Recently, I went to visit a very special place, Crowley's Ridge State Park, in Wolcott, in North-Eastern Arkansas, about an hour-and-a-half's drive from my home.
Crowley's Ridge is a most unusual phenomenon, and if you ever find yourself traveling across the flat terrain in the Delta region of Arkansas, amidst the rice, wheat and soybean fields, you will suddenly think you're seeing a mirage. But it's not a mirage at all; it is the lovely ridge known as, Crowley's Ridge, rising up ahead, as if it were Shangri-La. And in a sense, it really is one.
A strip of land between two parallel running rivers, the Ohio and Mississippi, Crowley's Ridge was formed by Nature some 50 million years ago. The soil on the Ridge is called "loess" and is a windblown deposit, created by glacial rock grinding during the Great Ice Age, and carried downstream by glacial melt-water. Because this type of loess soil is extremely vulnerable to erosion, steep-sided ravines and bluffs can form, as they have formed on the ridge. Unlike the Ozarks, which have a foundation of solid bedrock, Crowley's Ridge's foundation is made up of clay, sands, and gravel, some areas forming a fine sandy soil sixty feet deep! Some call Crowley's Ridge the largest sand bar between two rivers that nature ever created.
Crowley's Ridge, having escaped the powerful forces of water, exists by sheer chance, and is a unique area providing a variety of unique habitats, like trees and other plants that are more common east of the Mississippi River, as well as trees of the Ozarks. A crescent shaped landform, Crowley's Ridge begins just below Cape Girardeau, Missouri and extends for 200 miles, to Helena, Arkansas, being 12 miles wide across its widest point, and only ten feet wide at its narrowest!
I had traveled the Crowley's Ridge Parkway several times, but had never stopped to explore one of its numerous State Parks. That changed recently, when I spent a day at Crowley's Ridge State Park, with camera in hand, of course, and in the company of another nature lover, my son, Greg. I was so enchanted with the area that Greg had to practically drag me away from there, with the promise that we would return in the fall. And as luck would have it, we practically had the entire park to ourselves, heaven to a reclusive person like me.
Crowley's Ridge was named for prominent pioneer settler Benjamin Crowley, who homesteaded the area in 1825, and was buried on the ridge in 1842, in a little cemetery looking down to Ponder Lake. Of course, there was no lake there in his time, that was built in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps, along with Walcott Lake, and both lakes are fed by the numerous springs in the area, as is the lovely waterfall.
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