Arklahoma HikerTrails in Montgomery and Polk Counties in Arkansas, including Queen Wilhelmina State Park and the Shady Lake Recreation Area of the Ouachita National Forest.
For a list of all trails in this group, visit this link.
Queen Wilhelmina is a wonderful state park that sits on top of Rich Mountain, Arkansas’s second highest mountain in the Ouachita National Forest. The Ouachita Trail, a 223-mile hiking trail that runs from LeFlore County, Oklahoma, to Pulaski County, Arkansas, runs through the middle of the park. There also are a couple of short trails in the […]
The western part of the Caney Creek Trail is a wonderfully scenic hike through the Ouachita National Forests’s Caney Creek Wilderness. It is a hike of 11.4 miles (5.7 miles each way) and has 22 wet crossings (11 miles each way), but it is well worth the effort. The Caney Creek Trail runs 9 miles from […]
Katy Falls in the Caney Creek Wilderness is a cool 12-foot waterfall in a beautiful little cove by the west end of the Buckeye Trail. It is in the Ouachita National Forest, near Shady Lake, southeast of Mena. The waterfall is on a spur near where the Buckeye Trail joins the Caney Creek Trail. Also nearby […]
Back in April, I got to hike the west part of the Caney Creek Trail in the Ouachita National Forest’s Caney Creek Wilderness (Polk County, Arkansas). I hiked it from the west trailhead near the Cossatot River over to the trail’s juncture with the Buckeye Trail, a distance of 5.7 miles, and then back for […]
A couple of weeks ago, I stopped for a visit at Queen Wilhelmina State Park, near Mena and had an early evening walk on the Lovers Leap Trail. The most beautiful spot on the trail is the Lovers Leap overlook. These are some of the photos I took from the Overlook and the trail that […]
Tall Peak Trail is one of the cool trails near Shady Lake in the Ouachita National Forest, southeast of Mena, Arkansas. The trail is just 3.1 miles each way (for a total hike of 6.2 miles), but it is a challenging climb. The elevation difference between the high and low points is nearly 1,200 feet. […]