Fayetteville Parks and Recreation

Over the centuries, the Old Wire Road through the Ozarks has become a mosaic of quiet dirt roads, city streets, and modern highways that can still be walked or driven. However, one section now sleeps with the fishes. Lake Fayetteville hides the original road at a point just South of the last town featured, Springdale, Arkansas. The lake was flooded in 1949 as a municipal water supply, only to be dwarfed less than twenty years later by the creation of the much more voluminous Beaver Lake for nearby water needs. For decades, Lake Fayetteville was like Rogers' Lake Atalanta in that there was little traffic beyond biology class field trips and fishing. Luckily, a recent surge of attention is changing that.



[City of Fayetteville: Lake Fayetteville Park]

We have already read how Heritage Trail Partners, Inc., is looking to make the historic Old Wire Road a local attraction by establishing it as the main artery for a regional network of walking and cycling trails. No one in the area has embraced the concept more thoroughly than Fayetteville, which already has a broad paved highway grid for people-powered travel. One of the most popular portions of the trail network is the freshly minted five-mile loop around Lake Fayetteville, currently open and nearing full pavement completion as of this writing. The city even recognizes the historical value of the Butterfield Overland Route that made the most notorious use of the Old Wire Road.

[Fayetteville Flyer: Butterfield Trail Wayside Plaza dedicated]



The trail harbors its share of bucolic wooded scenes, but it also features a rather neat human-made view where it crosses the lake's spillway. Given the bridge's isolation from any roadside viewing, the gesture to style over a simpler lowest-bidder solution is uncommon and appreciated.



The most impressive sight on the Lake Fayetteville trail is the Botanical Garden of the Ozarks, occupying city lands on the lake's Eastern shore. The Garden is a non-profit, volunteer-driven showcase of floral creativity that officially opened for public enjoyment in 2006, and continues to plot expansion. It has a novel division of greenery into themed areas with artful installations, including a Japanese Garden, Children's Garden, and Ozark Native plants installation. Concerts, farmers' markets, and trail access points bolster the attraction.



* The local recreational opportunities are excellent, but this entry comes stamped with an asterisk. Every post to date has been a call to drive, see, and enjoy the fruits of motoring. An unfortunate reality is that Fayetteville, seat of the University of Arkansas and my home town, does not lend itself to an especially convincing study of the romantic roadside Americana. Some parts of Fayetteville are an Ozarkbahn antithesis, spurning cars and the freewheeling spirit of travel with a labyrinth of often steep, narrow streets choked with speed tables and restrictive parking ordinances. The terrain-driven street discontinuity and college-town eco-idealism express a minor, but surly intolerance for the automobile, the essential tool for Ozark pathfinders. Quite a few locals would recommend you abandon internal combustion and strictly operate by bicycle.



Why should this bother us? America's love of road-going mobility and roadside attractions, once strong at mid-20th-century, has dwindled into begrudgingly accepting cars as a means to an end. Now that cars are widely regarded as burdensome pollutant-coughing appliances, rather than lusty accessories to life's journey, the joy of travel and everything along the way is dying, as well.



Still, Fayetteville has a laudable insistence for ever-expanding public recreation, such as park space, art walks, and concerts. In grasping for communal sensibilities, the town seems more inclined to grow deliberately in order to minimize creeping suburban anonymity. Fayetteville is not a flavor that always suits the pallet of driving enthusiasts, but it is a unique one. Possession of personality in itself warrants an Ozarkbahn honorable mention, for it motivates us as roving enthusiasts to seek new and different experiences. Lake Fayetteville, for example. If you happen to enjoy greenways as much as byways, Fayetteville does it the best in the Ozarks.