Woman told her boyfriend no ring until she did one bizarre thing. So she grabbed a shovel and camped for 3 weeks

Most people go to a jewelry store when they want to buy an engagement ring. But Micherre Fox had a different plan. The 31-year-old from New York City wanted to dig up her own diamond from the ground.

According to NPR, Fox started thinking about this idea around two years ago. She wanted a diamond that was ethically sourced, so she decided to find one herself. Her boyfriend Trevor Ballou agreed to wait until she found her own diamond before they got engaged.

“We’re not getting engaged until I do that,” Fox told him. “They come from the ground. What is stopping us from just getting one ourselves?” She did some research and found out about Crater of Diamonds State Park in Arkansas. This park is the only place in the world where regular people can search for diamonds and keep what they find.

She managed to find what she was looking for

Fox went to the park in early July after she finished her graduate studies. She brought a tent and camping gear and stayed there for three weeks. Almost every day, she would dig in the dirt from 8 in the morning until 4 in the afternoon. She only took one day off the whole time.

The hot Arkansas summer made everything harder. Fox later said she was not ready for how tough it would be. “There were days where I wouldn’t shower for several days,” she said. 

“By the time I got out I was so tired and hurt. I couldn’t muster the energy to spend 10 minutes undressing and taking a shower.” Things got worse when someone took her shovel. She had to walk for three hours to get to a hardware store and back to buy a new one.

On July 29, which was her last day there, Fox walked out to the field one more time. She saw something shiny near her foot. She thought it might just be water on a spiderweb. She pushed it with her boot, but it stayed in place. When she picked it up, she realized it was a diamond.

“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,” Fox said. 

She took it to the park staff at the Diamond Discovery Center. They told her it was a 2.3-carat white diamond. It was the third biggest diamond anyone found at the park that year. Fox started crying when she heard the news. “I got on my knees and cried, then started laughing,” she said.

Fox called her diamond the Fox-Ballou Diamond, using both her last name and her boyfriend’s last name. She wants to put the diamond in her engagement ring. She has not gotten it valued and does not want to. The money is not what matters to her. 

Fox said she wanted to find something real that would show her partner what kind of person she wants to be in their marriage. She wants to be someone who keeps working on problems even when things get really hard. 

“If you take giving up off the table, the only thing left is to keep moving,” she said. Fox’s effort to create something special for her wedding shows how much some people care about making their big day meaningful.

Crater of Diamonds State Park is built on top of an old volcanic crater. A volcano brought these diamonds up from deep underground more than 100 million years ago. The park says that people usually find one or two diamonds every day. 

Most of them are pretty small. Only about a dozen diamonds bigger than one carat get found each year, according to Waymon Cox, who helps run the park. 

Since 1972, when it became a state park, people have found more than 35,000 diamonds there. While Fox’s trip might seem wild, it’s probably safer than some other wedding-related adventures people have tried.