NORTHWEST ARKANSAS — As Wakarusa organizers dismantled stages Monday, deputies worked to process bond payments and empty the county jail of patrons arrested outside the four-day music festival.
A judge set bond Sunday for dozens of people arrested largely on charges of trespassing and drug- and alcohol-related offenses on public roadways outside the Mulberry Mountain Events Center on Arkansas 23, Franklin County Sheriff Reed Haynes said.
“We’ll have them all out before next year’s Wakarusa,” Haynes said.
The Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival, in its second year at the site in the Ozark National Forest, attracted about 18,000 people, including vendors, musicians and fans. Organizers sold about 15,000 tickets, up from 10,000 last year.
Officers of the Arkansas State Police, the sheriff’s office and the U.S. Forestry Service stationed themselves outside the event. The festival grounds were monitored by private security. The agencies did not have official counts of those arrested or cited Monday.
The festival went smoothly with the exception of a few black bears that wandered out of the nearby woods and onto the campgrounds, spokesman Emily Ginsberg said.
Haynes said the number of arrests appeared to have increased from the previous year, mirroring the increase in attendance.
The Franklin County jail, which has a 35-inmate capacity, was full Saturday, Haynes said. Other suspects were housed in Logan and Crawford counties.
He estimated about 1,000 people without tickets sneaked onto the festival grounds. Several people who’d been banned by festival organizers were charged with trespassing when they attempted to return, he said.
Agencies arrested about 100 people last year.
An increase wouldn’t be surprising, Haynes said.
“The population of our county’s only 18,000,” he said.“There were more people out there than we have [in Ozark].”
Agencies prepared before the event, staging helicopters on standby to bypass congestion on narrow and windy Arkansas 23 for medical responses, and setting up sobriety checkpoints along well-traveled routes.
Fayetteville resident Chaz Davis, 29, who performed at the event as DJ Bizar, said the festival was fun despite the presence of two black bears that posed for pictures and ripped holes in several tents. A young bear and a larger adult, which Davis estimated weighed 250-300 pounds, were spotted separately in the campgrounds.
Davis stopped the larger beast from sniffing a deeply sleeping camper’s face by banging a metal spatula against a meat smoker.
“Right at that moment, he woke up and saw it running away,” Davis said. “He was pretty pale.”
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Northwest Arkansas, Pages 7 on 06/08/2010