Shoal Creek

[Josh Sanford]

Can someone please tell me how to access the put in? Today we dropped a car at the take-out and then spent 90 minutes trying to follow the "instructions" available online. They don't work, as written. Perhaps I needed a gazetteer? We ended up just dragging our boat and rip board down through the woods and hopping on "somewhere up stream". It was fun, but it would have been so nice to not waste so much time driving around pursuing directions that aren't borne out by the signage on the roads. And not getting to do the whole creek was a bummer. Erg.

But at least we had fun. We especially enjoyed diving repeatedly off of the take out bridge onto the rip board in the middle of the lower-water bridge-squeezed outflow. I could have done that for hours...

[anthony]

top of mt magazine and ride it down from there

[Roger]

Can someone please tell me how to access the put in? Today we dropped a car at the take-out and then spent 90 minutes trying to follow the "instructions" available online. They don't work, as written. Perhaps I needed a gazetteer? We ended up just dragging our boat and rip board down through the woods and hopping on "somewhere up stream". It was fun, but it would have been so nice to not waste so much time driving around pursuing directions that aren't borne out by the signage on the roads. And not getting to do the whole creek was a bummer. Erg.

But at least we had fun. We especially enjoyed diving repeatedly off of the take out bridge onto the rip board in the middle of the lower-water bridge-squeezed outflow. I could have done that for hours...

Yes! :myday"

Seriously, it is handy sometimes especially if you're not familiar with an area. Glad you had fun.

[NickHobbs]

I think you go to Paris, go south on 309 towards Magazine for about 16 mile then turn left on spring lake road, drive until you cross Shoal creek, It's a long shuttle. On the west side of 309 you can paddle Gutter rock creek, short shuttle 3/3+ depending on water level.

[prophet]

from the takeout bridge, it's shorter to go east, then South, then west back to the putin but finding the right road back west is the trick. the road that heads south also connects to Hwy 22 next to a large store/gas station. whether you can cross the takeout bridge might mean having to go back to Hwy 22 if approaching from the West side at the Sorghum hollow horse camp sign

and i rec the AG&F map book over the gazeteer because it has many put-ins/takeouts marked and section lines allowing easy mile correlation to your odometer.

[Cowper]

Another good map book to have is the official Arkansas County Road Maps, although if I could only go with one I'd probably choose DeLorme's "Roads of Arkansas" as already recommended.

But I just have to put in a plug for a basic mapping GPS. A Garmin E-trex 20 can be found on sale for $150, maybe less. You add the micro-SD card for $50 (if you shop around), and you have topographic maps of the entire US in your hand. I'm mildly irritated with some of their color choices (smaller dirt roads are almost the same color as the topo lines and very hard to see on the map, for example) but once you learn a few basics it is an incredible tool that puts a smart phone to shame for navigation in the woods, and no cell signal required.

On my very first run of Beech creek, the stream flashed on us and one or two folks decided to call it a day and walk out. I didn't really know the area, but I looked at the map on the GPS and was able to tell them that we were probably only 300 feet from the remains of an old road. They both walked out without incident. No hunter who likes to hunt in more than one or two familiar places should be without one either. Beech creek veterans probably could have told them the same thing, but I still find it amazing that this "tool" allowed me to point someone in the right direction even though I was NOT a veteran of that particular stream.

I just used your scenario as a test. It was harder than I thought - I was going to just go to the AWA page, grab the GPS coordinates for the put-in and declare victory. But Shoal creek was not listed. So I went to the OWP, clicked on the description, and found the Shoal creek description did not include coordinates (most if not all OWP page descriptions pre-date when GPS became commonplace). But it had that old stand-by, a map! So I compared that map to my GPS map to find and mark the put in. It took about 3 to 5 minutes of scrolling around on the two tiny screens, but I was able to mark it, and I'm now sure I could drive there (even if I had never been there before) with minimal difficulty. All of this is a cake-walk if you mark and save several put-ins and take-outs that you might be gunning for before you leave the house, while you still have access to a full-size screen and multiple on-line and paper resources.
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