The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has been seeing its local campgrounds fill up leading to Monday’s eclipse. KTLO, Classic Hits and The Boot’s Heather Loftis visits with Dylan Edwards from the Corps.
Listen:
LOFTIS: Dylan, you worked the night shift last night at the campgrounds. It’s been a busy weekend for our Corps of Engineers. Are the campgrounds full?
EDWARDS: Well, you know, Heather, we started filling up on Friday. We had a lot of people come in Friday. We had more coming in yesterday, and what didn’t fill up yesterday is going to finish up tonight. So we will be full tonight. Our reservations are at 100%, and we’ve got people from all over the country coming in. So we do have a big crowd.
LOFTIS: Any good conversations from people far away that are excited to be here?
EDWARDS: We have had lots of good conversations with folks. People who are excited about eclipses, they follow them all over the country when they have the opportunity. We’ve got some folks that have different telescopes and different things like that to watch from the campground. And so there seems to be a lot of excitement in the air in the campgrounds right now.
LOFTIS: Do you expect there to be much traffic on the on the lakes this week or tomorrow during the eclipse?
EDWARDS: Well, we do expect there to be quite a bit. I know I’ve talked with some of the folks from the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, and they’re gonna have boats out there. And so, we do expect there to be traffic on the lakes. Of course, we do know that there’s lots of traffic in our parks because we can prove that through our reservation. So we’ve got boats prepared to get out on the lake if necessary. We’ve got them staged with some of our different parks. I think we’re about as prepared as we can be for that.
LOFTIS: Are you treating this any differently than you would the Fourth of July weekend?
EDWARDS: Absolutely we are. We’ve created kind of different patrol schedules for the rangers. Normally they would cover different areas of the lake where they may go to three or four different parks throughout a patrol, and we’ve built the schedule this year to pretty well put Rangers in one park so that they can stay put in some of our parks that we know will possibly get even busier like Cranfield and Quarry below Norfork Dam. We’ve got two and three rangers posted up in some of those parks. So that’s in the event that traffic does get bad, and they can’t get to other places that we’ve got coverage of where we need to have that.
LOFTIS: Again, I want to make sure everyone heard 100% occupancy at all of our local Corps campgrounds.
EDWARDS: That’s right, as far as the campgrounds that opened April 1. So we’ve got most of our parks that open April 1. There’s a few that don’t open until May 1, such as Henderson, Panther Bay, Oakland Park. But all of our campsites and campgrounds that opened May 1, which are all the big ones, Cranfield, Quarry, Robinson Point, Bidwell Gamaliel, even Highway 125 over on Bull Shoals, which is in the line of totality. All of those are 100% booked up.
LOFTIS: Have you heard from your friends in the state parks? I mean, Bull Shoals-White River, how are they looking?
EDWARDS: They’re full. Of course, those folks down there are always full. But, you know, it’s no surprise that they’re filled up for this event as well. I have been in communication with with the superintendent out there because we, of course, you know, we’ve got Bull Shoals Dam, which is something that we’re looking out for, and, and of course, we’re both kind of right there close to the dam, and so we’re going to do our best to keep traffic off the dams. We’ve got signs posted on, and both Norfork and Bull Shoals Dam. Letting folks know that we’re not going to allow any eclipse viewing from the dam. And so we’ll be working with them on that.
LOFTIS: Is the dam going to be closed during that time?
EDWARDS: Well, the dam’s not going to be closed to traffic. It’s a state highway. Both of them are state highways.
LOFTIS: Just no parking on the dam during that time?
EDWARDS: That’s right. We, we would never allow parking on the dam. And similarly to the firework show on Bull Shoals, we don’t allow spectators to set up chairs and watch the fireworks show from the dam either. And we’re gonna follow that same principle for this event as well. Try to get people and traffic to continue moving on across the dam.
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