Ozarks St Francis National forest

When was the last time you heard real silence? I mean the real kind, the deafening, space between your ears kind? The check to see if you have tinnitus kind? The kind of silence that makes you realize how loud cars, AC, your cat, the fridge and everything else in your life is? If you are looking for a little silence in your life look no further than a national forest.

School house falls

On a momentary break from the rain we drove the extra 90 minutes from where we were staying to the eastern most tip of Ozarks St. Francis National forest. A sprawling forest located in northwest Arkansas this land is peaceful, full of country roads, and abundant hiking trails. Our goal was to see waterfalls but what we ended up getting was some solitude.

I frequent hiking trails around Austin, I drive out of the city to see nature, and I see nature everywhere around me. However, it is a rare occasion that I don’t see or hear a single person on my adventures. There is plenty of evidence that people are around in the national forest, you can even own land nearby but they just weren’t there on our visit.

Trailhead

In a rather bizarre coincidence the trail was called “Austin trail” which may have been one reason why we chose to go there. Unfortunately, the maps available on the Arkansas website were rather limited and without a subscription to alltrails I decided to wing it with google maps and some poking around. There was a small parking area and the trail itself was very easy to walk on.

Schoolhouse falls is located downhill in a gulley and the water is frigid. This gives the area around the creek a eerie cold feeling that would be pretty spooky in the early morning or evening. The most interesting thing about the pond was that it was completely full of crayfish. I am always reminded that our most favorite fantasy novels are written with the influence of our natural world. This space felt like a sacred site where many magical creatures came to practice or rest.

Sam Houston National Forest

So you are thinking you want to get away from the city during a pandemy. First thing you wanna do is find some sort of activity where you have the least amount of contact with people. That would probably be hiking, boating, solo painting in a dark room with the door closed? Well hiking it is then.

Sam Houston has been on my list of places to visit forever so we packed up the volvo and headed east to the pine curtain.

Sam Houston is big, real big. Big enough that two people could go to the same trailhead and possibly never run into each other. National forests are also a bit of wild west still in the civilized world. You can hunt most of the year with a gun and the only stipulations are that you need to A. Buy a license and B. don’t shoot while standing on a trail and point away from the trail so that your bullet never crosses a marked hiking trail. I feel like the federal government is putting a lot of trust in people. You can also camp anywhere, not only designated camping sites. Even with all of that in mind only 1000 people every year are injured in hunting accidents, 75 of those result in fatalities. That seems like a lot, but get this 85% are self inflicted accidents. That means only 11 people die each year in hunting accidents where someone else was at fault. This makes hunting or hiking in a active hunting area safer than riding your bike. Now that I have convinced you to enter the forest with people carrying guns, lets checkout some stuff you might see.

Houston is swampy so most of the trails cross a water feature of some kind. Wear boots.

The most notable thing about a national forest is the silence. Its really quiet. There is a major road that cuts through Sam Houston that connects two counties. Even with this highway the sound of the road disappears within the first half mile of the hike. Once you get going you start to notice that YOU are the loudest animal in the forest. You really have to keep quiet to hear the sounds of the animals, because they hear you. We could also hear other hikers several minutes before we ran into them on the trail.

Coral tooth fungus Hericium Coralloides

Winter means that there isn’t a lot of wildlife but there is a lot of evidence of wildlife.

The trail had a hikers notebook in a mailbox that people write in as they hike by. I sat down for a while and read a few of the notes in there. Some were sweet, some mentioned things they saw, and some were quite sad. One hiker was in the midst of a serious medical battle and wasn’t sure if they would make it. It seems that many people return to the forest to seek some peace and guidance.