(light music) Hello.

My name is B.T.

Jones.

I'm a park interpreter here at Petit Jean State Park.

Park interpreter is a person who interprets the park, and by that, it means that if you visit the park, I help you get to know things better here, show you things you may not think to look for.

Petit Jean State Park is Arkansas's oldest and first state park, and we're here in the exhibit room.

This visitor center exhibit room is a great place for you to come to find out about the park before you ever go out into the park.

You can get maps, you can find where to go and there are wonderful things out there to see.

And we're about to head out to the park and see what we can find today.

(light music) This is Cedar Falls just to the side of me.

It is considered by most people to be the centerpiece of the park.

It is a 95 foot waterfall, an icon in the state of Arkansas.

(sound of waterfall) When the rainfall is up, Cedar Falls fairly roars sometimes and you can hike down to Cedar Falls from Mather Lodge, just a one mile down, one mile back hike, and the trail is rated as strenuous.

So if you don't want to do that hard trail to go down to the waterfall, you can always come here where we are now to the Cedar Falls overlook and get a good look at it from up above.

It's a pretty impressive place.

Where we're standing now at the gravesite overlook in the park is also called Stout's Point because of a previous landowner that had land across the river, the Arkansas River from here.

But this is one of the most scenic places at Petit Jean and a lot of people like to come here and look out across the Arkansas River Valley, as well as Ada Valley to the south of us.

This place is the site of most of the stories or legends about how Petit Jean got its name, and it is undoubtedly named by French people.

They pronounced it Petit (jun).

In Arkansas, it's come to be known as Petit Jean.

This is a rock house cave.

It's the park's key archeological site.

It forms an ancient erosion and grand place and it was used by Native American Indians, both as a refuge early on and later as a ritual site.

And later on in time, over 200 rock art samples can still be found here, mostly pictographs, painted images.

Some of the drawings are clearly humanlike others are animal like, and others are very unusual, and we don't really know what to make of them.

This wayside panel at the Rock House Cave shows five of the larger, more interesting pictographs in Rock House Cave.

If you look at the very top, the most common answer we get for this one is it looks like a duck-billed platypus and we have to explain that duck-billed platypus, platypi, platypuses live in Australia, probably never seen here by an American Indian.

But there is an animal that looks a lot like that that lives in the Arkansas River, even today, a spoonbill.

The next image is this one.

It looks like two things interlocking and that symbol could mean a lot of things.

Again, we're not really sure exactly what it means, but here's the same pattern here found on this pot.

It was found in Carden Bottoms just west of the Petit Jean mesa here.

This this pictograph that we're seeing on the wall up here is the one we said could be a winding river or a snake curled around or maybe even a human figure inside.

And along with this, what could be a footprint, just to the right.

This is another rock art symbol we saw at the front of the cave, the paddlefish.

You can see the long nose here, the body of the fish and the tail back here.

The trail down to the rock house cave brings you across a sandstone glade.

A glade is an open area and it can be a grassy area.

It can be a stone area, it can be a limestone glade, sandstone glade.

Here at Petit Jean, we have sandstone glades throughout the park and these glade areas mean open spaces where forest gives way to open and sunnier places with a beautiful glade.

And on the glade there are features called turtle rocks that are very popular with park visitors.

They are erosional features and mounds in the sandstone that resemble turtle shell.

Thanks for joining us today.

Petit Jean State Park is a special place, a place where there's something for everyone.

And we hope to see you soon.