Blackjack Oak
Thick leathery leaves and a scrappy crown let blackjack oak occupy soils where richer forest trees grow poorly.
Places and wildlife — page 25
Browse Explore’s field guide to destinations, wildlife, art, and the natural world. Open a discovery for practical details and background.
Piping Plover
A pale plover nests almost invisibly on open northern beaches where changing water and human disturbance can erase a season’s work.
Sharp-tailed Grouse
Spring males stamp, rattle, coo, and pivot on traditional dancing grounds called leks while hens quietly judge the performance.
Pallid Sturgeon
An ancient-looking fish is actually a living specialist of big, warm, sediment-rich rivers whose natural flow has been heavily altered.
Bighorn Sheep
Restored bighorn herds use Black Hills cliffs as escape terrain, but disease carried by domestic sheep remains a serious management concern.
Iowa Pleistocene Snail
A thumbnail-sized snail persists in refrigerated pockets of habitat left by the Ice Age, making microclimate—not scenery—its entire world.
Bobolink
A bubbling metallic song tumbles over spring grass from a bird that will later migrate all the way to southern South America.
Ozark Big-eared Bat
Enormous ears make this rare bat visually unmistakable, but entering its cave to confirm a sighting can threaten the very colony being sought.
Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art
Five centuries of American art, daring architecture, and wooded trails meet around spring-fed ponds in Bentonville.
Hot Springs National Park
A national park woven into downtown, where protected thermal water, mountain trails, and Bathhouse Row share one compact valley.
Buffalo National River
A free-flowing Ozark river winds beneath towering limestone bluffs, linking paddling reaches, wilderness trails, gravel bars, and old homesteads.
Thorncrown Chapel
Fay Jones’s glass-and-timber chapel turns a quiet Ozark woodland into one of America’s most celebrated modern sacred spaces.
William J. Clinton Presidential Library and Museum
Full-scale White House rooms, policy exhibits, and millions of presidential records fill a glass building reaching toward the Arkansas River.
Arkansas Museum of Fine Arts
A dramatically rebuilt Little Rock arts campus combines international works on paper, craft, live theater, studios, and free general admission.
Museum of Native American History
Five chronological galleries move from Paleoindian stone tools to historic clothing, pottery, beadwork, and the difficult histories behind collecting.
United States Marshals Museum
Immersive galleries trace the nation’s oldest federal law-enforcement agency from frontier courts to witness protection and modern operations.
Mid-America Science Museum
A wooded Hot Springs science center turns motion, electricity, engineering, and perception into large-scale experiments visitors operate themselves.
Historic Arkansas Museum
Restored nineteenth-century buildings, Arkansas-made objects, and changing exhibitions reveal frontier Little Rock as a complicated urban community.
Mosaic Templars Cultural Center
Objects, oral histories, music, and reconstructed spaces trace Black entrepreneurship, creativity, faith, and civil rights across Arkansas.
Arkansas Museum of Natural Resources
Working-scale machinery, geology exhibits, and a recreated boomtown explain how the 1921 Smackover discovery remade southern Arkansas.
Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site
The working high school and visitor center interpret the Little Rock Nine, the 1957 desegregation crisis, and its unfinished civic legacy.
Fort Smith National Historic Site
A riverside site connects military occupation, Cherokee removal, Judge Parker’s court, federal jails, and the border with Indian Territory.
Pea Ridge National Military Park
A remarkably intact 4,300-acre battlefield explains the 1862 campaign through terrain, Elkhorn Tavern, exhibits, and a driving loop.
Arkansas Post National Memorial
Trails and exhibits trace Quapaw homelands, a 1686 French trading post, changing empires, Arkansas Territory, and Civil War battle.
President William Jefferson Clinton Birthplace Home
A ranger-led tour of the Hope house connects Bill Clinton’s early family life to the ideas of home, race, education, and public service.
Historic Washington State Park
Guided buildings, working crafts, streets, and museums preserve a courthouse town linked to the Southwest Trail and Civil War Arkansas.
Plum Bayou Mounds Archeological State Park
Eighteen preserved mounds, an embankment, plaza, and visitor center reveal a sophisticated ancestral community active roughly 650–1050 CE.
Parkin Archeological State Park
A mound, village footprint, laboratory, and river trail explore the community often linked to the Casqui encountered by de Soto in 1541.
Hampson Archeological Museum State Park
A compact museum on Wilson’s square presents extraordinary late Mississippian pottery, tools, ornaments, and evidence from northeast Arkansas villages.
Garvan Woodland Gardens
Miles of paths join seasonal plantings, native forest, Lake Hamilton overlooks, playful children’s structures, and Fay Jones–school architecture.
Botanical Garden of the Ozarks
A compact community garden combines native plants, herbs, roses, sensory beds, seasonal displays, and Arkansas’s only butterfly house.
South Arkansas Arboretum
A short paved loop protects native south Arkansas trees, understory plants, wildlife habitat, and seasonal color within the city.
Little Rock Zoo
Arkansas’s largest zoo combines century-old stonework, primates, big cats, elephants, reptiles, and keeper programs in central Little Rock.
Turpentine Creek Wildlife Refuge
A nonprofit Ozark refuge gives lifetime care to lions, tigers, bears, and other survivors of private ownership and commercial exploitation.
Petit Jean State Park
Sandstone overlooks, CCC architecture, rock shelters, forest trails, and a 95-foot waterfall spread across a flat-topped mountain.
Devil’s Den State Park
A landmark 1930s park combines native-stone cabins, lake, waterfall, mountain-bike routes, and trails through sandstone crevices.
Mount Magazine State Park
A forested plateau rises to 2,753 feet with cliff overlooks, hang-gliding launches, rare butterflies, trails, and a mountaintop lodge.
Pinnacle Mountain State Park
Two demanding summit routes, accessible valley trails, riverside habitat, and a modern visitor center sit minutes from the capital.
Crater of Diamonds State Park
Visitors search a plowed volcanic surface for diamonds and other minerals, then keep whatever genuine specimens they discover.
Lake Ouachita State Park
Arkansas’s largest lake spreads among undeveloped islands with paddling, camping, swimming, fishing, and guided water interpretation.
Hobbs State Park-Conservation Area
A 12,000-acre conservation landscape wraps Beaver Lake with long trails, backcountry camps, paddling coves, wildlife, and a strong visitor center.
Cossatot River State Park-Natural Area
Clear water, boulder gardens, rare species, rugged trails, and the Class III–IV Cossatot Falls demand weather-aware planning.
Whitaker Point Trail
A moderate forest hike reaches Hawksbill Crag and a sweeping wilderness view, with an unprotected drop demanding deliberate behavior.
Lost Valley Trail
A family-popular Buffalo River trail follows Clark Creek through limestone walls to a natural bridge and rain-dependent Eden Falls.
Goat Trail to Big Bluff
A strenuous descent from Centerpoint reaches Big Bluff’s exposed Goat Trail, then demands the full elevation back to the road.
Eagle Rock Loop
A roughly 27-mile Ouachita circuit combines repeated ridge climbs, Little Missouri River crossings, remote camps, and flash-flood exposure.
Seven Hollows Trail
A long Petit Jean loop threads forested hollows, a natural bridge, rock shelters, and a rain-fed grotto beyond the park’s busiest viewpoints.
Blanchard Springs Caverns
Reserved Forest Service tours enter vast decorated chambers where flowing water still builds columns, draperies, and flowstone.