From the Mind of Trevor Stone

As we hit the road, 7 day weather forecasts for the eclipse were looking dicey. The "raining all day Monday" forecast quickly turned to "partially cloudy all day," with a line of clouds along the eclipse path from the Rio Grande to the Ohio valley. We were committed, though, and set off to our campsite in Arkansas. "Pray to your favorite weather and sky gods," I said in my email to campers.

Weather in the Ouachita Mountains turned out to be fantastic. The first night was a bit chilly, but the rest of the week featured sunny days and a few high wispy clouds. It's refreshing to camp in a state that's damp enough to have a campfire without hypervigilance that you might burn down the whole forest. And as someone who's used to spending vacations on festivals or distant adventure travel, having a vacation with just a couple dozen people and no schedule of events was a nice change of pace. The night before the eclipse the forecast was still calling for "partly cloudy," with with wispy clouds that might still show the great gig in the sky. As the Earth turned to Monday we were greeted with completely clear skies, the sun perfectly visible through a clearing at our campsite. Jupiter also made an appearance, though we couldn't see the passing comet.

Many times during the two-year planning period for this adventure I was rather amused that I was driving a thousand miles on a two week adventure for a four minute experience. Totality was indeed pretty neat: "evening" came on quickly, then a dark sky with wispy solar promenances visible to the naked eye. Our position at the base of the trees didn't offer much of a views to the horizon, though I could see sunset hues in each direction. I would've loved to bask in the experience for an hour; between taking photos (a few of which turned out alright) and looking around to see what all was different I didn't get a chance to really tune into the eclipse vibes, man. Now that I've got a solar camera filter and I know solar binoculars are a thing I should spend more time just gazing at the sun.

In the days before the main event I hoisted two wire antennæ into the trees and managed to get the fake internet points award for making contacts on 10 amateur radio bands. I didn't actually make a lot of contacts, since I seemed to only call CQ on bands with poor propagation or nobody was listening. I did make a lot of park-to-park contacts—I wasn't the only one with the idea to have a radio campout for the eclipse—and made some very low-key contributions to science by participating in the Eclipse QSO Party before and after totality.

En route, I played ham radio on the Santa Fe Trail in Dodge City and the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge. The former had a really high noise floor for some reason, maybe machinery at the agricultural processing plants. The latter was a lot of fun: we started by digging for selenite crystals that form a short dig below the crust of the salt basin. The radio waves liked the site as well; I had a steady pileup for most of an hour. Sea water helps HF propagation, and a field of salt with water a foot below the surface seems to have the same effect.

We spent a day in Tulsa visiting the Greenwood Rising center and the Woody Guthrie museum. Greenwood Rising opened 100 years after the Tulsa race massacre when a white mob burned down "Black Wall Street," the black neighborhood of Greenwood, one of the largest concentrations of black wealth in America. This is an incident that wasn't talked about as part of Americas history until recently. Despite attending a racially-conscious elementary school and using Howard Zinn's book as my first high school history text, I was unaware of the Tulsa race massacre until 2019. Greenwood Rising isn't just about the massacre, but does a good job creating a sense of the place before it was destroyed and what it meant to have a thriving black neighborhood on the other side of the tracks. Modern museums are big on interactivity, and Greenwood Rising does a good job of creating an immersive experience to enhance the educational goals. The Guthrie Center was also a good visit. I hadn't known that Woody was a prolific sketch artist, many with the same incisive yet accessible social commentary as his songs. I'd also thought the Dust Bowl was an extended dry period with poor farm soil care practices leading to the fertile land slowly blowing away. I hadn't realized that there was a specific day, Black Sunday, that blocked the sun and buried entire towns.

The big rain event that had all the eclipse chasers worried all week managed to hold off in Arkansas until about 10pm; enough time to pack up most of our camp and switch from the canvas tent to a dome tent, easier to wrangle when wet. And despite a wet night, the weather gods smiled on us again, pausing the rain in the morning so we could pack the final bits. We got to enjoy some lovely scenic pullouts along the Talimena National Scenic Byway. At the top I activated Queen Wilhelmina State Park at the top of the mountain while the clouds closed in to form a wonderfully liminal cloak. Despite the high elevation all my strong signal reports were coming from Georgia, a mysterious pipeline through the ionosphere.

On the way home we spent another couple days in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation. Subdivision of Cherokee land under the Curtis Act, along with many other factors, makes the Oklahoma nations feel a lot different than the Indian reservations folks in the U.S. west are used to. Tahlequah feels like an ordinary town where several parcels are owned by natives and the tribe. There are several good Cherokee museums and a casino, but everything else feels like a typical mid-sized American town in the southeast from fast food and barbecue restaurants to big ranch houses out towards the lakes. Funky res cars, res dogs hanging out in the shade, and the smell of frybread that you might imagine on a reservation in the southwest or on the plains doesn't show up in Tahlequah or elsewhere we saw among the five "civilized" nations.

