Bluff Shelters of the Arkansas Ozarks

The bluff shelters of the Ozarks in Arkansas are home to prehistoric and historic rock art of the Native Americans. Thousands of years ago these shelters were used by people to live. Archeologists can trace i 9000 years of history in these shelters in the Ozark Mountains. Visitors can find two types of art in these mountains and shelters: pictographs and petroglyphs. Pictographs are paintings drawn on the surface of rocks mostly with red and black colors that the native people created through minerals. Petroglyphs are made by pecking the rocks and creating some shapes. You’ll find plenty of this art in the Ozark mountains in Arkansas.

Painted Rock (San Luis Obispo County, California)

Located in California, Painted Rock is a sacred place for Yokuts, Chumash, and Salinan people. Around 3000-4000 years ago, native Americans started painting their sacred images within the alcove. You can still see the pieces of art at least 200 – 1000 years old. Over the years, the walls have been vandalized with graffiti; hence, the older paintings are not preserved. However, it is still one of the most iconic places to witness native American art.

Spanish Ship (East County, San Diego, California)

In an undisclosed location, somewhere on the east side of San Diego, a huge boulder carries possibly the oldest interpretation of rock art. There’s a replica of the same boulder present at the maritime museum of San Diego.

Judaculla Rock (Cullowhee, North Carolina)

This specific rock has 1548 carvings, which is more than on any other rock in the eastern United States. Its whole existence has been a mystery, as experts have failed to understand the art. Some local historians say the recent ones depict a map of local resources.

Reef Bay Trail (US Virgin Islands)

This is one of the most beautiful [examples of] rock art found in the US Virgin Islands and pays homage to the Taino civilization, which flourished from 900-1490s. The basalt rock has been decorated beautifully in a space stretching about 20 feet.

Petroglyphs, Pictographs, and Fossils

Dinosaur National Monument is famous for dinosaur fossils and river rafting on the Green River and Yampa River, but it is a treasure trove of amazing rock art. My personal favorite rock art sites are found along the river as we float on our 4- and 5-day raft trips.

I really enjoy the sites found in Echo Park where the Yampa River and Green River join forces. Echo Park is an archaeology treasure trove with multiple sites in several locations with petroglyphs and pictographs from the Fremont culture. The Fremont culture inhabited the region 700 to 1200 years ago. This indigenous culture did not leave a lot of evidence of their lifestyle in Dinosaur National Monument except for some fabulous art sites.

My personal favorite is a hard to access rock art site located on the cliff face of Steamboat Rock. This site is only accessible by rafting the river and a short hike up to the base of a magnificent geologic feature.

Echo Park has several sites accessible by car and viewable from the roadside. [Although] this road is only recommended for high clearance vehicles and 4-wheel drive, its definitely worth the trip-one of the most scenic drives in Colorado.

Outdoor recreation and visitation

Outdoor recreation and visitation are the two most powerful tools in the conservationist’s PR kit.

As we saw with climate change, a PR campaign can only take you so far. Scientists, movies, documentaries, television, and social media did manage to make a dent. But physically experiencing the damage by seeing it in person is an entirely different story.

Growing up in Indiana and Illinois, my childhood was largely outdoor-based, but there were never any enormous expanses of preserved land to enjoy and explore like there are in western states. Midwest economies are driven by a lot of agriculture, and children have a very small sphere of perspective about the great big world out there. A child that sees no realistic opportunity to ever experience the more magical and wild places of the world might care less about recycling, proper trash disposal, water table pollution, or biodiversity. The wheels underpinning civilization often mask the real cost of things through economies of scale. You throw your trash into a bin. Maybe you throw your trash out the window. Who cares? It goes somewhere over there, someone else will pick it up, and it disappears into the ether. It costs nothing, and it’s not really your problem.

In 2011, I spent some time at the Marine Corps Mountain Warfare Training Center in Bridgeport, California. There were some stringent regulations there about environmental protection that make you roll your eyes when you’re performing military duties. But when the time came that someone spilled diesel on the ground and we had to dig out the ground to make sure the contamination didn’t spread, nobody had any problem with this manual labor. These midwestern young men had never experienced total immersion in such a spectacularly beautiful and untouched place. We all cared for it in a much deeper way by experiencing it than anyone giving us an environmental lecture could hope to do.

