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Little Rock, AR → Murfreesboro, AR → Little Rock, AR 210.0 mi (338.0 km) |
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Spring is heating up, everyone!
That means it’s time for Firstbud, and after spotting the flowering trees in Little Rock yesterday, I have a hunch that the conditions at my next national park will be just right to celebrate this beaver holiday in style! It’s one of the smallest national parks in the USA, and definitely one of the most unusual ones. It’s Hot Springs National Park, and it was going to be a fine place to kick off this chilly morning!
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All up and down Central Avenue in downtown Hot Springs, Arkansas were hints at what lay under the street. There were steamy fountains covered in calcium deposits, just like I remembered from Hot Springs State Park in Thermopolis, Wyoming! Just like in Thermopolis, this water, rich in silica, calcium, magnesium, sodium, and potassium, has long been sought out for health and wellness, whether by bathing in it hot or drinking it cold, straight out of the ground!
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Unlike in Thermopolis, though, this water isn’t heated by volcanic vents but pure rock pressure! Hot Springs National Park is bordered by the Zig-Zag Mountains, so called because of the way tectonic movements have bent and cracked the rocks that make them up, called novaculite! These cracks allowed rainwater to seep way down into the crust, as deep as 8,000 feet down, where the pressure is intense! It takes 4,000 years for it to reach that lowest depth, and then as it heats up, it only takes 400 years to rise back to the surface, well heated to 143˚F but free of that characteristic sulfur smell you might whiff in places like Yellowstone!
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These hot waters have been enjoyed for millennia by tiny critters called thermophiles, which range from single-celled nanobacteria to tiny aquatic crustaceans called ostracods! They thrive in high heat with no light for their entire lives! Native folks have been quarrying novaculite from the surrounding hills for thousands of years to make spear tips and arrowheads, as well as sharpening stones. But the park came to be in its current state, with only a few small natural “display” springs left, starting with the arrival of the Dunbar-Hunter Expedition in 1804!
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And so the heart of Hot Springs National Park, founded March 4, 1921, is Bathhouse Row, a series of eight historic bathhouses that now cover up Hot Springs Creek, a process that took forty-three years, from 1880 until 1923! Six of these bathhouses have been repurposed by the National Park Service, but two are still open for bathing in the 4,400-year old mineral water! I figured I’d stroll the length of Bathhouse Row and see what I could book!
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I started off at the Lamar Bathhouse, both one of the oldest and the youngest in the park! Named for former Secretary of the Interior, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus Lamar, the original bathhouse was completed in 1888 by Harry Schwebke, then redone in marble, circa April 16, 1923! This one boasted a co-ed gym and had the largest lobby of all the bathhouses, which made it ideal to find new life as the national park’s official shop!
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While browsing the shop’s sundries, I couldn’t help but notice a poster on the window next to the door. There’s another eclipse coming up in just a few weeks? Oh my goodness! It was so cool to watch my last total solar eclipse in 2019. I’m a little too early to watch it here, so I better get to researching where else I can experience this phenomenon on April 8th!
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But first, I was only two bathhouses onto the row when I spotted a sign that said “Now Accepting Walk-Ins!” It was just chilly enough that a dip in the soothing heat sounded perfect, and I turned right into the Buckstaff Bathhouse, which has been operating continuously since February 1, 1912! Built by Frank W. Gibb and Company, it has three floors able to house 1,000 bathers a day, and I was determined to get in for a soak before a thousand-person line formed!
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Because photos weren’t allowed inside for privacy reasons, I’ll illustrate my experience with photos from the visitor center at the Fordyce Bathhouse! I wandered into a big room and sat in a plastic chair until the attendant, Mr. Ricky Lawson, ushered me into an open bath in a private stall! This was very different from the open pool I was expecting, but by the time I started to float in the warm, bubbling tub, my twenty-minute soak turned into eons of relaxation!
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After my soak, Mr. Lawson led me over to a sitz bath (left), which poured warm water down my back for 10 minutes, then five minutes in a vapor cabinet (right)! Vapor cabinets fill up with moist air as hot as 140˚F to induce sweating. The idea was that it would cause the patient to sweat out toxins and maybe be cured of rheumatism, obesity, and even syphilis! Since I didn’t go into the bathhouse with any of those ailments, I couldn’t say for sure if they really worked! But after being thoroughly steamed, I laid out on a table for another lovely 20-minute rest. For this mad rush beaver, that was a wild experience on its own!
