A $800M museum, a hanging judge, the country's second-oldest national park
Northwest to south through Arkansas. KXNA Northwest Arkansas, seven miles southwest of Bentonville, is closest to Crystal Bridges — Alice Walton's 200,000-square-foot Moshe Safdie museum built into an Ozark ravine fed by Crystal Spring, with five centuries of American art and free admission for life. The Frank Lloyd Wright Bachman-Wilson House is on the grounds, moved from New Jersey and reassembled. South 25nm to KFYV Drake Field at Fayetteville for the University of Arkansas hill campus and the southern Ozark Mountains. Continue southwest to KFSM Fort Smith — the western edge of the United States from 1817 until Oklahoma statehood in 1907, home of the Fort Smith National Historic Site where Judge Isaac Parker, the "Hanging Judge," ruled Indian Territory from 1875 to 1896. End at KHOT Hot Springs Memorial: the second-smallest U.S. national park (5,500 acres), built around 47 thermal springs at 143°F whose water fell as rain 4,400 years ago — home of Bathhouse Row, MLB spring training in the 1880s, and Al Capone in the 1930s.