You know your neighborhood is cool and hip when they start naming extreme bicycle courses and areas after your neighborhood. According to an article in the Dem/Gaz on Monday November 12th, a local group with the assistance of the NLR Parks Dept. is building an extreme bike riding area and trail in Burns Park. And guess what? They have named the area, the Argenta Freeride Area. Is there a Hillcrest or Heights or even Quapaw Freeride area? I think not! It cool to be hip!
Click on the Read More button below for the Dem/Gaz article on the Argenta Freeride Area
LITTLE ROCK — Erik Mettler’s fat tire skidded off a narrow arc of wooden bridge and - bang - he slammed over fresh sawdust and landed beside a naked strand of greenbriar.
Had his bicycle just cracked in two?
No. With a jerk of his tattoo-laced muscular arms, the 23-year-old reclaimed his balance, no harm done.
That bang, which resounded across the new Argenta Freeride Area’s warm-up loop like disaster, had been nothing more (or less) serious than the fat teeth of a “bear trap” pedal slamming into the hard pad of Mettler’s shin guard.
“Dude!” his buddies called. “You trying to break the rocks around here?”
Alternately cheering and needling one another, eight men politely took turns ramping up and over the same short swoop of hardwood bridge to a tall teeter-totter that every so often kicked one of them to the ground. They were freeriding - the sort of look-Ma, adrenalinerush activity listed under the heading “extreme sports.”
Freeriders balance their off-road bicycles along raised trails made of wooden planks laid end to end atop tree stumps. They race downhill on dirt courses studded with boulders and jumps. They swoosh up steeply pitched mounds or wooden walls designed to propel them up, up and away, and once they’re airborne, they flip and pivot like freestyle snowski jumpers.
Central Arkansas’ new Arkansas Freeride Society doesn’t have courses built yet for doing all of that, but the freeriders do already have a usual Thursday night playtime. They romp on a skills circuit they’re building in leaf-crunchy hickory woods west of North Little Rock’s Burns Park Tournament Golf Course.
During a recent session, all of these (young and younger) men wore protective pads and helmets, which all just happened to be black.
Their shirts just happened to be drab - no clown-colored jerseys - and all their bikes, except one, just happened to be dark. The nonconformist bike was baby blue - but very dirty.
These guys say it’s awesome fun to bounce their big-boy BMX-type machines up onto a scrawny little rail - while you’re riding, just hop on up there. And then you can wobble slowly along the railing where it ramps up and down like jagged wooden teeth! And then you can, oh boy, rocket up onto that teeter-totter bridge until you cross a tipping point and your weight carries you down and momentum flings you - wheee! - right off into the air.
Or you could rocket up a wall set into asteep mound of clay!
Or plummet down a dirt switchback trail pedal-to-pedal with three other dudes!
And maybe you could land on your elbow, on your ear. Wheee!
As Chris Spann, a 33-year-old digital designer, put it, “You’ve got a bunch of guys in their late 20s and early 30s who are entertained by a pile of dirt.”
Until this year, freeriders in Arkansas had to drill for their thrills in make-shifty places that might or might not have been legally OK.
Meanwhile they drooled and daydreamed over images of the North Shore-style freeriding practiced on elaborate wooden playgrounds called Ewok villages in Vancouver, British Columbia.
“We’re exposed to photos and videos of people doing all this crazy-cool stuff, things that we’ve wanted to do for a long time. But in this part of the world for a long time it’s been totally remote and inaccessible,” says Ryan Johnson, a freerider with a grownup job at Competitive Cyclist bike shop in Little Rock.
But then in April the Slaughter Pen Hollow Mountain Bike/BMX and Freeriding Park opened in Bentonville.
And now this ambitious group of men in central Arkansas has partnered with North Little Rock to create the Argenta Freeride Area in Burns Park.
Led by Johnson, his co-worker Eric “E2” Easterly and Kaos Culture skate shop owner Damon Crawford, the Arkansas Freeride Society aims to build a regional attraction that will draw freeriders from Dallas and Memphis. They’re inspired by the “very cool” SlaughterPen Hollow park created at Bentonville by Tom Walton and the Ozark Off-Road Cyclists.
With the blessing of North Little Rock Parks and Recreation, a dozen or so volunteers recently invested 160 hours in the first of three construction phases, a warm-up loop of wood-plank bridges they call “skinnies.”
