Mount Magazine State Park

Mount Magazine is a plateau that rises roughly 2,200 feet out of the Arkansas River Valley, and its Signal Hill is the highest point in Arkansas at 2,753 feet. Native people did not live on the mountain year-round, but six Archaic sites dating from 9,500 to 650 BC have been recorded there, and a bluff shelter near the top held Woodland and Mississippian pottery and stone points made from Ozark and Ouachita rock, which shows trade on both sides of the mountain.

White settlers came in the mid-nineteenth century. In 1900 the town of Magazine was platted on the summit, and hotels opened for tourists. The town foundered in the Depression. In 1934 the Resettlement Administration bought the mountain and handed it to the Forest Service, and the Works Progress Administration began a gravel road over it from Paris to Havana; the engineer in charge, James W. Hardy, is buried near it. The Civilian Conservation Corps added a lodge, restaurant and cabins between 1938 and 1941, but the lodge burned in 1971. The state park opened in 2001, though the Forest Service still owns the land.

The summit is cooler than the valleys, and its rocky slopes shelter the threatened Magazine Mountain shagreen snail. Ninety-four of Arkansas's 134 butterfly species have been found here. The park's visitor center is on the mountain, and a sixty-room lodge on the south bluff looks toward Blue Mountain Lake.