The unfathomable size of the sequoias, the fresh pine smell of the little ground plants that filled the air, and the brilliant smog-free sunrise and sunset were enchanting. I fell deeply in love with nature during my time there, and I have never forgotten it.

When I was around 16, I worked at Best Buy. One of the sales tactics we were taught was to put the product in the customer’s hands. This works because people begin to take mental ownership of the product while they’re holding it. They want it. They’re enjoying the fantasy of owning it. Tourism works in the same way.

While not everyone can get up and move to more secluded or wild areas to enjoy them year-round, an enormous number of people weekend and vacation in and around our National and State Parks, Forests, and Wilderness areas. In the past 10 years, 51% of Americans have declared that they annually enjoy outdoor recreation of some kind. I would guess that number has grown higher in recent years as the internet has pulled us all closer together 24/7 and made the “wanderlust” lifestyle more appealing through social media.

In this space, the outdoors represent freedom: freedom from bills, emails, phone calls, text messages, work schedules, the boss, car exhaust, sirens, and the constant stream of negativity and noise coming from politics, television, and social media. For a nation that claims freedom as a foundational principle, the areas in which it may be experienced are dwindling. People are becoming more aware of this.

Astronauts have said that viewing the Earth from above has given many of them a new perspective about the world. When people visit tourist sites and see how small and fragile even our most enormous and majestic places are, many of them are changed. Outdoor conservation is one thing that both the right and the left actually agree on. Hunters and anglers generate more revenue for outdoor conservation than the Sierra Club. People that enjoy and use the outdoors understand how limited it is becoming as cities spread and trash shows up on the banks of protected rivers. The spread of civilization is beginning to threaten their favorite hobbies and pastimes.

We don’t need less visitation or recreation in the world’s wild places, we simply need better management, enforcement, and more protected areas. The American Outdoors Act is fixing a lot of upkeep issues with our outdoor management institutions and facilities, but this is more a war of hearts and minds than money.

Outdoor recreational opportunities can be limited for people that have little disposable income or little experience in the joy of it. Our wildlands bring out the best in us. There’s drama, romance, liberty, solitude, purity, chaos, and natural order. It’s sacrificing the ease and comfort of civilization in the great pursuit of adventure. The wild is the only place left where you can discover something that has never been seen before. Increasing access through recreational opportunities will win hearts and minds once people experience feeling small again. It shouldn’t be limited to an easy drive on a paved road. Like a runner’s high, the reward is in the sacrifice.

It may take sweat and solid footwear to get to a glorious waterfall, but everyone that has been there knowing why it is better than looking at a photo online.

I recently started a personal program in the past couple of years that I plan to take mainstream. While living in the Phoenix area, I would often visit the wild horse bands of the Salt River. The grace, majesty, and beauty of these animals are hard to beat for a 20-minute drive from home. Unfortunately, boaters, tubers, and campers have absolutely wrecked the shoreline with trash. No matter how many volunteer cleanups were organized, the manpower available to combat the litter is simply overwhelmed.

It occurred to me that like many things, we may be able to spontaneously crowdsource this issue instead of attempting to create Facebook groups for activists to whine about how other people aren’t doing enough. If we boil the old, “leave it better than you found it,” adage to its core, we find that the minimum effort necessary to leave a place better than you found it is to simply pick up one piece of the trash whenever you visit somewhere. This, “Just One Piece,” initiative has been my personal mission for a few years. Now that I live at the gates of Rocky Mountain National Park, I find myself often coming back from the park with a cigarette butt or a cargo pocket full of pieces of foil and plastic wrappers.

The impact I’m making may be small on its own, but if we could convince the other 51% of Americans that enjoy outdoor recreation at least once per year, we could be picking up nearly 200 million pieces of trash every year while expending no money or effort beyond bending over one time per trip and putting one piece of trash in our pockets. It’s a simple solution to a complex problem. But if we can win the hearts and minds of the public to put in so little effort that it is forgettable, we can make a world of difference.

