She Spent Three Weeks Digging for a Diamond for Her Engagement Ring—and Unearthed a 2.3-Carat Stunner

When Micherre Fox and her boyfriend decided to get married, she flew to Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas to search for the diamond herself

Sarah Kuta

When Micherre Fox and her boyfriend started talking about getting married, she decided to take matters into her own hands: She wanted to find her own diamond for her engagement ring.

Now, Fox has done exactly that. After three weeks of searching, she found a 2.3-carat white diamond at Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas last month. Since the park has a “finders, keepers” policy, Fox was able to bring the gem back home to Manhattan, where she promptly handed it over to her boyfriend, Trevor Ballou.

Fox has done the hard part. All Ballou has to do is figure out how he’s going to top Fox’s grand, romantic gesture when he proposes.

“I certainly have to find a way to live up to this now,” he tells the New York Times’ Mark Walker. “She’s dealt her cards and now it’s my turn to put together something impressive, and I’m really looking forward to that.”

Fox came up with her unconventional engagement ring plan roughly two years ago, when she and Ballou began discussing the prospect of spending the rest of their lives together. He agreed to wait on getting engaged until she could find a diamond.

“There’s something symbolic about being able to solve problems with money, but sometimes money runs out in a marriage,” Fox says in a statement from the park. “You need to be willing and able to solve those problems with hard work.”

Earlier this year, Fox finished a master’s program at Fordham University. She decided it was the ideal time to travel to Arkansas and spend three weeks camping while she searched for her diamond.

“So I brought my tent, and my cot, and all the mining equipment I would need,” Fox tells CBS New York’s Jesse Zanger. “This was a perfect opportunity for me to make a commitment about who I want to be in a relationship.”

Fox, who is 31, started digging in the park’s 37.5-acre diamond search area on July 8. By July 29, she still hadn’t found a diamond—only wet quartz and mica. She was prepared to call it quits when she spotted what looked like an “iridescent, dew-covered spiderweb” in the dirt, according to the statement. Upon further inspection, she realized it was a “very shiny stone,” roughly the size of a human canine tooth.

“Having never seen an actual diamond in my hands, I didn’t know for sure, but it was the most ‘diamond-y diamond’ I had seen,” she says in the statement.

Though she didn’t want to get her hopes up, Fox took the stone to the park’s gemology office for inspection. There, staff confirmed it was a white diamond. When she got the official word, Fox was so relieved she “crumbled,” she tells the Times.

“My head was bent to the ground and my eyes were wet, and I’m just like: ‘Oh my God. That was an impossible thing, and I did it and I am proud of that,’” she says.

Mission complete, she packed up and flew home the next day, carrying the diamond in a small box in a fanny pack she wore across her chest. When she arrived at the apartment she shared with Ballou, she handed him the box and said: “I hunted this for you,” per the Times.

The Fox-Ballou diamond, as it’s now known, is the third-largest diamond found at the park so far this year. It’s one of 366 diamonds that have been registered at the state park in 2025, and one of 11 stones that weigh more than a carat.

“Being in the right place at the right time plays a part in finding diamonds,” says Waymon Cox, the park’s assistant superintendent, in the statement.

White is the most common color of diamond unearthed at the park, followed by brown and yellow. Every year, roughly 160,000 individuals visit the park in hopes of digging up their own one-of-a-kind gem—and many are successful. Over the past century, more than 75,000 diamonds have been discovered at the state park, which is located roughly 110 miles southwest of Little Rock.

The state park’s history dates back to 1906, when John Huddleston—also known as “Diamond John”—started finding gems in the dirt. Word got out, and soon fortune-seekers were flocking to southwest Arkansas to unearth their own treasures. One of the most impressive finds was the 40.23-carat “Uncle Sam” diamond, which was discovered in 1924 and still holds the record as the largest uncut diamond ever found in the United States.

When the area became a state park in 1972, officials decided to let visitors continue searching for gems.

The park’s diamonds started life approximately three billion years ago as stable carbon 60 to 100 miles beneath Earth’s surface. Over the years, intense pressure and high temperatures transformed that carbon into diamonds. Then, roughly 100 million years ago, a volcanic vent eruption carried those diamonds and other rocks to the surface, creating an 81-acre crater on the ground in the process.