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The park is the site of the nation’s only you-pick diamond field located at its original volcanic source. For a $10-a-day fee, visitors can comb through fragments of the Earth’s mantle found on a 37.5-acre section of periodically plowed crater rim and keep any diamonds they find.

Wredberg walked away with a gem of an Arkansas souvenir, believed to be worth up to $15,000 — sentimental value not included.

Over the years, visitors to the park have found diamonds significantly larger than Wredberg’s, although hers was the largest found so far this year.

Last October, an Arkansas man found a 9.07 carat white diamond there. In 1975, two years after the site opened as a state park, a Texas man found a 16.37 carat diamond. The biggest find ever recorded at the site took place in 1924, when a 40.23 carat diamond — the largest ever found in the U.S. — was unearthed.

In the west, diamonds have been commercially mined in Colorado and found in scattered locations from California to Wyoming. In the east, diamonds have turned up in at least four sites in Virginia and one in West Virginia — along Rich Creek at Peterstown in Monroe County, home of the Punch Jones Diamond.

Found during a father-son game of horseshoes in 1928, the eye-catching rock was not identified as a diamond until the early 1940s, when it was shown to a geology professor at Virginia Tech.

No other diamonds have turned up in Peterstown, Monroe County or anywhere else in West Virginia since the 34.46 carat alluvial diamond was found by William “Punch� Jones and his father, Grover, so the state would not be a viable site for a diamond-themed state park like the one in Arkansas. In fact, West Virginia’s lone diamond left the state in 1984, when an Asian buyer placed a $67,500 high bid for it during a Sotheby’s auction.

But maybe the state parks system could market “jewelry grade� coal dug in limited quantities from safe locations in parks with roadside coal seams or inactive coal mines. Visitors could dig their own coal with hand tools rented from the state, then — using park-rented equipment — convert it into letter openers, earrings, pendants and the like, or pulverize it, mix it with resin and cram it into molds to create figurines.

As Henry Kissinger is purported to have said, “A diamond is merely a chunk of coal that did well under pressure.