I begun a week-long escape from July in Joklahoma with an eleven-hour haul from Bartlesville to Pueblo, Colorado.
I took the Dodge City route, but having suffered through the tourist trap there before, today I made only a brief stop in the Hispanic portion of Dodge for a rather authentic Mexican meal at Tacos Jalisco. I ordered their Carne Asada plate and added a side of queso…and the puzzled lady at the counter offered me some grated cheese instead of the queso dip I was expecting. I began to wonder if I’d made the right choice – my original target had been the old El Charro restaurant for some Tex Mex, but they were closed. What had I gotten myself into?
But while Tacos Jalisco had never heard of queso dip and their version of a Carne Asada was tiny chopped bits of steak, it was quite tasty and joined by an absolutely enormous homemade flour tortilla. I almost burned my fingers tearing it apart to form three wraps. Everyone but me in the entire joint was Hispanic and the food was cheap and good, although as I drove by Boot Hill, snapping a shot of a street sign, I noticed my tongue was feeling rather hot. So I stopped at a Dairy Queen to cool down my burning mouth with a dipped cone and headed on westward for the dreaded feed lot gauntlet.
Anyone who has suffered along the highways of southwestern Kansas and southeastern Colorado knows what I caught a strong whiff of at regular intervals as I poked my way through one little prairie town after another. My tummy rumbled with each breath, and I’m pretty sure I heard it gurgling the words “Tacos Jalisco” every so often.
The only real standout town was Greensburg, Kansas. It was wiped out in a tornado in May 2007. They’ve rebuilt much of it with brand new buildings and streets, although I didn’t care for the overdone streetlights. Several facilities had large windmills for power. Greensburg has certainly gone green in some ways. Its appearance is a stark contrast to the dilapidated struggling towns that dot the rest of the highway.
I rolled into Pueblo, which was rather quiet and sleepy today with little traffic. I drove past downtown and by an enormous and sadly quiescent steel factory to reach my Microtel. After checking in and collapsing on the bed for a bit, I ventured back out to drive a loop around some of the major streets of the south side, debating where to dine. I stepped into one recommended Italian joint, but it was cramped and crowded (despite the nearly empty streets outside) and the pizza didn’t look at all appetizing to my abused stomach. So I gave up and went to a Furr’s cafeteria where I could pick out some nice bland dishes – and got what I expected. ‘Nuff said.
There was still enough daylight to venture downtown, where I found many railroad tracks and a river that has been converted into a tourist ditch, er, Riverwalk much like the one in Oklahoma City. But at least their ditch/river opens out in a spot where they’ll rent you a paddleboat. I always loved paddleboats, but the area was almost deserted and I knew it would be better to save it for Tuesday lunch.
I drove over to photograph the grand old depot and the somewhat unfortunate Diana the Huntress statue out front. I tried to ensure some shadows would provide a penumbra for her prominent pudenda.
For the first time ever, I didn’t edit and upload today’s photos from my netbook, but instead imported them into the iPad where I used the Photogene app to edit them and the FlickStackr app to upload them. I enjoyed editing with the iPad and the Flickr upload went okay, but I had to break out the netbook to organize the upload set to my liking. So I went ahead and used the netbook for this blog post. The iPad is great for consumption and good for some bits of production, but the touch interface has severe limitations with online services that aren’t built to use it.
Tomorrow I’ll tour around the downtown area and have lunch there, and then hit the road for the Wolf Creek Pass on the Continental Divide and a short hike to Treasure Falls before falling down the western slope to Pagosa Springs.
For those tracking this adventure, here’s the Google Map.
I awoke Sunday at 6:30 am to a car horn pealing out, over and over again, somewhere in the parking lots at the Ozark Folk Center cabins. Someone had bungled their car alarm, I suppose, and I had to grin when I heard them driving off with the horn still bleating. Perhaps it was car thieves, but more likely some befuddled guests. That set me to work uploading the rest of Saturday’s photos and videos – tedious work since the WiFi was being quite dodgy and required frequent resets.
But I finally got everything posted and could then march up the road once again to the Skillet restaurant high on the hill. On the way in, I met Joan and Frank, an elderly couple from San Diego. They invited me to join them for breakfast and they told me of their love for elderhostels, their volunteer work back in Chula Vista (the suburb where they live), and Joan wondered if she would enjoy the collard greens they were promised as part of their current elderhostel trip, which had led them to drive over 1700 miles from Chula Vista to Mountain View, Arkansas.
