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.
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