Anticipating rain, I carefully stretched the thin rubber cover I had brought from Texas over my helmet as part of my process to leave the hotel in Mt. Ida. I also swapped out my wool socks for waterproof ones and put on my rain pants and rain jacket. My rain gear is made by Outdoor Research [1] . It is light, breathable and packable, and I believe the Helium II is the optimum fabric for bikepacking in rainy weather with temperatures above 40 degrees. The other side of the coin of this fabric is that it is not totally waterproof. Prolonged hard rain will seep in through the fabric. Here’s what you must remember, though: trying to stay totally dry while bikepacking in Arkansas is a fool’s errand. It cannot be done since you are pedaling a loaded bike up and down mountains and generating an enormous amount of body heat. Let me hasten to add that I’m talking about warm weather. If the temperatures are 15 – 20 degrees colder, this calculus may change [2] . Waterproof socks and gloves may th

  I packed my stuff, loaded my bike, took a caffeine pill to stave off the impending no-coffee headache and rolled from the cabin at 4:38 a.m., set on making it to Hatfield some 30 miles distant for breakfast. Waiting for Steve to start breakfast at the store at 7 or timing my passage by the state park lodge for breakfast would waste too much time and put me behind schedule for the day. My calorie deficit immediately started to tell on me as I pedaled up the paved climb to Queen Wilhelmina State park. I had no power, energy, or snap in my legs and my breathing was labored. Regardless of how much I had eaten the night before or how much I had rested, the extreme lethargy of early morning was to be a trend throughout the race [1] . It seemed like my legs always needed a couple of hours of steady pedaling to wake up and function properly.   I took the obligatory selfie at the park sign and continued along the flat pavement of Highway 88 to the point where the course diverged onto the st

  I rolled out of the campground at 4:30 a.m. knowing that the store at Rich Mountain would close at 6 p.m. I was aware that since this day's route was much more demanding, I’d have to push the pace to make it there by closing. With short stops for filling bottles, eating, and going to the bathroom I had managed to maintain a pace of roughly ten mph over gravel through the previous two days, but I knew the route would be much tougher today. After a ten-mile flat start the course steeply climbs a ridge comprised by Petit Jean and other mountains. This is a truly remote area and I saw several wild turkeys, which are normally very wily and people shy. Near the end of the first long hilly section near Kingdoodle Knob, a black object appeared at about 75 yards in the double track gravel road to my front. My initial thought was that a large dog sat in the road, but I was far from any houses. The moment my brain processed the word "bear" I braked and discerned that two small bla

  I woke, packed my gear before dawn and forced myself to eat my last Oark burger in the pre-dawn damp cool of around 50 degrees. I started riding wearing the long-sleeved t-shirt I had slept in as well as a neck gaiter under my rain jacket, reasoning that I’d change out of them when I warmed up. The “when” turned out to be a scant ten minutes later. A few hundred meters of climbing had me starting to sweat and I had to stop, strip off that shirt, and stow it, and put on my still-damp shirt from the day before. This was a foolish camping blunder that I didn’t make again the rest of the race. I am firmly convinced that for bikepacking or backpacking you need to have dry clothes that you only put on when you are off the bike and in a dry place. Those clothes must stay packed away in a dry bag while you are riding and generating sweat. While it’s no fun to put on smelly still-damp socks, bibs, and shirts in the cool of the morning to start riding, it’s the only way to avoid winding up w

  After chickening out of even attempting the Arkansaw High Country Race in 2019 and only completing 667 miles of the 1,030-mile course as an individual time trial (ITT) in 2020, I trained and equipped myself to go for an ITT this May (2021). Our COVID-adjusted semester ended in early May, and I reasoned that my best bet would be to attempt it before the debilitating June heat started to kick in [1] . I drove to Fayetteville on May 12 th and stayed at the funky, kitschy Graduate hotel which constitutes the start-finish line. I decided to run the course counterclockwise so that I could still be relatively fresh and fat during the long early stretch from Russellville to Hatfield (about 200 miles) with very sparse food, water, and shelter options. Luckily, those first four lean days coincided with some of the best weather I could possibly hope for, comparatively dry and cool. The weather reports I started to track in the days before the race predicted that I would start to encounter scat