I was glad for the company and grateful to them for pointing out a hidden trail that led down through the woods back to the cabins. It was too steep and uneven for them, but I happily used it to avoid walking in a concrete culvert and alongside the shoulderless asphalt roads. It was my first, and by far my easiest, hike of the day.
I then packed up and drove to Tyler Bend, the site of the Buffalo National Scenic River Visitor Center (BNSRVC to its friends?) and a 4.2 mile loop trail. I parked at a trailhead away from the visitor center at about 11:45 am. My feet ached after hiking ten miles the day before in tennis shoes, so I was glad that my hiking boots were dried out and serviceable. Even though the temperature would be in the 90s all afternoon, I wore long hiking pants since I figured some of the trail might be overgrown. And I sprayed 100% Deet around all of the openings in my clothing, hoping to keep the ticks at bay – I still found myself the victim of four ticks at the end of the day. I guess I’m just ticklish, not tickless.
The trail began as part of the Buffalo River Trail, which extends for dozens of miles along the river and will eventually span its entire length. The first stop was the Collier Homestead, constructed in 1928 by subsistence farmer and river guide Sod Collier, who lived here without electricity or indoor plumbing. After a half century, the property was purchased by the National Park Service for preservation and the Visitor Center a mile or two away was built in 1990. The house had several rooms of poor construction, with remnants of newspapers on the walls, once used for insulation. Sod and his family must have been pretty short. I had to duck under the porch overhang and the ceilings were only inches above my head, and I’m only 5′ 8″. The structure looked sturdier, if less picturesque, from the rear. There was a shed out front by a huge tree and the trail ran past another building behind the house. I can’t imagine living in such a place, especially with the heat, humidity, and bugs that plague the area…I don’t even want to camp out under these conditions.
The trail ran along a ridge circling a deep hollow, approaching the Buffalo River far below. The trees were cut away to provide a splendid panorama of the mountains, forest, fields, and river below. A bird of prey even flew by while a group floated in the river below, creating a postcard moment. My telephoto lens revealed it was an inflatable boat carrying three couples. It also revealed plowed fields and hay bales with the gorgeous river and its bluffs in the forested background.
The trail turned to follow the river and descended to another viewpoint, where I could see canoes on the shore. I used my superzoom camera to shoot a video of a couple navigating the river far below in their canoe, starting in close on them as they paddled toward me, and later pulling back out to show what it really looked like from my high vantage point.
When I reached the visitor center, I was welcomed by a blast of cold air. It was delightful and helped compensate for my disappointment that all they had on offer for refreshment was a water fountain. Oh, how nice some ice cream would have been at that moment. The displays were of mild interest and it wasn’t long before I was back outside on a big back deck, snacking on some trail mix on a shady bench. After another visit inside for the cold air and water, I was ready to finish the hike.
The next segment of trail was the Rock Wall Trail, named for an old moss-covered boundary wall erected by settlers years ago. It ranged from knee to waist height and the trail was not nearly as well maintained as the one from the Collier Homestead to the Visitor Center. While the trail was easily discernable, the overgrowth left me grateful for my long pants. I saw butterflies alighting on leaves and purple coneflowers as I struggled up the rugged hillsides in the heat. Finally the trail made a lovely gentle curve around a hollow as I approached the trailhead.
And that concluded my final day hike of this trip, 4.2 miles in 90-degree weather with plenty of bugs and humidity. A far cry from the Pacific Northwest, where I prefer to hike in summer, but I handled the heat well and can still bear up as I approach my 44th birthday. The return trip was almost a straight shot along US 412 to Tulsa for a big dinner at El Chico and then back to Bartlesville to unpack, do some laundry, and prepare this final post from my five days of Arkansas day hikes. Here’s my updated map showing where I’ve performed day hikes since September 2009.
Once I was out of bed on Saturday I checked to confirm that my videos from Friday had finished uploading to YouTube while I slept, so I could insert them in the blog post and publish it. Then I prepared for the day and headed up the hill to the Skillet restaurant for the breakfast bar. I knew I should have a hearty breakfast since my day hikes would leave me with lunch on the trail. Then I headed out toward the ghost town of Rush, Arkansas.
My route wound through the mountains for fifty miles, eventually leading me down the steep grade to the Buffalo River and back up the other side to the Rush Historic District turnoff. A few miles off the main drag, the road descended steeply toward Rush Creek and the Buffalo River, converting to gravel as it descended. As soon as I reached the bottom I made a sharp right and saw the shells of houses and buildings which were abandoned decades ago.