Restoring rather than protecting

In detail, it is not as straightforward and of course, it depends on the ways nature conservation happens.

Nature conservation in its traditional forms is not entirely open to tourism. This type of nature conservation aimed to restrict human access and protect nature mainly from human interactions. That, by default, is not very compatible with tourism.

But there are new fresh approaches to nature conservation such as rewilding that actually encourage interactions with humans. Thus, it allows for or even invites, tourism initiatives. It calls for restoring rather than protecting, which conserves nature in its functional forms and without conservationists having to interfere too much.

A great example is the Rhodope mountains in Bulgaria. Nature conservation efforts realized that in order for nature to be conserved and restored to its functional forms, large grazers need to be introduced to fill in the gap of healthy nutrient cycles of the landscape.

This costs a lot of money and the local rural communities that suffer from urbanization – young people leaving to cities – could not afford to support it. In fact, they didn’t even understand the reasoning.

But tourism initiatives really help to make the local communities reconnect as well as finance the investments in bison reintroduction. Bison roaming the Rhodope mountains then contribute to a healthy nutrient cycle to soils, help graze areas that would otherwise change because of overgrowing vegetation.

But most importantly, it attracts tourism to the region bringing more money and thus fuel for restoring human-nature relationships as well as help to nurture local communities.

Tourism in the Rhodopoe mountains, therefore, creates a win-win-win situation. It supports the nature conservation efforts, connects local communities with nature, and creates unique experiences for the tourists.

Give individuals opportunities to experience beauty, and adventure

As humans, we form bonds with the place when we have meaningful experiences there. Some families want to go back to a particular oceanfront or mountain retreat again and again, notably because they have come to associate that place with positive family time, fun activities, personal growth experiences, special relationships, and times of awe and beauty. When we as travel professionals or outdoor guides provide meaningful experiences in outdoor places, our guests learn, almost without thinking, to value and treasure those places. It is not a large step then to educate them about how to care for those places. Taking our trash with us when we hike, not damaging trees by carving our initials in them, not pasting big boulders with ugly spray-painted graffiti – these are not merely the rules of outdoor behavior. These are the expressions of a heart that loves a place. So rather than teaching the rules about caring for the outdoors first, let’s give individuals opportunities to experience joy, companionship, beauty, and adventure in these marvelous places. Then, with a little guidance and education, the practices and behaviors of conservation and environmental care will flow naturally. People will work and fight to protect what they love and value, and that is often true of people in wild and natural places.

As an adventure guide, I take a lot of young people into the outdoors. And I find that if I, for example, simply include a trash pickup after the hike, and give children a hands-on opportunity to beautify a place, they become fiercely protective of that place, and almost indignant when they see someone littering or defacing the area. Psychologists say that we often think our way into a way of behaving, but I would observe that we can also behave our way into a way of thinking. When we involve people in these behaviors, we are helping to shape their values, and hopefully, raising a generation that will forever value and protect wild places.

Going outdoors is a lot of fun. There’s a lot of adventure to unfold because there are so many things that we can do outdoors. There’s a lot of benefits to going outdoors, and part of that is helping in the conservation of nature.

Here are ways outdoor activities and tourist spots can help in the conservation of nature:

Increases support for conservation

Tourism and outdoor activities can help in giving more support for conservation. When we go to tourist spots and do outdoor activities, we become more curious and want to learn about the world around us. Being more curious about outdoor activities can spark some community movement for nature conversation.

Finances conservation

Tourist spots that people go to usually have fees. But they aren’t only for the maintenance of the place. They help in financing the conservation of nature. We wouldn’t be able to conserve nature more effectively if there were no funds. So, by visiting tourist spots, we’re already doing our part in the conservation of nature.

Spreads awareness

When we do outdoor activities like hiking or camping, we know more about the places we traverse. We realize that every mountain has a story. Every place we set up our tent is important. We become more aware of what we have to do for nature.

