The Narrows

I have to apologize for the lack of any recent posts to any readers of this blog (if there are any out there still). This summer in Arkansas has been brutally hot, and the heat has stolen any willpower to go out and take pictures. But last week it was like someone flipped a switch, and it went from temps in the 100s to temps in the 80s. And with the cooler weather, it made me want to leave the precious embrace of air conditioning and go outside to take some pictures. So I reached out to my good friend Zack, and we decided to pay a visit to a spot along the Buffalo River called The Narrows.

It's not easy to reach The Narrows. You can either get in a canoe and float there, or drive down a bunch of dirt roads. The dirt road option can be tricky, however, since the road crosses Richland Creek a few times. And when the water is up, you can't safely cross. But since we have barely had any rain this summer, we definitely didn't have to worry about this. We followed the road as it ran by the creek, and made a stop at this old abandoned house.



The house was built in the "dogtrot" style, with an open breezeway between the rooms in the house. A seemingly new decoration to the house was a selection of bones and a skull, hung Blair Witch-style on a railing. I'm assuming those were placed there to scare people away (or maybe they were fans of Georgia O'Keefe paintings?).



The wooden beams on the old porch didn't seem like they were very stable so we didn't really explore too much around the old house:









We then headed further down the road, and passed by a cool old barn:



And then another one:







And then we headed further down the road, as it headed deeper into Richland Valley:



And we went by another barn, which seemed to be leaning off to one side. This one probably won't be around for too much longer.







And then we finally made it to the Narrows (or The Nars), which is a really cool spot along the Buffalo River. It is the remnant of an old mountain, that once sat in between the Buffalo River and Richland Creek. The two rivers carved and eroded away much of the mountain, so all that remains is a narrow sliver of rock that stands about 100 feet tall, but is only a few feet wide in places. The Buffalo River still flows beneath the unique bluff, but Richland Creek has since migrated to the other side of the valley.





And to just give a sense of scale of how narrow the bluff is here. On one side is the Buffalo River, and the other side is the road far below.



The last time I was here was in 2012. We had camped in a field nearby, and we were visited in the middle of the night by a herd of elk.





We carefully made it down the bluff without falling, and I got one last shot before we left. This bluff that we were just standing on stands tall on the left side of the image. The road runs to the Buffalo River just beyond.