MMRanch wrote on 11/06/19 at 21:33:51:Deb and I did Arkansas at the end of September and the riding is very good. The curves are more open than they are in the Blue Ridge area, it is sort of like riding the Blueridge Parkway without all the trees and tourists and with very wide mountain tops. There are some really good views - but the mountains have flat tops and once you are up there it is just like riding around in farm land with low hills. (There is one road where the ridge is only about 40 feet wide and the road narrows and you can see the mountain dropping off on both sides of the road). You only experience the steep and really tight curves as you drop up or down the sides of the mountain, and some of those switchbacks are first gear curves - those extremely tight curves are not common. The Arkansas Dragon is good, and the Pig Trail is excellent - it takes about an hour of riding to get to the Pig Trail from Jasper.......but the ride to and from is really good.
We rode up to Harrison and it is a busy city - but I don't think that is where you want to stay. We got a ride brochure and a lot of the rides start in Harrison - but when we tried a few of those rides we found they were too open, too flat and often too boring and there often would be 4 lane highways for long stretches. It is necessary to ride through Harrison to get to Eureka Springs and it is worth going to see - but the ride to/from there was pretty disappointing as it was mostly just highway riding.
Harrison is about 20 miles too far north of the good riding - I think Jasper is a better choice. We stayed at the Dogwood Springs campground, and the good riding is only minutes away.
http://jasperdogwoodcabinsandrv.com/Not sure how early the weather gets reliable in AR......it looks like April and May are the wettest months. As this weekend proved when we let several really good says go by and waited for the Nov 8-10 weekend to arrive just to find out the weather turned crappy- this group is not real flexible about changing the trip dates to go when the weather is good, and wet the good weather pass by without getting to ride in it. You can't count on the weather forecast being accurate 2 weeks in advance, and even a few days out the weather can make big changes. Click on the icon for "all months" in the link below and you can see averages for temperature and rainfall each month. Arkansas appears to be pretty dry and the wettest months have 8-10 days of rain - not sure if that comes with 1 rainy day and 2 dry days.......or 2 events with 5 straight days of rain! When we visited for 6 days in September it rained a little bit one evening, and on the last day it rained all day.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=jasper+arkansas+weather+...