National Bike Week - Rocktown Trackdown

Since last summer, Bryan and I had been thinking that a bike/walk scavenger hunt in Little Rock would be fun.  Vinny's alleycats are great fun for a handful of people, but what if somebody did a race that was a little less competitive and a little easier to navigate?  If participants were given a map, it'd be easier to plan a route.  If people just had to answer questions, we wouldn't need many volunteers.

National Bike Week - Bike to Work Day

Sometime in February, a coworker from upstairs said that she'd like to do Bike to Work Day as an 'employee wellness program.'  She's the one who does Walk Across Arkansas, and a number of other wellness things - she's a gerontologist - and she thought we should do Bike to Work again.

In the past, Extension has done Bike to Work Day as part of the 4H program, with really limited success.  LaVona and I decided that we'd do better.  Against my better judgment, we formed a Committee.  I hate committees.  But this one was pretty good, because we picked people we liked, and every month we'd ride across town to eat lunch someplace and talk about what we were going to do about Bike to Work Day.

Early on, we understood that we couldn't very well expect our coworkers to ride several miles across town without teaching them anything, or encouraging them to build up to the event.  So we planned out a series of little 'workshops' on Fridays, at lunch.  We borrowed some bikes from the 4H Center.  We expected two people and we got twenty.  We started out with NOTHING - truly, the first Friday we just told people to get on bikes and ride around the parking lot, to remember that they COULD still ride a bike, that they WOULD still have fun.  And they could.  And they did.  And those who had forgotten were taught again.

Photo by Mary Hightower

National Bike Week - Ride of Silence

Photo by Judy Lansky

In May, every year, there's an international event honoring those cyclists killed while riding.  This year's local event saw about 75 local cyclists riding silently, in pairs, from the Clinton Library to the state Capitol.  We wore white shirts, and on our backs we pinned cards with the name and age of a fallen bike rider.

I rode for a young man killed just this last month, run over in anger.  He'd made a mistake but he didn't deserve to be killed for it.  My friend Lisa wore the name of a six year old girl.  We don't know her story, but we know her life ended far too soon.  Others rode in memory of friends - Marilyn Fulper, who was killed by a car at the top of River Mountain Road a couple of years ago; Sam Avery, a hit and run while on a group ride recently.  Others rode bearing the names of people we don't know, and never will.

At some point, we're all cyclists.  We all start out as little kids, teetering down neighborhood streets on our first two wheelers.  Some of us end up as serious racers, and others ride to improve health.  Some just need a bike to get to work or to the grocery.  We all ride because it makes us feel good.  We're willing to take the risk.  We know it's there.  We're all out on the street, vulnerable, and it's fitting that we rode tonight to remember those who have been killed. 

I've always wanted Little Rock's Ride of Silence to be a more visible event.  This year's was a little better than we've done in the past, and I hope that trend of higher visibility and meaning continues.

National Bike Week - Cyclofemme Womens' Ride

One thing I brought back from the National Bike Summit this spring has to do with women in cycling.  Only 25% of cyclists in the US are women.  Why is that?  Because, as a group, we really do need different things than men in order to be comfortable riding bikes.  Women like to ride as a social thing, I learned.  Women like to feel clean and safe.  Women like to feel accepted when they ride.  And if women can be encouraged to ride more, more kids will grow up on bikes.  It's worth working on.  I hadn't realized it before.

So when my friend Lisa over at ArkansasOutside.com announced that she was going to host a local ride as part of an international Women's Cycling Day, I figured that I should support her efforts. 

Falling Water Gravel Tour

Mandy's shaping up to be a singlespeed rigid mountain bike girl.  She wears plaid and she smells bad and she says she has three speeds:  pedal, pedal harder, and walk.

 

We spent some miles last weekend on gravel roads up near Sand Gap.  Jarion decided to play SAG wagon / fisherman, which meant we could ride light and put our gear in his Jeepett.  It was a great weekend of grinding up gravel hills, flying down them, wading in the creek, eating steaks in the rain, and playing cards in the middle of gravel roads.

The Rebel Alliance

BACA, our local bike advocacy group, has been pretty stagnant for awhile.  Membership's sort of gone flat (click here to sign up).  Lots of clubs and groups don't feel represented.  Lots of minor events are sponsored, without much effect.  Meetings felt useless to most cyclists, and people stopped coming.  The most recent board tended to get into shouting matches at their meetings.

