By DAVID HOLSTED, times staff - davidh@harrisondaily.com
03/16/2008

LOWER BUFFALO WILDERNESS - An occasional buzzard circled lazily in the sky.
A tentative rabbit hopped a few steps before stopping to reconnoiter.
Somewhere over the heavily wooded hills, in their final days before
giving birth to another spring, the Buffalo River rolled unimpeded, as
it had for centuries, to its rendezvous with the nearby White River.

It was a pristine world, the Lower Buffalo Wilderness, an area of the
Buffalo National River where nothing mechanized is allowed, nothing
with wheels, not even chain saws.

Scrambling down a rocky hillside, carefully stepping over mossy boulders wet from the morning
mist, one comes upon a recess in the rocky bluff. Not quite a
full-fledged cave, the recess is known as a rock shelter, shaped out of
the porous limestone of the hillside. One can imagine hundreds of years
ago, the original inhabitants of the area seeking shelter within the
recess from a cold rain, boiling snails brought up from the river and
discarding the shells into a pile.

Then another sight is beheld. It is the manifestation of another activity, this one not so
long ago and not as reverent of the wilderness.

Spilling out of the rock shelter is a landfill of old cans, buckets, bundles of
rags, the rusted carcass of a camping stove, the skeletal remains of a
folding table, parts of broken cups, a container for prescription
medicine, a large piece of sheet metal, a dirty picnic cooler, rolls of
rusty baling wire, seemingly acres of plastic and canvas tarps and
other discarded items.

Mark DePoy, chief of fire and resources management for the Buffalo National River, held up a plastic bottle.

"From the condition, I would guess it's been four or five years that this has been going on," he said.

This past weekend, in an unexpected alliance of strange bedfellows, three
such dumpsites were removed from the Lower Buffalo Wilderness. The
Buffalo River Back Country Horsemen, a group that loves nothing more
than to ride the trails of the Buffalo, joined forces with the Ozark
Society, an organization that enjoys hiking those same trails.

"We try to leave nothing but tracks and take nothing but memories," said
Fred Woehl of Harrison, a member of the Buffalo River Horsemen, in
explaining his love of riding the wildernesss.

Woehl said his organization and the Ozark Society have had their disagreements over
the yearss. It was a wonder they didn't kill each other, he said with a
laugh. One thing they did share was a love for the Buffalo River and a
desire to keep it clean.

"I can't take away from anybody who
wants to share in the beauty of this river," Woehl said. "The river is
very beautiful and precious."

Friday, Woehl, along with Buffalo River Horsemen president Jackie Alexander of Little Rock,
joined DePoy in forming a kind of initial strike force in the war
against junk. Not only did they bag some of the debris and haul it out,
but they scouted out three rock shelters where debris had been found,
made plans for the next day's battle and marked trees for the horsemen
and hikers to follow. Using pack horses, the combined forces would haul
the rest of the trash out of the wilderness.

The watershed year for the Buffalo National River is 1972, when the area became the
property of the National Park Service. Artifacts predating 1972 found
in the park, even rusty car bodies hidden in the weeds, are considered
archaeological artifacts, important to the history of the region.

Vestiges of the pre-1972 era could be seen on the 45-minute horseback ride to
the junksites. Part of the trail led over what was once a county road.
A few concrete blocks or a short segment of rusty wire fence were mute
testament to the time when the Lower Buffalo Wilderness was, as Woehl
described it, populated by a few barely subsistent farmers who did a
little trapping and a little moonshining.

The garbage at the rock shelters was definitely post-1972. Park rangers, searching for
archaeological sites, had discovered the debris left by careless
campers. The mess was definitely not what DePoy had in mind when he
said, "We encourage camping with a 'leave no trace' philosophy."

Accompanied by the machine gun sound of water falling from the overhanging
algae-covered bluffs and hitting the rocks below, Alexander, Woehl and
DePoy went through the trash, sorting it into things that could be
taken out that afternoon and larger things that would require more
people and more effort the next day. Mental notes were made to bring
along a sledge hammer or a pair of cutters or to haul this or that up
by rope over the bluff.

Of the Buffalo National River's 95,730 square acres, about 36,000 are designated as wilderness areas. The
Lower Buffalo Wilderness is the widest part of the park. Unlike other
wilderness area along the river where, as Woehl said, an occasional
chainsaw, vehicle or other sign of modern life might be heard, the
Lower Buffalo Wilderness is almost completely separate from the outside
world.

Woehl explained the reason for the work being done by the horsemen and hikers.

"To keep the Buffalo River in pristine condition," he said, "a place where people could go for peace and quiet."

Article By DAVID HOLSTED, times staff - davidh@harrisondaily.com
03/16/2008
Staff Photo/David Holsted
Mark DePoy and Jackie Alexander enjoy a few moments of relaxation
within a rock shelter in the Lower Buffalo Wilderness. Along with Fred
Woehl, they spent March 14 cleaning up trash by campers.