Springtime in the Midwest… It’s the best and worst time of year here, with plenty of beautiful days with sunny skies and warm temps, but also an abundance of stormy days with severe weather. It’s the season for float trips when the water is up and the temperature is pleasant, but it’s also difficult to plan ahead for them due to a high likelihood of storms.
And thus, we had our weekend picked out this year, and constantly checked the weather for that day for 2 weeks in advance. Every day, the outlook changed, and it wasn’t until the day of that we knew for sure we’d be able to go.
Bright and early Friday morning, we packed our coolers and our dry bags with beer, water, sandwich stuff, chips, the works. We grabbed our tents and our sleeping mats and pillows. There were four of us and we hopped in two cars, and headed south to Buffalo River.
The state campgrounds are all first come, first serve. We knew we weren’t going to want to drive all over the place with limited cell service trying to find a campground after we were done floating, so we went straight to the Carver campground, a tiny campground but the closest one to where we would be pulling out on this float. We booked a site, and quickly set up a tent so that people would know it was claimed.
We then all hopped in one of the cars and drove off to the Buffalo River Canoes office in Ponca where we rented two canoes and shuttle service for our car. One more brief drive later, we were parking at Pruitt. We put our stuff in our canoes, and took off paddling.
For it being the middle of May, the water level was pretty low, but we only dragged once.
The Buffalo is always beautiful. While Steel Creek to Kyles Landing is my preferred float, Pruitt to Hasty was still quite pleasant, with clear water and the occasional bluff as your backdrop.
We were in no hurry, so we took our time, making lots of stops to swim and snack.
There were more people than we were expecting on a week day, but it never felt overcrowded.
After close to six hours, we arrived at Hasty, though we had to ask someone to be sure since there were no signs. We found our car, and headed off to our campground to finish setting up camp.
The Carver campground is very basic and there were ticks and mosquitos all over the place, but it was quiet and peaceful there. We had a pleasant campfire, had some dinner, and hung out and talked until bed time.
The next morning, we didn’t waste much time before tearing down camp and getting on the road.
We had around an hour drive to get to the starting point of the hike to Whitaker Point. Even though we had all grown up near northwest Arkansas, none of us had done this hike, the endpoint of which was the view that peppered any article about Arkansas tourism.
The way to the point was shaded and mostly downhill. Once we got to the edge of the cliff, there were endless views along the way.
Whitaker Point itself is a big beautiful rock that juts out over the valley below. Arkansas can be surprisingly picturesque.
We hung out and climbed around there for a while, taking too many pictures.
But eventually, we had to turn back and repeated the 1.5 mile trek back up to the parking lot, having a long afternoon of driving ahead of us.