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And I’m glad the experience ended with the rest and relaxation, because I don’t think I would have survived a needle shower like they used to have in these bathhouses! These were set up to work like acupuncture, shooting needle-thin jets of water at someone from all angles, supposedly to stimulate the liver, ribcage, or spine! Something like this, I think, would have gone right through me!
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Oh yeah, that brings me back to the fact that I was illustrating my Buckstaff Bathhouse experience from inside the Fordyce Bathhouse. Well, this one was also home to the magnificent Men’s Bathhall, which featured a domed skylight made up of 8,000 pieces of glass! Here, they took full advantage of the water likened to De Soto’s Fountain of Youth, and sure enough, at the center of the room was a statue of Hernán de Soto himself, receiving water from (presumably) a Timucua girl!
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The Fordyce Bathhouse gets its name from Samuel Fordyce, who came here in 1873 when the springs were covered by rickety wood shacks and invested in the city, with hotels, an opera house, bathhouses, and more! His son, John, supervised the construction of this bathhouse, designed by Little Rock architects, George Richard Mann and Eugene John Stern! Since it opened on March 1, 1915, it’s been the biggest bathhouse on the block!
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Backtracking a little, I beheld the Ozark Bathhouse, also designed by the firm of Mann & Stern, as a middle-class bathhouse in 1922! It was the fourth draft of their building, completed in the Spanish Revival style, and since 1977, it’s been the park’s cultural center and headquarters for its Helpers, the Friends of Hot Springs National Park!
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Next to it stood a third Mann & Stern creation, the Quapaw Bathhouse, also opened in 1922 and sporting a magnificent dome! This is the longest house on the row, having been built over two other bathhouses, and today it’s the second bathhouse still in operation. I sure lucked out visiting the Buckstaff earlier, because the line inside the Quapaw was starting to reach out the door!
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As the sun peaked over the rooftops of Bathhouse Row, I beheld the Maurice, designed by George Gleim, Jr. and opened on January 1, 1912. It was the only bathhouse on the row with a swimming pool! Next to it, the Hale Bathhouse is a hotel today, but it’s also the oldest structure still visible on Bathhouse Row, dating back to 1892 when it was constructed by George and Fremont Orff! Underneath the Hale (named for early bathhouse owner, John Hale) is an open spring and thermal cave, which are still open but not in use!
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And lastly, I completed my survey of Hot Springs National Park’s Bathhouse Row at Superior Baths. Like the Quapaw, this one was built over two previous bathhouses, but unlike the Quapaw, it’s the smallest of all! A Harry Schwebke bookend, it opened on February 1, 1916 and tailored to the low-budget visitors, offering only hydrotherapy, massage, and… mercury therapy?
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The Superior has the most unique modern title of all the bathhouses: It’s the only brewery inside a national park and the only brewery in the world that uses thermal spring water to make their beer! Naturally, I just had to try a glass, and well, it was real rich and smooth! It paired really nicely with French fries. It also left me flying high for Firstbud!
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And as luck would have it, Superior Bathhouse was right next to Arlington Lawn and another open spring cascading down the hillside! Sure enough, there was a lovely redbud tree in bloom over the pool, and so, even though it was a super popular spot for photos, I was able to spring in by the spring long enough to celebrate spring! Hooray for Firstbud, and hooray for thermal beer!
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Hot Springs National Park is super unusual in lots of ways, not least of which is the fact that it’s shaped like a donut! The historic heart of Hot Springs, Arkansas is completely surrounded by national park land, which includes 26 miles of hiking trails! Once I’d had a good Firstbud frolic, I wanted to take a little time to explore at least one of these trails. I left Bathhouse Row behind and headed up to North Mountain to look for a good hiking spot!
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And I found it! The Gulpha Gorge Trail promised some fantastic views, and it was going to be a pretty short jaunt. Plus, there was going to be a landmark point, Goat Rock, to explore!
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The trail was very gentle and well traveled, as it leads down to one of the park’s main campgrounds! By this time, it had warmed up considerably, and because of my sumptuous soak and a little because of the beer, I was flying like the wind down this trail!
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Goat Rock gets its name from a goat that used to live in the novaculite outcrop I was about to visit. The stairs leading up to it, and the bench on top of them all date back to 1924 when the trail system was first being developed here in the park!
