For 31-year-old New Yorker Micherre Fox, the road to a perfect engagement diamond didn’t lead to a jeweler’s counter, but to Arkansas’s Crater of Diamonds State Park where, against the odds, she unearthed a 2.3-carat gem on her last day of searching.
About two years ago, Fox set herself an unorthodox goal: to forgo conventional channels and, instead, secure a diamond at the source.
“I was willing to go anywhere in the world to make that happen,” she said. “I researched, and it turned out that the only place in the world to do it was right in our backyard, in Arkansas!”
With her supportive partner encouraging her mission, Fox dedicated the better part of her month-long break after earning a graduate degree to prospecting at the only public diamond-producing site where visitors can keep their finds.
“You need to be willing and able to solve… problems with hard work,” she said.
Arriving on July 8, Fox's daily searches across the park’s 37.5-acre field proved to be "daunting."
"After all the research, there's luck and there's hard work,” she said. “When you are literally picking up the dirt in your hands, no amount of research can do that for you; no amount of education can take you all the way."
At about 11 am on Tuesday, July 29 — her last scheduled day at the park — she paused near the West Drain when a flash of sparkle caught her eye. At first, she thought it might be “an iridescent, dew-covered spiderweb.” Nudging it with her boot, the shine remained.
Fox scooped up what she described as the “most diamond-y diamond” she had ever seen.
Clutching the gem in her fist, Fox raced to the park's Diamond Discovery Center, where the staff confirmed that she had found a colorless diamond weighing more than two carats. It was the third-largest diamond registered in the park so far in 2025.
Overcome with emotion, she “got on [her] knees and cried, then started laughing.”
The diamond — about the size of a human cuspid tooth, with a smooth, rounded shape and metallic luster — is typical of most Crater diamonds. The gem's blemished surface hints at its violent journey to the surface from deep within Earth’s mantle.
Fox, honoring both her and her partner’s surnames, has dubbed her find the "Fox-Ballou Diamond" and plans to set it in her engagement ring. It's not clear whether she will have her stone faceted or leave it in its natural state.
Assistant Superintendent Waymon Cox remarked that her discovery underscores how “even when putting forth your best effort, being in the right place at the right time plays a part in finding diamonds.”
Her discovery joins 366 diamonds registered at the park so far in 2025. In total, more than 75,000 diamonds have been unearthed at the site of Crater of Diamonds State Park since the first diamonds were discovered in 1906 by John Huddleston, a farmer who owned the land long before it became an Arkansas State Park in 1972.
Credits: Images courtesy of Arkansas State Parks.