Buffalo National River: Indian Rockhouse Trail and Rush Historic District

Old store building in Rush Historic District

Buffalo National River has always been one of my favorite parks. I loved going there back when the Park Service paid me to count buildings and bushes (also known as updating two National Park Service databases, the List of Classified Structures and the Cultural Landscapes Inventory) and I like going there as a tourist. I have toyed with the idea of volunteering to be campground hosts at Buffalo but unfortunately the usual camping season in Arkansas includes months like July and August. No one, probably not even people born in the state, really wants to be in Arkansas in August. 

Also, to be totally honest, the roads into some of the campgrounds at Buffalo scare the crap out of me. I never minded the drive down to the Steel Creek campground in a car but would not be real thrilled to tow a decent sized trailer down to the river. Or, for that matter, to have the fun of dragging that trailer back up a steep hill that seems to last forever. Ditto the Buffalo Point campground. Nicely laid out a gazillion years ago by the Civilian Conservation Corps and located right on the river with a lovely little beach but featuring a long winding drive down on what feels like a steeper than average grade. (Steeper than average grade applies to a lot of roads in the Ozarks, both in Arkansas and Missouri, not just campground access roads.) 

This past March I persuaded the S.O. and the Younger Daughter that it would be nice to spend the first weekend of Spring at Buffalo Point. Buffalo Point is on the eastern end of Buffalo National River and was a state park prior to the U.S. government creating Buffalo National River. Once the National River was in place, Buffalo Point became an NPS site. Today Buffalo Point includes the campground (a fairly big one), the Indian Rockhouse Trail (rated as moderate to hard), rental cabins, a contact station (small visitor center), and a restaurant that's open seasonally. The Rush Historic District is farther down the river and requires driving several miles around on county roads to get to it. We rented a cabin at Buffalo Point. It was fairly spartan, but nice. I'd stay there again. 

Back wall of the Indian Rockhouse with stalactites

Prior to going to Buffalo Point, I had talked the Indian Rockhouse Trail up to the Y.D. It's called the Indian Rockhouse Trail because its key feature is a bluff shelter, a not quite a cave but close to it. When the state park was established in the 1930s archeologists excavated the Rockhouse. They found tons of evidence that the shelter had been used for possibly thousands of years. Bluff shelters like it are pretty common in Arkansas, although usually the typical shelter isn't quite as spacious as the Indian Rockhouse. It's big enough with a high ceiling and going back quite a few feet that it has actual cave formations (stalactites and stalagmites; one of the latter looks remarkably phallic but is a natural rock and not an example of pre-contact porn. It wasn't just my dirty mind that picked up on the similarity. I overheard several other hikers comment on the fact that the stalagmite several kids were climbing on looked like a dick). It's a popular site within the park. The parking lot at the trailhead usually fills up fast on nice days regardless of time of year. At one time, back in the state park days, there was a road. Park visitors could drive to within maybe a quarter mile of the Rockhouse. There's still one small section of paved road left, but it might be hard to figure out just exactly how that old road ran. But, as usual, I digress. 

Back in my Park Service days I hiked that trail several times. I did not view it as much of a challenge. It's an interesting 3 mile loop that includes a variety of terrain and passes several historic and natural features, like a small waterfall and an abandoned exploratory mine excavation -- it's a site where prospectors hoped to find zinc but didn't find enough to make it worth it to continue digging. The trail never raised any issues when I'd zipped over it before. It does have a fair amount of climbing involved to get back up to the trailhead, but it's not particularly hard trail. As the photo below shows, the trail can be easy walking. Or so I thought. 

Section of the trail that parallels Panther Creek

Of course, those happy hiking experiences were about 20 years ago and it was all pre-vertigo. My sense of balance has been kind of hit or miss for the past couple years (one of these days I really need to see an otolaryngologist to determine if it's an inner ear problem or something else) but I still figured no problem, especially when I'd be hiking with the kid. If I had issues she could always grab me by the ankles and drag me back to the parking lot. Turned out the uneven steps on the steeper parts of the trail were a definite issue. Not only is my sense of balance screwed up, so is my depth perception. The first two miles on the trail were fine, and then the vertigo kicked in. Stepping up or stepping down was interesting. My mind would not process just how high or low a step was, things would start spinning, and then the nausea hit. I lost count of how many times I puked so we wound up moving rather slowly on the last half mile. In short, my hiking days may be over, at least on any trail longer than a short shuffle from the parking lot.

