Arkansas MTB Trip

Hey all. Looking to make an Arkansas mountain biking trip from Florida. Going to take 8-10 days and drive out and sleep in the 4Runner. I've never biked Arkansas. Does anyone have experience there? Also, I have a roof rack and two 96L Roam cases. I'll put my bike on the back. Thinking about buying the Waterport 8 gallon weekender. Anyone have experience with this? Thanks in advance!

C

 

I've never been but a friend of ours visited Bentonville for the first time about 1.5 months ago and he had a great time riding multiple days. He rented a couple different bikes while he was there and started his rides from the shops. You might check out mtbr.com's regional forum for feedback from locals. Have fun!

 

I'll second @dbtong. I've never been there myself, but I'm hearing all kinds of wonderful things about Bentonville:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL5S7V5NhM8JQOIb9bGk8CwrLvU--ee-0R

 

Bentonville is an awesome experience for biking. The amount of money the Walton's have put in to make it a "MTB destination" is pretty crazy. They have all kinds of different track types. I would recommend AllTrails app to at least take a look at the different types and distances. If you like particular track types then researching helps, but we've just started on a trail and tried to see where it would take us. From what I can remember is Slaughter Pen MTB Park is the more centrally located trails then you can branch off from there.

Unfortunately, I have no experience camping there because we had relatives that live there so we would just bike in and bike out from the house.

We are looking into The Bike Inn experience next time we go in February.

 

It doesn't get much better than the Bella Vista/Bentonville area! Try this guide and especially the Huntley Gravity Zone, pure bliss and you don't have to go crazy, you can take it easy and work up. But be SUPER careful out there, we saw a generic trail on the map we thought we'd take to huntley. It started off fine but went right into a super steep rocky downhill that snuck up on us. We're experienced bikers but my buddy went over the bars and broke a couple bones our second day out.

https://www.oztrails.com/trail-locations/huntley-gravity-zone/