Arkansas Scenic 7

Waypoint introductions and full write-ups

1. 1. Hot Springs

   Hot Springs is the only city in America with a national park running down its main street. The springs are the reason: forty-seven of them rise at the foot of Hot Springs Mountain, carrying rainwater that fell thousands of years ago and heated deep underground. Congress set the area aside for federal protection in 1832, decades before Yellowstone, and the elegant bathhouses along Central Avenue, known as Bathhouse Row, were built in the early twentieth century when visitors came from across the country to soak away their ailments.

   Read the complete Hot Springs write-up.

2. 2. Russellville

   Russellville sits in the Arkansas River Valley between two very different landscapes, the flat, farmed bottomland to the south and the rugged Boston Mountains to the north. It is a university and industrial town of about twenty-nine thousand people, home to Arkansas Tech University, with a downtown of old brick buildings, a nuclear power plant on the river and the broad water of Lake Dardanelle, created by a dam on the Arkansas River in the 1960s. It is the sort of place where a ride along Scenic Highway 7 makes its decision about direction.

   Read the complete Russellville write-up.

3. 3. Jasper

   Jasper is a tiny town in the heart of the Arkansas Ozarks, with a courthouse square, a few shops and a population under five hundred, but it sits at the junction of some of the best scenery in the region. The Buffalo National River, the first river in the United States to be protected as a national river, flows nearby in a long, winding course between limestone bluffs, and Jasper is one of the gateways to it. The surroundings are steep, forested hills, with deep hollows, creeks and rock outcrops.

   Read the complete Jasper write-up.

4. 4. Harrison

   Harrison is the main town of the north Arkansas Ozarks, a courthouse square with a few brick buildings, a lot of pickup trucks and a pace that tells you the big cities are a long way off. It is the seat of Boone County and sits on a plateau above the valley of the Buffalo River, which flows east for well over a hundred miles through limestone bluffs and is protected as the first national river in the United States, set aside in 1972.

   Read the complete Harrison write-up.