National Park Week

I feel I'm been somewhat remiss in not posting this earlier. My abject apologies!  Please feel free to beat me with a bar of chocolate.

April 16-24 is National Park Week and admission is free to all national parks. You should immediately stop what you are doing and drive to your nearest National Park. Right now. Put down the paper,  pack up a lunch, throw the kids in the car, and GO.

If that's not possible, then at least take a day and spend it at the nearest national recreation area, historic site or monument in your area (although I'm not sure the admission is free to those places this week).

The National Parks nearest to me are all in Arkansas, which can brag about having SIX National Parks. Hey, Hogs- share the love, will ya?!?! 

My favorite Arkansas spot just happens to be a National River, the Buffalo, and it also happens to rank in my top five trips ever.

This was the trip in which we had a close encounter of the hog type, and I'm not talking about rabid football fans.

I'd have to say some of my best outdoor memories take place in national parks. One of my other top 5 involves a national park in Colorado.

Oklahoma has national sites and monuments, as does Kansas. I could wander down into Texas to the LBJ Park, but probably won't right now, but I can't see not at least wandering through some historic sites locally. Otherwise, I might lose my Outdoor-Kinda-Gal Card.

However, whenever, with whomever, and as soon as ever...celebrate the outdoors!!!

    Happy Trails, and may your adventures be a walk in the park!

Buffalo River, Day Two

After our crepuscular hog wild encounter of the night before, I was glad to be up and into the boats and moving on down the river in the sunshine. We were glad that reports of rain had not materialized, and the day promised to be perfect for paddling.

Mist still lay upon the water, turning the wildlife downstream into a soft-edged portrait.

By now we had seen so many eagles, both adult and juvenile, that we were excited to see a great blue heron. Whoo hooo!  Something new and different!

The water was so perfectly still as we left our campsite that I felt like the guilty child disturbing the cake icing when I dipped my paddle in. That same child also thrills to be the first to taste the confection, and I felt like a true explorer, being the incipient of the early morning ripples melting the perfect glass surface.

The wind rose after about three hours of paddling, but never to the level of the previous day, where I had felt like I was trying to churn the water into butter, I worked so hard. We did have to portage several times, though, and I gave up on the hope of ending with dry feet.

We began spotting landmarks, such as Elephant Head, and realized we were making far better time than we thought.

As we drew closer to the confluence of the Buffalo and White Rivers, it seemed the Buffalo picked up speed, as if eager to join its riparian relative on the journey to the sea. We completed the 24 mile expedition several hours earlier than we had planned.

As we entered the White, it was much colder, much deeper, and much faster. We had to shoot the width of it to enter the canoe take-out. If I missed, it was going to be several miles before I had another chance to get out. I made it.

All gear intact, including trash bags. No one became bacon bits. I call that a successful adventure.

Buffalo River, Day One

Last Wednesday, after spending the morning climbing up and over the tallest mountain we could find in this part of Arkansas, it was time to launch the kayak part of the adventure. It's kind of a cross between kayaking and backpacking. You carry everything you need, everything has to be pared down for weight and bulk, but you don't have to carry it on your back.

You might be a redneck if....
Why buy expensive, waterproof deck bags for kayak camping when a couple of Hefty trash bags will work just fine?!

We launched at noon from Rush Landing, on the last section of the Buffalo River before it reaches the White River, a trip of twenty-four miles by water. This is the last chance to change our minds, because once we're committed, we're really committed. There is no access for the next 24 miles other than by foot or by horseback. Rescue is difficult, assuming you could even make contact.

Look at the unbelievably clear, 42 degree water. It's so transparent it looks like I'm floating on air. Beam me up, Scotty!

We'd been warned that the river was so low we might have to portage a lot. Five minutes into the trip, my butt was dragging across a rock bed. I thought "if I'm doing this for the next 24 miles, I won't be a fun person by Friday." Five minutes after that, we spotted out first eagle, and my outlook improved considerably.

The river tracks back and forth, with gravel and sand bars on the inside curves, perfect for camping and pullouts, and sheer bluffs on the outside curves that made me wish I had rappelling gear.

We paddled about four hours the first day, hit only one spot that we had to walk the boats across (although technically there were more, we just used our paddles to pike across the rock bed because I didn't want to get my feet wet). We found a nice sand bar on which to camp, with turkeys and eagles nesting in the trees on the bluff across from us.

Oh look. No matter how far we get from home, I'm always in the kitchen. Cook, cook, cook. Clean, clean, clean.

Because we weren't sure of the bear situation, we cooked well away from our tent, and hung our food for the night. Lordy, were we glad we did. More on that later...

Wildlife count today:
1 armadillo
5 eagles
5 deer
1 Lesser Blue heron
10 ducks
2 buzzards
2 turkeys
too many crows to count

This doesn't count all the other critters we heard but didn't actually lay eyeballs on.

Night comes early on the river, as the sun sneaks behind the hills then runs away. Yawwwwn.  We've come about six miles. Eighteen more to go.  Goodnight.

              Happy Trails, and may your adventures always count!

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!