Side-Town Borders a Trail System That Was Never Built to Be Scenery

The first bridge crosses Hot Springs Creek about sixty yards past the trailhead, close enough that you can still hear cars on the street behind you. By the third bridge, you can't. That's the whole trick of the Whittington Trail: a flat gravel loop under a canopy of magnolia trees, and it does more to separate you from the day than its 1.2 miles would suggest. There's no map kiosk, no group waiting for a tour to start, no line for anything. Most mornings it's a jogger, a person walking a dog, and whatever birds are working the creek that day.

That's not an accident of low traffic. It's the design doing exactly what it was built to do a century ago, and it still works that way today for the neighborhood sitting closest to it. Neither of the two mountains flanking Hot Springs tops out much past 1,000 feet, which is part of why this system was built the way it was in the first place. Nobody was climbing these ridges for a summit photo. They were walking them because a doctor told them to, and the paths still carry that intent.

Built for Walking, Not for Looking At

In the spa era, a doctor here didn't just prescribe a soak in a specific spring. He prescribed a walk too, often on a specific trail, as part of the daily routine that was supposed to work alongside the bathing. That's why so many of the park's older paths, including the ones threading West Mountain, were built wide enough to handle a horse-drawn carriage. They weren't attractions. They were part of the treatment.

Whittington Park itself started life in the 1890s as Whittington Lake Reserve, named for early Hot Springs businessman Hiram A. Whittington, and it once held two shallow rowing lakes, a caretaker's house, pavilions, and carriage drives. Almost all of that is gone. What's left is the shaded loop trail, still graded the same gentle way, still built for someone walking every day rather than once a year.

Hot Springs has more than 30 miles of connected trail across the two mountains that flank the city, most of it short, interlocking stretches rather than one long haul. That's a meaningful number for anyone measuring a neighborhood by what's within a fifteen-minute walk of home instead of what's worth a special trip.

A Mountain With Several Front Doors

Side-town's own edge runs against West Mountain, which the neighborhood has long used as its backdrop. The mountain itself isn't a single trail with one way in. The National Park Service documents entrances at Whittington Park, at a Canyon Trailhead tucked behind the Mountain Valley Water building downtown, and at Prospect Avenue on the mountain's western side, all feeding into the same interconnected network.

That matters more than it sounds like it should, because it means nobody living near West Mountain has to cross through the busiest part of downtown just to get onto it. Whichever entrance ends up closest to you, the trail on the other side was built to the same century-old spec: wide, graded, and meant for repeat use rather than a single photo.

One detail worth knowing if you use the Whittington Park side: there's a National Park office right there with a free spring water tap on the sidewalk, so you can fill a bottle with the same thermal water the bathhouses use, no ticket required.

What Each Piece Is Actually Good For

The trail system reads as one connected loop on a map, but in practice each stretch fits a different amount of time.

The Whittington Trail is the one for a Tuesday. It's flat enough to run without thinking about footing, and the creek crossings give you natural stopping points if you're out with someone slower. The West Mountain Loop is the one for when you actually have an hour, climbing enough to feel like exercise without requiring trail shoes, and it passes a genuine piece of park history: a shelter house built in 1924, the oldest one still standing anywhere in Hot Springs National Park, usually empty and shaded at roughly the halfway point.

If you want to go further, Sunset Trail keeps going from the West Mountain summit toward Music Mountain, the highest point in the park, before continuing on for another 2.6 miles toward Sugarloaf Mountain, where the trail passes a formation called Balanced Rock. That's not a casual loop. It's a real hike, and it's there for the day that calls for it.

And if none of that sounds right, the Summit Drive covers the same ridge from a car. The first overlook looks out over Bathhouse Row and the former Army-Navy Hospital. The second has the historic 1924 shelter and picnic tables. The summit overlook faces south toward the Trap Mountains and Lake Hamilton, next to an outcrop of Arkansas novaculite, the same fine-grained stone Caddo toolmakers once shaped into blades before settlers later used it for whetstones.

Every one of these trails is open year-round, and none of them carries an entrance fee the way the bathhouses do. Dogs are welcome on all of them as long as they're leashed. That's not a footnote. For a neighborhood where a walk with the dog is part of the daily rhythm rather than a weekend event, having that access built into a national park boundary rather than a private HOA amenity is the kind of detail that never shows up in a listing description but shows up every single day.

The Part Worth Sitting With

None of this gets marketed the way Bathhouse Row does. There's no brochure explaining that the paths behind Side-town were engineered for daily use rather than a single visit, and there's no sign at any of the trailheads pointing out that you're standing on infrastructure built for people who live nearby, not people passing through once. You'd only notice the pattern by using it enough times: the same mountain, several ways in, all of them built to the same forgotten standard.

That standard is still what makes the difference. A path graded for a carriage in 1890 stays gentle enough for a stroller in 2026. A trail built for a daily prescribed walk stays short enough for an actual daily walk. Side-town doesn't need to drive into downtown's tourist core to reach any of it. The mountain is already at the edge of the neighborhood, built the way it's always been built, waiting to be used the way it was always meant to be used.

For questions about Side-town, West Mountain, or anywhere else in Hot Springs and the Garland County lakes, reach out to 501 House to Home. Jeff and Paulia Kennedy have spent more than two decades learning which corners of this city were built for visitors and which ones were built for the people who actually live here.