After leaving Two Rivers Park and turning onto County Farm Road, Chantal Roberts saw a biker mending a flat tire and moved on. Normal. And then she saw another, and another, and another.
Then, as she passed Maumelle Park, Roberts felt the air whoosh out of the back tireon her purple Jamis Ventura road bike.
Roberts and her husband tried to patch it up, but the patch wasn’t enough to save the tire, which was punctured by one of the numerous naillike tacks strewn across the bike trail between Two Rivers Park and Pinnacle Mountain State Park during a busy Saturday for biking last month.
Roberts and her husband were participating with about 150 other bikers in the second annual Bike and Hike for ALS - amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disorder otherwise known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.
Ride organizers said they’d never heard of anything like tacking a bike trail and that they had taken the usualprecautions, such as scanning the trail the day before for fallen trees, broken glass and the like as they put up route signs for the bikers. The 18-plus-mile ride and Pinnacle Mountain hike Aug. 24 also had two sheriff’s deputies and a few yellow-vested volunteers closer to the mountain - down the path from the tacks - on hand toensure safety and direct vehicle and bike traffic.
Similar precautions will be taken for this month’s central Arkansas bike events - Bike MS: Arkansas next Saturday and Sunday, and the Big Dam Bridge 100 on Sept. 28. Bike MS traverses Pulaski, Saline and Garland counties and has 100-125 participants, while the Big Dam Bridge 100 goesthrough Pulaski, Faulkner and Perry counties and has 2,500 to 2,600 participants from all over the nation and other countries.
Volunteers for the events have brooms to clear the paths, but they can’t be everywhere.
Lisa Finkbeiner, a Bike MS organizer for theNational Multiple Sclerosis Society, said tacks could have been tossed on the road by bored teenagers or people angry with cyclists. She’s had to deal with vandalism before in her 13 years with Bike MS - last year 50 of the tour’s 500 route signs were knocked down, all in one area. But she’s never heard of someone placing tacks on a trail.
“It’s a charity event; it’s a great cause,” Finkbeiner said. “It’s a shame.”
Monty Cole, an organizer for the Bike and Hike for ALS, said he’s not sure how the tacks got on the trail, but he’s willing to believe that they were dropped by a truck and that it was just an accident.
Roberts isn’t so sure. She said she thought the tacks were deliberately placed, because they mostly affected people on the bike path. Roberts was on the road until she turned and crossed the bike path.
Roberts filed a complaint with the Pulaski County sheriff’s office late Friday afternoon, the first formal complaint filed on the incident.
Sheriff’s office spokesman Lt. Carl Minden said a complaint does not necessarily guarantee an investigation. He said he doesn’t know how easily police could find who actually placed the tacks on the trail, if anyone intentionally did so.
After reports of tacks on the trail began coming in to Bike and Hike organizers Cole and Tim Vahsholtz, Vahsholtz called Pinnacle Mountain staff members, and Cole and other volunteers went to help stranded cyclists and transport them by car back to the starting line in North Little Rock. In all, Cole said, they transported five or six bikers, but it’s possible that other cyclists fell victim even after the Bike and Hike ride ended.
Area residents and cyclists emailed River Valley Property Owners Association President Louis Bianco about the tacks. Bianco then emailed Pulaski County Judge BuddyVillines, who emailed Bianco last Sunday to tell him that he had sent a county sweeper out to the area that morning to clean up any tacks that might remain.
“Anyone who tacks a bike trail is just stupid,” Villines told the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.
Villines said cycling isn’t a fad but a growing activity that people need to get used to.
Last year, the county decided to add more than 70 miles of roads and bicycle paths to the designated Arkansas River Trail - extending the trail to an 88.5-mile loop. However, not all of those roads have shoulders, Villines said, meaning that at times cyclists and motorists must share the roadways.
County Farm Road, where the tacks were found Aug. 24, has bike lanes in both directions.
Cyclists and motorists have occasional conflicts when bike riders travel in the roadway instead of in bike lanes, something many often do when they’re bicycling with friends, advocates say. Some cyclists - in or out of the bike lanes - have experienced cars driving too close to them, or drivers gesturing at them with middle fingers or throwing bottles at them.
“This is not the norm, but it happens,” said Bruce Thalheimer, co-owner of Chainwheel bicycle shop.
Reports made to the police should have license plate numbers in them, Minden said, otherwise the already tricky task is a “needle-in-ahaystack” situation.
Although many cyclists are careful and accommodating of other traffic on the road, some cyclists take up too much of the road and don’t move fast enough for traffic, Bianco said.
As the county’s population grows, traffic on the sometimes hilly and twisty roads stands to increase.
But because of a lack of cycling infrastructure in city limits, cyclists frequently use county roads and the River Trail, Thalheimer said.
“Can’t we all just get along?” he asked.
Northwest Arkansas, Pages 15 on 09/01/2013