Northwest Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Aiming for tranquility
Changes to parking, traffic coming at Mount Sequoyah.
FAYETTEVILLE — Changes are coming to the Mount Sequoyah overlook.
The iconic spot with a nearly 100-year history has been featured in countless photographs by visitors wanting to get a view from above of a large swath of the city. The overlook is part of about 400 acres of mostly private land east of downtown that includes the Mount Sequoyah Retreat and Conference Center, cottages, tennis courts, a pool and other spots for recreation. The surrounding neighborhood has about 30 homes.
Visitors are welcome as long as they don’t disturb the tranquility of the site, said Emily Gentry with Mount Sequoyah’s nonprofit organization. Neighbors last month discussed too
many cars parking near the cross and speedsters looping around Skyline Drive, which circles the top of the hill.
The Mount Sequoyah Inc. nonprofit took over ownership of the property from the United Methodist Church in 2016. It’s undergone a rebranding with the intention of opening the campus to a variety of people and interests outside of religious affiliation, according to the Mount Sequoyah website.
Visitors historically have parked or let their cars idle in front of the cross or along Skyline Drive near the overlook, Gentry said. The result can be carbon emissions from the exhaust and light pollution from headlights. Mount Sequoyah staff frequently pick up trash tossed near the site, she said.
Next week, the few marked parking spaces in front of the cross will be removed. Visitors will be encouraged to park at one of three parking lots nearby and walk to enjoy the view.
Picnic tables and seating will replace the parking spots with containers for trash and recycling. The nonprofit is partnering with local architecture firm Modus Studio and the city to renovate the area, Gentry said.
“We think we can come up with some really cool ideas to activate the space and make it feel more like a park,” she said. “Being like that should help cut down on the traffic and the speeding.”
A second part of the plan involves traffic calming along Skyline Drive. The city has a program neighborhoods can apply for to put in simple road features such as planters, paint and plastic bollards to help slow cars. There’s also $100,000 in the city budget to serve a variety of traffic purposes, including slowing cars.
Dane Eifling, the city’s mobility coordinator, joined the November neighborhood meeting and said the traffic calming plans are still in development.
“They love having the cross, and they love having visitors there. They just don’t like people driving too fast on that circle or doing things they’re not supposed to be doing,” he said.
Neighbor Kevin Roessger gave a presentation during the meeting that showed Skyline Drive had 31 calls to police from January 2019 to Oct. 31, an average of about a call a month. Most of the calls came from the west side of the mountain near the cross and after 10 p.m. when the lights turn off and the overlook is supposed to be closed to visitors, he said.
Most of the calls involved intoxicated drivers, suspicious activity and noise, Roessger said. The overlook bears the brunt of behavior young people typically engage in while unsupervised — blaring music, littering, mild drug use and sexual activity, he said.
The undesirable activity has increased since the start of the pandemic, Roessger said. The hope is youngsters won’t do in the open on a picnic bench what they would do inside a car, he said.
Cars speeding around Skyline Drive is the larger issue, Roessger said. He recalled a bad wreck in March in which someone hit another driver and took off down the hill.
“It’s not that this is somehow a bad place to live. I think it’s the best place to live in all of Fayetteville,” Roessger said. “But there are issues going on, and these are real issues. We need to work toward a solution.”
The changes are intended as a pilot program, Gentry said.
“We’re going to try it. We’re going to see how it goes,” Gentry said. “It could be an epic fail of an experiment. We just want to better the space and help people use it in the most effective way that they can.”