On New Year’s morning Matey and I took our last walk over Hot Springs Mountain, coming down to Fountain Street.
We walked down to the elegant, slightly seedy, and beautiful downtown Hot Springs.
Jamie, Sean, Adler and Bria, the dog, came over for lunch. In the afternoon they took Matey and me for a hike on West Mountain. Notice that a week after we’d spent three days below freezing, with a low of 6, we’re hiking in t-shirts!
This was my first hike on West Mountain, just the other side of downtown. Hot Springs Mountain is in the distance with the tower. Downtown is in the valley between.
Bud stayed behind adding air to the tires of our new Dodge Ram 2500 diesel pickup truck, getting it ready for today’s trip. Yep, we broke down and got a bigger truck. The Toyota had been a good truck for us, but we wanted something capable of towing more weight. We didn’t like being on the upper edge of what the Toyota could do. With a three quarter ton diesel we know we can have our water and waste tanks full, add extra stuff and still not be near the 14,500 pound towing capacity of the new truck.
We drove a bit over 300 miles and are now at Roosevelt State Park in Morton, Mississippi with some pretty cool ducks.
This is our Christmas tree, made for me by a coworker in 1976, still shining brightly.
The lights on our trailer sparkle also.
The holiday tableau is somewhat ruined by the contents of our refrigerator and freezer, spread out in the 25 degree cold because our refrigerator quit working, we think because of the cold. It has a cold pack on it that is supposed to keep it working down to 0 degrees Fahrenheit, but we think the 6 degrees did it in. Supposedly the cure is just to turn it off and let it warm. Anyway we intend to enjoy the day, and happily Bud found a convenience store with ice open on Christmas morning.
We had stayed our allowed two weeks at Lake Ouachita State Park.
This morning Matey and I took a final walk. Although it wasn’t sunny, it wasn’t sleeting or raining as predicted. The lake looked beautiful in the morning light.
By two o’clock this afternoon we were all set up at Hot Springs National Park campground at Gulpha Gorge. The spaces are tighter here and there are more campers.
But the setting is nice and I’m looking forward to the trails on Hot Springs Mountain.
Meanwhile, when the sun does shine we’ve been playing disc golf at the local course, Wildcat Disc Golf Course at Cedarglades Park.
Sorry I haven’t posted in a while. We’re just hanging out in Hot Springs for the holiday season (and doing a lot of annual doctor and dentist visits).
We have moved to Lake Ouachita State Park, which is a much nicer setting. We managed to find a site where we have both cell service and an opening for our satellite TV antenna. Only one end of one camping loop gets cell service, and that area is wooded, so finding a spot with a break to the southwestern sky is not easy.
It’s very pretty here, but for the ten days we’ve been here we have rarely seen the sun. It has been clouds, mist and rain almost constantly. And for more than a week we couldn’t visit Jamie as she had COVID, again! This despite being vaccinated and boosted, but when you’re a primary care physician you are exposed every day.
Matey and I have seen deer on our drippy walks.
When there are breaks in the weather we play disc golf.
I’ve put out the holiday lights. (If you look closely you can see a few red and green dots on the camper. This was at dusk, at night they are bright.)
So all in all it has been good. And the rain is supposed to be ending for awhile. This is the sunset last night, so nice to see.
I booked us into the campground at the Greenville Recreation Area because it had full hook ups and was only $12 a night for us.
As an Army Corps of Engineers campground it has the hoped for level, paved sites. In fact the whole campground is unusually flat, since we’re in the hills of southeast Missouri.
On my first walk with Matey I was surprised to come across what looked like a city sidewalk running along the campground road.
I soon discovered that the recreation area is built on the former site of Greenville, MO.
It has sidewalks running along streets that have become part of a bike trail.
And sidewalks that now just run through the woods.
It has street signs, but the streets are gone.
The campground shares space with old foundations…
and an old cemetery.
So what happened to Greenville?
This level site is on the floodplain of the St. Frances River. The flood of 1935 was the eighth major flood since the town was established in 1818. Ironically, when a flood control dam was started downriver in 1939 it was expected that the town would flood more often and to a greater extent as it would be within the high water pool of the newly created Wappapello Lake.
This is a piling for the bridge that now takes traffic on US 67 over the St. Frances River and over the entrance to the Greenville Recreation Area. If you look at the high water marks and dates that are painted here you can see that they were right. The highest mark before the dam was built was the flood of 1915, midway up the round part of the piling. If you look at the water depth on the house in the 1935 flood, you realize that the flood of 2011 would have completely covered every building in the town.
Except that in 1940 they moved the town two miles to higher ground. About 40 homes were moved. Other buildings were torn down and rebuilt.
It is still a small town.
But it still has the courthouse and remains the county seat of Wayne County, Missouri.
Its old site is left to be discovered by campers like us.
Sunday we drove south and crossed the Ohio River into Kentucky very close to its confluence with the Mississippi.
There were barges everywhere, probably waiting to make it through the shallow river.
Now we’re along the Mississippi in Kentucky at Columbus-Belmont State Park. And there is a lot of commerce on the river here, as has been the case historically. Kentucky tried to stay neutral during the civil war. But because this is a bluff along the Mississippi between the confluence of the Ohio and the northern border of the Confederate States, General Polk of the Confederates came here immediately to fortify this as a defensive position.
