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Half a mile at halftime

Early morning rodent relocation, church, and mountain bike practice

Day 1 - 396 cars, 1.9/mi, 0.5/min, 44.1mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/139798
Day 2 - 792 cars, 3.1/mi, 0.7/min, 38.6mph(avg)
https://www.mybiketraffic.com/rides/view/139990
What an adventure! Cut Day 2 a bit short because of broken rear spoke on Day 1. Wheel was out of true but I loosened the rear brake so that it wasn't rubbing. The highlight of the adventure was a close call between climbing Rich Mountain on the Talimena Skyway or enjoying the nice biking infrastructure in Little Rock. 

Because it's a 7+ hour drive to get to Little Rock, I didn't start riding until after 5am with only an hour or two of sleep before I left home at 930pm. So it was already starting to get light by the time I left Little Rock. The first adventure of the day was after making it down to Pine Bluff where I had had a previous adventure in the 20 degree freezing cold last winter.

I had routed myself southeast of town  on this cool one-lane each way highway built like an interstate trying to get far enough to cross over into Lincoln County in the shortest distance. I saw from google streetview that it had a nice wide shoulder. The normal access to it was from I-30, but I noticed there was a spot I could climb up to it from an underpass. As it turns out, there was a moat on one side (drainage ditch) and the other side had some nasty looking poison oak/sumac. So I had to go around to the side and found a break in the fence, but I had to push through tall grass in prime snake territory especially with so much water nearby. 

Once onto the top of the hill and across the guardrail, I had access to a nice shoulder for about 10 miles on a road that was very flat and straight and thankfully still catching shade with the tall trees on the eastern side of the highway. Once off the highway I was on some nice chip/seal all the way to Rison where I had my first gas station stop. The nice clerk asked where I was from, and I told her I was from Alabama but parked in Little Rock and doing a loop out to Mena. I prounounced it like Mesa but with an "n". She corrected me to "Mee-nuh" (confirmed by Wikipedia pronunciation guide just now). She was puzzled why the map would have routed me down there to Rison. I mentioned that I was trying to ride in all the counties.

Lots of flat to gently rolling farmland but still with enough forests that the Cicadas were very loud ... making this background high-pitched drone that I didn't recognize but assumed must be the Cicadas. I took several video recordings of the sound. They were loud. The next adventure was heading to Kansas Rd over the Ouatchita River on what looked like a low water bridge! This seemed ridiculous to me given that the sections of the Ouatchita that I am familiar with farther south and east are very large -- far too large for a low-water crossing. The spot where I would be crossing the river was much farther west closer to the source in the Ouatchita Mountains. And, as it turns out, the bridge itself was made like a low-water bridge with the same kind of concrete, but this one had some supports (no guard rails) to raise it several feet above the water and was not intended to flood as frequently as the low water bridges I'm familiar with. I'm still not sure how they prevent flood debris from accumulating. Maybe it was just high enough for the typical tree to pass underneath. 

In any case, in the rural Wildlife Management Area (which was still paved) shortly before the bridge, I saw a bobcat sitting in the road staring intently away from me. You could tell from the ears and size that it wasn't a normal house cat. In any case, once I got close enough that it new I was coming, it took off so incredibly and unbelieveably fast. Then I saw an owl flying across the road. Then I crossed the bridge and lost my pavement. I knew this from the satellite, but I figured I would just ride slowly (which I did) on all the dirt and loose gravel. I still managed to break a spoke, though!

A broken spoke is not great with about 400 miles still left to ride. I immediately did a google search for bike shops and the closest was about 60 miles north of me in Hot Springs. The next closest was about 75 miles away in Texarkana in the general direction I was heading. Unfortunately it was too late in the day to make it to either shop before they would be closed. This left me a few options:

1) Wind my way up to Hot Springs or Texarkana and spend the night in a hotel, wait for the shops to open in the morning and fix the wheel. 

2) Turn around immediately and ride back to the start

3) Continue on and hope for the best.

I decided to go with option 3, especially since the rest of my route for the day was in the general direction of Texarkana (except quite a bit to the north). If things went poorly with the wheel (i.e., break another spoke) then I would find my way to Texarkana, spend the night, and then fix the wheel when the shop opened there. 

This worked out well. I was about 50 miles northeast from Texarkana at the point where my route was going to veer west and even northwest to get over to Mena when I stopped for a quick bite to eat at Sonic and check the weather since I noticed dark clouds ahead and got a severe thunderstorm watch alert on my Garmin. I had thought I was coming in behind the weather and the next system was going to be to my south. Either it went farther north than anticipated, or I had read the weather wrong and there was some nasty storms coming my way from Texas and Oklahoma. The system was moving north-northeast so that even though the storms were only about 75 miles or so to my west, I thought I could make the 40 miles over to Nashville, Arkansas before the storm arrived. I was wrong. I didn't mind the rain, but the lightning was pretty bad. I made it to Nashville and stopped at a gas station near the hotel to load up for next day since the gas station would likely be closed by the time I was ready to leave around midnight. 

