Professor pens book on Petit Jean park

handout
cover of the Guide to the trails of Petit Jean State Park by Matthew D. Moran
handout cover of the Guide to the trails of Petit Jean State Park by Matthew D. Moran

Petit Jean State Park's such a popular destination for hiking and camping it's easy to forget what a puzzling place the mountain can be.

How did the legendarily heartsick French explorers bury the legendary Petit Jean in her little grave on Stout's Point? The cabin boy who really was a girl and died while trailing her lover to the New World bears a name that means Little John, true. But unless she was about 2 inches tall, there's not enough topsoil on Stout's Point to dig her a hole.

What made the lumpen outcrops called turtle rocks? Who painted the pictographs in the Rock House Cave? Why is the bottom of Cedar Falls' backsplash black when the top is yellowish brown?

And who planted all those prickly pear cactuses?

"That's a native species," says Matthew D. Moran, biology professor at Hendrix College in Conway and author of the just-released Guide to the Trails of Petit Jean State Park.

His book explains that some cactuses occur naturally in Arkansas in a few desertlike spots such as atop Petit Jean -- witness the prickly pear he stalked for a month so he could photograph it resplendent in yellow blooms.

Something more than a traditional trail guide, Moran's 104-page book details "the natural history, geologic history and human history" of the area occupied by the state park. Besides the usual line-drawing maps and "trailhead is on the right" walking directions for eight paths and the interpretive site at Stout's Point, he pinpoints specific rock formations, plants and wildlife along each trail.

For instance, he tells you right where to find that prickly pear cactus on the Seven Hollows Trail, and why it truly is at home there -- as are a few Western diamondback rattlesnakes.

"Arkansas is in what I call this junction between East and West," Moran says. There are species we associate with other regions but are in fact natives growing wild here in small numbers because Arkansas is the eastern or western limit of their ranges.

Collared lizards (Crotaphytus collaris) are another example of a western species found on Petit Jean. To see some of these "mountain boomer" lizards, Trails of Petit Jean State Park says, hike the Seven Hollows Trail in the early morning. Go past the (always wet) Grotto and up to the turtle rocks on the ridge. The lizards sun on these rocks.

Farther along the same trail at mile 3.3, a deep canyon with a never-logged stand of oaks, short-leaf pine and gum trees is a good place to look for a pair of pileated woodpeckers.

Moran's knowledge of natural science along with his expertise gained from 19 years of exploring the mountain, where he and wife Jennifer Penner live, offset the few typographical errors in this self-published guide.

"I really wanted to make it educational so you could learn a lot about the things you see, but also give you some stuff to look for," he says. "Obviously, you won't see the woodpeckers every time you're out there, but to know where to look for them, to me, is real informative.

"There's a lot of stuff out there that if you didn't know to look for it you might never notice."

HUMAN HISTORY

Although the Grotto does contain a set of "pictographs" dating from the 1970s, the park is a treasury of ancient history, including Arkansas' largest known group of pre-Columbian rock paintings.

Moran explains that these faded designs were painted by members of a farming and fishing culture that lived in Carden Bottoms between the mountain and the Arkansas River from 1000 to 1500. While they are believed to have hunted and made pilgrimages on the mountain, Moran says, no evidence has been found that they lived atop Petit Jean.

"The bottomlands are much easier places to survive, while the top of the mountain's kind of a harsh climate," he notes.

The large communities had all but disappeared by the 17th century, when the French arrived to scatter their place names hither and yon. Most likely, Moran says, the pictograph painters had been wiped out by epidemics brought by the Spanish in the 1540s.

MYSTERY LUMPS

One thing Moran doesn't explain is the park's turtle rocks -- humped formations with polygonal markings.

"Nobody can, unfortunately. But I think what's cool about them ... is they are completely unique to Arkansas," Moran says. "They are only found in that one geologic formation, the Hartshorne Sandstone."

The Hartshorne is a layer of sedimentary sandstones stretching from west central Arkansas and the Arkansas River Valley into eastern Oklahoma, where it's associated with coal mining near Hartshorne, Okla. At Petit Jean Mountain, it lies exposed on the surface, atop another vast sheet of sandstones, the Atoka formation.

(You can also see exposed Hartshorne on nearby Mount Magazine, but it's not the top layer of rock there.)

"There are some ideas on what's going on," Moran says. "We know that there is mineral that is getting into the cracks in the rock after it forms, probably quartz, and that quartz erodes at a different rate than the sandstone around it. That may in some way [lead to turtle shell shapes], but nobody has been able to simulate it in the lab or figure out exactly what's going on."

Meanwhile, his book explains that the two layers of sandstones are readily seen in the two-color backsplash of 90-foot Cedar Falls, which is created by the softer, dark gray Atoka eroding out from under the yellowish brown Hartshorne rock as Cedar Creek eats through them both.

"Most large waterfalls around the world are formed where hard geologic formations overlie softer ones," the book explains.

And as for Petit Jean's improbable gravesite in the mighty hard rock of Stout's Point, the story -- of the brave girl who pretends to be a boy so she can travel with her lover but then dies aboard ship -- is not unique to Arkansas, Moran notes. It is told around Europe in various old ballads. Also, her story somewhat mysteriously became attached to the mountain -- around the time the park was created in 1923.

Not a parks project but his own labor of love, Moran's Trails of Petit Jean State Park is available at moranbooks.com as a spiral-bound paperback ($8.99) or in the Kindle eBook format from Amazon.com ($6.99).

ActiveStyle on 09/01/2014

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