Major local issues went unnoticed, or worse, BACA board members said the wrong thing in public and other cyclists and groups spoke up to disagree.  The city and county government stopped listening because they didn't know who to listen to.  BACA could have an enormous impact, but it doesn't.

Or it didn't.  Some of us got together to talk about it.  It turned out that a lot of cycling families and groups felt the same way we did.  We extended some olive branches to teams that have been feeling like outsiders.  The sort of vague, leaderless group ended up hatching  a group volunteers excited about serving on the board to make it a wider, louder, more active advocacy organization.

I managed to get a spot on the nominating committee, and four days after that committee was established, we had a full slate of officers to nominate - mountain bikers, road racers, blog writers, trail builders.  The April BACA meeting saw that group voted in, amid angry confusion and loudish cheering. It makes me smile to watch people do what they care about, and I'm looking forward to this year.  I'm looking forward to having an advocacy group here in LR.  I think they'll accomplish great things, starting right about now.

The Tall Bike Project

Our friend Mitch got a welder for Christmas, and ever since then, we've been thinking about that welder.  He doesn't know how to weld but he's got a book.  Bryan doesn't know how to weld but he's been around his dad who can weld.  I don't know how to weld, which makes no sense because all the guys in my family can, but they never taught me, which I've always been slightly offended about.

We've all been thinking about tall bikes for awhile.  And we have this lovely welder.  Welding can't be that hard, right?  You just wear a funny hat, put pieces of metal near each other, and poke them with that stick thing. 

National Bike Summit 2012

I've been doing a ton of work with Little Rock's bike friendly community committee, so when they offered me a chance to represent LR at the National Bike Summit this month, I was eager to go.

At the last minute my flight from LR to Dallas was cancelled, and I was rescheduled on a flight the next day.  A day's delay would have meant missing part of the conference, so somehow, with me standing at the ticket counter inside and Bryan in the truck looking up flights on his iPhone, I managed to get on a different airline's flight to Chicago and then to Washington DC, right on time.

New Mountain Bike

In the back of my head, I've thought that mountain biking would be interesting to try but over the years I've never gotten closer than riding my Long Haul Trucker (LHT) touring bike on gravel roads near Lake Sylvia or in Newton County or riding my polo bike on a very flat beginner mountain bike trail while my daughter rode her mountain unicycle.  My LHT is pretty nice on gravel roads because of Surly's "fatties fit fine" policy that allows me to fit fenders and 50mm tires.

Photo by Cliff Li

Tweed Ride

Our friend Vinny decided that we should have a tweed ride.  He'd seen photos and stories from tweed rides in other cities, of people in old-timey woolen clothes smoking pipes and riding bikes, and he thought we should have one in Little Rock, too.

Caddo Valley Rail Line

We're a member of the Rails-to-Trails Conservancy and Bryan is one of their email lists that notifies interested people when a rail company files abandonment paperwork for a section of rail line.  Thousands of miles of rail have been abandoned in the last few decades, and most have seen their rails and crossties sold for scrap and their corridors sold piecemeal to adjacent landowners.  It's handy for farmers and businessmen to have a little extra chunk of land, I suppose, but it means that the rail line can never be used again for anything of economic benefit to the whole community.

Rails to Trails aims to prevent this from happening.  They send out a notice, along with information on how to file paperwork to preserve the rail corridor for use as a trail.  It's called "railbanking" and it's a low-cost way for communities or organizations to preserve the corridor for a few months, so that they can make plans to use the space for a multi-use trail of some sort.  They can use the space for a trail, with the understanding that if it's ever needed again for rail transport, it can be easily converted back to that use.

Railbanking can be a win-win kind of thing.  It's good for everybody.  So when Bryan got an email that fifty-or-so miles of rail line between Gurden and Caddo Gap, in southwestern Arkansas, was being abandoned, we decided to nose around a bit.

We camped in Glenwood, at Caddo River Camping & Canoe Rental.  The people there were super excited about the idea of a bike trail going through their campground; in fact, they own a chunk of land on the river just at the north end of the abandoned rail line, there's a camping area already there, and they made some inquiries about bike racks for their existing canoe shuttles.  Glenwood's chamber of commerce just installed an old caboose next to their building.  That sounds like community support for a rail/trail!

