Californian Noreen Wredberg gets to keep the massive gem she found in Crater of Diamonds State Park.
A woman stumbled upon a 4.38-carat yellow diamond in Arkansas’ Crater of Diamonds State Park in September, according to the Parks Department.
Noreen Wredberg, from Granite Bay, California, was out on a trip to Hot Springs National Park with her husband, Michael, when she decided to have a walk around Crater of Diamonds.
“I first saw the park featured on a TV show several years ago,” she told the Parks Department. “When I realized we weren’t too far away, I knew we had to come!”
Noreen and her husband went to the park a couple of weeks ago, just days after a solid rainfall, which made for the best diamond-searching conditions.
Park interpreter Waymon Cox said in a press release:
“The soil had dried a little, and the sun was out when Mrs. Wredberg visited two days later. She was in just the right place to see her diamond sparkle in the morning sunlight.”
Noreen had been exploring for only about an hour when she saw the huge diamond.
“I didn’t know it was a diamond then, but it was clean and shiny, so I picked it up!” she said.
Arkansas is the only state with a public diamond mine. When people find the precious gems, they take them to the park’s Diamond Discovery Center, which confirmed that Noreen’s piece was, indeed, a diamond. The park said it is the biggest diamond found in the park in the past year.
Noreen, who gets to keep her finding, has not yet decided what she will do with it.
More than 75,000 diamonds have been found at the Crater of Diamonds in the past century.
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