Where's Oark

On Wednesday it was raining and that was going to be that...  So we donned our rain gear and headed back to the South, up over the mountain again...  This time taking a fork in the road to the west...

Most of the roads run along the ridges of the mountain tops, with jaunts thru the valleys to get to the next ridge...  Our destination was a little town of Oark, several mountains over to the West..

The Oark General Store

We went back thru the fog and mist but lost the wet rain drops fairly quickly..  But that was when we also thought we were lost...  As it turns out, we had passed the correct road....  So we stopped at a country post office in Ozone, Ar...  And in a few moments a local fellow arrived to get his mail..

So a quick discussion with him yielded that the road we were looking for was gravel..  Well no wonder we didn't take it..  I guess it was mostly mud and the gravel part was big rocks that might be up to 8 inches around...  And he strongly suggested we didn't want to take that on our cycles...

But we were determined that we had to get to the Oark General Store...  Mostly because of the ride up that mountain..  It is billed as one of the harder and more scenic roads...

We ended up traveling all the way South again to Clarksville, Arkansas which is farther West along I 40...  Then back to the North up the steepest mountain road, complete with 10 mph switchbacks.  These were so sharp that my Goldwing motorcycle had trouble making the turn if it was an inside corner...  You  couldn't stop, as the steep incline wouldn't let you start up again without killing the engine..

This road almost was beyond my ability to ride a motorcycle...  And later at camp that night we heard a story that two of our Romeo brothers had crashed on such a switchback...  That happened as one of the riders was attempting to shift down and mistakenly ended up in neutral as he was leaned over going around the sharp corner..  The bike fell instantly to the inside of the turn, and the fellow behind him crashed on top of him..  They didn't end up hurt really badly, but their bikes had a lot of  road rash..  One of the bikes was only 6 days old...

Eventually we found the general store and had dinner there...

Al inside the store waiting for our meals

From the town of Oark, we headed out on another road called the Pigs Tail Trail..  We were miles from the Hub and the road was even more curvy and steep..  That's when it began to rain in earnest..  So back on with the rain gear..

This time I was soaked...  My jacket kept my main body dry, but my pants didn't have the liner inside and I didn't want to take my clothes off along the road to put it in.  But as we travelled the road we were treated to the most beautiful rainbow..  We seemed to chase it, but couldn't catch it...  I was cold but ignored the wetness...

This was the last evening of the rendezvous, and our last ride in the mountains, so we enjoyed it even while we were wet...  Arriving back a couple of hours later, we had a banquet to go to after a change into dry clothes..

There were over 100 people in the hall, and we had a raffle ticket drawing for some door prizes, along with the pork roast and beef in gravy dinner...

I was glad to hit the pillow that night...

Retired Rod