Day 10

All through the night last night we heard yipping and howling, undoubtedly from coyotes, but aside from that slept well in the bags with liners. (A+ to Campmor's down bags.) We were up and packing by 9:00 CST when Laura first noticed a bloody fish head on the ground while on her way to the trash can. The area is open to fishing/hunting and while it was understandable for it to be there (field butchering is common), the hunters should know better... For us campers it's really not cool to sleep directly next to a tasty snack for wild animals. To our horror, on our final walkthrough of our campsite before leaving, we were shocked and appalled to realize we had set up camp amongst a whole bunch of different kinds of meat discarded on the ground. Apparently, we had missed all that in the dark when we arrived last night and were sleeping in what could have been a buffet for the coyotes (or whatever else they have in Kansas).
Trying to make up for oversleeping a little, we decided to skip over a hot breakfast and eat our snacks in the car and get our drive on. We watched the prairie turn to farmland while driving across the entire length of Oklahoma. We felt very authentic with the Oklahoma license plate on our truck until, of course, we would pull in for gas or go in for a cup of coffee and stick out like the crazy rain-jacket wearing, mountain loving, city people we are.
Hours passed. Many hours. And finally as it got dark, we crossed into Arkansas, made a left, and drove into the Ozark National Forest. Again, we had decided this at practically the last moment, but had a much easier time finding this campground than the last. On the way in we saw some wildlife (opossum, deer, raccoon, and shadowy bigfoots), drove up and down a couple mountains, and found our destination for the night. After a quick and chilly camp set up, we saw there was a bunch of firewood piled next to the firepit and a couple of pieces of half-burnt ones still in there so we took advantage of the opportunity to have a fire and burn up someone's leftovers. For the second night in a row, the temperature was in the 20's, and as we huddled around our fire we heard the coyotes again, this time MANY more of them and much louder because the sound was reverberating off the mountains and through the valleys. One of the sequences(?) of howling was strikingly melodic and it was creepy how much it sounded like singing. We managed to get a long series of howls in a movie on our camera, though this one was not nearly as harmonic. We let the fire burn down and went to sleep.