Vacation Wrap Up

As many of my long time readers can probably guess, when we have some time around the holidays, odds are we end up at the family cabin in the Boston mountain of NW Arkansas along the Buffalo National Wild and Scenic river. The prior post "painted" by the A.I. Claude was supposed to depict me hiking through the woods of said mountains and not picking cabbages or being mooned by giants as some guessed. Claude really does need to practice his art skills.

We did accomplish some hiking and a whole lot of disconnecting from society which were our two main goals. Above is Magnolia Falls which we hiked too on the first day.

On the second day, we headed down to the Buffalo River to scope out some of the damage caused by a historic sized flood a few weeks earlier. Above was the remains of a low water crossing on the upper Buffalo. All my life, I have walked, driven and paddled canoes underneath that low water bridge and even swam in the pool on the upstream side. The same flood that deposited the debris in the trees some 20 feet high in the foreground of the bridge, also carried hundreds of tons of rocks and deposited them under and on the upstream side of the low water bridge and essentially turned it into a low head dam. Now that the river is back down to it's normal low flow during the winter months, instead of going underneath the bridge, it is flowing over and also around, cutting off the entrance to the bridge so you can't cross it anymore by vehicle or by foot. Unclear is what will happen during the spring boating months when thousands descend upon this river and put their boats in the water, normally from the opposite side which is now completely blocked by a huge gravel bar. Not to mention, when the higher waters of spring arrive, this now low head dam will be incredibly dangerous to any who get caught in the vortex it will create.

All along the river, we saw huge changes created by the flood. Channels I have boated most of my life are no longer and new ones have been carved out. Above is one of the few, relatively unchanged sections that we found during out time hiking. 

One of the last, if not the last, residents of the Buffalo River National Park (as the land was transferred into the national park system) lived in the above cabin before leaving sometime in the late 1970's. One can find several other cabins along the river if you know where the look but most vanishing to mother nature at a rapid pace. This cabin alone, is still standing and there are talks of further preservation to keep it that way. I'm not sure it can be done and still preserve the charm of an abandoned cabin. 

Above is a common spot for lunch on some of our longer hikes. It is a south facing overhanging bluff with a nice wide rock ledge to sit on underneath and soak in the sun while eating our trail lunch. In the distant center of the photo, you can see a large gravel bar probably six feet deep in places. That has always been the channel as long as I have been coming down to this river for nearly four decades. The river now goes through a narrow channel hidden in the trees to the left next to the bluff and is currently completely blocked by a large tree that has fallen clear across the channel. Hopefully it eventually gets cleared before the spring boating season starts.