Since I had only ridden 205 miles on Day 1, the remaining 350 miles would need to be covered on Day 2 if I were to complete everything. 350 miles on a wheel with a broken spoke seemed kinda unrealistic even with a midnight start instead of a 5am start. So I decided even before bed that I would cut out the northern portion of the loop up to Russellville and just head straight across after Rich Mountain. This turned out to be another surprising highlight of the ride! (But more on that in a bit)

I left Nashville at about 1230am trying to time it to make it to the Talimena Scenic Drive and climb up Rich Mountain by about sunrise, but my feet and all the weight I was carrying from food, tracking, batteries, chargers, cables, etc... meant that I crawled up all the hills that had gotten longer and steeper. And instead of being able to bomb down the other side, I had to coast and even use my front brake (rear brake was off-limits) because of the rear wheel wobbling like crazy. Why are you even riding a bike if you have to use your brakes? I'm mostly kidding ... but, seriously, the thought of ever using my brakes on a long, perfectly straight downhill is anathema to me and here I was doing exactly that! So I didn't make it to the bottom of the climb until about sunrise, but with a long hour long climb up to the top, it was going to be way after sunrise by the time I made it up to the top of second highest point in Arkansas - Rich Mountain at just under 2700'. I got to experience all the vistas, though, during that magnificent golden hour post sunrise. It was fantastic.

Back to cutting out Oklahoma - I turned right and dropped off the mountain at the Queen Talimena state park after seeing the 5.6 miles to the Oklahoma border sign, which mean just shy of 11 more somewhat rough miles on that broken rear wheel. Ended up on a few US and state highways that alternated between really good and cracked mediocre pavement. I wouldn't have cared except for every bump making me wonder if that was going to be the one that breaks another spoke and leaves me stranded somewhere.

With each passing mile heading east, I was getting closer to the bike shop in Hot Springs which was assuring since I could possibly call the bike shop and pay someone to drive out with a replacement wheel or shuttle me back to the shop, which while expensive would have meant not having to hitch hike all the way back to Little Rock, abandon the ride, and lose out on another Eddington 256. My revised route was going to stay north of Hot Springs itself and ride through Hot Springs Village which was awesome! This was one of the suprises mentioned earlier ... after school traffic was bad, but there was a very long 15 mile bike lane on perfect pavement. That bike lane was sooo narrow (1-2 feet in several sections, but mostly about 3 feet wide). I think it was perfect, though, and so many bike lanes don't get built b/c they cannot meet what I'm sure is the legal specification here in Alabama.

The hills were very steep and with my relative proximity to a bike shop I let it fly on them all to carry my momentum up the other side. I ran out of water through here b/c I didn't see any convenience stores the whole way through the "village". I figured there would be a gas station on the other side, but the first thing I saw was a local pharmacy. I went in, and they barely had any food and only one small cooler of drinks, but it was perfect ... 99 cents for two cold 1/2 liter water bottles and 1.50 for a 16oz coke and a nice sized bag of chips. I had expected to get ripped off given the proximity to a very expensive neighborhood, but instead it was far, far cheaper than pretty much ALL gas stations. 

I was a little bit nervous given how much traffic was inside the villages that I'd now be on a bike-unfriendly state highway. But, nope, there was a very nice mostly debris-free shoulder for the many miles I was on AR-5 until turning off to make my way up to the Arkansas River Trail. 

After cuttin off my Oklahoma loop and the Russellville northern section, I was going to be about 25 miles short of an Eddington 256. I couldn't stop laughing about how my ride went from 350+ miles down to about 230 miles. This worked out well, though, because I have heard that the ART is supposed to be a cool trail and my original route had me staying west of Little Rock and arriving directly back at the Walmart where I had parked in Mabelton. With 25 miles to play with I figured I could head northeast towards the river and ride at least some of it before heading back southwest to Mableton and the car.

This worked out well, except I ended up on many miles (maybe 15?) of essentially Rocky Ridge Road (for those familiar with the Hoover, Alabama area). Drivers were great and I kept pulling off to let approaching cars pass b/c it was always convenient to do so given the ridiculous hills and many driveways ... I could just pull off into the driveway let the car (or sometimes two) pass and then come back on without stopping given the steepness of the hills. I wondered how many river bluffs and feeder valleys there could possibly be before finally hitting the river ... answer: a bunch. 

I made it eventually, though, and hit the ART far short of the actual river itself. I went from being the only biker on ALL the roads for the previous 200 miles to seeing so many people running and biking. I crossed a pedestrian bridge on the ART over the large feeder river right at the confluence with the Arkansas River and was impressed with how wide (and expensive) that bridge must have been. Little did I know that I would soon find myself following signs to the "Big Dam Bridge" which is a pedestrian/cycling bridge crossing OVER TOP of a huge lock and dam. I took so many pictures here, but was ready to be done riding so I entered the Walmart into my google maps directions and started following it when I got passed by a mountain biker who I thought for sure was riding an e-bike. But, nope, he was just hammering! It motivated me to try to keep him in my sights and eventually with him following the mountain bike trail off to the side of the ART, we connected at a stop light we both missed. He said I looked like I was riding a long ways and I told him that I had started in Mena (which actually I had started 75 miles southeast of Mena, rode to Mena itself and then northwest of Mena almost to the OK border before finally starting my trek back east to Little Rock). 

It was great chatting with another cyclist briefly before he turned to head back onto a different mountain bike trail at a different park. I found myself on a different bike path after wandering through some neighborhoods and eventually popped out at the Walmart, where thankfully the car was still there a couple days after I left it and started this Ouatchita Mountains adventure. 


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Brian Toone

Ouatchita Mountains adventure from Little Rock, Day 1

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Half a mile at halftime

Early morning rodent relocation, church, and mountain bike practice

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