The loop crowns a wooded hill with a spectacular view of White Oak Bayou and the Arkansas River. It’s reached by pitted trail about an eighth of a mile off the dirt maintenance road that links Tournament and Arlene Laman drives.
Parks director Bob Rhoads says the Parks and Recreation Commission was glad to work with the freeriders to begin developing the park’s proposed “extreme sports” zone. The commission envisions playgrounds for several such sports sharing the basin created by a one-time dirt quarry and the big hill above it.
The commission approved the freeriders’ first-phase plans for their wooden playground and allowed them to build it themselves using untreated lumber donated by Taylor & Sons sawmill in Clarendon. Rhoads says city workers will be more involved as the freeriders begin their second and third projects - a downhill race course and a dirt track with big jumps.
DIFFERENT STROKES
The warm-up area is designed for a form of freeriding that evolved from a motorcycling sport, Easterly says.
“You set up what they call a trap, and the object is to get through it, up and over the obstacles, off of them, on top of them,” he says. “Get to the end without putting your foot down.”
That appeals to people who like balancing stunts, hops and very slow and tricky-technical riding. The second and third phases of the park will appeal to different thrill-seekers.
“Another sector will be a four-cross course that will go down the face of the quarry in part along an old roadbed,” Johnson says, “but we’ll use the gradient from the top of that quarry face across and down it and around.”
Whee!
“A four-cross would be a downhill race with four people. There will be switchbacks, curves, berms, jumping and maneuvering around boulders and other mountain biking-type obstacles, but heads-up racing, elbow to elbow, wheel to wheel.”
Yikes!
The third area, planned for the base of the old dirt quarry, is a dirt track sort of like a BMX track but as Crawford puts it, “totally different.”
“The BMX track jumps are built based on speed as opposed to getting up in the air,” he says. “What we’re building, the lips will be more vertical. The jumps that we’re building will be for getting you up in the air, doesn’t matter how fast you’re going.”
Johnson adds, “You’ll ride your bike up to the start ramp and just try to hit dirt jumps and learn tricks or do tricks, backflips, 360s, stick your foot out, fall on your face, whatever you can muster.”
Well, maybe you will do all that.
GOOD TO KNOW
The Argenta Freeriding Area will be a free playground open to the general public during Burns Park’s regular hours. But the organizers plan to label their constructions clearly so neophytes will be less likely to wander in and hurt themselves trying something designed for advanced riders.
Eventually they will have beginners’ bits in the warm-up area and the dirt-jumping track.
WHAT YOU NEED
Basic equipment includes the right bicycles, helmets and pads. Not just any old mountain bike would do. Which off-road bike to use depends upon which freeriding section you want to tackle.
Those entering a four-cross downhill race would want a sturdy bike specifically designed for downhill racing with great brakes and not a lot of excess weight, while a jumper wouldn’t care so much about the weight of the bike as the sturdiness of its frame.
“You could get by with the wrong kind of bike, but if you push that bike really hard, you’re going to ding up your wheels,” Johnson says. “A regular cross-country bike is a little lightweight for jumping and dropping off stuff.”
Also, he said, riders who wear clipless pedals or any kind of clips shouldn’t attempt the skinnies and teeter-totter ladder bridge that are already in place. “You just can’t get off the pedals as fast as you can in flat shoes,” he says.
Easterly seconds that: “There’s no area out there that would be beneficial to be clipped in.
“For the most part, we don’t get up and ride unless we have some shin guards on, too. If you slip your foot off one pedal, the other foot goes down and that pedal comes right back and tears into you.”
Witness the noise made when Mettler’s pedal smacked his shin guard.
A hard plastic disc cover for the front chainwheels, appropriately called a “bash guard,” will keep gear teeth out of your ankles.
And downhill riders will need full-face helmets. Regular bike helmets are OK for the playground’s warm-up loop.
You might also want to leave some of your excess years at home. Too much age could get in your way.
At 35, Johnson is the old man of the group.
Easterly admits he’s “28-plus” years old; Crawford claims to be “29-minus.”
“Ultimately, when we get the quarry area developed, we want to have a section of wider skinnies that aren’t real high off the ground so your average mom and dad on their hybrid bike can ride up and over and just get a sensation of what it would be like,” Easterly says.
Just a little bit of that sensation, please.
Directions, maps and riding information about the Slaughter Pen Hollow park are at www.slaughterpen.com. More information about the Argenta Freeride Area is at www.arfreeriders.com .
This article was published Monday, November 12, 2007.
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