Listing Through Life

By the time you reach the top of Mount Nebo, you’ve already done the most interesting thing to do in the park — drive the road up the mountain. It twists back and forth through 11 hairpin turns that are steeper than anything I’ve driven anywhere else. The road is left over from the 1890s when the mountain was a resort reached by horse-drawn coach. For some odd reason, I’ve never taken a picture of it, but pictures wouldn’t do it justice.

The mountain is flat topped and pretty much covered with cabins. The overlooks on either end of the mountain are cool, although the trees on the west end have gotten so high that they block much of the view. Here’s the east end view I took today.

And the view from behind the visitor center with Lake Dardanelle below. I don’t know what’s with the sign, but I felt compelled to obey.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen at Nebo was the huge flock of Snow Geese that hang out in the middle of Lake Dardanelle in the winter. This shot was taken in February, 2024. That’s a tremendous number of geese — in the 10s of thousands, I’d guess.

Not that this has much to do with Mount Nebo State Park, but here’s a shot of a tiny bit of that same flock of geese taken from the lakeshore just a few days before I took the above photo.

Back to today’s visit. The two round peninsulas that jut into Lake Dardanelle each have a section of Dardanelle State Park on the near shore. The further section is where I headed next.

Here are some more photos of the park taken on past trips. I’ve hiked the rim trail three times. It’s a 3.5 mile loop around the edge of the summit, often on a ledge below the rim.

Mount Magazine is the highest point in Arkansas — 2,753 feet. There’s a short trail to the summit from the lodge. I didn’t walk it this time, but I’ve done it before. There are also scenic overlooks all around the rim, but today when I went to get my passport stamped, while still scenic, they didn’t overlook much. A dense fog blanketed the valleys much of the time. Not only was this beautiful, but it kept things nice and cool — just a skosh above jacket weather.

I’d left home early and got to the visitor center just minutes after it opened. I got my passport stamped, took my picture by the sign, and stopped at a couple of the overlooks.

Looking southwest into the Petit Jean River Valley.

The view to the north from the Cameron Bluff overlook.

A few minutes later, this same view looked like this.

The history of the battle that took place here can be read on the markers at the bottom of this post. I’ll just add that it all seems a bit silly. The Union marched toward Little Rock. The Confederates burned the bridge across Bayou Meto and forced them to stop. The Union army backed up a ways, waited for the Confederates to leave, then moved forward again and took Little Rock. What remains is a seven-acre park with a cannon and a few markers. An old farm has been reconstructed on the site — to educate school children, I imagine.

This is pretty much the entire site. Bayou Meto is just beyond the trees to the left.

It looks like this. If I had a choice to try to get across it when people were shooting at me or wait a few days until the people left, I’d wait.

I walked the perimeter, saw everything there was to see, and spent maybe 15 minutes. Since it’s 45 minutes from my house, of course I was going to visit sometime, but I wouldn’t make a greater effort than that.

Pinnacle Mountain, located between the Maumelle and Little Maumelle Rivers just upstream from the Arkansas River, rises 1,011 feet. It’s the reason the nearby rivers, lake, and city are called “Maumelle,” which is French for “breast.” Those wacky French explorers had been away from  home a long time. Here’s what it looks like from the Big Dam Bridge over the Arkansas River, with the I-430 bridge in the foreground. (Picture taken in 2009.)

I’ve been to the park many times to bird and hike, although I’ve only climbed the mountain three times. The last time was in early 2023. On the way down, I tore my meniscus so badly that I lived in pain for a year and a half and eventually had knee surgery. So when I say “last” time, I’m pretty sure I mean it literally. You can read about my 2011 climb and see my photos here.

But I needed to get my passport stamped, so I went again.

I walked the two trails where I regularly bird. The first is the Kingfisher Trail, a short, paved loop that runs along the Little Maumelle River where there are some giant bald cypress trees that a marker says could be more than 500-years old.

From there I went to the Arkansas Arboretum trail. It’s another paved loop, this one about three-quarters of a mile long. I always think of it as a great place to bird, but I just checked my records — I’ve been there nine times and have only seen 43 species, none of them particularly unusual.

This museum is about four miles up the road from Plum Bayou. It’s a collection of buildings that were connected to local cotton farming. Displays and equipment explain the process of producing cotton, from planting the seeds to the finished product.

The visitor center and museum is in an old brick store built in 1912. Another section was added in 1929 as the Scott post office. It now houses special exhibits (currently one on Chinese immigrants in Arkansas).

The museum does a good job of explaining the process of farming cotton and makes it interesting.

Some random displays from the musuem:

The spread of the boll weevil.

Another building, a reconstruction, houses an original, fully restored cotton gin, where seed was separated from the cotton, and the cotton was baled.

Seed Warehouse No. 5 explains the process of storing, drying, and bagging cotton seeds. The doors to the building are through two Cotton Belt railroad cars.

An aerial view from … ? The store (visitor center) is on the right. Several of the buildings on the left are still there, but not part of the park.

We were hungry, so we walked through some of the buildings quickly and skipped the old tractor collection entirely. But it’s worth the time to visit — certainly a far cry better than the Lower White River Museum.