Fall 2024

By Fred Paillet, OS Education Chair      During my days as a geology instructor, I often saw the disappointment from students on field trips to view fossil excavations.  Having seen T-rex and triceratops skeletons embedded in their reconstructed environments at some of our great museums, students are bummed out to observe nothing more than bits of bone fragments and disembodied teeth in a sandy matrix.  The sad fact is that almost all fossil remains of exotic creatures from the past consist of disarticulated bones that have suffered a long tumble among gravel and boulders before collecting in the bottom of a lagoon.  Even more disappointing is the observation that most of the exposed landscape in the Ozarks has been eroding away for more than 200 million years.  The remaining rocks contain a few bivalve shells, fragments of crinoid stems, or the flattened stems of coal swamp plants – all from ages before large animals roamed the planet.  The only place we can see degraded remains of truly impressive creatures is in the far southwest of the state where sediments consist of a pro-grading coastal plain with some respectable dinosaur trackways.  A little to the northwest there are the remains [...]

By Bruce Hammock and edited by Brian Thompson      I grew up during the “fight to save the Buffalo from being dammed.”   As I was a teenager, I was rather low key in my opposition, contributing a little money (very little in my case) and kidding my uncle, who worked for the Corps of Engineers, telling him that if they saw still water, they wanted to drain it, and if the water moved, they wanted to dam it.  It was good natured since he rated a dam on the Buffalo as about as dumb as trying to change the course of the Mississippi River (the corps lost there as well).       As you know, southerners tell tales, tall tales, lies, and damn lies.  I have told this tale a few times, and my daughter wanted me to send it to the Ozark Society.  As best as I could, I removed the lies.       I grew up in Little Rock and loved wandering the hills as a kid, but my favorite activity was when I traveled once or twice a year to the Buffalo River State Park with my folks. This love intensified when my folks bought me a [...]

By Stewart Noland, OS Archive Chair    Jim Meinecke, a Fayetteville resident, is the fifth recipient of the Ozark Society’s Sassafras Hiking Award.  Jim’s interest in hiking began in Yosemite National Park, where he was transported by his grandfather to hike with his father.      Jim’s favorite Sassafras Hiking Award trail is the Ozark Highland.  It is the diversity of the OHT that attracts Jim, particularly the rivers including the Buffalo River, Hurricane Creek, and Richland Creek.  The most challenging of the four trails was the Ouachita Trail mainly due to the snow, ice, and related cold weather conditions experienced during his hike.      Jim’s most dangerous hiking experience occurred in Yosemite.  While cowboy camping, a bear came into camp and ate all of their food while Jim and a friend remained in their sleeping bags a few feet away.  Jim’s favorite Trail Angel stories are food and transportation related.  On one hike a friend delivered much appreciated brownies on several occasions.  An uncommon hiking item that Jim carries is a bird app and monocular to identify and view the birds.  Upcoming hiking plans include the Eagle Rock Loop and perhaps a loop in Yellowstone National Park.  [...]

By Loring Bullard, OS Schoolcraft Past President Citizens in southwest Missouri were recently locked in battle with a company from Arkansas, Denali Waste Solutions, that spread sludge from waste lagoons serving meat processing facilities located in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri. Denali was sued by neighbors for terrible odors arising from land application of sludge from a lagoon that nearby resident Valerie Steele called a “cesspool of rotting flesh.” For the last several years, Denali had been spreading sludge from two lagoons in southwest Missouri on about 20,000 acres of farmland. In 2022, the company dumped 36 truckloads of sludge, 165,000 gallons, a few days ahead of heavy rains, contaminating a neighbor’s land and causing pollution of a nearby waterway. Missouri DNR personnel saw sludge “covering vegetation in the fields.” One problem was that the waste company operated under the authority of the Missouri Fertilizer Control Board, since its waste products were intended as a “fertilizer” for farmland. But this material was nothing like the commercial fertilizers we see in bags at the farm stores. It was composed not only of blood and animal parts, but could also contain cleaning chemicals from meat processing or antibiotics and pharmaceuticals from animal [...]