10 ½ Hours

Buffalo River Overlook--from Deck of Visitor Center
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Check it off on your list as the silliest NPS junket we’ve ever made, but we did make it back to Buffalo River today to get the elusive stamp in the passport, representing our 1990 visit, before we actually bought a parks passport. We figured that the icy road last week ended up costing us 100 extra miles, 2 extra hours, and $5.75 in tolls on the turnpikes we had to take from Oklahoma City to Buffalo River [Tim pointed out that for a deeply Republican Small-Government state, Oklahoma has a LOT of turnpikes! I think that the Indian tribes get the money, as they are all named after one tribe or another, to which Tim suggested that that must be so, since they don’t make enough money from the casinos.] I will say this for the turnpikes, though: there was almost NO traffic, and we buzzed along in peaceful solitude for hours. Totally different from the truck-infested I-40 which is the other way across Oklahoma and Arkansas.

The river was up!
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At any rate, we rolled into the Tyler Bend visitor center about 3:00 to reap the reward of a veritable BONANZA of stamps: one for that center, one for the Pruitt Ranger station, and one for the park headquarters. We close out this book in a flurry of gray stamping. We spent a half hour or so poking around the visitor center (mostly cases of taxidermied plants, animals, birds, and reptiles), and then we watched the 17-minute film that the ranger claimed had something about the history of the land becoming a park, but which in reality was a sentimental pastiche of video clips of people fishing, swimming, camping, and canoeing down the Buffalo during all four seasons accompanied by a medley of twangy country songs about wanting to stay there forever. If you have to drive 100 miles out of your way to get there, I would suggest giving it a pass. If you need an NPS stamp, however, that’s another story and you should depart post-haste.

"Note the shiny blue carapace and the unusual markings. Must be a sport."

Tyler's Bend Visitor Center--wasn't there in 1990
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The movie starts out with a ranger instructing a family on how to canoe, and he says, “It’s really pretty hard to tip a canoe over,” as he rocks it wildly back and forth. To which I say: “That’s a lie!” Tim and I managed to tip ours over about 40 seconds into our 1990 expedition down some segment of the river. River was up today; it would have been a good day for canoeing, but we decided that we just didn’t have the time. Maybe some other day. Or maybe not.

A Rare and Elusive Critter...Stalk Carefully!
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Main memory of the park from 1990: we bought our National Geographic bird book in the visitor center there—a direct result of the canoe-tip. The Audubon guide we had prior to that did not survive the dunking—at least not in any fashion that anyone would have considered to be usable. In light of that memory, Tim and I spent our half-hour in the visitor center wandering around perplexedly as neither one of us recognized it (or the building, or the road leading to the center, for that matter), until Tim had the good sense to ask the ranger when this center was built, and when she told us that it was dedicated in 1991, that solved the mystery. We determined that we had been to the Pruitt station (a fair piece up river), so our three stamps are all legit: we have actually been to those places, and by waiting only 18.5 years, we also go the third stamp that didn’t exist when we were there the first time. You just never know when things are going to work out for the best!

We did, however, take a walk down to the river where I took the photos appended. Most amusing photo: the rare and nearly-extinct Telephonus boothus, this one fully functional. Note the shiny blue carapace and the unusual markings. Must be a sport.

That was the highlight of the day—the rest was just driving driving driving—10 ½ hours worth.

Cheapest gas alert: $1.37^9/10 (I am not making this up; we actually bought gas at 1.39^9/10 as we were more than half full when we saw the cheapest station). Makes me wonder if we’re actually going to see dollar gas again. This can’t be good.

Best birds of the day: about 1000 Red Tailed Hawks; looked like someone had just sprinkled them all over Eastern Oklahoma and Western Arkansas—we must have seen one every few hundred yards the whole morning. Also two Pileated Woodpeckers flew across the road; very nice!

Tomorrow will be longer: 12 at least, and with the loss of the hour due to crossing the time zone line, 13. Should be home by 9 or 9:30. Cat will no doubt be happy to see us. Barring unforeseen (and unwished for) adventures, tomorrow’s entry will merely be a sign-off to close out the map, and I won’t send out e-mail alerts. Happy trails!