Though access has improved in recent years, much of White River NWR is still remote, and many of its waters feel little fishing pressure. Photo by Keith Sutton.

It wasn't easy getting in there.

First we'd suffered through the pre-dawn drive from Little Rock to St. Charles, a trip of about 100 miles. Then there'd been another 15 miles or so over gravel roads in bad need of attention from a grader.

And that was the easy part; the last half-mile was the back-breaker. We bogged down more than a dozen times in the series of mudholes that passed for a road, and we had to winch out of six of them. We finally arrived at the lake we wanted to fish at 8 a.m., having left Little Rock five and a half hours earlier.

Was it worth it? Well, my fishing companion and I -- the only anglers on the lake that day -- caught and released more than 125 largemouth bass between 1 and 6 pounds, 30 or so chain pickerel (they stayed in the air almost as much as they did in the water) and a double-dozen hard-fighting grinnel that turned our spinnerbaits into scrap metal. Just before we put the little johnboat boat back in the truck and fought our way back to the gravel road, we switched to ultralight tackle and used small curly-tail jigs to catch 25 fat crappie for the ice chest.

Was it worth it? You be the judge.

That fishing trip took place more than 20 years ago, in 1987. At the time, that sort of difficulty was pretty much par for the course if you wanted to fish the more remote lakes of White River National Wildlife Refuge. The gravel road network was small then, and most of the refuge lakes were hard to reach.

In 2007, we fished that same lake again. This time, we drove on gravel for only four miles, all the way to the lake bank, where a concrete ramp provided us an easy launch. We could have driven there in a Mazda Miata.

Not surprisingly, we didn't have the lake to ourselves this time. Four other vehicles were parked near the ramp when we arrived, and another one showed up before we were through launching. Equally unsurprising, we didn't catch as many fish. It was still a productive trip, with about 25 keeper-sized bass and a few pickerel and grinnel to show for the day, but that's a long way from our tally in 1987.

This isn't intended to be one of those things-aren't-like-they-used-to-be whinefests, but the comparison of two fishing trips on the same lake represents a microcosm of what's happened in east Arkansas' White River National Wildlife Refuge over the past two decades. The refuge is much more accessible and user-friendly now, and that's resulted in increased fishing pressure on the easier-to-reach lakes. Overall, the fishing in these more accessible waters isn't as good as it used to be.