MINGO NATIONAL WILDLIFE REFUGE, DAY 2.
Day 42 – We left for Mingo this morning for day 2 of our visit. We’re still only one of two campers at the campground. So quiet, so nice. On the way to the Refuge, we stopped to take a picture of the bales of cotton by the side of the road waiting to be picked up for processing. The sun was out and it looked like it would be a nice day.
One of the reasons we really like this wildlife refuge is the auto tours. One option is the Ozark Highlands Auto Tour which took us several hours to complete. It’s only 17 miles long but the way we do the auto tours is to drive extremely slowly, with the foot barely touching the pedal – I drive and Rob pretty-much hangs out the window with the camera. It’s so much fun to study every detail of the ground, water, trees, and sky – like really stopping to smell the roses! – and you can see some amazing things. It sounds like we’re nuts, and we know it would drive a lot of people crazy to do this, but we love it. Today we saw no one at the Refuge; but some days when creeping along, we see others doing the same thing.
We did this Auto Tour today with the sun going in and out of the clouds. The road is a narrow, gravel, one-way road that travels from near the beginning of the refuge, then all around the outer side of the refuge, finishing back in the refuge again. It travels up and down hills and curves through forests of the Ozark mountains with places to pull over for the views. There is the huge Monopoly Marsh, Fox Pond, and the large May Pond where we stopped to eat our lunch. Sometimes you are driving through swamp lands with cypress trees and sometimes you are driving through farmlands; the terrain and scenery change continuously. One thing we saw in a forested area that had many streams was a large number of trees that had been chomped on (almost artistically) by a beaver. We hoped to see this beaver, but did not. Another fun item – there were two people horseback riding on this Tour road. What a great way to spend your day.
After the Auto Tour ended back at the inner Refuge area, we continued on the road by Ditches 1, 2, and 3. (On the Refuge Auto Tour which we did yesterday and will do in more detail tomorrow, you drive along roads between “ditches” that have water in them. The numerous ditches have the water controlled and they can be near completely full down to almost empty. The wildlife you see varies accordingly. Kayaking is allowed on some of the many ponds. Fishing from many bridges that cross the ditches is also popular. Most of the migrating ducks, geese, and waterfowl are found in and around these ditches.
Tomorrow we will spend our final day here driving around all the ditches. This will take most of the day. The high today was 57 degrees and it was partly sunny.