As we learned more about the line, we got more excited about the idea of a bike trail here.  I did a little research into the legend of the Gurdon Lights, a well-known Arkansas "ghost story". I'm pretty sure that this is the rail corridor people walk to see the ghost lights.  Wouldn't it be cool if we could camp at a Gurdon city park and RIDE to look for the swinging lantern in the dark?

We spent the afternoon in and out of the Subaru.  Hayduke and I sat in the back, with a gazetteer across my knees, navigating and taking notes as we visited twenty spots where the rail line intersected roads accessible by car.  When we reached each one, Mandy and Bryan would jump out of the front seats and have a look, taking photos and poking around.

The trestles all seem to be in fine shape.  We had worried about the big bridge in Glenwood, crossing the Caddo River, since there was a lot of flooding in that area in 2010.  But it seems to be fine - in fact, I walked across the whole bridge.  (When I saw that some little boys had watched me do it, I told them not to try it - I said that I worked for the railroad company and that if they walked across they'd be arrested, if they didn't die.)  There were some little minor issues, like rail misalignments, but those aren't things we're worried about.  The rail bed and the bridges are in fine shape, as far as we can tell.

So we hope this isn't the end of the Caddo Valley Railroad, but just a stop along the line, along the way to its becoming the Caddo Valley Rail Trail.

Note, added 12/26:  I've had some conversations with people from the Intermodal Authority in this area.  They're in negotiations with the Governor's office to, essentially, negate the abandonment filing.  They want to purchase the bankrupt rail line, pay off its debts, repair the rails, and reopen the Caddo Valley corridor to train service.  Apparently there are a couple of businesses along the route that would be impacted really positively by having rail service again, and it could mean a few hundred jobs for the people who live in these counties.  If this falls through, they say, they'll want to talk to us about railbanking and building a trail.  Stay tuned.

Bike Fair 2011

So somehow, somebody got the Mayor of Little Rock to agree to leave his car at home for a week and get around by bus and bike.  He said he'd do some media stuff and really encourage people to join him in a car-free week.  Great, said the Bike Friendly Community Committee.

Somehow, somebody (I really don't think it was me) suggested that we hold a kind of educational event to teach practical skills so that people would feel more comfortable using their bikes for transportation.  Somehow, I made suggestions about this event.  And somehow I got put in charge of it.  A Car-Free Learning Day.  A Bike Fair.  With three weeks to plan.

I made a list of twelve problems people might have when planning to ride a bike to work.  I listed things like "Won't People Think I'm Wierd?" and  "How do I carry my stuff?" and "How do I Plan a Safe Route?"

We got lots of volunteers to help out.  We had two people at each table, and I asked people to do things they really knew about.  Brad has seen a huge improvement in his asthma since he started riding a lot - he was perfect answer the question 'Why should I ride more?"  The "How Can I Clean Up When I Get to Work?" table was covered by Julie (an attorney) and Kathy (a teacher) - if they can ride to work and look professional by 8am, anybody should be able to.

Ron King, the guy who heads up the Recycle Bikes for Kids program, was there to talk to folks about bike maintenance and repair.  And I even got Central Arkansas Transit to bring a bus and let people try out the bike racks on the front.  CAT donated some free passes, to help get cyclists to try out using CAT for part of their bike commute to work.

Mayor Stodola came to the Car-Free Fair and spoke to the four TV cameras that were there.  I had to say stuff too, but mercifully they didn't actually show me on the air that night.  The newspaper interview went really well, and the photo that was published in the Democrat-Gazette showed Nick and Mandy knife-fighting on unicycles in the new ring we'd built just for the occasion.

It was such a good event.  It wasn't perfect, but with only three weeks or so to plan it, I was really proud of how our family and friends and the rest of the bike community showed up and helped out.  Thanks, everybody.  I think we really helped some people.  I hope they'll ask us to do it again next year.

Bikes Vs. Zombies!

Bike culture in central Arkansas isn't all that interesting, so when something out of the box comes along, we try to help out.  Our friend Vinny (that's him above, in the terrible suit and the zombie makeup) put on his second alleycat race tonight, and we volunteered to help organize the event.

