  Last weekend, my wonderful girlfriend and I went camping. We originally intended to go to urlLink Haw Creek Falls which is where we went last year, but ended up going to urlLink Richland Creek instead. In a previous post I mentioned that we were worried about running out of gas and that was the reason we actually ended up going to Haw Creek Falls last year. Well, apparently we took a different route this year because gas stations were abundant. This year, we took Arkansas 16 all the way from Fayetteville to a town called (argh, I don't remember...
I'll have to ask Ang) where we stopped to ask for directions to the campground, which was about 2 miles back the way we came, and then about 9 miles down a gravel county road. The county road was almost exactly 121 miles from the Fayetteville city limits. The trip down was very scenic. Lots of Ozark mountains and valleys to see. The roads were urlLink canopied in urlLink trees for most of the way, periodically breaking for towns and urlLink farms .
When we got there, the campgrounds were mostly deserted. There were about 3 groups there, and we had no trouble finding a partially secluded urlLink site . After setting up camp, we started collecting wood for our dinner fire. I foolishly went traipsing around the surrounding woods, collecting dead branches. Meanwhile, Ang was checking out the empty campsites and found a big stack of logs someone had kindly left behind.
They were still kinda green, so it took a lot to get them started and it was a real smokey fire once it did get going. But it served it's purpose. After a light dinner of mushrooms and grapes, we settled around the fire and enjoyed the evening. Sleep did not come to me that night. I was alternately freezing and sweating. It was only about 55 degrees, and we were not prepared for this with only 2 blankets. Ang somehow managed to ignore the elements and slept for most of the night. At one point, she woke up and I took her to the little outhouse toilets. When we exited our tent we found out that the rustling sounds we'd been hearing was a skunk. We were both relieved when it ran away without spraying.
I finally started to doze off about the time the sun was coming up. That morning, I started the fire again, and we ate roasted sausage and pineapple shish kabob. Mmmmm that's my favorite camping treat. After breakfast, we started breaking down the camp so that we wouldn't have to do it later in the day when we were tired from hiking. After breaking camp, and dousing the fire we donned our hiking gear and headed down to the creek.
We hiked upstream for about 2 hours, turned around and hiked back and then went skinny dipping in a urlLink beautiful blue pool . Richland Creek is absolutely gorgeous. The camera does it no justice at all. The pictures look nice, but the reality was breathtaking. We saw lots of interesting urlLink rock formations and natural springs. We also saw lots of creek wildlife, including several different kinds of fish, some urlLink tadpoles , crawdads, and even a wicked looking urlLink snake .
Some of the tadpoles were in the process of becoming frogs. They had fat little frog bodies, little stumpy legs, and long, wide tails. They were also quite easy to catch. The snake was very interesting to me. It was in a crevice of a rock with about 20 minnows. I'm not really sure how the minnows got there though. Did the snake catch them and bring them to the crevice to eat them, or were they stranded somehow? It doesn't seem likely that they were stranded since the crevice was nearly dry, and about 4 feet from water in every direction. That leads me to believe that the snake brought them there. But how? And why? The only way I can think of that it could catch them is in its' mouth.
But if that's the case, why didn't the snake just swallow them then instead of bringing them to a rock and trying to catch them again? After our hike, we went back to camp, cleaned up a bit, and headed back to Fayetteville. I know my writing doesn't convey it very well, but we had an excellent time, and will probably do something like this again if not this summer, definitely next. The entire collection of pictures is urlLink here . Enjoy them. 
