A Snapshot and The Scoop: An Arkansas Homestead

While backpacking along the Buffalo National River in northern Arkansas last November with Torrey we made a stop on our second day at an old homesteading site tucked back away from the river and accessible by a side trail to the one we were trekking. Old homestead sites, cabins, ghost towns, and the like are always interesting to poke around in, if you're allowed to do so. This particular site even had a prefabricated concrete outhouse, which at the time was state-of-the-art technology. A dugout fruit cellar, always cool even in the humid Arkansas summers, a smokehouse where they preserved meats, a chicken coop, and a few other smaller buildings littered the area, and it wasn't difficult to imagine a family living there, scraping together a living from the land and their own bare hands. A touch of the past, indeed.