Hiking White River Bluff in Syllamore

Wow. Angel and I absolutely LOVED this trail and this area. I took some vacation this week and we decided to drive about 4 hours from Fort Smith over to Mountain View, Arkansas.

We stayed in a great little "cottage" called the Lincoln Street Cottage which turned out to be a nice little two bedroom house not far from non-alcoholic downtown. The nightly fee was only $65 which was $15 less than the Best Western in town which did not look very nice. Our cottage, on the other hand, had a private driveway, a sun room, full kitchen, and was kept immaculately clean. This was easily the best deal in town and I highly recommend them if you plan a visit to Mountain View.

Now to the trail.



We got started around 10:30 am, but because of the slope of the hillside, the light was like early morning. It was a brisk 50 degrees or so outside and there was still dew on the leaves as we began. I'm not generally the kind of guy who throws around adjectives like "magical," but I have to say that this trail was exactly that: magical. The first portion of the trail is filled with quartz peppered stones that shimmer as you pass which is just surreal. Further up, the trail turns to flint under foot and displays fantastic water shaped pale white outcroppings.

It also seems as though we picked the right time of the year to visit as the leaves were changing brilliantly and were out in full force. The trail winds through evergreen and deciduous forested portions which provide a varied path of soft pine needles and colorful fallen leaves.

The trail winds about along a ridge line which means that the elevation does not change very much, making for a nice gentle hike. At about mile 3.5, the rail opens up to a vista of the White River cutting through the community of Syllamore.

I'll stop typing at this point and let the pictures speak for themselves.

New Toy: Mio C230 GPS

Here's my new toy. I just purchased the Mio C230 GPS for about 100 bucks from CompUSA. If you, my limited but privileged readership, have not yet figured out, I'm a GPS whore. I have been using a combination of an iBlue 747 GPS data logger linked via bluetooth with an HTC TyTn running BeeLineGPS as a display. I hope all that techno name dropping excited someone other than myself.

My iBlue/HTC setup has actually worked VERY well for a lot of applications such as geocaching, hiking via checkpoints, and pairing data with jpegs for geotagging photos. It is, however, lacking in the application that most "normal" people use GPS for: road navigation.

I've only taken this bad boy out for a cursery road test, but it looks pretty impressive to me so far. It has a 3D map display function that updates smoothly, voice prompts, and an SD expansion slot. It also runs on Windows CE which means I can hack it to my heart's content. I just can't leave well enough alone.

Hiking Lake Fort Smith

Angel and I decided to go for a hike today at the recently reopened Lake Fort Smith State Park. The weather was beautiful but the park was a little bit of a disappointment. I recall riding mountain bikes here when I was younger, but unfortunately, most of the trails I used to run with my dad were flooded by the expansion of the lake. The only trail that remains is the beginning leg of the Ozark Highland Trail. To be honest, my legs were aching before we even began from jogging on the new treadmill, but we set out anyway.

We only made it about 1.5 miles up the trail and back. It's a fairly rugged trail in some parts, but isn't too strenuous. I got some really cool pictures along the way. Angel kept pointing out mushrooms as we went so we amassed a great little series. I also got to play with a new technique that I've only tested before called Geotagging. Basically, you turn on a gps that has the capability to timestamp while you walk around and snap pictures with a digital camera that has the capability to timestamp jpegs. Put the two data logs together with a nifty little application and presto-bango, the GPS data is embedded in the picture file enabling programs like Google Earth, Picasa, and several other programs and services to plot the pictures on a map. Check out my example.

Here are a few of the mushroom series pictures. To see more, click here...