We took a trip to Petit Jean State Park, Arkansas's first state park. It was about an hour from Russellville, AR. Pat said we came here when we lived in Arkansas about 16 years ago, but I don't remember it. Don't know if we camped or just made a day trip of it back then. It is a beautiful park. With temperatures in the 50's it was a great day to explore. You can read about the legend of the young girl, Petit Jean (means Little John), here
https://www.arkansasstateparks.com/parks/petit-jean-state-park/about/history
We took the Cedar Falls trail and we were so glad we did. Cedar Falls was stunning! Krikkit enjoyed sniffing all of the posts on the wooden trail to the lookout. We could have gone further, and may go back, but there were a lot of steps involved which would have been impossible for Krikkit.
The CCC (Civilian Conservation Core), under President Roosevelt, developed a lot of the infrastructure at Petit Jean in the 1930's including roads, bridges, cabins, buildings, trails and dams (Lake Bailey and Roosevelt Lake). They also built Mather Lodge which overlooks Cedar Creek Falls and is still used today. There is a great 3.3 mile bike and hiking trail that goes past the falls. This building is the CCC water tower. I love how the CCC uses stone in it's structures. We will be back there in the next month to try other trails in the park.
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| Lisegang bands in the sandstone |
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| Ivy's Cove RV Retreat--a quiet place to hibernate during Covid-19 |
Are you finding less people traveling now or is it about the same?? Love seeing your adventures. So glad you are doing a blog, gives me a lot more info about each site as well as spy on you lol!!!
ReplyDeleteSeems we're having email notification issues! Oh well, plenty of time to work on that. Hard to tell. We of course are parked. We see a lot stopping for just the night. Not sure if that's because we are right off the interstate or not. Most people stay to themselves, including us. Several I talked to earlier had things cancelled and were just heading home. Wouldn't surprise me if a lot were heading home. We were heading towards MO and IA but since we are "home" we decided to go somewhere away from others, hoping we don't have it, and if we do, we won't pass it on. On our hikes in the parks we've just seen locals with kids out of school. The lodge at Jean Petit SP looked busy though.
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