Date of Visit: 19 October 2023
Mammoth Spring, AR
65º sunny, breezy perfection!
Park 10 of my project took me north to the Missouri border to visit Mammoth Spring. For this expedition, I spent a long weekend based in Mountain View (thank you, friend with a cabin there!) and covered 3 parks, with Mammoth being the first. On the heels of my fall at Mount Nebo (pun intended), I planned carefully to avoid any parks with strenuous hiking and was pleased that my knee held up for a weekend of walking and one easy hike (see next post). Named for the 10th largest natural spring in the world (yup, in the world), Mammoth Spring State Park features the spring, the lake it forms (Spring Lake), an historic Frisco train depot museum, a dam built in 1888, the hydro-electric plant built on the dam in 1925 and used until 1972, and the headwaters of the Spring River, one of Arkansas’ major trout & floating rivers. I want to give a huge shout-out to the staff at the visitor center, who on my arrival let me know that if I wanted to tour the train depot museum I needed to head over there right away because they all had to go to an eclipse meeting in 90 minutes. Mammoth Spring, like other parts of Arkansas, will be in the path of totality for the April 8th eclipse, and the park system is planning ahead to deal with an influx of visitors.
The main attraction of the park, the spring and the lake, features a self-guided walking tour around the lake’s circumference, with the train depot at station 8 (of 15). I fast-walked over to the museum so I could meet the park interpreter there, and I’m glad I did. I’ve learned that if I step up and let the park staff know what I’m doing there, and if I ask my questions, they are happy to talk with me, a willing and eager audience. In this case, Katie, a fantastic park interpreter gave me a private and extensive tour of the 1886 Frisco Depot Museum. The oldest of its kind in the state, the building preserves a time in history when railroads ruled the rural south and elsewhere, with 1900 – 1930 being the peak years for the Mammoth Spring station. While a major train line still runs alongside the museum, neither freight nor passenger stop here anymore. In the depot I saw exhibits of the segregated Black-Only and White-Only waiting rooms, separated by the working office of depot personnel featuring telegraph machines, log books for freight, and passenger tickets. I found out that at the beginning of the 20th century, peaches were the 3rd largest export out of Arkansas behind hogs and cattle. (Today, nearly all of the peach orchards of Arkansas are gone.) Of course, of all my pictures from the depot, I prize this one the most of the central agent’s typewriter with a tiny sack of flour from a mill that once stood nearby, powered by the river.
After the depot, I headed back to station 1 and wound my way counterclockwise around the 10-acre lake, with the spring being one of the last stops. The trail is only 6/10 of a mile but I took my time, stopping to take pictures and read the information in the tour brochure. When I visited, a large flock of Canada geese floated on the blue-green water with a smattering of ducks thrown in for good measure. I even got to see a clutch of goslings learning to dive for food alongside a mature goose. They may seem like nuisance birds to some, and I know they can be aggressive, but I love to watch them toodle around on the water.
What you see in the picture above is the pool formed at the site of the spring with one set of rapids (not the spring!) in the foreground where the pool spills over its banks into the lake. As the water of the spring erupts from a subterranean artery more than 70 feet deep, the pool covers the actual bubbling up you might expect to see at the source (this other photo illustrates). This pool then spills over in two channels around a small island, and without the dam, would have been a river from there. The building of the dam created Spring Lake. The color of the lake stunned me at every view as the sun shone all day. It turns out, the color comes from the high nitrogen content of the spring water. In fact, the water contains concentrations of nitrogen and oxygen that are too high for most fish to survive in the spring or in the lake. In addition, because the water filters down from the surface of Missouri before entering the underground channels that form the spring, it also picks up harmful human-created chemicals. When the water runs over rapids, and most importantly over the dam, the action creates aeration, bringing the levels down to the perfect environment for the fish and other aquatic life of the Spring River. Yes, that’s what made it into the poem!
One of the things that has surprised me about my project is that some poems suggest themselves quickly and some of them are being quite stubborn. Mammoth Spring’s poem worked itself onto the page in November and in December I revised it to a point where I’m ready to include it in my next set of submissions. I wish I could document the process of the quick drafts in order to understand why some of the other poems are so recalcitrant, but alas, there’s no rhyme or reason (hah! another pun).
Next Stop: Bull Shoals – White River
