This week’s travel dream: Autumn in Arkansas

If the fall colors pass you by up North, you’ll have plenty of time to catch up with them in the “autumn-painted” woodlands of Arkansas, said Josh Noel in the Chicago Tribune. The sun shines warm a little longer down South, and it’s only in November, when the rest of the country is bundling up, that the weather in central Arkansas turns from hot and humid to “dry and short-sleeve friendly.” The state’s miles and miles of trees slowly follow the weather’s lead, transforming into a “vast palette of earthy hues—burnt orange, yellow, rust, brown, and red alongside the conifers’ evergreen.”

The “low, rolling mountains” of Arkansas’ oldest state park, Petit Jean, are an ideal place to take in the season’s “colorful beauty.” Opened in 1938, the park is “marvelously built, full of rustic trails, picturesque bridges,” and stone steps dug deep into rugged mountainsides. Arkansas is known as “the Natural State,” and in Petit Jean, nature still rules the land. The park’s most popular trek, Cedar Falls Trail, wanders among huge pines and through dense swaths of sycamores, then drops 200 feet into a canyon bursting with more lush foliage, and ends at the bottom of a 95-foot waterfall.

About 50 miles west of Petit Jean sits Mount Magazine, the state’s highest peak. At the top, 2,753 feet up, I was “actually above the clouds that skirted by” and could gaze down on the “handsome mix of reds, yellows, and green” below. The “smell of fresh, wet lumber filled the air.” As I looked out, the blanket of trees that covered the park was “bronzed into an even deeper beauty” as the sun started to set. After completing my descent, I headed south to Hot Springs, where 4,000-year-old precipitation rushed up from below ground, stirring 143-degree thermal baths. Here I could finally rest my weary bones in those famous mineral baths—and satisfy my appetite with a heaping plate of pit-smoked ribs at McClard’s Bar-B-Q. That’s what I call a perfect end to a “very Arkansas experience.”

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Contact: Arkansasstateparks.com