A spa town wrapped in forest
Downtown Hot Springs sits in a notch between mountains, and the mountains are national park: the ridges above Bathhouse Row are hardwood and pine right down to the back fences of Park Avenue and Whittington Avenue. The old neighborhoods climbed those slopes a century ago, which means the city's yard trees are big, old, and growing out of thin rocky soil over novaculite — shallow roots holding tall trunks over rooflines. Every wet spring wind tests that arrangement.
Outside the city the picture changes but the problem doesn't. Lake Hamilton and Lake Ouachita are lined with pines that were young when the lots were platted and are now towering over docks and decks. The Village was cut into twenty-six thousand acres of Ouachita woods, and its half-acre lots keep more trees than people. North up Arkansas 7 toward Jessieville and west past Royal, the county turns to national forest and pine plantation, where drought years bring the beetles and ice years bring the limbs. And the ash along the creeks has been on borrowed time since the emerald ash borer was confirmed in Garland County in 2017.
