Outdoor Adventures in the Ozarks

     Today while not supposed to be hot, won’t be cold either, so a good day to go hiking somewhere.   We decide to try the Bench Trail on the north side of the Ponca Wilderness, mainly because Kat wants a trail with little elevation gain and very little bushwhacking.      Bench Trail is on a bench along the south facing mountain slope, so the trail should be relatively flat , and it is an official trail of the BNR so there shouldn’t be any bushwhacking.   I’ve been curious about the Bench Trail for years and today I’ll finally get to see it for myself. Sherman Mountain through the utility clearing      With two vehicles you could hike the entire Bench Trail pretty easily on a day-hike, going west to east is best with a lot less elevation gain than going the other way.   Today our plan is to check out the east portion of the trail to somewhere around Cecil Hollow then turn around and head back, but if we have some extra energy,   we may climb up into Cecil Hollow to Antenna Pine, w

     Kat went online a week or two back and ‘put us on the list’ for a ranger led tour of the historic Boxley Mill.  As part of the 50 th anniversary celebration for the Buffalo National River, the park service has opened the mill for guided tours, every weekend in the month of October.      We arrive early and our group starts out a little after 10:00 led by tour guide Kevin Middleton a retired Park Ranger.  Beginning at the gate on an old road that we learn is the actual old highway that went through the Boxley Valley before the new paved highway was built back in the late 1970’s, we walk back to the mill. Boxley Mill at the start of the tour      The mill was built by Robert Villines in 1869 just as people started returning to the valley after the Civil War, construction took almost a year.  The Villines Gristmill opened in 1870, the structure we see today is mostly original, other than the siding and roofing.  The mill operated for eighty years by three generations of Villines.