Why being compared to Disneyland is a good thing.
The final road trip of the year was to Bentonville, Arkansas, the self-proclaimed mountain bike capitol of the world. Also, the corporate home of Walmart.
I have a story of an adventure in Arkansas in 1996 where marijuana saved my life (I’ll share it with you sometime on a ride) which I swapped for local knowledge during the Little Sugar mountain bike race. This guy had grown up in Bentonville and left in 1999, swearing never to return. He believed my story, knowing first hand what the Ozark back woods were capable of back then. He moved to Spokane, then Seattle, and for 20 years excelled in the aerospace world, creating futurist materials. He is now back in Bentonville full-time, doing the exact same line of work, this time for manufacturing entities. He boldly stated that he wasn’t a mountain biker before moving back to Bentonville, but now that there are 500 miles of singletrack capable of being ridden from his door in downtown B-ville, he is officially an addict. He rides the local bike, an Allied BC40, a svelte looking full suspension carbon bike built from scratch in the neighboring town of Rogers, one of only a handful of such companies in the U.S.A.
We highly recommend a trip to Bentonville in your future, but strongly suggest you wait a couple of years- the whole place is under construction. In two years or so, they should have all the new neighborhoods in place as well as the infrastructure for the bike free downtown they have envisioned. It’s a tremendous amount of effort to work on the three square miles of parking garages just outside the city center, the spiderweb of non car trails connecting it all, and the reorientation in the flow of life that will surely upend any town’s sense of calm and well-being (think back to what it did to Glenwood Springs to have one interstate interchange re-done). There isn’t another city or town in this country that would attempt it. 56,734 inhabitants of a city in a state south of the Mason-Dixon line are set to become the first place in America to have a car free downtown. There’s no way to believe it without seeing it- just be a little more patient and witness the finished product.
The gravel biking in B-ville is just as extensive as the mountain biking: there are easily 500 miles of hilly country surrounding the town so feel free to set off in any direction. The locals are friendly (or at least don’t flip you off and try to make you feel like an intruder) and the views are grand in the fall, just watch out for the dogs who freely roam the roads and neighborhoods in the quiet back woods areas I swore I’d never wander down again. The Big Sugar is an exceptional race, bringing the royalty of American gravel racing together for an end of season finale that rivals only SBT GRVL in ambiance, firmly establishing B-ville as the Disneyland of cycling.
Most all of this is thanks to the Walton Brothers, the quiet, first family of cycling, and owners of the Coal Basin Ranch outside of Redstone, not to mention the heirs to Walmart.
Stay tuned to discover what that bodes for the future of our area?
Cheers.
