Agile Trekker: Signal Hill, Mount Magazine State Park, Arkansas State High Point, 2,753'

Date	Distance	Time	Elevation Gain	Average Moving Time	Year to Date Miles
4/5/2023	1.1	34 minutes	198'	2.2	155.7

Parking:

Cameron Bluff Campground

Map:

Gai GPS

Directions:

Cross the street from the campground to reach the trailhead. Where the trail splits, stay left towards the high point.

Driving through much of Arkansas everything was very flat farmland. The area was very rural, with very small towns. In order to pass the time, we would guess the population of the town (based on looking at the map) we were approaching, as well as the number of churches per town. I'm guessing 1 church per 300 people on average. Some towns looked like they might have had 1 church per 100 people. When we got closer to Mount Magazine, the cows were replaced by trees. It was quite pretty actually. No really tall mountains.

Yesterday was 90 degrees in Hot Springs, Arkansas, and today was 45 degrees and rainy at Mount Magazine State Park. There was a chance of severe thunderstorms until 11am and a tornado watch until noon. We sat in the parking lot until 11am and then headed out for our hike. We did meet 2 other highpointers on our short hike to the summit. The summit doesn't have a view, but on the drive out, there is an overlook with a very good view.

When we were just about at our hotel, our low tire pressure light came on. We made it to the hotel and found a piece of metal in the tire. Oh boy. It was already 6:30pm. We found a Walmart Auto Repair open until 7pm, and it was just 5 minutes from our hotel. We quickly drove there, and well...they tried to patch our tire but couldn't. Apparently, they only have one kind of patch kit, and they said it wouldn't work for our tire (our tire has sound proofing inside it). By the time they figured that out, it was after 7pm and no other shops were open. We had them put air in our tire so we could make it the 2 miles back to our hotel. We had planned to go out to an Indian restaurant in the evening and didn't have any food on us except for some unhealthy car food. We decided to try driving the < 5 miles to the restaurant. We thought we had an air pump in our car, so we knew we could always fill up the tire again if we needed to. We got to the restaurant and noticed the air was leaking out of the tire much faster than expected. We had lost a lot of tire pressure. Glen went out to pump it up while I waited for our food. But oops - the air pump wasn't in our car. We must have left it in our other car :( We had a very stressful drive back to the hotel on back roads in order to avoid driving the car on the highway. We made it back to the hotel with a sigh of relief. We knew we wouldn't be able to drive our car tomorrow, but at least we made it safely to our hotel.