North American eclipse hunters will have to head overseas for the next two decades, so I'm glad I made a trip out of it. The 2045 eclipse will pass right over the same campsite but I think I'll stay closer to home for that one since it passes across Colorado as well. I wonder how early Valley View will take reservations…

At the beginning of April I drove down to Arkansas to scout locations and get the climate vibe for the April 8th, 2024 total solar eclipse. I also used the trip to play radio through Parks on the Air. My top priorities were finding out whether early-April camping was pleasant, if the weather made early-afternoon clear skies likely, and whether trees were likely to block the view. My summary report is that all three conditions were met.

Aside from 24 hours of overcast skies and rain my first day, the weather was very cooperative. There were plenty of light fluffy clouds, but if April 8th 2024 is anything like April 8th 2022, the eclipse viewing forecast should be pretty good. The trees were also not nearly as obstructive as I'd worried: even a small break like a road or a campsite lets you see the early afternoon sun above the treetops. The deciduous trees were just starting to bloom and the evergreens don't have thick foliage like ponderosas, so there's plenty of sky even in the middle of the forest. This means almost anywhere in the path of totality could be a decent viewing location, not just the panoramic mountain vistas and north-side-of-a-lake spots I'd been scouting. I spotted Craw Billy's cajun restaurant en route to my first campsite, an eclectic open-air setup run by a colorful character; I told him they could probably do good business if they rented out space to eclipse campers and maybe had a couple bands play.

The environment felt a lot like the Colorado Rocky Mountains in late spring, but with water oozing randomly oozinig from the ground. The weathered limestone rocks had a very familiar feel, particularly when used as a vantage point to look out over a stream-carved valley. The tree species were all different, but their density created a familiar forest feeling. The days were warm enough to take off my shirt when the sun was out; nights got chilly enough that I wore long underwear under pijamas. I'd heard that ticks and chiggers could be trouble in the Ozarks, but they weren't out yet.

I stayed at three campgrounds—two at Army Corps of Engineers reservoirs and one in a mesa-top state park—all of which were comfortable, though not without weather challenges. My first day at Greers Ferry Lake featured light to medium rain all day, followed by heavy rain and wake-you-up thunder through the night. When I set up in the dark, my Colorado mountain camping instincts had correctly identified a water channel running between campsites and kept my tent on thee dry side of things. Before the rain began in earnest I figured out what worked (eye bolts attached to fishing line) and what didn't (paracord doesn't like to slide over branches) when tossing a wire dipole into a tree, finally succeeding in getting my feed point close to 20 feet up a tree with the wire sloped down but still above head height. After a couple park-to-park contacts from the picnic table in some very light rain, I set up the radio in my tent and made about 30 contacts as far away as California, New Hampshire, Puerto Rico, and even a beam antenna in Italy. Since the rain was pretty heavy in the evening I also tried checking in to The Freewheelers Net on 80 meters. I'd listened to that net from home with an indoor antenna that had no shot at getting out on 80m; I'd hoped that my tree hanging job, plus being several hundred miles closer to most of the folks on the net, would help my signal get through, but no dice. Several folks could tell someone was making a call, but between my low-for-80 antenna height and the major thunderstorms from Texas through the Ohio valley they couldn't pull me out of the static. I guess I'll need to work out an 80m antenna plan for my small suburban lot before I can proclaim "It's good to be a freewheeler."

