Arkansas River Valley full of hunting opportunities
Arkansas River Valley full of hunting opportunities
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11.01.10 - 11:55 am
Story date: Oct. 31, 2010
By Joey Fisher
Fish Tales
Last week while spending a little time swapping deer stories at Wilkins Brothers
Outdoors, a group of young men from Arkansas Tech University dropped in to
browse the gun section and see if any of us knew of any good hunting spots in the
area for them to do a little deer hunting.
As we began to tell them about some of their options, I realized a lot of people
might not know about all of the hunting opportunities that actually exist on public
lands - all within an hour of the greater Russellville area.
Three or four years ago, I comprised a top-10 list of public hunting lands and,
with a little modification, have reconstructed it for those of you who are looking
for a few more places to do some hunting.
These areas provide hunters with a wide array of hunting opportunities and
habitat, along with several varieties of game to pursue. We are actually blessed to
have public hunting land that is not only accessible, but loaded with plentiful
amounts of game to pursue.
Holla Bend National Wildlife Refuge is not just a state treasure. It is a national
treasure and a bow hunter's paradise. Holla Bend is located along the banks of the
Arkansas River and is surrounded by the Old Arkansas River Channel. It is an
awesome fishery as well.
Holla Bend serves as one of the state's top waterfowl resting areas and provides
some great habitat for migrating birds. Although waterfowl hunting is not
allowed on the refuge itself, the surrounding area usually benefits from the large
number of birds who fly in and out of the refuge each year.
World-class deer hunting is the main attraction. Holla Bend is a bow hunter's
dream, and there is no other public land in the country with a better opportunity
to harvest a trophy deer. Holla Bend is also blessed with an abundance of turkeys,
but taking a turkey with a bow is no easy task.
We are sandwiched between two other extremely large tracts of land that have
lots of wildlife -the Ozark National Forest to our north and the Ouachita National
Forest to our south surround the Arkansas River Valley with some of the best
forests in the entire United States. Both provide acres and acres of small game,
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