AEDC’s Rod Stewart enjoys finding diamonds in the rough … literally

  • Published
  • By Patrick Ary
  • AEDC/PA
ARNOLD AIR FORCE BASE, Tenn. --  Rod Stewart knows how unbelievable his pastime can sound.

Stewart, AEDC's scientific technical information officer, attended an acquisitions class recently. To get acquainted, everyone in the class had to tell four things about themselves. The kicker: one fact was not true, and everyone in the class had to guess which one it was.

Stewart told them he hunts for diamonds as a hobby. No one believed it, and he's not surprised.

"A lot of people just haven't heard of it," he said.

But Stewart does go on the hunt at least once a year, and he has more than a dozen sparkly pieces of evidence for the non-believers.

Stewart's diamond-hunting hobby started about seven years ago, when he bought a camper for the family and was looking for places within driving distance to spend some vacation time. He happened across Crater of Diamonds State Park near Murfreesboro, Ark., - about 500 miles from his home in Tullahoma.

"I thought it would be interesting," Stewart said. "My little boy loved to play in the dirt, so I said, 'Hey, let's just try that.'"

The park touts itself as the only diamond-producing site in the world that is open to the public. For a few dollars a day, tourists can search for diamonds in the rough - a 37-and-a-half-acre field that is the eroded surface of an ancient volcanic pipe. What visitors find, they keep.

The park says thousands of tourists visit every year and try their hand at diamond hunting. Stewart says there are 15 to 20 regulars who spend most of their time there hunting. He puts his own expertise somewhere in between the two groups.

"There's a lot of science to it," he said. "And there's just a lot of history in just knowing where has been dug, what they did back when it was a commercial mine and those kinds of things."

Most casual visitors to the park sift through the dirt near the surface, taking that surface soil and washing it to find precious stones. But the hardcore hunters - including Stewart - go deep. His most recent visit in April consisted of digging a hole about eight feet deep to find the more gravelly dirt that he said is more likely to yield diamonds.

Once he finds the "good dirt," Stewart loads it into five-gallon buckets and stores it in a storage bin. Once he's taken out what he wants and fills the hole back in (a park rule), he uses a series of screens to wash away excess dirt followed by a special screen called a saruca. When the saruca is rotated and shaken, the heavier sediment moves toward the center. He then flips the sarcua and its contents, looking for that familiar flash.

"There's a lot of quartz," he said. "Once you do it right, all the 'heavies' are in the center. Of course, quartz is heavy. But if you let it dry just a little bit, the quartz will kind of turn milky and if there's any sunshine, the diamonds will shine just like a flashlight. It's amazing how the light will shine off of them."

It took Stewart two years of searching before finding his first diamond. In the years since then, he's found a total of 16. Most of them aren't particularly valuable; he's never had them appraised, but he keeps them in a bank vault all the same. His two biggest finds were a 2.67-carat diamond that he estimates is worth at least $2,600, and a 1.25-carat yellow diamond he had mounted in a ring for his wife.

There are big finds out there in the dirt. Just this year, a visitor found an 8.66-carat white diamond. It's the third largest diamond on record to be found at the park since 1972, and it was found three days after Stewart left the park.

"I know exactly where she found it," Stewart said. "I guarantee you I stepped within three feet of it. She was digging some. You get a heavy rain and it washes all the stuff down, and you can just dig where the heavies would be. That's what she was doing. But I'm sure I walked within two or three feet of that diamond. It was just covered up. I didn't know it."

The excitement of possibly finding a big diamond is there, but Stewart knows the odds of retiring off a big find in the dirt are miniscule. So why spend at least a week every year digging holes from sunup to sundown?

"The thing I like about it: nobody can bother you," he said. "You go out there and you work as hard as you want to work. It's just peaceful.

"It is kind of funny, because I don't necessarily go out there expecting to find anything. I just go for the fun. But I guess finding something is the icing on the cake."

He is quick to caution that the odds of finding a valuable diamond are small, but that hasn't stopped some of his co-workers from tagging along once they've heard about it. ATA structural and mechanical engineer Russ Groff has made the trip to the park twice and wants to go back.

"It's a lot of work," Groff said. "You have to do the work yourself; it's interesting and keeps you busy, and every once in a while if you find something, you get a little incentive."

Groff has the incentive; on his last trip, he found a diamond in the hole he and Stewart dug that was nearly three-quarters of a carat. He said he's certain that one day Stewart is going to find the big one, because of his dedication to the work.

"He's enthusiastic about it," Groff said. "He's pretty scientific and pretty thorough. He's researched this quite a bit. It's not like he's not going out there without a plan. He usually has a plan, and each successive time he goes out he does a survey. It's not totally haphazard."

Stewart said he'll take anyone along with him who's interested, but he cautions that they have to be ready for some hard work if they want to increase their chances. Stewart estimates that he and a friend he met at the park who lives in Dayton, Ohio, moved four tons of dirt this year - all of it by shovel.

"I say it's hard work; if you want to just go out and walk around you can do that," he said. "But if you want to increase your chances, it's going to be hard work. So get ready. Carry Advil, because you're going to need them."