It was supposed to be a fun event for kids — a bike race on Main Street in Altamont.

Instead, the kick-off event for the annual Longhorn Days celebration last Monday led to a confrontation of sorts between the race's organizer and Duchesne County Sheriff Travis Mitchell.

Mitchell said he was informed that state Road 35, which serves as Altamont's Main Street, had been blocked for the race and went to investigate.

“I'd already told my sergeants that when we got the call (from the race organizer) we were not going to let them have the bike race on Main Street,” Mitchell told the Uintah Basin Standard on Friday. “But we didn't get the call to have that discussion with them.”

Jenny Dixon, who has organized the race for four years, maintains that she did contact Central Dispatch in advance to request that sheriff's deputies come shut down the road as they had in years past. She said a dispatcher put her in contact with someone she believed was a deputy and she relayed her request.

But when race time came and no one showed up to provide traffic control, Dixon said she enlisted the help of a few volunteers and closed the road, creating a small detour around the race route, and got the event underway.

Dixon said she didn't recognize Mitchell, who was not in uniform, when he approached her just as the final race was about to begin.

“All of a sudden this guy is there and he's yelling at me,” Dixon said. “He was like, 'What right do you have to do this?'”

Dixon said when she told Mitchell she had OK'ed the road closure with the sheriff's office he responded, “I am the sheriff's department.”

“It was just such a shock,” Dixon said. “I just kept thinking, 'Who are you?' … When he handed me his card and I read, 'Travis Mitchell,' then I knew who he was, but that was practically at the end of the conversation.”

The brouhaha drew the attention of most people at the race, including Longhorn Days organizers Marilyn Winn and Kristi Sorensen, who both talked to the sheriff. Winn said Mitchell appeared to be so angry that she “thought his head was going to explode.”

“He was a first-class jerk,” she said, adding that Mitchell left Dixon in tears. “All he cared about was his story.”

Mitchell admits to being “pretty direct” during his interactions with Dixon, Sorensen and Winn.

“But I wasn't yelling or anything like that,” the sheriff said. “Marilyn and those guys got defensive immediately because they felt like we let them down because we hadn't showed up. It kind of escalated real fast there.”

Mitchell said he was able to determine that Dixon's call for the road closure had been routed to a Utah Highway Patrol trooper, not a sheriff's deputy, because the road she was seeking to close for the race is a state road. He added that the Utah Department of Transportation has informed sheriffs throughout the state that closing down state roads and highways for events should be something that happens on a very limited basis.

“Locally, we try not to block these roads except for parades or other large events that are well attended by the public and cannot be practically held in other areas,” Mitchell said in a letter sent to the Standard. “Small events, such as bike races, that require complete blockage of the road, and that have much smaller attendance, need to be held on side roads, such as city streets or county roads.

“I've been trying to get them to move it off Main Street for years because it really doesn't have that big of a crowd,” Mitchell said. “For the amount of people that are watching that, compared to shutting the highway down, it's just not a practical situation.”

Winn said she told the sheriff that race organizers had no problem taking their event off Main Street in the future, but that she did have a problem with the way he handled the situation.

“We had no idea this was illegal,” she said. “We had gone through the proper channels. We thought we had officers who had agreed to come.”