Rush began with a failed silver smelter in 1886 and then a series of zinc mines which boomed in the 1890s and peaked during World War I. The mines failed in the Great Depression and the last of the town’s structures closed in the 1960s. A trail winds past many of the ruins and then up the mountain past the sealed mine entrances and down to the Buffalo River and neighboring Clabber Creek.
It was a sunny, humid, and hot day. So I took along extra water and wore plenty of sunscreen and bug repellent. Unfortunately my hiking boots were still drying out, so I had to rely on my tennis shoes. I hiked the Rush trail in shorts, a decision I would later regret.
The first stop was a large stone smelter, the oldest structure in the ghost town. Three prospectors built it in 1886 because they thought they had found silver ore, and were so disappointed and broke when no silver appeared that they tried to sell the smelter to another prospector for a tin of oysters…and he turned them down. It was finally sold to later zinc miners and used to burn lime for mortar in 1898.
The smelter is on the site of the Morning Star zinc mine, which operated a general store visible across Rush Creek and the road. That store was the last center of the community until it finally closed in 1956. The ruin next door was the store owner’s home. Next was a blacksmith shop, built in 1925 when the Morning Star mine had a brief revival. It closed in 1931.
I then climbed the steep hillside up to the sealed entrance of the Morning Star Mine. A whole series of mines runs southeast along the mountainside toward the Buffalo River. They were all sealed after mine inspectors reported in 1984 that they had large, loose ceiling rocks, deep pits, water-filled pits, and several tunnels showing signs of recent cave-ins. I recognized the same sort of metal bars as were used to seal up Onyx Cave up north on the Sugar Camp Scenic Byway up in Missouri.
Along the trail I found a butterfly that was intensely focused on the orange blossoms of a large weed, sufficiently intent that it let me take several shots, even returning to the weed if I got too close. Later I found the plant is aptly named Butterfly Weed!
The trail passed by an old mining car and the heat was really bearing down as the trail crossed tailings piles. It was hard to believe that in 1982 a record flood of the Buffalo River brought it all the way up here, several stories above Rush Creek and over a half-a-mile inland from the river’s channel. This week the Caddo and Little Missouri rivers in Arkansas’ Ouachita Forest rose 20 feet overnight, killing at least 20 campers at the Albert Pike and other campgrounds, so I suppose the Buffalo River’s power should not be underestimated. But today the Buffalo was in its banks, and pickups carrying canoes and tubes kept buzzing by far down below, on their way to and from the popular Rush Landing, which I was approaching from on high.
The trail finally reached the end of the mountain and I took a side trail down to Rush Landing. Three dozen vehicles were parked there and at the landing itself three motorized launches were, well, launching and a couple of canoes were being paddled into shore. I stood by the shore and watched the green water roll by and then headed back uphill toward a shelter.
It was almost noon and I was getting hungry, but a semi-nude couple were occupying the shelter: a slim girl in a bikini and a big fellow in trunks. Despite the intensifying heat, I decided to leave them undisturbed and just have lunch somewhere out on the trail. So I clambered back up the mountain and headed onward to rise out of the Rush Creek watershed and enter the Clabber Creek one to the north.
The trail ran high above the south bank of Clabber Creek, eventually joining an old wagon road, which petered out at the Monte Cristo mine, which was reopened in the 1960s and then abandoned yet again. A large engine was rusting away along the bluff there, reminding me of the ones littering the abandoned oil fields in the Caney River floodplain around Bartlesville.
I had come 2.3 miles along the Rush Trail, with an unmaintained section ahead that ran back over the mountain’s crest to Rush. In my attire that was out of the question and the heat and humidity were pounding away. So I backtracked on the wagon road, activating my GPS and playing an audiobook for the first time that day on the trail.
I was approaching the climax of The Subtle Knife and was sufficiently distracted that I missed the trail turnoff up the mountainside. I blindly kept marching down that wagon road as it descended toward Clabber Creek, only halting when I was startled to see some abandoned buildings ahead. I couldn’t be back at Rush, so what was this? Looking about I realized I had reached some abandoned settlement on the banks of Clabber Creek. Perhaps this was the remains of the 1960s mining operations, as some building clearly were for missing machinery and the structures were in sad shape but far newer than what one sees in Rush.
