Scenic Highway 7 Arkansas

Scenic road chapters

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.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Hot Springs is where the day begins. Next is Russellville.

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.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Russellville comes up about 117 km into the recorded legs. Next is Jasper Arkansas.

3. 3. Jasper Arkansas

   Jasper is a courthouse square with a handful of shops and cafés in the middle of the Boston Mountains, and it is the finish line for a ride that has earned its sit-down. Newton County has fewer people than almost anywhere in Arkansas, and the village, a few hundred strong, is the county seat in the way small places often are, with a stone-fronted square, a pharmacy and a long front porch of a restaurant that has fed travellers since 1909. Harrison, twenty-six kilometres to the north, is the nearest town of any size.

   Read the complete Jasper Arkansas write-up.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   about 223 km into the recorded legs you reach Jasper Arkansas. Next is Harrison.

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.

   Recorded stop-planning note

   May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.

   Planning note

   Harrison closes the day.