There are a lot of benefits to outdoor activities and tourist spots. As they say, it is the great outdoors. Learn to explore and you never know how much help you can give.

Dinosaur National Monument

Without a doubt, Dinosaur National Monument is the best place in Utah (and the entire United States) for paleontology and fossil enthusiasts. There’s a good reason this [site] is the dinosaur capital of the world. You get to visit a quarry that used to be an active dig where the paleontologists found a bunch of dinosaur bones. It’s really quite awe-inspiring. I also love that you can get in a bit of hiking while checking out this cool landscape and seeing more fossils and petroglyphs.

For people who prefer to stay indoors, the BYU Museum of Paleontology is definitely an underrated attraction. Plus, it’s free, which is great for large families on a budget. It’s also really cool to see real paleontologists at work here.

20 Mile Dinosaur Tracks

For anyone interested in paleontology, visiting the 20 Mile Dinosaur Tracks in Utah is a must! They are located along Hole in the Rock Road near Escalante, Utah. This area has over 350 individual dinosaur tracks that have been preserved in the sandstone rock. What’s amazing is you can walk unrestricted amongst the very same places as the plant-eating sauropods once did over 150 million years ago.

U-Dig Fossils

Utah is a top destination for paleontology and fossil buffs. One of the best places to go in the state to look at fossils is Dinosaur National Monument. Here you can spot the fossils of dinosaurs that once roamed these lands.

If you’re looking to take home your own fossil souvenir, head to U-Dig Fossils near Delta, Utah. Here you can scour the freshly excavated shale to look for fossil trilobites. Anything you find you can keep.

Show them how fun being outside

First, start small and make it exciting. If your children love being inside, they may not enjoy outdoor activities as much as you expect them to. The last thing you want is to make them miserable. The goal is to show them how fun being outside is. Introduce them gradually and don’t force anything.

Another thing, find something they love and work with that. If you notice that the kids love the water, do activities that involve that. Take them swimming, canoeing, or paddleboarding. This will make it easier for them to want to be outside more. If you have no idea what they like, try different things and note their reactions.

My kids love the water and, fortunately, so do I. We got them started on watersports when they were young and they love it. They don’t need any persuasion to go outside.

Kids get cold easier

You can never bring enough layers. It’s better for them to be overdressed and have to remove layers than to be cold and uncomfortable. Always bring way more layers than you think you’ll need. Extra socks, hats, sweaters, and scarves can save a trip.

Short hair is easier to clean on the go
We keep my five-year-old daughter’s hair chin-length because it’s easier to clean while we’re traveling. I’m sure she’ll want to grow it out in a year or two when she starts thinking about those types of things, but until she asks, I’ll keep it short for the sake of our day trips.

When you have young kids, always be prepared to leave early if you have to
One of the realities of parenthood is that you don’t always get to stay for the entire event. You have to accept that before you go anywhere, especially outdoors. I’ve seen parents get very frustrated because they had to leave a picnic or BBQ due to a sick or tired kid, but it is what it is. As long as you manage your expectations and understand that you might have to leave before the event is over, you’ll always have a good time.

Prepare a master list for outdoor activities

As a mom of two, I know that outdoor activities are very important for our kids to develop independence, social skills, and self-confidence as well. However, with the pandemic happening, it’s become harder for our kids to participate in anything outdoors. So, here are my tips:

• Brief your kids about some rules. Before going out, make sure you talk to your kids about following the physical distancing rule. Also, remind them to be more mindful of the things they touch outside, and always carry their own hand sanitizer as well. More importantly, make sure your kids know that they have to keep their masks on at all times. While you may assume that your kids might already know the rules or if you’ve discussed them before, it’s still better to have a short briefing before you actually go out. This way, their minds are refreshed on the do’s and don’ts.
• Choose low-risk activities. When choosing what activities to do outside your home, go for those that don’t involve a lot of people. Personally, I recommend going fishing, hiking, or taking a picnic in your yard. Other activities you can do include biking, boating, or drive-in movies.
• Prepare a master list for outdoor activities. Outdoor activities with your kids require planning. And since you’ll be doing it multiple times, it’s good practice to have a pre-written list of things to do and bring before the activity. That way, you don’t have to constantly remind yourself of everything you need to do before your kid goes out. It gives you peace of mind and it can also reduce the prep time you need beforehand since all you have to do is follow the list.

