2005/04 Deep South trip - Prairie state park |
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We left after lunch, heading due north across Arkansas into Missouri. Our stop for the night was at Prairie state park, which is just that: a park created to preserve one of the few remaining tracts of virgin prairie in Missouri. I wasn’t able to do much exploring as the trails were all closed at dawn and dusk to protect the prairie chicken’s breeding season. We were also supposed to check which areas the bison were in, but there was no one around to ask, not even a bison.
We had to drive across Drywood Creek to get into the campground. “Area prone to flooding”. Obvious place to put the campground! It turned out to have only two campsites, and one of them was occupied. They were labeled “camping by reservation only in designated sites”, whatever that means. We operated on the principle that it is better to ask for forgiveness than permission, and occupied the other site. Nobody disturbed us.
Saturday April 16th
I went out to the park’s trailhead to call the kids, as the campground had too much tree cover for the phone to
work. The trailhead was blocked by a ten feet high fence, obviously intended to keep the park’s bison in their place. For the first time in weeks, I got a human instead of the answering machine. As usual the kids had lost the phones and they couldn’t find them because the batteries were dead. While Michael was telling me about all the vehicle problems they’d been having, I leaned back against the fence and found out the hard way that it was electrified! I would guess that bison rate a lot higher voltage than the usual sixty volts for cows or horses. I dropped the phone but we kept the connection.
Later, I walked a little way across the prairie. There was a lot of last year’s dead grass, and a few birds and lots of spring flowers, but the prairie’s probably more impressive in mid-summer when the tall grass reaches its full height.