He had 13,000 troops and 10,000 slaves and they dug miles of huge trenches.
The park preserves about 10% of the earthworks.
They also have this cannon that was dug up about twenty-five years ago from under 40 feet of earth.
Polk also had a giant chain stretched across the river. It was held up by flat boats and anchored on either shore. They could adjust the height of the chain by adding or removing boats. Unfortunately for the Confederates, they pulled out too many of the boats and the waves and current caught the chain and broke it. This section of chain and one anchor were uncovered in a landslide on the banks and are now displayed in the park.
The whole enterprise did not work out well for Polk. He had diverted so many troops to this defensive position that the line was weak to the east. The Union army was able to take that territory and cut off Columbus. Polk had to abandon the site in less than a year and the Union held it for the rest of the war.
Happily for us preserving these earthworks has created a beautiful public space along the Mississippi.
The trees have grown undisturbed and there are some towering specimens.
The campground is very nice, with a number of sites, like ours, that have full hook-ups…
and have a wonderful view out over the Mississippi.
You can tell this is an old campground, the sites are pretty small and not at all level. No, we did not crash the Toyota into the tree, that’s just the only way it would fit on our site. But it is worth it because this is one of the prettiest and most unusual parks we’ve visited.
We’ve taken three short hikes here. The first was a loop up to a rocky peninsula that overlooked the park road.
The neck of the peninsula has a rock wall running all the way across it. This wall was built over 1,000 years ago and archaeologists have no idea why, but they do not think is was defensive, even though the local name for this site is the stone fort.
The end of the peninsula is quite rocky and drops off abruptly. A pretty and interesting spot for sure.
Yesterday we took the Giant City Nature Walk. After a short walk through the woods we came to this wooden walkway.
At the far end the path takes you between huge sandstone rocks, the “streets” of Giant City. The sandstone was broken apart as the last glaciers melted.
The size and regularity of these rocks are impressive.
Even the graffiti is fascinating.
This very narrow passage led up and under…
this balanced rock.
A second walkway with stairs brought you down and around to the other side of the formation.
There was a very long undercut shelf on this side, you can just see another hiker on the far end of the shelf.
Today we took the Trillium Trail through the aptly named Fern Rock Conservation Area.
Again we were walking by sandstone cliffs.
The cliffs had large overhangs.
This rock was a narrow wedge, you can see Bud’s walking stick, which was almost as long as the width of the rock.
We thought these were even bigger than the rocks at the Giant City site.
Storms went through last night, but it was still dry behind this rock under the overhang.
Because the cliffs face north it is cool and damp, besides the ferns there is moss and I found one of my favorite plants, these flattened little liverworts. Both mosses and liverworts are non vascular plants, so they can’t transport water from roots, they need a very moist site so water can seep into all of their cells.
We met some hikers who spotted this critter. I think it is a Northern Slimy Salamander. It has no lungs and gets oxygen through its skin and the lining of its mouth, so it also needs a moist environment. I was thrilled to see these decidedly non-desert species.
The second half of this walk took us through the woods above the cliff. Matey was on his leash. It looked safe…
but we were close to the edge. There were fissures…
and it was a long ways down. Look closely and you can see the hikers we met, now at the base of the cliff while we are on top.
So even with an old campground with tight, uneven spaces, this was definitely a place worth visiting.
We are staying at the River Campground at Trail of Tears State Park and we are right along the Mississippi River. I took this photo from the back of our campsite. There is a chain link fence, then the railroad track, then the parking lot for the boat ramp and then the river. For the past three days the river has seemed busy, with tugs passing every few hours. The largest array of barges we’ve seen is five long and two wide, ten in all. I think that much larger ones are possible, but the river levels are very low, and I wonder if they have been unable to maneuver the larger ones. Today we had seen no river traffic at all, but as I sit here writing a 10 barge array is going upstream.
The trains have not stopped. There are about seven or eight trains a day that pass – close! I was sitting just at the back of the camper when this one came by. The park road to the boat ramp crosses the tracks less than 100 yards from the trailer and the trains blow their whistles for it. It makes for an interesting experience, if not a peaceful one.
Matey seems unfazed by the trains. He is much more interested in the many armadillos here. This is one we saw, I thought it was letting us get this close because it was right next to a culvert that it could hide in if we came closer.
But this one kept digging around paying no attention to Matey.
In fact, it came right up to him. It’s now hard to walk Matey around here, because he’s more interested in hunting armadillos than in walking. He can smell them all around.
Today we drove through the park to an overlook. You can see the sandbars in the low river.
We then drove about 20 miles further north to Tower Rock. This odd geological formation is a well known landmark on the Mississippi. The Lewis and Clark expedition camped here on their way up to the Missouri.
The rock appears to be a cut off extension of this bluff.
When the water is low enough you can walk out to the Tower Rock. We couldn’t, but there was a lot of exposed riverbed we did walk on.
Since we were out we drove on up to a disc golf course. This was in a city park and it was a nice one. The park was huge and we ended up walking almost two miles to play. It was a nice day, and this has been another nice stop, although fall is catching up to us.
On the Roam Again 