Shuffle off to the Buffalo

I'm happy to say that we survived our recent camping trip. We just spent a couple of days on the Buffalo River in Arkansas, on a spur-of-the-moment urge to try the sport of kayak camping. Like most of our trips, it started off by us arriving at the campground and setting up our tent by feel in the dark. It's happened so often now that I'm not sure we could set it up by daylight. It's always nice to wake up the next morning and see that you didn't set up on an island, or something worse.

During the night we heard some groans and sounds that we could not identify. Arkansas, not that far from Deliverance. I thought I started to hear the first notes of a banjo being plucked...

No signs of anything odd the next morning, so we set off to tour the town. The ghost town, to be more exact. The town of Rush was established when there was a boom in zinc mining in the 1900's, when zinc was used for shell casings in WWI. Five thousand people filled the hillside. Now it's just a few abandoned buildings and some stone foundations. This is a national historic site.  Hmmm, I've lived in a place that looked like this...

There were some great hiking trails around the area, some of which led up to the abandoned mine shafts, closed and populated now only by bats. I was very disappointed I couldn't get into the mine.

We did all of the maintained trails, then took a little side jaunt on something called "over the top of the mountain to the trailhead" trail. This was a trick. There was a sign denoting this trail. There was a blaze marker at the start of this trail.

That was one of the few clearly marked blazes we found. We spent the next two hours climbing up the mountain, scouting for something that looked like a path, or help, help me, Rhonda, a marker. I thought I heard the sound of TWO banjos...

Of the markers we did find, some were stuck on a twig at knee level, like the one above, or worse, were on trees that had been downed by an ice storm. Hard to see those.

Sometimes all we found were CLUES to markers...

If we had had all day, this would have been really fun, a kind of scavenger hunt hike. Unfortunately, we had time constraints, because we had to get the truck to the river access drop off, so the outfitter could pick it up and take it down to our river exit point, 24 miles away.

But, Dan'l Boone and Sacajawea finally made it over the mountain, showered by leaves, only slightly out of breath, and ready for the next stage of the adventure.

Happy Trails, and may your adventures never buffalo you!