With a name like Crater of Diamonds, visitors to the Arkansas state park have high expectations. But for 14-year-old Kalel Langford, the dream of finding a diamond came true after just 30 minutes.
Kalel was walking along a riverbank in the Crater of Diamonds when he saw a glimmering brown stone on the ground. It was about the size of a pinto bean. He immediately knew the rock was special.
He called his dad over to look at the stone, and they both “knew we needed to have it looked at,” said Craig Langford. The stone was coffee colored and frosty, but they knew it wasn’t any old rock.
When the Langfords took the rock to be identified at the park, which charges visitors $10 to search for diamonds, they were shocked to learn it was the seventh largest diamond to be found there, and the largest brown diamond in 40 years: 7.44 carats.
Kalel named his diamond the Superman Diamond because of his love for the Man of Steel. He is going to take it home as a souvenir.
More than 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed in the park since the first diamonds were discovered there in 1906. The park has a “finders keepers” policy, which is pretty generous considering the many large diamonds that have been found there, as regular CNN readers may recall.
Among the finds:
— Dan Frederick and his daughter Lauren, after less than an hour in the park on their first visit, found a 2.03 carat diamond in October 2016.
— In June 2015, park visitor Bobbie Oskarson of Longmont, Colorado, discovered an icicle-shaped 8.52 carat diamond while digging around the Pig Pen, a 37-acre search field.
— Susie Clark, who is from Evening Shade, Arkansas, in April 2015 found a 3.69-carat white, teardrop-shaped diamond in a plowed field in the park. Clark named it the Hallelujah Diamond.
— Dean Filppula, an offshore steward from Shreveport, Louisiana, found a yellow 2.01-carat diamond in February 2015.
— CNNMoney’s Vanessa Yurkevich even went hunting for one in 2015.
