Crowley's Ridge Parkway

National Scenic Byway, Designated 1998. Roughly 200 Miles Following Crowley'S Ridge From The Missouri Line To Helena On The Mississippi A Narrow Loess Ridge Standing Up To 200 Feet Above The Delta, A Landform Of A Kind Found In Only One Other Place On Earth. · Piggott, Arkansas

Crowley's Ridge is a strip of high ground running two hundred miles down eastern Arkansas, never more than a few miles wide, standing up to two hundred feet above a Delta that is otherwise table-flat for a hundred miles in every direction. It is made of windblown loess sitting on older river deposits, and geologists reckon there is only one other formation of the kind in the world, in China. Because it is high and well-drained it grows hardwoods - oak, hickory, tulip poplar, beech - that belong in the Appalachians rather than the Delta, so the ridge is a green forested line drawn across cotton and rice country. The National Scenic Byway follows it from the Missouri line down to Helena on the Mississippi, through a string of small towns and half a dozen state parks. It is a landform you drive rather than a viewpoint you stop at, and that is worth knowing before you set off down two hundred miles of it.

Crowley's Ridge Parkway, Arkansas Highway 141 and US 49, Piggott, Arkansas, United States

A public highway, open at all hours in all seasons and free. The parks, museums and visitor centres along it keep their own hours - most are daytime, several close on Sundays or Mondays, and the smaller museums reduce their days in winter. There are no seasonal road closures on the route itself, though ice storms can close sections of the ridge roads in winter. Fuel and food are in the towns along the way and there are long gaps between them.

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