Guided tour

Party of 48 million, your table is ready

Just in time for the new director of Arkansas’ state tourism department: Do you, ma’am, have RV parking for 48 million?

Good Gravy. Did you see Monday’s front page? Arkansas had 48 million visitors in 2022, nearly a 20 percent increase over 2021. And 2021 was still a covid year, so you’d think that more people would’ve been inclined to camp out or hike on vacation.

The state has 3 million residents, give or take a few Hawg callers. So 48 million people coming through, paying sales tax on gasoline, staying in hotels, eating out, is a big deal. Maybe we should reconsider the old nickname “Land of Opportunity.”

If a body digs down into the numbers, and reporter Aaron Gettinger did, you’d notice that three rural counties in Arkansas had the biggest percentage gains in “visitor spending,” which is the best kind. Sevier County in the Southwest; Perry

County, 60 miles northwest of Little

Rock; and Woodruff

County far enough east to sit right in the Mississippi Flyway, have increased their tourism dramatically. If you look at percentage.

This from the story, though: “The very small sizes of the counties’ tourism economies contextualize those increases . . . . ”

Yeah, but they’d be going in the right direction.

A stream of cash is beginning to flow into Sevier County. It has a brand marketing it as a place “where creeks and culture unite” owing to the Cossatot River, Lake De Queen, numerous streams and a dozen or so Mexican restaurants built over 20 years of migration (58 percent of De Queen is Hispanic) to the area for work.

However, the goat-to place is Perry County—when it comes to goats.

Donnie Crain heads the Morrilton Area Chamber of Commerce and didn’t hesitate to note the Arkansas Goat Festival attracts around 8,000 visitors per year. He also mentions Lake Sylvia State Park’s taking possession of itself from the U.S. Forest Service.

He said, “Now it’s a state park recreation area, and we’ve seen a lot of improvements and increased visitation” and that its central location makes it easy to reach from Louisiana, Oklahoma, Mississippi, Memphis and eastern Arkansas.

He added that many are also “cultivating side hustles” renting out homes to supplement incomes.

In Woodruff County, duck hunters are increasingly landing in the area from within and outside Arkansas. During duck season, McCrory Chamber of Commerce President Betty Kaye Thompson sees more out-of-state cars in parking lots and strangers in grocery stores.

And the Cache River is rapidly becoming a destination for kayakers and canoeists. County Judge Michael John Gray compares the area to the Amazon with great fishing on the White River and stands of tupelo trees through which to navigate.

Not just “one-off” tourism anymore, he says, they’re buying duck-hunting land, coming back every year and staying in $500,000 homes when they do.

However, he wishes there were more public/private partnership opportunities to get things really going. So far, the lion’s share of the investment has come from the private sector, which is primarily a function of a sparsely populated county with few resources to add to the mix.

If nothing else, all this gives the new state director of tourism a lot to think about. Apparently, there’s a joke bumper sticker popular in Vermont: “Welcome to Vermont. Now go home.”

Send those folks down to these latitudes, Vermont. Arkansas can make room for a few more RVs.