Forrest L. Wood Crowley's Ridge Nature Center

Crowley's Ridge is one of the odder landforms in the country. In a region defined by dead-flat river bottom, it stands as much as 200 feet above the surrounding plain, a forested spine of loess and gravel that stretches from southeastern Missouri to Helena, Arkansas, on the Mississippi River. The ridge takes its name from Benjamin Crowley, an early settler who established a homestead on the high ground in the 1820s, drawn like many others to land that stayed dry when the Delta flooded.

For a long time no one could agree on how it formed. The leading explanation today is that the ridge is an erosional remnant, a strip of older land left standing when the ancient Mississippi and Ohio Rivers ran on either side of it and slowly wore away everything around it. Over the ages, wind piled fine, wind-blown silt called loess on top, deepening the soil and helping the ridge hold its shape. That loess cap is what gives the ridge its steep, easily gullied slopes and its distinctive forest.

One reason the ridge feels so different is that it grows a different forest. On these well-drained loess slopes you find tulip poplar, American beech, sugar maple, and cucumber magnolia, trees far more typical of the Appalachian and Ohio Valley uplands than of the wet Arkansas lowlands. Botanists have long treated the ridge as a kind of biological bridge, carrying eastern woodland species westward into a region that would otherwise be too flat and swampy for them.

The nature center's trails let you walk through that forest firsthand. In spring the slopes fill with wildflowers, and in fall the ridge glows with the reds and golds of maple and beech, a display you simply do not get out in the surrounding farm country. It is a small taste of the mountains set down in the middle of the Delta.

The center interprets the animals of two very different worlds that meet along the ridge. From the uplands come white-tailed deer, wild turkey, and the woodland songbirds of the ridge forest, while the surrounding lowlands host the herons, wood ducks, and turtles of Delta sloughs and bottomland woods. Aquariums and displays inside bring the fish and reptiles of both habitats up close.

The wider region is one of the great flyways for migrating waterfowl in North America, and the flooded fields and wetlands of the Delta draw enormous numbers of ducks and geese each winter. The center is a good place to learn what to look for before heading out to the ridge trails or the nearby lakes and forests.

Spring brings wildflowers to the loess slopes and a rush of returning songbirds, one of the best times to walk the ridge trails. Summer is green and humid, typical of the Delta, with the shaded ridge forest offering some relief from the heat.

Fall is arguably the ridge's finest season, when the beech and maple turn and the higher ground shows color the flat farmland never can. Winter is quiet and often gray, but it is prime time for waterfowl out on the surrounding wetlands, and the bare ridge reveals the shape of the land beneath the trees.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.