Buffalo River

Why should it be a National Park?

The Buffalo runs 135 miles out of the Boston Mountains through limestone bluffs that rise more than 500 feet above the water. It was the first river in the country Congress ever protected as a national river, in 1972, and it earned that distinction the hard way. The Army Corps of Engineers wanted to dam it at Lost Valley and again at Gilbert. A retired physician named Neil Compton founded the Ozark Society in 1962 to stop them, and after a decade of fighting, he did.

What the dams would have drowned is a landscape of bluff lines, caves, and clear green water. Hemmed-In Hollow drops 209 feet, the tallest waterfall between the Rockies and the Appalachians. Big Bluff rises above the river at Goat Trail. Elk, reintroduced in the 1980s after a century's absence, graze the bottoms at Boxley Valley. More than a million people float, fish, and camp here every year.

The river's fights did not end with the dams. Hog farming in the watershed, gravel mining, and the pressure of visitation have all threatened water quality, and the Ozark Society has never really stood down.

In 2022 and 2023 a Bentonville development group with Walton family ties quietly explored redesignating the Buffalo a National Park and preserve, on the model of New River Gorge. When the plan surfaced in the fall of 2023, the reaction in Newton County was immediate and furious. People feared that the word preserve would open the door to extraction, that private land would be taken, and that the crowds would ruin what they had. More than a thousand people packed a town hall in Jasper, a town of fewer than five hundred. The proponents retracted within days, and in December the Arkansas Farm Bureau adopted policy against any redesignation. It is the clearest recent demonstration that a National Park cannot be given to a community that does not want one.

It was first for a reason. When Congress created the Buffalo National River in 1972 it invented the designation, because the fight had been about stopping dams rather than about scenery, and the point was to protect a river as a river. Fifty years on it is still the model everyone points to, and New River Gorge's promotion in 2020 has made people ask out loud why the Buffalo is not a park.

The Ozarks around it are old in a way western ranges are not. These are eroded remnants, not uplifted peaks, which is why the bluffs are limestone rather than granite and why the country is honeycombed with caves and springs. Elk were reintroduced in the 1980s after being gone for a century, and the herd that grazes the fields at Boxley is now one of the reliable wildlife sights in the middle of the country.

The hog farm is the cautionary tale. A concentrated feeding operation was permitted in the Big Creek watershed in 2012, upstream of the river, and it took six years of lawsuits, science, and public pressure to get it bought out and closed. The Buffalo's protection covers a narrow corridor; the water arrives from a watershed nobody controls. Any honest park proposal here has to say what it would do about that.