prospectin' fer diamonds

For Father's Day, the kids wanted to take Luke camping at the Herkimer Diamond Mines in New York. We'd planned a trip here last year, but it ended up pouring for those 2 days we'd planned to go so we never made it.

Basically, they use huge machinery to slice off pieces of the hill, and dump it here for us to scuttle through, looking for the diamonds. These crystals are unique in that they form without "growing" out of something else, so they have 2 points at either end. We found some perfect tiny ones lying on the ground, but you could also chisel or split rocks to expose some bigger ones.