My route on Thursday, April 22nd took me through Little Rock, Arkansas, and for a brief moment I considered visiting the Clinton library, but I overcame my brief insanity and continued on to Searcy, Arkansas and spent the night at Wal-Mart because there were no RV parks available.
On Friday, April 23rd, I headed for Mountain View, Arkansas. I have to say that there is a lot of beautiful country along the way and I enjoyed all of the back road travel.
I checked into the Sylamore Springs RV park just east of Mountain View. It is a nice park located on Sylamore Creek.
After situating my rig I had lunch at a nice restaurant that over looked the White River.
After lunch I drove up to Blanchard Springs Caverns to get info from the park ranger. BSC is similiar to Carlsbad Caverns and there is a trail system that runs from near my RV park all the way up through the Ozarks. I didn't take the tour of the caverns, but they had a slide show that I watched, so I just took pictures of the slides. If you're interested you can view them here: Blanchard Springs Cavern
I had planned to do a little hiking on Friday afternoon, but thunderstorms moved in and it rained heavily all afternoon and evening.
On Saturday morning I had planned to hike from the trailhead near my camp ground up to Blanchard Springs (approximately 10 miles round trip). I began the hike at the trailhead, but after about a mile I discovered that you had to wade across Sylamore Creek to continue. Apparently during the summer it is only ankle deep, but the recent rains has it running four feet deep and there was no way.
Having been thwarted on this hike I drove up to Blanchard Springs again and planned to hike from there on up to Cooper's Pool another 10 mile round trip that doesn't require you to cross the creek. However, the thunderstorms moved in again and it began pouring rain in buckets and this part of the road was obviosly closed.
Between downpours I was able to visit some of the sites around Blanchard Springs. This is a picture of Blanchard Springs. It is the water flowing out of the lower caverns that had over the eons carved out the beautiful cavern. If you're interested you can see all of the pictures for this area here: Ozark Trails
On Sunday, April 25th, I packed up and headed for Alton, Illinois, where I plan to visit my cousins and other relatives from my mother's side of the family. Again, there were some beautiful views while driving through Arkansas.
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