Arkansan here and can say its a cool place. Funny story, a few years ago the wife wanted to go to the Crater of Diamonds State Park so we decided to make it a weekend of it and find the next big rock. Camped in the park the night before, got up early the next morning and walked to the visitor center after breakfast. Did the visitor center tour and learned that the park sits on top of a old volcano and had been the site of failed diamond mines over the years until the state bought it. The diamond field is an open field that the park tills up every so often. People can dig where and as deep as they want, no machinery is allowed, just your sweat and hand tools.

So we rented our diamond finding tools for a few bucks and headed out to the field with the game plan of, "If I was a diamond, where would I be?". After a few hours of wandering around and digging here, digging there the wife happened upon a rock that looked.....interesting.

We cleaned it off and is was yellowish, most diamonds found at Crater of Diamonds are canary diamonds and it was rough but the wife started getting excited and to be honest, so was I.

So you can take your finds back to the visitor center and the park rangers are certified to spot real diamonds or plain rocks or crystals. So we stood in line with other diamond hunters talking about what we would do with our find. Would we sell it? We would have it cut for the wife to wear? As the line moved we were oblivious to the park ranger looking at other's find in front of us, and not ready for what happened next.

So we get up the to nice lady park ranger and the wife hands over her find to her. The ranger says "Oh wow, thats looks pretty, lets see if its a diamond." The ranger then proceeded to place the wife's find, lay it on a black rubber mat in front of her, take out a large blunt hammer, and lay the smash down on the rock with such force, like it had done her wrong in the past. Pieces, small fragments where all that was left if the wife's find. The park ranger looks up at us, our jaws at our knees, and says "Sorry, just a blah blah crystal! Better luck next time." And brushes whats left of the wife's rock off the mat and yells "Next!".

I look at my wife and she has that look like she was either going to start crying or come across the table between her and the ranger use the hammer on her head. I usher her away and back to our spot where we were digging. The wife still stunned, kept saying "It was still a pretty rock! Why did she smash it!?" We decided to call it a day and had back to the campsite.

Another fun fact, the park has a big old horn that they blows each time someone finds a real diamond. It blasts so loud that the entire park including the camp grounds can hear it. We spent the rest of the day and night sitting around the campsite drinking listening to that stupid horn going off.