It doesn't feel like fall yet...

Today has finally brought some relief from the heat, humidity, and yes, drought, of the past weeks...No matter what the calendar says about fall starting in the third week of September, it never feels like that this time of year in southern Arkansas!  Yes, we have a lot of the fall trappings, such as kids back in school and football (and tailgating) back in style...But the only leaves changing colors down here are those succumbing to drought.  As you can see in the picture above, Stephen and his fellow bandmates are still playing at halftime of these evening games in shorts...and our tailgating the other weekend at the UAM football game was a warm and sunny affair:

I spent several days traveling parts of Arkansas for work recently, looking at old stands of timber...and some of the wildlife that lives there...Saw my first tarantulas in the wild while on the Ouachita National Forest on this trip...The one pictured below was actually being killed by a large wasp called a "tarantula hawk" that preys on these big spiders (note how big the wasp is itself):

We were looking for mature to old-growth stands of timber for my agency as a part of a related effort, so I got to see some pretty cools stands of old trees that we're huge, but had lots of character:

The oaks in the picture above are probably 150-200 years old...and the shortleaf pine pictured below on a different site is probably just about that old as well:

One of the recent games Stephen played with the band in the nearby town of McGehee was another warm evening, with lots of dusty, hazy time due to harvesting of the soybeans, corn, and rice that was going on:

Made for some really pretty sunsets!  Right after their halftime performance, Stephen and I drove up to north-central Arkansas to meet up with Hope and Beth and our archeological friends and colleagues for this year's annual meeting of the Arkansas Archeological Society.  Hope participated in the Society's leadership meetings and I gave a talk on the cinnabar mining site documentation project I've been working on.  We had a grand time!  The final part of this meeting was a Sunday morning field trip to a large rock or bluff shelter right next to a golf course in the resort community we were staying at for this meeting:

This bluff shelter is known primarily for its petroglyphs that were originally carved by Native Americans many hundreds of years ago, and added to by more than a century of other visitors.  In the picture below, you can see some of both--the meanings symbols carved have long since been lost to time:

Lots of other historical graffiti has been carved into the soft rock of this bluff shelter, which is a truly impressive feature:

There is also a small museum on the top of the bluff above, which we visited and Beth rested by:

We enjoyed our weekend visit with Beth--she came over with some of our archeology friends from Fayetteville, where she's working on her first semester as a college student.

Better go--almost time for one of those signs of fall--the Green Bay Packers game!