Year after year, campers, hikers and other outdoorsmen have been attracted to the diverse scenery and landscape of Northwest Arkansas. People flock to the region looking for quiet getaways and scenic float trips.
“I was a student at the U of A many years ago, and I’ve been making trips back up for camping and canoeing ever since,” Little Rock native Steve Mangan said.
This is a tradition that current students are still just as excited about today.
“Camping somewhere around Fayetteville always seems to be my first priority in the summer,” student Katie Harris said. “I don’t get to do it as often as I’d like, but I’m always up for it.”
This year, though, camping has been lower on Harris’ list of priorities, and she’s not the only one that feels that way.
“It’s just so hot this summer,” Harris said. “I’d still love to go but it’s hard to find a time when it seems reasonable.”
Between the dates of Jan. 1 and July 31, Northwest Arkansas reached its highest ever average temperature.
Little Rock native Laura Neale and friends made a trip up at the end of July for a girl’s camping trip on a little river in Northwest Arkansas to bond and beat the heat at the same time.
“We wanted to camp near a swimming hole, knowing how hot it was going to be,” Neale said, “and the photos we saw of Kings River Falls looked so lush and beautiful.”
What they found, however, was not the image of a rushing waterfall they were expecting from the internet.
“We drove up there and hiked the half-mile in, only to find the river reduced to little more than a series of puddles in the hollows of the rock bed, tadpoles trapped and frog eggs slowly simmering in the sun,” Neale said. “The swimming hole was a basin of dry pebbles with about a foot of murky green water left just under the falls, which was barely a trickle.”
Fayetteville summer resident Ashley Mangan, one of Neale’s friends on the trip, said there was no way camping could have been possible without water.
“It was just too hot,” Mangan said. “The hike was pretty brutal on its own, but without having some water to jump into when we finally got there was just not okay.”
The group turned around and left the campgrounds, heading to Mangan’s apartment in Fayetteville for an air-conditioned weekend of fun.
“It was disappointing that the water was gone and we couldn’t camp, but I think all of us were at least a little relieved,” Mangan said. “It was just hard to imagine sitting by a fire or sleeping in sleeping bags in that kind of heat.”