Dog park with K

Delivering cookies

Post Christmas quiet-ish roads

Family Christmas plus Ross Bridge plus Hwy 31

Short commute route lots of traffic on Christmas Eve

854 cars, 3.1/mi, 0.8/min, 46.2mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/118402
Still trying to write up about my spring break adventure in Virginia, so I'm just going to write about this one here in the description. This was an "eclipse scouting" ride with my family out of town in Utah for spring break. I decided to ride to the spot where we are going to watch the eclipse in the Ozark mountains to check out the cellphone reception b/c I was planning on broadcasting it live to my class. Only 1 bar of service, so might have to switch to alternative plan.

I drove Kristine's car (I don't have a car) to Jonesboro, leaving Birmingham about 5pm arriving at the Academy Sports parking lot about 12:30am. I was on my way before 1am with a massive tailwind heading north-northeast to pick up the far northeastern Arkansas counties. The wind was dying down, though, because after a while when I finally turned expecting a nasty crosswind, it wasn't bad. It was definitely a crosswind, but probably only 5-10mph. Plus, after about 10 mile of painfully flat farmland it started to get hilly again.

My route northeast of Jonesboro followef this long ridge line that  eastern AR. So not only did I have a massive tailwind as I was leaving, it was on tons of rollers through the ride. Lots-of-fun. When I rode from Marked Tree a few months ago, I was shocked by this big hill in the middle of a lot of flat farmland. As it turns out, Jonesboro itself is on this same ridge.
https://toonecycling.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Screenshot-2024-04-03-at-7.10.34%E2%80%AFAM.png

By sunrise, the wind was completely gone. It did start to pick up again as a headwind, but by this point I was well into the mountains and forests and sheltered most of the time.

Hardy was a cool town and traffic started to pick up here. Arkansas drivers were pretty cool for the most part, but there were a few pick-up truck assholes rolling coal and gunning their engines with absolutely nobody coming the other way and long sight lines. The drivers and clerks I talked to all gas stations were all awesome people and every single one said "watch out for the crazies" or something along those lines. (the assholes probably were cool, too, but they were probably venting anger at me because I represent something "different" than their normal lifestyle AND they may have had to let off the gas for a second or two, doubtful they even had to hit the brakes, but maybe the ones who were real jerks did have to hit their brakes). Definitely still in the South.

Back to the ride, it was getting hazy, hot, but not humid. Still pretty dry as I definitely made it into the outskirts of the Ozarks. Lots of rollers, and occasional longer climb, and lots of rivers, creeks, valleys, etc... Not too many sweeping views because so many trees, but I eventually made it down AR-9 to Callico Rock and White River Bluff loop, where we are planning on watching the eclipse.

Mid day on a beautiful Saturday and there were lots of cars. Lots of mountain bike trail signs and we will have our mountain bikes with us, so the eclipse day is going to be a blast.

The road to the hiking trail was a pretty rough gravel so I opted to just take a pic and start the long leg back to Jonesboro. This leg started out with a sign that said 20 miles crooked and steep road ahead. I was looking forward to this when I was plotting out my route and had noticed "Scenic Overlooks #1, #2, and #3" on the map. But I never saw signs for them in person, so I never took any pictures thinking I would just take pics from the scenic overlook. Hilarious, not sure what happened. 

In any case, the last of the climbs took me close to 1000 feet but not quite, but I saw there was a tower access road off to the right, so I took that gravel climb up to the top which was a bit over 1000 feet. There was so much climbing through here, even on the descent, and the one thing that helped was that I had a pretty good cross-tailwind.  That tailwind kept up for the most part all the way until Black Rock. Before, then, at a gas station I had a fun ribbing back and forth with a guy who asked if I had run out of gas. I laughed and said, yep going inside to get some more. He was one of the people who told me to watch out for crazy drivers on AR-25. They do their shoulders pretty good in Arkansas, The broken rumble strips are good because the shoulder is narrow, but just wide enough to the right that when a lot of cars are coming I can cross over to the right side in between the strips and let the cars pass. It's not wide enough to comfortably ride there for very long, so after the cars pass I can get back out to the left of the rumble strip, which itself is still a few inches to the right of the white line. Alabama, on the other hand, will have an unbroken rumble strip that extends either the entire shoulder or almost all of it and definitely goes all the way up to the white line. About as un-bike-friendly as you can get. Inexplicably, though, there would be sections of the Arkansas highways that would switch from being broken rumble strips to full rumble strips for a mile or two and then switch back to the regular broken kind. Probably some miscommunication with whoever "rumble stripped" those sections.

Eventually, I made it to Black Rock, having had a massive tailwind for about the 40 miles before that. Turning there and merging onto what is practically an Interstate (Hwy 412/US Hwy 63 combined) I was now faced with a nasty, strong cross head-wind all the way into Jonesboro.

So many cars and trucks, all with a speed limit of 65mph. I was well separated from traffic in a nice shoulder except for the small towns where you would lose the shoulder completely and the lanes would narrow. In a couple of the particularly small ones, I had to hop on a sidewalk because there was no alternative road I could take. In others, there was an alternative parallel road I could switch over to. Sidewalks are particularly dangerous on high speed roads like that so you have to watch for cars in front of you and behind you darting across quickly to try to turn. Not a problem if there are very few cars, but when there are tons of cars, you are needing to stay particularly vigilant.

This long stretch was table top flat until I finally made it back to the ridge line with Jonesboro. It was pretty wide, there, so even after I got to the first hill after many miles I still had about 10 more miles of busy roads to ride to get back. Again, traffic, was good through here and no bad encounters even as the traffic got particularly heavy Saturday at about 7pm since i was in the main business district.

I made it back to my car shortly after sunset, packed up and began the 8 hour drive back home to Birmingham, still not having slept in more than 36 hours by this point. I napped at a gas station on the way home and eventually pulled into the garage around 5am, slept for another couple hours before driving to the airport to pickup the family from the airport returning from spring break. 

https://toonecycling.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/AReclipsescout-scaled.jpg


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Brian Toone

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Dog park with K

Delivering cookies

Post Christmas quiet-ish roads

Family Christmas plus Ross Bridge plus Hwy 31

Short commute route lots of traffic on Christmas Eve

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