Mena
"From Rich Mountain, the Ouachitas roll out in blue ridgelines that seem to have no end."
A mountain gateway town beneath Rich Mountain, where a scenic drive along the Talimena skyway unspools ridge after forested ridge of the Ouachitas. Lia and I came for one overlook and ended up chasing the sunset along the entire mountain road, unwilling to turn back.
Mena grew up as a railroad town in the 1890s, laid out with wide streets by a Dutch investor who never actually visited, and it still functions today as the practical gateway to Arkansas’s wildest mountain range. We stopped for lunch at a diner on the town square, where a mural of the old depot covered one wall, and a waitress told us — unprompted, proudly — that Mena was the only town in America with a Dutch name most people can’t pronounce correctly. We never did get it quite right.
The Talimena Scenic Drive
The real draw is just south of downtown: the Talimena Scenic Drive, fifty-four miles of two-lane blacktop that rides the crest of Rich Mountain and Winding Stair Mountain through Arkansas into Oklahoma, with pull-offs at nearly every bend. We drove it in early evening, the light going gold across ridge after forested ridge of the Ouachita National Forest, stopping at the Rich Mountain overlook to watch the Arkansas River valley spread out below. Lia counted seven distinct mountain layers fading into haze before the sun finally dropped and we admitted we’d have to finish the drive in the dark.
Queen Wilhelmina State Park
Near the drive’s high point sits Queen Wilhelmina State Park, home to a rebuilt mountaintop lodge nicknamed the “Castle in the Sky,” originally constructed by the same Dutch railroad investors who founded Mena and named for the young queen of the Netherlands. We had dinner on the lodge’s restaurant terrace, elk and deer sometimes wandering the grounds below, then walked a short nature trail through mountain laurel just as fireflies started lifting off the underbrush. It felt improbably remote for a spot barely twenty minutes from town.
Getting There
Mena sits along U.S. Highway 71 in west-central Arkansas, about two and a half hours west of Little Rock or two hours southeast of Fort Smith Regional Airport by car. The town also anchors the eastern end of the Talimena Scenic Drive, making it a natural starting point for the full mountain-ridge route into southeastern Oklahoma.
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