AGFC nature center welcomes millionth visitor

Staffers at the Janet Huckabee Arkansas River Valley Nature Center in Fort Smith were on pins and needles leading into Memorial Day Weekend, looking forward to a special visit from one particular visitor, although they didn’t know who it would be. Last Friday afternoon, the center celebrated its millionth visit, a feat that took just under 20 years to complete.

“We knew it was getting close,” Karen Westcamp-Johnson, Arkansas Game and Fish Commission nature center director, said. “We’ve been keeping up with attendance since we opened, and when [Forrest L. Wood Crowley’s Ridge Nature Center] announced their millionth visitor last year, we started adding up all those years of attendance. We knew we’d hit one million sometime late this spring or early this summer.”

Westcamp-Johnson has seen the majority of those visitors, as she began working for the center before its opening in 2006. She’s only the second director of the center and has been heavily involved in guest visits for the last 20 years.

“All of the staff at the center is a big family, and that’s what’s so neat about this milestone hitting last week,” Westcamp-Johnson said. “All of the active staff were at the center, working for our special ‘May Days’ promotion for students, when we broke the million-person mark.”

Julie Kleinschmidt, a resident of nearby Greenwood, led a party of young adventurers to the center on Friday afternoon, rolling the center’s “outdoor odometer” past 1 million.

“Julie and her grandson, Cash Kleinschmidt, are here pretty often to explore and enjoy the center and its trails,” Westcamp-Johnson said. “They are a few of our regulars. This time, they had a few additional guests. Julie brought her other grandsons, Adam Fenix Craze and Layf Craze, both from Spiro, Oklahoma, on this trip. We’re not sure exactly which one of them was number 1 million, so we celebrated with all of them.”

Westcamp-Johnson said the group received a basket full of AGFC- and outdoors-adventure-themed items, including cups, coolers and a very nice spinning rod-and-reel combo, and will be treated to a future outdoor experience, courtesy of nature center staff.

“We thought it would be great to offer our millionth visitor a special one-on-one experience at Well’s Lake or the center grounds where they would be the only ones enjoying some time with our staff,” Westcamp-Johnson said. “Since there are four of them, I guess it’s going to be a four-for-one deal instead. We’ll set up a great adventure for them, canoeing, kayaking, fishing and anything else they want to do at the center in the next few weeks.”