Buffalo River Trail - Woolum to Margaret White

This past weekend I went on a short backpacking trip on the Buffalo River Trail between Woolum and Margaret White. The roughly 6 mile route had some real elevation change going from river level to the top of the bluff line twice. While we got some amazing views from Dave Manes Bluff, I suspect big views are more frequent (though less colorful) in the winter.

The river was bone dry for most of this section, something that isn't rare this time of year for this part. In fact, the water is there, it is just flowing underground through the karst and it resurfaces downstream in interesting springs. Oddly enough, we had to cross flowing water at Woolum, but then were able to cross the dry bed downstream of there to camp near Dave Mane's Bluff and Ben Branch.

We heard tons of coyotes at night and saw a lot of stars.
Here is a link to more photos of the dry river bed: http://trailsofarkansas.blogspot.com/2012/08/buffalo-river-low.html
There are some interesting trails near here up around Point Peter:
http://trailsofarkansas.blogspot.com/2014/01/point-peter-mountain-trails-buffalo.html

30 Crossing Recap

I've written quite a bit about about why it is worse than a waste of taxpayer money to widen I-630 and I-30 and provided some discussion of better ideas that would save money and have positive impacts on our community and state. Today I want to focus on the I-30 project, now also referred to as "30 Crossing".