Canoeing/Kayaking in the Natural State

Great Arkansas streams

How bad has the destruction been? The state's Arkansas Floater's Kit notes that the Saline River is the Ouachita Mountain's last major undammed stream.

River access points below Rockport include Midway (between Friendship and Donaldson on U.S. Highway 67), Friendship (county road south of U.S. 67) and 2 riverside city parks at Arkadelphia (Highway 7 just across from city and at end of Hemphill Road). The state Game and Fish Commission has developed the access point at Midway (tables and ramp; camping is allowed).

Beginners can do any of these stretches. The falls above Rockport can be tricky, but even beginners can complete them if they read the river "V" properly. (This are very similar to the Spring River falls.)

Arkansas Stream Team

You may want to join to work on a stream, or simply to stay informed. The only membership requirement is a concern for the state's flowing water resources.

Possible activities include receiving help as a landowner with a stream, helping other groups in the watershed, water quality monitoring, learning more about water conservation, helping school and youth groups and helping to improve streams on public land. Co-sponsors of this effort include the Natural and Scenic Rivers Commission, the Department of Parks and Tourism, the Department of Pollution Control and Ecology, the Division of Volunteerism, the Game and Fish Commission, Keep Arkansas Beautiful Commission, (whew, I'm already out of breath!), the U.S. Natural Resources Conservation Service, the U.S. Forestry Service, the U.S. Geological Survey and the University of Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service

Write: Steve Filipek, Stream Team program coordinator, 2 Natural Resources Drive, Little Rock, Ark. 72205; or call him at 501-223-6371. Let the coordinator know if you are interested in a particular stream, what segment and county it's in and tell about yourself or your organization.

More Stream Team info

The objectives of this group are to involve Arkansas citizens in the conservation, rehabilitation, and wise use of Arkansas' invaluable stream resources. Included in this involvement are aspectsof education, stewardship, and advocacy. The Arkansas Stream Team will be a hands-on effort to maintain the excellent streams that we now have and rehabilitate those that have been degraded by a wide variety of impacts (gravel mining, point source pollution, etc.)

Your volunteer work for the Arkansas Stream team might be taking care of a mile or so of your favorite stream, keeping it clean, or it might be monitoring the water quality in that section, or working with the land owner (who can be a stream team member too) to help stabilize an eroding stream bank, or learning about how streams function, or writing to your elected officils to help them realize what is happening to your stream, or all of the above. You pick the stream to work on and what you want to do on that stream.

Already the AGFC and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service are helping rehabilitate several smallmouth bass and other streams by working with the landowners to stabilize eroding banks and make the aquatic environments more hospitable to your favorite game fish, the smallmouth bass. In fact, they and the Corps of Engineers are also making a construction company renovate a smallmouth stream, Long Creek, that they had gouged for gravel.