Ouachita National Forest: The First National Forest Created from Public Land

The Ouachita National Forest holds a distinction that most visitors to its trails and campgrounds never learn: it was the first national forest established from federal public-domain land in the South and East. In nineteen oh seven, President Theodore Roosevelt set aside the Arkansas National Forest, which was later renamed the Ouachita, under the authority of the Forest Reserve Act. Previous national forests in the West had been carved from existing federal land holdings. The Ouachita was the precedent for creating national forests from the public domain in the South and East, where the federal government had not retained large swaths of undeveloped land the way it had in the mountain West.

The Ouachita Mountains themselves are geologically unusual. Unlike the Appalachians and the Rockies, which run generally north to south, the Ouachita range runs east to west, one of only a few major mountain ranges in the United States oriented that way. The range extends from central Arkansas into eastern Oklahoma, and its rocks were compressed and folded over several hundred million years into the ridgelines that now carry the Ouachita Trail and give the forest its characteristic terrain of parallel ridges separated by narrow valleys.

The forest covers approximately one point eight million acres, the largest national forest in the South. The Ouachita Trail runs two hundred twenty-three miles through its length, from Talimena State Park in Oklahoma to Pinnacle Mountain State Park near Little Rock, and is regarded as one of the finest long-distance trails in the South.

The forest is also the source of Ouachita River water that supplies much of south Arkansas and northeast Louisiana. The management question that has run through the Ouachita's century-plus of federal administration is the same one that has run through all southern national forests: how much timber, how much water, how much recreation, and for whom.