I was talking to the woman behind the counter in the gift shop/visitor center about this and that. A second woman walked out of a back room, sat down nearby, and said, “Is he bothering you?”
I did a double-take and then noticed she was looking beneath the counter where her dog was curled up. Joking, I said, “I thought you were talking about me.”
She replied, “Have you been a pain?”
I said, “I didn’t think so. I didn’t intend to be.”
We all laughed, I got my passport stamped, and I headed out to explore the park, not yet realizing that that conversation would be the highlight of the visit.
It’s a classic BCP park — boat ramp, campground, picnic area on a lake — like so many Arkansas parks. Still, I feel like I have to do something to earn my stamp. I chose the Mockernut Trail, a one-mile loop through the mosquito and poison ivy infested woods along the lake.
It’s called Mockernut Trail because the woods have a lot of Mockernut Hickory trees, so named because the nuts are hard for animals to open and only contain a small, unrewarding nut.
There were some campers in the campground and some fishermen in boats on the lake, but otherwise the park was empty, in part because the swim beach was closed due to high levels of E. coli bacteria.
Here’s a view of the lake from the dam. The main part of the park is on the left.
And that was it. I was drenched with sweat (the winds were straight out of the south — a torrential downpour hit the area about an hour later), gnawed on by mosquitoes, and hungry, so I left.