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And I sure felt like a mountain goat perched on top of this viewpoint! It wasn’t a huge effort to get here, but the views were downright spacious! It was wild to think that, here in these heights, I was overlooking a city, not an untouched wilderness, and for an urban park like this one, I thought it was a cool illusion! Oh, but I couldn’t dally here too long! I had a stretch-adventure left on my agenda, and I just found out it closes an hour earlier than I anticipated! Yikes!
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Of course, I’m talking about Crater of Diamonds State Park, which I learned about from the side of a U-haul truck! This is one of few places in the world where the public can step out into an old volcanic crater and dig for actual diamonds! It’s also super unique as a state park because it not only encourages digging on park land, but it also lets folks keep what they find! I, however, got here at 3:15. The park was scheduled to close at 4:00. The most I could really hope to get was dirty!
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State Geologist, John Branner, suspected there were diamonds here as early as 1889, because the soil was full of peridot, just like the diamond beds of South Africa! His theory was proven true in 1906 by John Wesley Huddleston, who found two fine-grade, blue-white diamonds on his farm! Mr. Huddleston sold his property to the Arkansas Diamond Company for commercial mining, but adjacent properties began opening up their land to tourists, causing a mini diamond rush! A 1909 commercial mine shaft is still on park land, but oh, I couldn’t spend too much time on the history! Tick tock! Tick tock!
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All over the grounds were shovel-shaped displays of the past diamonds found here, like the Star of Arkansas, discovered by hobbyist, Winifred Parker, on March 5, 1956! Graded E-colorless, it was cut into a marquise shape and sold at auction for $145,000! But that’s far from the only spectacular diamond found here. The Strawn-Wagner Diamond, found in 1990, for instance is the most perfect (cut, color, flawlessness) diamond ever certified in the USA, and the 40.23-carat Uncle Sam Diamond, biggest ever found in the US, was dug up here in 1924!
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Since this became a state park in 1972, visitors have found over 35,000 diamonds in this regularly plowed, 35-acre field! Even though folks were already filing out ahead of closure, hauling wagons full of buckets full of dirt, I wondered if rapid digging for half an hour might unearth any treasures!
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Boy oh boy, did I ever dig! I dug from the tops of the hills to the depths of the muck-filled trenches! I dug around Beatty’s Hill, looking for the characteristic shiny stones that are so slippery that mud can’t cling to them! By the time the loudspeakers announced that it was time for the park to close, I was right outta luck! I hadn’t even found an agate or a piece of barite!
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I took a moment to rest before returning my hastily rented equipment. Sure, it was never very likely that I was going to find the gem that would fund my next adventure, but if you never stick the shovel in the muck, your chances are zero! At least I could enjoy these beautiful flowers for a bit, all in all a really lovely Firstbud! With the park closing as early as it did, I really felt that I could squeeze in a little more Firstbud frolic. I knew just the spot!
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Returning to Little Rock, I made my way north of the Arkansas River to a spot that was impossibly scenic and astonishingly colorful! It fit all the criteria for Firstbud, and all the wedding photographers stationed here surely agreed! The Old Mill in T.R. Pugh Memorial Park was the perfect place to wrap up a day of hidden gems!
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The funny thing about this mill, even though it’s on the National Register of Historic Places, even though it’s prominently featured in Gone with the Wind, is that it was never a mill at all! It was commissioned in 1931 by developer, Justin Matthews, to look like an abandoned 19th Century grist mill, technically out of service but with just enough leak in the water gate to keep the wheel turning!
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Mr. Matthews also brought on Dionicio Rodríguez to build bridges and sculptures in the park! Mr. Rodríguez had made a name for himself in Texas after perfecting a secret concrete sculpting technique that perfectly resembled wood! He was so good at it that it’s even possible to identify the species of the trees he he sculpts without even looking for leaves! He was also so secretive about his technique that he died without sharing it with anyone!
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Ooh, but these explosive azaleas were just perfect, and the path led me right down to the water, where some Muscovy ducks beckoned me to join them. I may have had a hot start to the day, but now, after all my running around, a cool couple of laps sound like the best possible way to end an Arkansas Firstbud!
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Mission accomplished! Tomorrow, I’ll be heading back to Memphis to catch my flight home. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to see a few more sites along the way, but soon enough, I’m going to be back on a plane with plans to see a third eclipse!
Happy Firstbud!
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Total Ground Covered: 577.0 mi (928.6 km) |
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