The ancient hills and rocky soils aren't good for growing much but trees. But those hills drop down into valleys that glisten with rivers so clear you can spot a crawdad on the gravel bottom, creating a playland for floaters. Ozark rivers don't have the churning rapids that draw whitewater enthusiasts, but they offer a more leisurely ride that shows off the ferns and the wildflowers, the red-eared sliders and the great blue herons.

As a native of the Show-Me State, I was familiar with the jewels of the Missouri Ozarks - the Current and Jacks Fork rivers and the Eleven Point - and had floated the bluff-lined Buffalo River in Arkansas. I asked resident expert Mike Mills to compare the Ozarks of the two states.

"Well, Arkansas is the Ozarks," says Mills, who is more than a bit biased; he is the state's former tourism director and the owner of Buffalo Outdoor Center at Ponca, which rents canoes, kayaks, and ridge-top cabins with views of the Boston Mountains rolling into the horizon.

"The tops of the mountains in Arkansas are more than 1,000 feet higher than Taum Sauk," Missouri's tallest mountain, Mills says. "You do the Missouri rivers and like them, then come do the Buffalo and fall in love."

Mills was stirring up something of a border war. When America sought to protect its sparkling streams, the Current and Jacks Fork were the first to be chosen. The Ozark National Scenic Riverways, a national park that takes in much of the two rivers, was authorized in 1964. The Buffalo was named the country's first national river - eight years later.

"You don't get to be America's first national river by being second best," Mills counters.

Doug Ladd of the Nature Conservancy in Missouri picks up the gauntlet. "The Arkansas Ozarks are fine, they're a beautiful place with lots of scenic and natural amenities - for those who don't qualify to get into the Missouri Ozarks," he says.

He points to Missouri's fine floating streams, saying that Arkansas has nothing like "the incredible scenery of the St. Francis Mountains landscape with those ancient igneous knobs, elephant rocks, and shut-ins geologic formations."

"The Missouri Ozarks, by far, are the best," Ladd says, "although they are both important areas."

To see more of what Arkansas offered, I headed to Harrison, which bills itself as the "gateway to the Ozarks."

My adventure began with three hangers-on, who also brought kayaks. Five days later, our floating caravan had grown to 15, including one casualty who ended up in the emergency room with a gashed leg held together with duct tape. More on that later.

Too old and too spoiled for tents, we established a base camp at the 1929 Hotel Seville, which was built at a cost of $150,000, a lavish amount for the times. The hotel reopened in December after a $3 million restoration that took most of the interior down to its bare bones while retaining the Moorish architecture and the lobby with terrazzo floors and a wrought-iron chandelier.

Co-owners Jack Moyer and Donald Alberson worked on similar historic rescue projects at the Crescent and Basin Park hotels in nearby Eureka Springs.

"Harrison is a really wholesome destination," Moyer says. "There's a lot of true Americana here."

The Hotel Seville also has John Paul's Restaurant, the only place in Harrison to get a drink if you're not a member of the Elks or the country club.

If anybody knows every foot of the Arkansas Ozarks, it's Tim Ernst, the prime mover in creating the 165-mile Ozark Highlands National Recreational Trail. Ernst is a professional wilderness photographer and the author of 15 guide and photography books featuring his home state.

"I laid out this trail with a surveyor's wheel, putting up mile markers," says Ernst, 54.

Ernst and the other volunteers with the Ozark Highlands Trail Association chose the route to showcase the natural features, especially the waterfalls. Among Ernest's books is a guide to 133 waterfalls.

"We have hundreds of waterfalls that are 10 to 50 feet tall; probably 40 of them had names," Ernst says. "You couldn't publish a guidebook with 90 falls without names, so I got to name a lot of them."