hot Springs, Arkansas, for a two-hour trolley tour. As we went to the town’s highlights, the guide entertained us with the “dirt” on early political control and corruption.
We followed his advice to have lunch at Grateful Head’s Pizza before picking up some mail sent general delivery from our mail service in Texas to Mountain Pine, near our Army Corps of Engineers Park at Stephen’s Park.
The campground was just below a dam, and that seemed eerie night with all the fog on the water! On Wednesday, I arranged a two-hour side-by-side tour with Hot Springs Off-Road.
Jeremy took us out by ourselves and, after several obstacles to test Larry’s driving skills, announced that Larry blew him away and exceeded his expectations.
We had a blast going over trails for the next two hours, mainly two diamonds in difficulty but some harder three-diamond ones.
We are so impressed by the ability of the side-by-side in comparison to a Jeep—maybe we do need one to explore the Southwest!
After showers and changing clothes, we drove back into Hot Springs to find the home plate where Babe Ruth hit a ball over 500 feet (into a nearby alligator farm!) and his statue at Majestic Park.
We rounded out the day with a private soak at Quapaw Hot Springs on historic bathhouse row and finished off with cool mint towels for our faces.
No, not this one!
We mainly headed south and east on Thursday in stormy weather toward our next adventure on the Natchez Trace. We had lunch before touring a WW2 Japanese Internment camp museum in McGhee, Arkansas.
It was very informative, as last year, the museum in Minidoka, Idaho, was not yet open for the season when we walked around the facilities.We camped for the night at Lake Chicot State Park, where we learned at the visitor center that this is the largest oxbow lake in the US, formed due to the Mississippi River changing course. The Army Corps of Engineers has put in pump stations to keep out the silt so it is a clear water lake. Our campsite neighbors were cleaning the crappie they had caught that day in the pouring rain. I must admire that tenacity, but I fish while others catch!!
After our fun this week, we agree — Life is too short to stay on the pavement!