It was a lovely day, lots of other hikers out and about. It did not help my mood a whole lot while sitting on a convenient rock hoping the sick feeling would go away to be treated to the sight of preschoolers in Crocs or sandals skipping merrily by. Like I said, it's normally not a difficult trail. You're not going to be able to push a stroller with an infant but if a child can walk and has the stamina for a 3 mile hike (and show me a preschooler who does not have energy to burn and you'll be showing me a rare child indeed) it's a no-real-issues trail. It was gorgeous Saturday so there were a lot of families at the park.

Ruins of a mining structure at Rush

Fortunately, doing a short walk at Rush the following day went smoothly. No dizziness, no weirdness, and no problems going down a short flight of stairs. It was little depressing to see how much has been lost at Rush. Several structures that were still standing in 2006 have since been destroyed by arsonists and of course age and weather have not been kind to the surviving structures. After we got back to Hot Springs I made the mistake of reading the National Register of Historic Places nomination for Rush as a historic district. It is a great district nomination. Well written, nice succinct explanation for significance, and an extensive list of contributing structures. The nomination was submitted in 1986. 

When Suzie Rogers (the park historian) researched and wrote the nomination there were multiple buildings still standing. In fact, Susie lived in one of them. That building stopped being usable as park staff housing when the Buffalo hit record flood levels -- I have a vague memory of Suzie describing being evacuated by boat, which struck me at the time as moderately amazing because the house was not close to the river. Then again, Rush is one of those places where it would be easy to get trapped by a flood. You have to cross Rush Creek to get out and if it was flooded, too, you'd be stuck. When I was at Rush 20 years ago the building Suzie had lived in was still a real building, complete with four walls and a roof, although no longer usable due to damage sustained in the flood a few years earlier. Today it's basically the foundation being swallowed by brush. Depressing. 

One of the few surviving buildings at Rush. NPS desperately needs to do vegetation management, but that's not likely to happen when the park is short staffed. 

As to why a ghost town like Rush merited being a historic district the answer is, of course, its long association with zinc mining. Zinc is apparently a fairly easy mineral to mine. There were literally dozens of zinc mines in the general area of Rush. Some of the mine workings were just barely above the size of a small borrow pit and some literally hollowed out a mountain. I was told some of the mines were humongous. Miners used a room and pillar method in the mines and some of the "rooms" apparently were cathedral size, i.e., huge and echoing. For awhile Rush was popular with the suicidal spelunkers who like exploring and mapping abandoned mines but bat gates on the adits stopped most of that. Part of me regretted the adits being gated (I would have liked to see the large rooms) but the sane part of me was relieved. Anyone going into an abandoned mine is an idiot. Even in a super stable geologic stratum rock ceilings spall on a regular basis, and not just in mines. At Indian Rockhouse you can tell by looking at the ceiling that a fairly large chunk peeled off naturally at some point in the not-too-distant past. (Russell Cave National Monument in Alabama has a cave ceiling problem. The Park Service has tried to keep the ceiling from falling there but I'm not sure they've come up with a good solution yet.)

Silver smelter at Rush

One of the things that is rather amazing from a 21st century perspective is just how far the zinc ore got hauled. An area now designated as wilderness includes the route for a wagon road. Zinc ore got hauled by wagon downriver to Buffalo City, which is where the Buffalo and White Rivers meet. Having spent time driving back roads in the Ozarks it astounds me that a lowly metal like zinc would be worth hauling by mule or oxen-dragged wagons over some truly shit terrain. I know it's an important metal used in a lot of alloys and for various purposes, but it's not exactly in the same ballpark as metals like silver. 

The zinc miners did originally believe they were going to find silver. The first major mining company at Rush built a smelter to process the ore for silver. It was an understandable hope. The Google tells me zinc and silver are often found together. Not, however, at Rush. After the smelter was built, the mining company ran it one time. According to historic descriptions, the smelter yielded some lovely colorful smoke and absolutely no silver. The smelter was never fired again. It is one of the structures that has survived quite well at Rush, probably because it was built so solidly no one ever felt like dissembling it to re-use the stone elsewhere.