Listing Through Life

Lake Dardanelle is a 34,300-acre reservoir created by damming the Arkansas River. The state park has two sections, a smaller one on a bay along the north shore that is entirely campground/picnic area/marina, and a larger one near Russellville that is pretty much the same thing, only larger. And it has the visitor center. That’s the section I visited today.

It feels like the park was shoe-horned in at the last minute to give public access to Lake Dardanelle before all the lots were built up. The only “wild” area is a narrow strip of woods between the highway and the picnic/camping area. There’s a trail down the middle of this strip, but it’s neither particularly quiet or scenic.

It does provide a nice view of the lake. Mount Nebo is the flat-topped mountain in the left distance.

Here’s a closer view. You can see the Mount Nebo State Park visitor center on the top of the mountain if you could enlarge the photo enough and know where to look.

Probably the most exciting thing about the park is indoors. The visitor center has several large tanks with native fish. On this day, it also had a large group of obnoxious school children running around screaming, so I didn’t stay long. One lad, not paying attention to where he was going, nearly collided with me. He looked up and saw the binoculars around my neck, said a loud “Oooo!” and began reaching for them. Then he saw the look on my face and walked away.

I walked around the picnic area to get in my miles for the day and then headed for home.

By the time you reach the top of Mount Nebo, you’ve already done the most interesting thing to do in the park — drive the road up the mountain. It twists back and forth through 11 hairpin turns that are steeper than anything I’ve driven anywhere else. The road is left over from the 1890s when the mountain was a resort reached by horse-drawn coach. For some odd reason, I’ve never taken a picture of it, but pictures wouldn’t do it justice.

The mountain is flat topped and pretty much covered with cabins. The overlooks on either end of the mountain are cool, although the trees on the west end have gotten so high that they block much of the view. Here’s the east end view I took today.

And the view from behind the visitor center with Lake Dardanelle below. I don’t know what’s with the sign, but I felt compelled to obey.

One of the coolest things I’ve seen at Nebo was the huge flock of Snow Geese that hang out in the middle of Lake Dardanelle in the winter. This shot was taken in February, 2024. That’s a tremendous number of geese — in the 10s of thousands, I’d guess.

Not that this has much to do with Mount Nebo State Park, but here’s a shot of a tiny bit of that same flock of geese taken from the lakeshore just a few days before I took the above photo.

Back to today’s visit. The two round peninsulas that jut into Lake Dardanelle each have a section of Dardanelle State Park on the near shore. The further section is where I headed next.

Here are some more photos of the park taken on past trips. I’ve hiked the rim trail three times. It’s a 3.5 mile loop around the edge of the summit, often on a ledge below the rim.

Mount Magazine is the highest point in Arkansas — 2,753 feet. There’s a short trail to the summit from the lodge. I didn’t walk it this time, but I’ve done it before. There are also scenic overlooks all around the rim, but today when I went to get my passport stamped, while still scenic, they didn’t overlook much. A dense fog blanketed the valleys much of the time. Not only was this beautiful, but it kept things nice and cool — just a skosh above jacket weather.

I’d left home early and got to the visitor center just minutes after it opened. I got my passport stamped, took my picture by the sign, and stopped at a couple of the overlooks.

Looking southwest into the Petit Jean River Valley.

The view to the north from the Cameron Bluff overlook.

A few minutes later, this same view looked like this.

Pinnacle Mountain, located between the Maumelle and Little Maumelle Rivers just upstream from the Arkansas River, rises 1,011 feet. It’s the reason the nearby rivers, lake, and city are called “Maumelle,” which is French for “breast.” Those wacky French explorers had been away from  home a long time. Here’s what it looks like from the Big Dam Bridge over the Arkansas River, with the I-430 bridge in the foreground. (Picture taken in 2009.)

I’ve been to the park many times to bird and hike, although I’ve only climbed the mountain three times. The last time was in early 2023. On the way down, I tore my meniscus so badly that I lived in pain for a year and a half and eventually had knee surgery. So when I say “last” time, I’m pretty sure I mean it literally. You can read about my 2011 climb and see my photos here.

But I needed to get my passport stamped, so I went again.

I walked the two trails where I regularly bird. The first is the Kingfisher Trail, a short, paved loop that runs along the Little Maumelle River where there are some giant bald cypress trees that a marker says could be more than 500-years old.

From there I went to the Arkansas Arboretum trail. It’s another paved loop, this one about three-quarters of a mile long. I always think of it as a great place to bird, but I just checked my records — I’ve been there nine times and have only seen 43 species, none of them particularly unusual.