Leaves peak as hunting starts
Some park trails to see closures during deer season
Outdoors enthusiasts in Northwest Arkansas hoping to see the last of the fall foliage or catch a brisk jog through the trail system at Hobbs State Park Conservation Area should check their calendars before making plans for outings this month and next.
Seven popular hiking trails will be closed during the fiveday muzzleloader hunting season Saturday-Nov. 20, and again during the modern-gun hunting season Dec. 7-11. The closed routes include Shaddox Hollow Nature Trail, Pigeon Roost Trail, Sinking Stream Trail, Bashore Ridge Loop, Dutton Hollow Loop, Little Clifty Creek Loop and War Eagle Loop.
Steve Chyrchel, a park interpreter who has worked at the Hobbs park for more than 15 years, said the closure dates, which have changed throughout the years, were set at the behest of the hunting community.
“We’ve played with these dates over the years,” Chyrchel said. “They have been earlier, but it was too warm.”
Ray Wiggs, wildlife management supervisor for the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s northwest office, said starting dates for hunting various game and using different weapons across the state are staggered to reduce scheduling conflicts for hunters, as well as to alleviate the burden on commission staff members who operate “check-in stations,” where deer carcasses are weighed and antlers are measured.
Out of 52 state parks in Arkansas, Hobbs is the only one in which hunting is allowed. Chyrchel said that while much of the conservation area’s 12,056 acres are open to hunters, the 70 acres surrounding the park’s visitor center is not.
Hunting is allowed on many national parks within Arkansas,
including the Ouachita National Forest and the Buffalo National River. Caven Clark, a spokesman for the Buffalo National River, said the most recent change to hunting-season regulations in the park was the 2012 addition of archery deer-hunting at Buffalo Point near Panther Creek.
While the park is in the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission’s Zone 1, Chyrchel said, within the park, hunting takes place in Zone 320. Chyrchel said between 150 and 160 hunting permits had been sold for each of the two fiveday seasons on the Hobbs park.
After several years of drought and the resulting shorter periods of color transition in Northwest Arkansas’ fall foliage, the area saw a return to near-normal rainfall this year, according to the National Weather Service.
Nicole McGavock, a meteorologist with the service’s Tulsa station, said that between Sept. 1 and Nov. 7, the monitoring station at Drake Field in south Fayetteville recorded 9.81 inches of rain, just shy of the norm established by a 30-year measurement period from 19812010. McGavock said that since Jan. 1, area rainfall has totaled 40.88 inches, 1.16 inches below the established norm for annual rainfall.
Neal Mays, an agriculture agent with the Benton County Extension Office, said the relative brilliance of one fall foliage season over another is attributable to several environmental factors.
“The rainfall we have throughout the summer months does lead to more carbohydrates and chlorophyll production,” Mays said. “But the factors that really come into play are temperature and the amount of sunlight trees are exposed to. The best conditions for a brilliant fall foliage are a good growing season with ample rainfall, and a dry autumn with warm, sunny days, cool nights and no freezing.”
The November muzzleloader season at the Hobbs park comes during one of the more beautiful fall-foliage periods for Northwest Arkansas in recent years, Chyrchel said. Although, this year, fall color for several species of trees “peaked” in the last week of October.
“We’re starting to get pretty brown out here,” Chyrchel said. “There’s still some yellow on the pawpaws and the hickory, but a lot of the maple is gone. We’re looking like winter’s coming on us.”