An alleycat race is a little like a very fast scavenger hunt on bicycles.  Participants get a list of addresses and brief instructions just before the race.  They have to plan how to reach each destination, and at each place there's something they have to do.  This race included picking up packages, making crayon rubbings at a cemetery, and chasing zombies on rollerskates.  The first person to do all the things on the list and get to Vino's would win.

Vinny had decided from the beginning to have it just before Halloween.  The theme was "Bikes Vs. Zombies" and he encouraged everybody to dress up. I dressed up as myself, but my registration table saw lots of zombies and other interesting characters.  One guy had a French flag taped to his helmet and carried an entire baguette sticking jauntily out of his backpack.  Charlie Roberts dressed up like a little girl, complete with a strapless dress and bouncing blond ringlets under his bike helmet.

When all the participants had registered, we scooted out for our checkpoint, at the top of a big hill off Cantrell Road.  Our requirement for our riders was that they eat four powdered-sugar doughnuts as fast as they could.  We didn't provide drinks.  "OK, fine" said one rider, plonking down a giant can of Stag beer next to his doughnuts.  THAT was random.

Mandy and I had worked hard on her costume.  It was based on the old fashioned "ghost sheet" idea, but we made it very long and tattered and flappy, and she wore it while riding a unicycle so that it floated behind her in the air.  In the dark, under the streetlights, it was pretty striking.

The race wasn't planned perfectly but it was tons of fun anyway.  Most everyone had a good time, and there weren't any wrecks or injuries.  We're looking forward to helping with the next alleycat!

Arky 100 2011

We try to support the Arkansas Bicycle Club's annual fundraising ride, the Joe Weber Arky 100, either by riding or volunteering to help.  It starts and ends in Sheridan, which is about a half hour from our house.  As we've done in the past, we drove down the night before, ate with cycling friends, and spent the night in tents behind the small-town community center.

Up early, we helped around the registration a bit and got Mandy started - she'd decided to ride the metric century with our friend Kathy.  Her husband left in his 'sag wagon' with their dog and ours.  And Bryan and I loaded up the supplies for Rest Stop 2 and headed for Poyen.

We arrived at our spot just after eight, set up to feed and provide drinks for nearly two hundred riders - fruit, cereal bars, hot and cold drinks, oatmeal, and - the crowd favorite - tiny pbj sandwiches.  By eleven we'd fed everyone, cheered up the stragglers, reloaded the Subaru, and arrived at Rest Stop 5 to visit with friends before heading to the finish line to wait for Mandy.

She bailed at the 50 mile mark and caught the sag wagon in with Jim Britt.  It was disappointing, but not too bad considering that she hadn't ridden much at all since our summer vacation.  After a couple of finish-line hot dogs, she felt better enough to get her unicycle out of the car to entertain the people still left in the picnic shelter.

Kathy finished the 62 mile course feeling good and decided, after a bite to eat, that she'd just ride home.  The extra afternoon mileage meant that she met one of her big goals today - her first "century", or 100-mile ride. Congratulations my friend and thanks for sending "photographic proof" as shown below!

Clinton Park Bridge Opening

After years of budget problems and broken promises, the old Rock Island railroad bridge has been renovated and this weekend, it reopened as the Clinton Park Bridge. 

We wanted as many cyclists as we could muster to attend the opening, and a wide variety of people on bikes turned out to listen to Bill Clinton's speech and ride across the new old bridge.

There was even one unicyclist in attendance for the event.  :)

After the ceremony, the gates were opened and cyclists were allowed to cross from the Clinton Library grounds over into North Little Rock.  Our family was well-represented by 'firsts' - Mandy was the first unicyclist across.  I was involved in the first bike wreck when a go-fast guy stopped paying attention long enough to crash into my back wheel.  I was on the polo bike, so I was plenty stable enough to take the hit and keep going.  I got off anyway, though, to help the other guy scrape himself up off the ground and retrieve his expensive sunglasses, which he nearly flung off into the Arkansas River.

Bryan was on his polo bike too, and when he tried to skid he blew a hole in a tire, making a loud 'POP!'  We laughed later about how the sound probably really worried all the Secret Service guys standing around.

It was very cool to be part of such a big event - a THIRD dedicated bike/ped bridge spanning the river here in Little Rock.  We're still working on a million other details related to bike-friendly-ness here in Central Arkansas, but these cool bridges certainly send us in the right direction!

