Me and my buddies took a late June trip up to the Buffalo River.
Our three day route was to take us between Mt. Hersey and Gilbert:
(Right-click and view image in a new tab or window for full size.)
This map above is just a screenshot of the awesome interactive online map available from [buffaloriver.com]. The real deal allows for zoom and panning and other cool stuff.
For this trip, I had old friends: Marc from Virginia, Tom from Atlanta, and Jake from San Fransico, who all made the trip into Little Rock. Marc flew in to the Little Rock Airport Thursday morning. He flew in with an approximately 200 pound suitcase, whose unforgiving mass must have gummed up the baggage system as there were absolutely no bags forthcoming from this small plane. I was starting to get nervous when Marc told me about his bag. I was waiting around for somebody from the airport to come out and point at Marc and blame him for breaking the baggage handling system with his overweight suitcase, at which point the other passengers waiting for their $20-per-checked-bag belongings would have descended on him like a pack of angry villagers in an old Frankenstein movie. It took about 45 minutes for the airline to unconstipate the baggage carousel, which is extraordinarily long for our small airport. Bags finally in hand, we grabbed some lunch and beer downtown at the always something good [Flying Saucer] as we waited on Tom and Jake to drive in from Atlanta.
Once everybody arrived, we took stock of the gear on hand, pared down as necessary, and geared up.
Ready to roll, we hit the road. About 20 minutes into the drive north, we remembered that we had not made a stop at the liquor store for river-friendly plastic bottled bourbon. It seemed to take us almost 20 minutes to get back a wet county for the last key part of the provisioning. The rest of the drive up to Gilbert was uneventful. We stopped at a Mexican place on the way in Marshall, AR. Good food, somewhat tempered by being located, like Gilbert itself, in the dry county of Searcy.
The plan upon arriving in Gilbert was to pitch a tent at a campsite just outside the little town so we could be at the outfitters, [Buffalo Camping and Canoeing at the Gilbert store], first thing in the morning, allowing us to be on the river as soon as possible. Just out of town turned out to be really about 300 yards to the Gilbert store.
The campsite was great- peaceful, in fact. We were the only folks there:
The campsite was great, I’m guessing the only reason we were the only folks there was that it was late June in a mini-heat wave and it was still about 95° at 9pm that night. We made the best of it, tossed a frisbee around until it was literally too dark to see, and finally tried to fall asleep in the almost oppressive heat.
There was a shower house- having a nice hot shower to get clean after the previous night’s sweatfest was great. The campsite is nestled among some trees, so it was relatively cool the next morning, this turned out to be the last time I would not be actively sweating the rest of the trip:
We arrived at the Gilbert store promptly upon opening and had no problem getting our canoes or gear loaded up. We had quite a shuttle ride ahead of us, about 12 miles as the crow flies and maybe 20 miles by van, the last few miles bumping down a gravel road. I am trying to pre-load some water into the system before the shuttle departs:
Starting at Mt. Hersey would give us right at 30 miles of river to float down in two and a half days to pull out at Gilbert. It was already warming up, so we were ready to pack the canoes and hit the water:
We were finally on the water, and the river looked great…
continue on to [part 2]…