Blazing a Trail

© Charlie Ketchum

If there’s no route going where you want to go, sometimes you just have to make your own. So it was that Charlie Ketchum and his buddy Dan “Doc” Lewall went about mapping out what they dubbed the Trans Arkansas Trail, TART for short. Then having done all the research and gotten a route defined, of course they had to get on their dirt/dual-sport bikes and ride the trail.

© Charlie KetchumRunning just shy of 525 miles south to north through Arkansas, the trail begins at Junction City on the Louisiana state line and ends at Blue Eye on the line with Missouri. In planning the route, Ketchum says, “There was no rhyme or reason for it. What I was looking for was the most direct north and south route with as much possible gravel as possible.” He had an Arkansas Department of Transportation map from 1973, but it wasn't very accurate.

Plus, the route would take them through the Weyerhaeuser Forest, a tree farm for a forest products producer, and it was private but open to recreation, and not mapped except on a few topographic maps. Ketchum had ridden parts of it before and “figured we could get through.” He called it up on Google Maps, plotted a route, and then transferred that to his GPS unit.

“I did a lot of flying in Google Earth,” he says.

“We kind of had to pick our route through there because the roads are in flux. They close the roads to log or they'll close the whole area to a hunting lease while they're letting the trees grow. So when we started out I had a route laid out but it ended up we had to do several reroutes in the middle of that because of closed roads. But that was part of the adventure.”

Putting TART to the Test

Altogether, six friends agreed to put the TART to the test, but life has a way of interfering.  Doc Lewall couldn’t make the ride at all, and Travis DuPriest and Tim O’Leary had to work, so they could only ride for part. Starting out then, on day one, were Ketchum, Mike Spears, and Joe Robinson. They gathered the night before in El Dorado, AR, and hit the road in the morning.

© Charlie KetchumAfter 30 miles of gravel they blasted along about 40 miles of pavement and then got back onto the gravel. Then they hit some oil fields and swamps. Running through this area it was very, very dry and “that logging field was a foot deep in bull dust. Bull dust is very powdery, fine, talcum-powder-like dirt. And I mean, it lingers. It gets in everything. We were just covered head to toe. We had probably a good five miles of that through this logging area. The bull dust was something else. You could not see. I don't care how far you hung back from the guy in front of you, the dust just wouldn't settle because there was no air movement.”

The upshot of this was that Spear's allergies started acting up, so as the day progressed he got worse and worse and he had to drop out. That left two, Ketchum and Robinson, camping the first night at DeGray Lake Resort State Park.

In the early part of day two, the two riders faced some of the toughest riding of the trip. Along the way, says Ketchum, there are three highly technical sections that he would not recommend for an inexperienced rider. One of these was the road running above Lake Winona, which is about 25 miles southwest of Conway, AR.

“The road's almost overgrown. It has been for a long time, because some of the branches that overhung the road were quite big. You had to ride between the branches and in the crown of the road because the wheel tracks of the road were rutted at least a foot deep. There was about 4 miles of that. You really had to be on your game to ride it. We made it to the bottom and if there had been beer nearby we would have celebrated.”

What they did find at the bottom was a triathlon in progress.

© Charlie Ketchum“We came down off this particularly bad section above the lake onto a national forest road and there was a guy with one of those pop-up tents sitting there and he had a hand radio and a clip board, and I was really curious, so we stopped. I asked him, 'What are you doing?' He said he was a checking station for the runners, that they were having a triathlon. He asked where we'd come from. This guy was a local and we told him we came down off the mountain behind the lake and he says, 'No you didn't!' I said yeah we did. He said 'I went up there 20 years ago on an ATV and I vowed I'd never go back. You guys couldn't have ridden that on a motorcycle.' But we did and he was just amazed by that. So we felt that we'd accomplished something by doing that, because it was pretty tough.”

Roughing It

Nearing Perryville, AR, Robinson struck a rock so hard that he gouged a hole in his tire “bigger than my thumb” and ended up riding out to the pavement on his rim. His portion of the trip was done, but Ketchum rode on to Choctaw Recreation Area, about 30 miles north of Conway, where he was to meet up with DuPriest and O’Leary and where they planned to spend that night camping. He still had one more problem to face, however.

© Charlie Ketchum“I went on down this road and right before I got to the Arkansas River the road had berms of dirt on both sides of it. I got to the end and there was a berm of dirt about 4-5-feet tall, and on the backside, or non-road side, was a really deep ditch and it had water in it. I got down to the end of this thing and it was gated and the guy had put up an 8-foot chain link fence with barbed wire on top of it to keep people from coming off the highway and getting into it. I was trying to get out of the area and onto the highway.

“That was the toughest part for me. I couldn't get from point A to point B and it was 30 feet away. I couldn't get out there. It was a good 20-mile ride to that point and I would have had to backtrack. It was getting late in the afternoon, so I got to looking at the situation. I went back about a block from the end where this gate was and there was no wire there but the berm was still there.”

Earlier on the ride, Ketchum and Robinson had run into another berm and Ketchum had high-centered on his skid plate. In this case, “I got up with my little army shovel and dug a slot across the berm and had to go out through that and into the ditch and dumped the bike over. I had a hell of a time there. This kid came along the highway and saw me and was trying to figure out what I was doing there. He ended up being the landowner's son. He gave me 10 kinds of grief but he did help me get my bike out of the ditch and back onto the highway.”

On day three, the trio rode together until about noon, at which point DuPriest and O’Leary had to turn off and head home again, leaving Ketchum to proceed solo. Before that, though, they came across a place where the farmer had closed a public road with barbed wire.

“There was a little bit of discussion about unwiring the gate and going through but it was marked with purple paint. Here in Arkansas, anything that has purple paint is private property and you've got to stay out. And they mean it here, they'll shoot at you. So that caused us a long reroute.”

Revising TART

Parting with the others, Ketchum pressed on, nearing the end of the trail. At that point he had pretty much had it. He turned for home and came back later to ride the last few miles. Then, with what he had learned from his rides, he revised the TART route to allow anyone else interested in doing the same ride to avoid the problems he encountered. That route is now available on DualSportMaps.com, complete with icons showing places to get gas, color coding to show which portions of the trail are the roughest, and photos from along the way.

For anyone contemplating riding the TART he offers some words of warning:

“Where we were there just isn't gas. If you don't get it where I've outlined you're not going to get it. This is probably not a good ride for a beginner. I would not recommend it for a beginner.  Parts of it are so benign you could ride it in a tricycle. The technical parts you really better be on your game. If you've done enough dual-sporting you know that it can be dangerous. Where this takes you, a lot of it is really remote and you should consider riding with a buddy. Or if you have too much bravado for that, at least take a SPOT locater with you.”

For Ketchum, 62, “It was fun for me first of all because I was able to accomplish it at my age. Secondly, it made me feel good because I still have my technical abilities. I was concerned about that at the onset of this trip. I didn't know if I could keep up with the younger guys. When I got done I felt like a cheshire cat.”

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