Traffic Safety 101

Now that I'm on the city's Bicycle Friendly Community Committee, I'm really trying to practice what the League of American Bicyclists preaches in terms of exercising the right to ride a bike on the road, while understanding the responsibilities cyclists have to keep ourselves and others safe.  I hadn't taken the League's traffic safety course in quite awhile, and Mandy's never taken it, so we decided to enroll in the September group.

Only one other student participated.  Our teachers were Tom and Brad.  Mandy learned a lot, and my memory was refreshed.  I think putting time and effort into this sort of thing is well worth it for everybody involved.

After the riding part of class concluded on Saturday, our class met up with Mitch and his kids for a bike-and-unicycle lunch at the Rivermarket, and we rode around downtown for awhile.  The area around the Rivermarket is such fun for unicycling, with lots of paths and bridges and people to look impressed by dads and their kids riding along on one wheel as if it's the easiest thing in the world.

Bike Commuting

I've been wanting to try bike commuting.  From our house to my office is about seventeen miles, none of it particularly friendly to cyclists.  I don't have the option of using a nice separated bike lane or path - it's either the interstate service road or a busy 2-lane highway with fairly narrow shoulders.  Could I ride the whole way?  Could I drive partway and ride the rest?  Could I combine riding a bike and riding the bus?  I've spent the last month or so experimenting with multi-modal commuting.  First I tried just using a bike to do errands around our non-bike-friendly town.

Then I tried part-bike commuting: I drove the car partway to work, pulled a bike off the rack, and rode the rest of the way.  It was fun and not all that much more time consuming.  But it didn't accomplish a lot - I was still putting a lot of miles on the car.

Then I tried driving to the closest bus stop - about eleven miles from the house - and taking the bus the rest of the way to work.  I thought the bus was fun, but it wasn't saving any money, and it was using up a lot of time.

Then I tried riding the eleven miles to the bus stop, riding the bus to work, and then reversing that to come home.  This was the cheapest, and the most fun, but also the most time consuming - I was leaving at six to be ready for work at eight.  In the evening, I'd leave work before five but wouldn't get home until after seven.  I was having a great time, but I was never home, and the housework was behind, and Bryan and I missed each other.

So now I'm back to driving all the way to work again.  In just a few weeks of fiddling with my commute, I learned a lot - I'm stronger now, and much better at coping with traffic.  I understand how to read the city bus schedules and route maps, and how to use the bike racks on the front of each bus.  And maybe most importantly, I know I CAN commute without a car - I can get myself from home in the suburbs to work in town, every day, for several days in a row, and have fun doing it.

2 Rivers Bridge Dedication

The bike infrastructure and culture here is very strange.  Lopsided.  Great, and also terrible.

Cycling for recreation has become an accepted thing in the Little Rock area, I think.  Mountain bikers have lots of great trails in Little Rock and the surrounding counties.  Lycra-clad pavement cyclists whiz up and down the much-celebrated River Trail,but even it isn't really finished - the signage is unclear, and parts of the trail have cyclists traveling on busy streets, or on narrow shoulders.  Years-long calls to "close the loop" are still being met with opposition from taxpayers and businesses in the city.

Cycling for transportation and utility is viewed as the province of the drunken and/or homeless.  Not many people care about interconnected trail networks or even safe bike lanes for people who actually want to GO SOMEWHERE on bicycles. Little Rock has yet to adopt a real 'complete streets' policy.

In a city like this, would you expect to see THREE DIFFERENT dedicated bike/pedestrian bridges?  No, you would not.  But the county government supports cycling, even if the city government is halfhearted.  And so we have the Big Dam Bridge, the longest purpose-built bike/ped bridge in the US.  After much foot-dragging, the Rock Island bridge (AKA the stupidly named "Clinton Park Bridge") is now being repaired and adapted for dedicated bike/ped use by the Clinton Foundation, as part of the park surrounding the museum.

And this week, we attended the dedication of the Two Rivers Park Bridge, spanning the Little Maumelle River to connect the west LR River Trail to Two Rivers Park.  It's full of deer and other wildlife, and for years has been a community garden spot as well.  From the park, cyclists can ride low-traffic, paved county roads out past Maumelle Park, Pinnacle Mountain, and the quiet highways around the lake and up into the Ouachitas.

