C Jo

I am not a natural blogger. I do not fall into the camp of people that have an epiphany or an extraordinary day and blog about it. Nor do I naturally roll around thoughts in my head and decide to see them in print, thereby exasperatingly pounding on the keyboard to type fast enough to remember them all.

I should have blogged about my bike trip this past spring break week, since my topic is on bikes, and I need to get going on the blogs, but I didn’t, so I’m going to recap a few days. As I have mentioned (in class), I traveled with my boyfriend, Josh, to northern Arkansas to visit the Ozark National Forest. It was a spur of the moment decision, Arkansas has an especially good state website and I found an “epic” mountain bike trail system at the Syllamo Mountain Bike Trail. Syllamo has over 50 miles of single track trails (impressive), and it probably would have taken us about a week to ride them all. To say the least, we got our Northern arses kicked by the mountains, but to be fair there was major flooding during the week and we had to deal with extra water and debris.

Before we headed to Syllamo, we stayed in Eureka Springs, Arkansas for two nights and a little way outside of town there was Leatherwood City Park. A park, which a ranger explained to us, was over 1600 acres and funded by the city. It had rained more than ten inches in the area, which was not a common thing. On our hour drive way to Eureka Springs from Fayetteville while it was pouring, unbeknownst to us people were being washed away in the floods and dying. We decided to go mountain biking, and during that whole day the rangers words ran through my head saying, “it’s only gonna get worse”. Meaning that if we walked down a little part of the trail and it was bad for biking or walking, the rest of the trail was going to be worse later on. Now, I think of myself as a somewhat experienced cyclist, but I can say I’ve never forged as many bodies of water as I did on that trail. As the trail being sometimes a shallow rut for water to follow, we were finding ourselves riding on streams. As the rain pounded on the sides of the mountains, it brought down trees and rocks from the natural rocky exterior, blanketing the trails with debris. We found a series of disconnected bridges in an especially “lakey” part of the trail system, which we surmised that they had been connected at one time, and the water disjoined them. What was so singular about this experience in Arkansas is that I wouldn’t even have the slightest clue what the mountain bike trails around here would be like when it floods, due to the nature that you can’t ride the trails here when wet. Down there (in Arkansas) the trails are rocky, and here they are mostly packed dirt that would get all torn up if ridden in wet weather.

When we finally got to the highlight of the trip, the Syllamo trails, we only had two days to ride. For reasons due to flooding we couldn’t get to our cabin that we had reserved. Luckily, we brought camping gear with us, and it was so nice after the rain anyway we camped at the base of the trail system. The forest rangers were trying to get people off the top of one of the mountains who were trapped when we arrived, and the bridge connecting one side of the campground to the other was washed out. We watched bulldozers and trucks quickly remove the roadblock, and after it was cleared on the other side found other “hardcore bikers” from Oklahoma and Kansas. We spent a couple days here that was well worth the wait, and then came home, bruises and scratches from fallen tree branches all over our bodies, satisfied with the trip.

Posted by Carrie Swiggum at 06:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I just happened to notice that the National Bike Summit in Washington, D.C. is going on this week. Where bicycle enthusiasts from all over the country gather and support pro-bicycle legislation. Through the Minnesota Bicycle Pedestrian Alliance, I was asked to represent Minnesota a few years back, with another woman from Duluth to listen in on meetings, give advice on improving bicycle transportation, and to meet senators and lobbyists; however, this trip was dependent on receiving a stipend for anyone to go, so sadly I didn’t get a stipend, and I didn’t attend. I didn’t really care that much, nor do I think the summit does any real change or impact – but how would I know?

The amount of time, money, effort, and concerted city planning for feasible bicycle transportation in the Twin Cities is second to none. It helps that the former mayor of Minneapolis, R.T. Ryback was a staunch supporter of urban mountain bike trails which started the legacy of the Theodore-Wirth park trail, and other dirt trails off the beaten path around some of the Minneapolis lakes, that sometimes requires memory and landmarks to get to again. Minneapolis was just announced the second-highest bicycle commuter to car commuter ratio in the nation, an impressive feat considering the winter elements here.

I also just found out that the new 35W bridge is going to have a tunnel for pedestrians running underneath the bridge, and I am very excited about this. It represents the level of priority given to alternative transportation and the feeling of growth and continuance felt for the city and its dedication to alternative transportation funding. But really, I guess it is just a tunnel. It is actually kind of out of the way, taking the trip under the freeway, compared to routes most people take that already circumnavigate the bridge.

The Midtown Greenway bicycle “superhighway” is also a shining example of an unused space put to good use by the city planners of Minneapolis. The coalition is underway right now putting in a bike shop across the trail from the Midtown Exchange building, with bike and clothes lockers, bike repair, and maybe a warming house in the winter.

The point of all this is that the future state of affairs concerning our world is forcing us to consider alternative transportation. The precarious consequences of peak-oil, and global warming predicaments ; a fight against obesity and the corporations that profit off of it, and a seeming reluctance for kids to voluntarily play outside anymore; and ecoadventure conservation (I guess you might call it) more important and positive forces to the scary changes happening to our world. I ask myself daily is this fight against the destruction of our Earth, our carefree way of life (albeit in the U.S.), and the ever looming apocalypse really specific to our time, or are we “fighting” a different form of resistance that people have been resisting for centuries? Everyone thought they were going to die at any moment in the Cold War too. What I mean is, is the world really going to end soon if we don’t shape up? Because that’s the message I am getting. It’s confusing and scary, I’m just glad that there is support for an alternative way of life (bicycles replacing cars – it will never happen), however insignificant all these urban planning changes may seem.

Posted by Carrie Swiggum at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)