Arkansas, Little Rock, were eclipse epicenters: 'Path of totality is wide open and clear'

On Monday afternoon, hundreds gathered in a square off of Main Street in North Little Rock, Arkansas, to watch a rare total solar eclipse at what they called a “Moon Block Party.”

The loud, upbeat music from a live six-piece band in matching pink-sequined jackets went quiet as people cheered and removed their eclipse glasses to look at the sun’s corona.

Shortly after 1:51 p.m., the bright afternoon turned eerily dusky as the sun was completely blocked by the moon.

Was the eclipse everything they thought it would be?

“No, it was a little bit more,” said Monica Mackey-Walker of Jacksonville, Arkansas. "I thought I was excited until I saw it [but now] I'm really excited. I feel like a kid now, and I'm 51.”

Others found the eclipse unsettling as well as exciting.

“I loved it," said Dennis Geswein, from North Little Rock. “Kinda creepy but loved it. I don’t know what else to say about it.”

But almost everyone in the square was having fun.

"I think it’s pretty cool," said Evelyn Holsten, 10. “This was my first time seeing it and I made a new friend.”

She met Harper Jones, also 10, while they were both roller skating around the Moon Block Party.

"The next time we see this, we're going to be like 54," Holsten said.

Location, location, location

Central Arkansas was one of the best places in the country to see the eclipse, according to Dennis Cavanaugh, from the National Weather Service.

“Arkansas is kind of a sweet spot,” he said Monday morning. “Except around Texarkana, most of the path of totality is wide open and clear.”

On either side of Arkansas in the path of the eclipse, in Texas, Southern Illinois and parts of Indiana and Ohio, cloud cover made getting a good look less certain.

The eclipse came just in the nick of time — Arkansas will see high chances of heavy rain and thunderstorms Monday night and Tuesday, Cavanaugh said.

Arkansas was already a major destination for eclipse viewing and Monday’s weather conditions only made for an even greater influx of people from the region who decided, at the last minute, to drive to Arkansas for the day.

Low cloud cover in places like the Dallas metro area could have meant more people coming from out of state said Dave Parker, a representative from the Arkansas Department of Transportation.

Others have been planning for years to come to Little Rock. Kate Christian came to North Little Rock from Chicago with her husband and son, John and Quinton Kulka, to meet her mother Giovanna, who came from Florida. Christian said she and Kulka had been planning the trip since seeing the solar eclipse together in 2017.

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At an information tent, people marked a world map with colorful pins to show where they had come from — from all over the U.S. and overseas countries including Venezuela and Bolivia.

Rush hour

Traffic, Parker said Monday morning, “boils down to human nature and the weather.”

ARDOT’s live traffic advisory website was “getting pounded… with the amount of users,” Parker said. There were nearly as many hits already by 11 a.m. as it would see in an entire normal day. Still, he said, traffic was “flowing extremely well,” with only one major highway accident as of Monday morning.

“The unknown is still out there as to, once it’s over, what people do.” He expects that many people driving long distances from out of state will have learned the lesson of the last eclipse. Staying longer in Arkansas might mean avoiding the “major traffic jams” that happened during the return rush after the 2017 eclipse.

“That’s a win for everyone,” he added.