Katy Trip: Getting Ready

This summer, Mandy switched around her visit to Tulsa so that she could go to her Audubon camp.  That shifted the time we could set aside for a family vacation from super-hot early August to hopefully-nicer early June.

As a teenager, I rode parts of the Katy Trail in Missouri.  It's about 250 miles of mostly-flat packed limestone gravel, running from St. Charles (just west of St. Louis) all the way across the state to Clinton, Missouri.  We've been wanting to ride the whole length of the trail as a family.  An early-June vacation seemed like a good time to give it a try.


Here's a link to a map of the trail.

We bought a guidebook to the trail way back last year, and had been daydreaming over it ever since.  The Katy is the longest rail-trail in the US!  A landmark state park system!  With friendly little towns and ice cream shops and cyclist-centered campgrounds all along the way!  And historical thingamajigs!  All just one state north of us.

To make the trip a little more challenging (and fun), we decided to leave the car in Little Rock and do the whole eight-day vacation using alternative transportation.  We pieced together a route using mostly Amtrak, but also the public transit buses and light rail in St. Louis.  And, of course, the touring bikes.  It'll be the longest trip any of us have ever taken by bike, and we'll be doing it together.  With stops for ice cream.

Claire Bear Comes to Little Rock

It's a three-day weekend and we invited Mandy's cousin Claire, who is from rural Oklahoma, to come visit.  Mandy and I drove to Clarksville Friday night to meet Aunt Julie at Wendy's, and we brought Claire home with us.

We had a great time showing Claire around Little Rock.  She watched several bike polo games, and was a good sport about trying it herself.  

Mandy's new polo bike is an old-school Specialized Rockhopper.  It's not really set up for polo yet, so after the games we drove out to Pinnacle Mountain for a quick spin around one of the beginner mountain bike trails.  Claire thought mountain biking was pretty cool. 

Bryan rode his polo bike, and since the trail isn't very hilly he wasn't much bothered by having only one gear.  Mandy was on her offroad unicycle.  Somehow, at dusk, she managed to get lost by herself on the trail.  We split up to look for her, and she was found without incident.

Later, despite the chilly day and the threat of rain, we hiked up Pinnacle Mountain.  Claire confided that, actually, she'd never been hiking before.  She was a little nervous about climbing the rather steep, exposed 'spine', just before the top, but Mandy talked her through it.  It's fun to watch people stretch their boundaries and try new things.

I think Claire pushed back a lot of her boundaries over the weekend.  We went out for regular American kid pizza one night, but another night we had supper at a good Middle Eastern place.  We shared everything across the table, so Claire got to try lots of new spices.  She likes hummus but not baba ghannouj.  She wasn't wild about the taziki sauce, but thought the spicy fish was yummy.

And she said she walked more during her visit than she'd ever walked before in her life.

As a special surprise, I'd made arrangements with our friends Britt and Debbie to take Claire on a behind-the-gates trip to the zoo.  The first order of business on Monday morning was to go for a walk with Mary and Ellen, the zoo's two elephants.

The Little Rock zoo is one of only a small handful of zoos in the country who let their elephants walk around the whole zoo every morning before it opens to the public.  It's good exercise for the animals physically, and it's an interesting part of their lives.  And it gives kids like Claire and Mandy an occasional opportunity to do something really, really cool.

When we'd finished with our walk, we got to visit the big cats.  The weather was icky outside so most of them were still in their 'dens' and we got to say hello.  Since lions are Claire's favorite thing, this was a big deal - she even got to touch one of the lions' fur through the cage.  She loved having Debbie there to answer questions.  She'd always wondered if big cats purr, and know she knows the answer.

We got to see the bears, too.  We had to be quiet in the 'bear house' because the grizzlies are hibernating.  But Claire and Mandy fed the otters and sun bears.  Thor, the big male sloth bear, was his usual charming self, sucking cheerios off our hands and through his door.  Sasha, the other sloth bear, was less agreeable.  When she saw Mandy, she backed up and rushed the door, slamming against it and flinging spit all over Mandy's jacket.  When we walked by again, she did the same thing.  Apparently Sasha doesn't like plaid hats. 

Before taking Claire back to meet up with her mom again, we stopped by the Big Dam Bridge for a walk across, and to just sit and look out at the water for awhile.  We so enjoyed having Claire nearby for a few days.