Cycling opens up contact with local residents, farmers

PEA RIDGE — More than 300 cyclists — old and young, men and women — stopped in Pea Ridge Jan. 7 as part of the Pea Ridge Ramble.

Mayor Nathan See and Andy Chasteen with the Runway Group addressed the cyclists.

“There’s a big team of people who made this work,” said Chasteen. “This is great. Nathan’s (See) been great — working with us, trying to build community and just bridge that divide between people who don’t ride bikes and people who do, just be friends.”

Building awareness around the hub concept is essential, Chasteen said.

“This hub concept is really a place. It’s a place you can go, you can park your car,” Chasteen said, explaining that cyclists can find a variety of trails thanks to a QR code that shows all the routes available that leave from that hub. “That hub (the one in Pea Ridge) hits gravel almost immediately — which is awesome!

“You can go, you can meet your friends there, you can have group rides start from there, then you can have this really great experience on the gravel roads, and then, one of the cool things that we really want to see happen out of these hubs is that after you ride, or before you ride, you have a meal, or a drink at the local coffee shop or the locally owned restaurant … we are helping create economic impact for some of these smaller towns.

“The future is way beyond that in our dreams,” Chasteen said. “That’s one of the reasons for these hubs. We’ve got them in Pea Ridge, Gravette and Siloam.”

He said one was just approved for one in Goshen.

“There’s more to come,” he said. “Really, the idea is that in 20 years, we’ve built these beautiful relationships with these local communities and the people who own these local restaurants start thinking about us … that’s the idea behind the hub concept.”

Learning about the places they ride is another goal of the riders.

“I entered this project with this mindset, we’re riding out here on these dirt roads with these farmers and the people who live out there and if we can just get in front of them, we can teach them about us,” Chasteen said.

“We’re not trying to invade their land, we’re just passing through.”

Then, he said that after the first meeting with the local residents, he said, “Andy, you’re such an idiot!”

“The whole idea is for us to learn about them. We can’t control what they learn about us. But we can control what we learn about them. These are public roads, but these are the zones where they live, they work. That mindset switch for me was good — I would challenge you to think in that way.

“These people live out here. They work on these roads. So, it’s not how we can teach them about us, and how we’re nonthreatening. Let’s learn about them and how they work,” he said.

“Meet the people in the places where we are riding and hear from them,” he said, is an important aspect of the group.

The cyclists made the ride on mostly gravel roads from Bentonville to Pea Ridge, stopped at the Pea Ridge City Hall, and then returned to Bentonville for food, drink and fellowship.

(NWA Democrat-Gazette/Annette Beard) Hundreds of bicycles were parked — leaning against City Hall, lying on the grass, parked in the bike rack — as cyclists took a break from a gravel ride recently to meet at Pea Ridge City Hall for question-and-answer time with Mayor Nathan See.