The three days here, were unusually hot and I mean hot, over 110 heat index every day, it is not usually this hot now. After you gat all set up you can watch a video about how to find diamonds or like we did learn on the fly. So out we went. There are a number of ways to look, one is to surface hunt and just look around, some people do find diamonds this way. You can use a small trowel and just scratch at the surface or you can dry sift or wet sift with the screen sets you have. One screen has bigger holes for the dirt to go through and the other has very tiny holes for small stuff to collect. We were told dry sifting was not to good as they had just gotten a lot of rain before we got there, so below a few inches the dirt was wet. We did however see people doing this but we went with the wet sifting. Wet sifting is done by bringing your dirt over to the two areas where they have the water troughs. How do you do that ,by buckets of course. Some people have wagons they bring many buckets over at a time, or like us, we had one 5 gallon bucket ,and one , one gallon bucket. It really does not matter where you get your dirt it’s all a matter of luck, but we wanted to stay no more than a few hundred feet form the troughs. So that what we did, with your buckets of dirt, you put some in the screen with the large holes, and put that over the screen with the small holes, put it in the water, and dissolve all the dirt, that leaves the big stuff on top and the smalls on the bottom screen. Take out the large screen look it over for anything of interest then throw it out, bring up the small screen and quickly flop it over, and look. Diamonds are heavy and as you slooch your screen they will fall to the bottom ,so when you flop it over there it will be staring you in the face, but no such luck. That’s what we did for hours at a time.

WHAT DID WE FIND

In the picture below is some of the rocks we found. On the outside of the container lid, we have Agate, Conglomerate, Volcanic tuff, Lamproite. Inside the lid on the lower left, is the semi-precious Jasper, we found lots of that in all colors and sizes, they make all kinds of jewelry out of that as when its cut open it has a very cool looking inside when polished. Some Hematite, calcite which is used in Tums and baking powder, and Quartz, they are the very tiny, pin head size clear looking ones, we also found two one inch pieces which are very cool also.

We had a very cool, exciting time doing this, although it was really hot and a lot of hard work. Knowing now what I know, coming back I would do things a little different, and this time find the big one.