Getaway, Day Two (Friday, October 4)

After ending my birthday by not setting an alarm and then sleeping for nine glorious hours- ahhhh! – we packed a picnic lunch, a few games, and set out on what we hoped would a fun scoping expedition. Scott had learned that there was a swinging bridge in the area, and the day before we had seen a sign for “Swinging Bridge Road,” so that was our first stop.

Our cabin, Gracie’s Place Cottage, was located about a half-mile up a steep dirt road that cut off the highway at the east end of the Highway 9 bridge over the White River, where Sylamore Creek flows into it. The White River is the dividing line between Izard County on the east and Stone County on the west. Our cabin was in Izard County, and the swinging bridge over Sylamore Creek was in Stone County. We were hoping to be able to park near the swinging bridge and spend some time walking around, skipping rocks, and enjoying the area, but because it turned out that every square foot of land around the bridge is privately owned, posted, and inaccessible, all we could do was roll down the window, take a picture of the informative sign, and drive across the bridge. This post (by someone else) includes pictures and describes the interesting history of the bridge, which is evidently one of only two wire-cable suspension bridges in Arkansas still open to vehicular traffic.

Next we headed into Mountain View to explore the town and visit the Stone County museum. I also wanted to find the little bakery that we’d taken the kids to for breakfast-y treats during our camping trip at Blanchard Springs in 1993. We did find the white water tower near the square that I remembered, but as best we could figure, the bakery must’ve been torn down and has been replaced by apartments. Towns can change a lot in 26 years. So can people…

We found the history museum, but it wouldn’t open till 1:00 PM, so we went back to the square and wandered into the courthouse to ask where we could get an Arkansas state highway map. The paper kind. I’m old school. How and why we’d left our map in our cabin was a mystery that could not be solved. They had free maps (I took two, one for the car and one for the house) and gave us directions to the city park which was billed as a good place to walk and “really pretty.” With thirty minutes to kill before the museum opened and not yet hungry enough for lunch, we went for a walk in the park, and it was indeed most lovely. Scott pointed out an unusual tree that I thought was possibly bald cypress and might have the scientific name of taxodium distichum. 

I had not brought our tree book, but being a true tech whiz (HA!), I whipped out my cell phone and looked it up on wikipedia. (Yes, I do realize that wikipedia is not a definitive reference source, but hey, I wasn’t writing a research paper.) And YES! Not only does the above photo show a bald cypress tree, I even spelled its scientific name correctly!!! Pretty impressive recall, when you consider that that piece of information came from a botany class I took 40 (can it really be forty?) years ago as a freshman in college! That although I almost daily walk into a room and can’t remember what I went in there to get.

Back at the Stone County museum at 1:10 PM on Friday, October 4, the sign out front said CLOSED, although the sign on the door said “Open Thursday-Saturday 1:00-4:00 PM, April through October.

Hmm. We were sorely disappointed, but after waiting around till about 1:25, Scott made some calls and we eventually learned that the museum is staffed by volunteers; evidently that day’s volunteer was a no-show. Maybe we’d try again Saturday.

We drove out to Blanchard Springs and had a nice picnic while playing Sequence and reading a bit of our cherished tome,  The History of the United States: A Christian Perspective, by Robert Spinney. Then we took a short walk to the spring. It was impressive, and due only to prohibitive signage, Scott resisted his extremely strong urge to climb up behind the waterfall, muttering, “It just screams to be climbed.”

Then we did something that was sad to me. We went looking for the spot at the end of the road where we’d had our first-ever camping trip as a family. As I think I already mentioned, it was site of the “It’s a BIBLE, Mommy!” incident, and I knew I’d know it when I saw it. But there was a problem: that camping area was marked “CLOSED!” In October, prime camping season. How very odd. Even the memorable bathroom was closed. The road was overgrown and crumbling, and here’s the picnic table at “our” site, being taken over by vegetation.

Scott insisted that I pose, leaning on my trusty walking stick, in shock and awe. Back in the day, our tent had been set in the right foreground.

We later found a couple of Ozark National Forest employees on break, and I asked them why that area was closed and so overgrown. It turns out I wasn’t the first person to ask. They, of course were young enough to be our kids, but they told us that in 2012, heavy rains had submerged that part of the campground, and around the same time 20 people who were camping at Albert Pike campground in the Ouachita National Forest in southern Arkansas died in flash flooding. Our campsite there at Blanchard Springs was up on a little bluff, some 15 feet above the river. The volume of water required to flood that site is almost unimaginable. Although no one was injured here, a camper (a vehicle, not a person) was washed away, and to prevent future risk to guests, the Forest Service permanently closed this part of the Blanchard Springs campground. The employees told us that lots of people have come back and asked about it and that “our” site had always been the most popular in the whole park.  = )

Before going back to our cabin for a nap, a sad Cardinals game, and yummy shish-ka-bobs on the charcoal grill, we stopped back in town (Mountain View) for a picture of what is now my very favorite propane tank of all time.