Always guarantee the safety of the place

A few things to keep in mind if you bring your child out to play is to always guarantee the safety of the place you’re going to and keeping an emergency kit within your reach. As the pandemic is still very much among us, I wouldn’t recommend taking your kids out but you can enjoy the sun from your backyard. Before you bring out your kids to play, make sure that your backyard is a clean and safe space to play in. Double-checking beforehand helps minimize the chances of your child getting hurt or other emergencies.

It’s also best to keep an emergency kit within your reach at all times. Doing so will let you respond quickly and more efficiently. If emergencies occur, parents and guardians should keep a clear mind in order to give the children the care they need.

Tips and tricks

Speaking as a backpacker who pushed through the “figuring things out” stage long before ever trying any kind of guided trip, I can say that the biggest things non-guided adventurers are missing out on are accelerated learning and a sense of direction. When you first decide to [follow in the footsteps of] your favorite Instagrammer and go backpacking, it can be challenging because you don’t even really know what backpacking is. Having someone with a deeper understanding by your side to “guide” your experience can help you get a feel for not only how to do it but how to appreciate it. They’re great at making new and difficult experiences feel more comfortable, which ultimately will give you more opportunity to appreciate them and more confidence when you set out on your own.

Another seemingly obvious thing, though one that doesn’t become truly apparent until it happens for you, is just how much a guide can accelerate your learning. You can learn tips and tricks in one session with a guide that would have taken you dozens [of trips] to figure out on your own. Even simple things like picking a campsite, setting up a tent, or filtering water can be daunting to a newbie. A guide will make them easy. All of this adds up to better experiences for you in the future and at a much, much faster pace.

Those are the big things that I think people are missing out on if they don’t have a guide.

Interesting details

No matter how much thorough planning and research you do, once you get out into the wilderness, it can be difficult to navigate unfamiliar terrain. If you want to make sure you see all the highlights and hidden gems a place has to offer, it’s a really good idea to go with a guide.

The beauty of having a guide with you is that, unlike you, they know the terrain. It’s like the difference between wandering around a new city you’ve never been to before by yourself and having a local show you around and take you to all their favourite spots.

With a guide, you won’t waste any time getting lost or staring at a map trying to figure out which way to go. Saving this time will maximize the amount of activity you can fit into a day.

The main thing, though, is that you won’t miss anything special. An experienced guide will be able to direct your attention to far more interesting details than you’re unlikely to uncover on your own.

Outdoor knowledge and methods

While the majority of outdoor enthusiasts believe they don’t need help and their skills are sufficient to be successful, which I’m not disagreeing with, but there is something you miss out on by not engaging with a guide.

Depending on where you are exploring the outdoors, the people of that culture or area may have a totally unique way to do certain things (whether that’s fishing, hunting, etc.). For example, I’m sure an outdoor enthusiast can visit Virginia and hook themselves up on a big catfish just fine. However, would an outdoor enthusiast be knowledgeable about other methods of catching catfish, such as noodling?

While an outdoor enthusiast can have a great time without a guide, there is the potential they’ll miss out on so much more by not engaging the guides and experts in that specific region. Most outdoor enthusiasts I know are continually trying to learn, and you are shortchanging yourself by not soaking up as much information as possible from as many sources as possible.

Knowledge and experience

I personally believe it is better to have a local guide to guide you on treks because they know the land more than your TripAdvisor site. This is vital knowledge and experience from people who have explored these forests and lands more times than you’ve traveled there. So, why waste time trying to find something yourself when they can guide you directly to it while giving some fun history behind it. Not to mention, most guides have certifications in providing proper medical care in the event of an accident. Don’t risk your life [because of] your pride. Time is money. Make the most of your vacation. Be safe and trust the locals. They live there; you don’t. Support the land in supporting those who take care of it.