Refreshed, I headed back to Rush. It was around 90 degrees when I arrived back at the car after a hike of about five miles. I cranked the air conditioning and cooled off during the brief drive to Buffalo River State Park, where I would be hiking more two trail loops. My legs had several cuts from the Rush trail and I discovered three ticks had ignored the Deet I had applied.
So when I arrived at the Buffalo Point trailheads, despite the heat I changed back into the stinky long hiking pants I’d soaked on yesterday’s hike. I renewed the sunscreen and Deet, put three pints of water in my pack, and headed out for the most wearying hike of the trip thus far.
I felt like I was melting as I headed down the first loop to a viewpoint above the Buffalo River. But I did get a nice view of the campground downstream, spying a number of folks enjoying the water. This viewpoint reminded me of when I was high above the river at Broken Bow last year and a kayaker down below hollered up at me. The wildflowers along the trailside seemed to think the sunshine was A-OK, while I was grateful when the trail entered a part of the forest with tall trees.
After surviving that 1.2 mile loop, I was ready to tackle the 3.2 mile Indian Rockhouse one, which promised a variety of features I could enjoy in my dazed delirium. The “ice house sinkhole” is supposed to spew out cool air from the caverns below, and I struggled a few feet down its steep slope, having to hang onto a tree to spot its bottom. It wasn’t worth photographing, and I could barely feel a touch of cool air.
My glasses fogged up when I entered a cool cave off the trail that formed a small rockhouse, complete with skylight courtesy of a section of collapsed roof. It took some courage to face the sunlight pouring in from the wide entrance and head back out onto the steamy trail. But I’d just finished The Subtle Knife and begun the final book in the His Dark Materials trilogy, The Amber Spyglass. The characters in those tall tales faced far worse, so I screwed up my courage and left my cave.
The trail ran beside Panther Creek, which was dry as a bone for the most part, but I did cross some creeks that were flowing. I had just crossed one when I spotted a bunch of butterflies gathered together on a creek stone. They were feasting on something, and declined to give up even with an annoying paparazzo hovering right over them. A few paces farther I came across a colorful blue-black-and-more butterfly like the one I’d seen on the King’s Bluff Trail yesterday, dining at a flower patch.
I crossed a section of Panther Creek that not only had water, but water which had carved a wriggly channel through the bedrock. Suddenly there was a distinct drop in temperature along the trail – I must be approaching the Indian Rockhouse. Yes, there it was – an immense gash in the hillside spewing cool air and the sound of rushing water. The huge shelter came complete with its own skylight, a creek roaring against one rear wall, and stalagmites.
I dawdled there for awhile, enjoying the cool air and the solitude. No one else was crazy enough to hike several miles through the forest in this heat and humidity, but I’d been rewarded with several interesting sights, and there was more to come.
The trail looped back to the car, passing by a natural bathtub where the water has scooped out a basin that seemed perfect for a cool dip. Later a creek supplied a big shallow pool which also looked inviting. As I ascended the final big hill, my iPhone’s GPS app chirped about losing its signal, which it never regained all the rest of the way to the car. I think it was too hot and bothered to care anymore about where I was going. A short side trail led to the old quarry where the CCC boys carved out the stones to build the park buildings and I rejoiced when I spotted my car through the trees.
After frightening off some Japanese tourists, who took one look at me and scurried off down the trail to find out what had happened down there, I peeled off my dripping garments and threw them into the trunk, scrubbing off the grime and chemicals with a washrag and putting on fresh socks, shorts, and a shirt to make myself presentable at the park restaurant.
It was 5:30 pm and all I’d had for lunch was some trail mix, so I thoroughly enjoyed two pieces of pressure-fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy, a trip to the salad bar, two scoops of chocolate ice cream, and three Cokes. There’s nothing like hiking almost ten miles in heat and humidity to make you throw out any dietary control!
I then zipped back to Mountain View, where I enjoyed a dip in the pool, which I had to myself. So I splashed and floated and even pretended to swim a bit, finally getting out as a chubby little fellow entered the area. As I left, he plaintively asked if I didn’t want to stay in the pool and play. I declined, although I did not point out that I had several hours of blogging and photo and video editing ahead of me before I could clamber into bed for a well-deserved rest.
In the end, the balky WiFi at the cabin forced to spend a few hours Sunday morning finishing up this extraordinarily long post. Now I’m ready to drive over to Tyler Bend for some hiking, and right after that I’m headed home.
Meador Manor 