on location: south ❖
jill m. rohrbach
Adventures Spelunkers get down and dirty on the Wild Cave Tour at Blanchard Springs Cavern in Mountain View, Arkansas.
Take it up a notch in the Natural State’s great outdoors
A
ctivities in Arkansas match your adventure meter whether it cranks to high, low, or somewhere in between. Groups will find a range of options, from canoeing and caving to dune buggy rides and zip line tours. A new zip line canopy tour opened in the Arkansas Ozarks in July. At the Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca, the Buffalo River Canopy Tour offers adventurers a treetop view of the lush Ozark terrain as they glide along a cable like a bird in flight. Harnessed to the cable on a zip pulley, participants are guided through a course of 12 zip lines 32 August 2010
reaching platforms on each tree. Set on a mountain overlooking Ponca Creek, the course is the equivalent of about nine football fields (or half a mile).The longest zip line is 400-plus feet, and the elevation ranges from 40 to 60 feet above the ground. Tours are two-anda-half to three hours with guides providing interpretation along the way. Gokart4wheeling in Northwest Arkansas now offers two- and four-seat dune buggies. The company, located in Winslow, provides guided dune buggy tours in which you drive your own buggy on designated trails. Private,
group, team-building and party tours are available. If cycling is more your style of adventure, Arkansas’ mountain biking opportunities are amazing. The Natural State is quickly gaining a foothold as one of the nation’s premier spots for mountain biking. Trails include the state’s two IMBA Epics: The Womble Trail, a single-track route across the Ouachitas maintained by mountain bikers since the 1980s, and the 50-mile Syllamo Mountain Bike Trail System in Mountain View. Each year the International Mountain Biking AssociaLeisureGroupTravel.com