I spent the middle of the week in Petit Jean State Park on top of a mesa that overlooks the winding Arkansas River. Whereas Greers Ferry didn't offer much to do besides boating (or a swim from the beach in chilly water), Petit Jean packs in several stunning vistas and fun trails. The marquee spot is at the east end of the mesa near the gravesite of the titular Petit Jean (a woman who disguised herself as a boy to join her husband's expedition in the North American wilds), offering a 270° panorama of the Arkansas valley floor. I expect that spot to be popular with eclipse viewers, though its small parking lot and lack of restrooms could create logistic challenges. The other side of the mesa features some fantastic sunset viewing with nearby hills taking the place of the eastward valley view. Both sides offer great views of vultures (to my Colorado eyes they still look like hawks until they're close enough to see their skin heads) casually circling on thermal air columns. In the middle, Petit Jean offers several nice hikes into a river valley fed by an impressive waterfall… it still feels weird that Arkansas has lakes on top of mountains. My radio adventures in Petit Jean were less successful. While I had some tall trees at my campsite, most of them didn't have branches until probably 30 feet from the ground. With an optimal setup this could have been beneficial—the higher the wire the better your signal generally gets out—but I didn't want to be throwing metal hardware high and hard in the dark towards campers across the road. I also realized that a dipole can be challenging to set up even with plenty of trees around, since you want three support points (wire ends and the feedpoint in the middle) with appropriate spacing and all in a line. My first attempt involved dealing with a rats nest of fishing line caught in some small branches (thank goodness I brought some telescoping aluminum tent poles I could use to unhook stray loops) and then making almost a 90 degree turn between the two wire segments at the feedpoint-strapped-to-a-tree. It turns out that a significant angle in my antenna results in a really high SWR in the 20 meter band, so while I was able to make a few park-to-park contacts on 17 meters, I decided I needed to redo the antenna before activating the park and having everyone try to contact me, so I went exploring instead. I tried picking up some contacts on the VHF calling and adventure frequencies from my handheld radio from the scenic overlook, but apparently nobody listens to 146.52 in the middle of the day in that part of Arkansas…or driving down I-40. My reconfigured antenna hanging job, with the feed point suspended about head height over a large bush was able to broadcast reasonably well the morning before leaving, picking up about two dozen contacts, mostly in the midwest and east coast but reaching as far as the Utah mountains and southern Arizona. Weather at Petit Jean was quite pleasant, though I did have trouble sleeping one night due to rapid flashes of light; they didn't come with any thunder, but it also seemed to be unlikely to come from the nearby small-time airport.

My final campground was on Lake Ouachita near Mt. Ida, the heart of Arkansas's crystal and mineral bonanza. Quartz just seems to ooze out of the ground there; you've got to move hunks of white rock out of the way in order to get a soft place to lay a tent. My visit just happened to coincide with a gem and mineral show in a field next to an insurance office, where I picked up some very reasonably priced pieces from some major rock geeks. You could tell that most of them are much better at collecting minerals in the forest than at running a retail operation. I'd booked a mildly rurgged campsite near thee tip of a peninsula in the lake, figuring noisy RVs would be less likely that far out, and also envisioning that a peninsula on the south shore of a lake would be a good mock-eclipse-viewing spot. As soon as I arrived, I realized I hadn't thought about the downside of camping on a peninsula: no wind breaks for a couple miles. Fortunately my site had a bit of a slope, so I managed to avoid the full force of the 30+mph winds while pitching my tent; sleeping was chilly and noisy, though. Not wanting to throw wires up a tree in high winds, I drank a beer and walked around the peninsula, helping a family secure the roof of a very janky popup, sharing marshmallows and stories with a couple young boys, and having a long fireside chat with an Arkansas couple who love Colorado, motorcycle touring, cigarette smoking, and talking. Hard wind continued the next day, so I went for a short drive in the mountains, hiking up a short fire tower trail to Hickory Nut Mountain where I could do a combined Parks and Summits on the Air. The SOTA app claimed I was not with a 25 meter contour of the summit, though I'm pretty sure the USGS survey corner I found marked the high point. (It's a lot less clear in the Ozarks than the Rockies when you're actually on top of a mountain.) Nonetheless, my dipole strung 10 feet up in the trees atop a ridge line got out quite well, picking up 50 contacts in about two hours. The California park-to-park activator couldn't quite pick me out of the noise, but I got four from Colorado and one from Montana. The wind was actually less intense on top of the ridge than it had been in the campground. My arms were sore for a couple days after dragging a cart up the hill with a 100 amp-hour battery, an early-90s base station radio, a folding chair and TV table, and far more cables and tools than I needed. There are much lighter-weight ham radios, but they're hard to buy in 2022 thanks to supply chain challenges.

I'm sure they'll be more popular come eclipse weekend, but none of the campgrounds were very crowded in early April (it was still a bit chilly). They would also be a nice setup for several friends to book adjacent sites in case we want to get a festival theme camp vibe going on. Dispersed camping in either the Ozark/St. Francis or Ouachita National Forests are also good options, particularly if you can hike to a hill with a nice view.

I planned my route around a couple roadside attractions and was not disappointed. Thanks to recommendations from Reddit, I stopped at Big Brutus, the world's largest electric shovel. It had electric cables with larger diameter than my arm, top speed of a quarter mile an hour, a 16-story boom for clearing earth away from coal deposits, and a worker dedicated to constantly lubricating the machine from 55-gallon oil drums. Boot Hill Museum in Dodge City has a good mix of cheesy interactive exhibits and extensive collections of old west artifacts, and would be lots of fun with kids. Crystal Bridges, the free American art museum funded by inherited Walmart money, outdid my expectations with some really good modern and experimental work as well as art highlighting the challenges faced by indigenous and Black Americans, sharing space with 18th and 19th Century paintings of rich white people. It was also playing host to prom activities, so there were lots of overdressed teenagers. I also crossed three state borders in about an hour without getting out of the car, which still feels weird to this western boy.