The Land of Oz
I can’t remember when the idea got floated. At some point Vbergh and I started kicking around going to ride Bentonville. I was the only one who had ridden there, and it was pretty brief. But it was enough to know it’s a rad destination. That was enough, I guess. Vbergh set his sights on it and drove the plan forward. After a bunch of back and forth with the wider crew, we ended up with 4 of us who could make the dates work and had the itch. It sounded straightforward enough. We would all jump in Vanimal (our 2015 Sprinter) and drive there from TX, stay the weekend, ride, have a few beers, and rip back home again. We had no idea what was coming. We should have.
It’s Vbergh, Mark, Z and me.
Thursday 11:00AM. I show up in Z’s driveway and we load his bike along with the 2 of mine already in the van. Then Mark. Then Vbergh. 6 bikes, 4 riders, a stack of avocados, Honeycrisp apples (don’t ask, really), and 6 beers. Let’s GO.
The route is north through Dallas from Austin, then Oklahoma, then finally NW Arkansas, better known as Oz. Of course we stop at Buc-ee’s, and then traffic in Dallas is killing us. Now we are 4 beers.
Ok, I just have to say it: Oklahoma, wow. We headed up past Lake Eufaula, which was so beautiful it hurt. I had no idea Oklahoma was this pretty. Turns out it’s man-made, finished in 1964, and the largest lake in the state. LBJ himself came down to dedicate the dam. 600 miles of shoreline. They call it the “gentle giant.” None of us knew any of that as we rolled past. We just kept saying holy shit, look at that.
Dark settles in, drive is getting long. I down my 4th Red Bull, a decision I will later regret. We arrive in the dark, the AirBnB is bad ass, we find our beds, and I finally fall asleep as thunderstorms rock the place. Hrm, tomorrow is going to be muddy.
Friday
Friday 8:00AM. We are up, groggy, but everyone is eager to both ride but also see if the trails are too wet, can we even ride? Bikes get prepped, shoes, packs, gloves, pumping up tires, time to roll. The amazing thing about Bentonville is, you just ride everywhere. No loading up the car, driving just to ride. Instead you ride right from town, easy to get to everything. In our case the trail runs right by the back gate. We set off. We immediately realize, yes, yes, it’s going to be a muddy day. At the intersection Vbergh quips some shit about trying to stay clean, to which I respond “what do you think is going to happen today?”. We crack up, tone set. Today will be rowdy.
Let’s go back to this 6 bike thing. I bet you wondered if you read that right. You did. 4 of us, 6 bikes. Vbergh, me, Z are on eMTB. Mark is insane and came knowing this. God damn legend. Vbergh and I both brought analogs. You know, just in case. Today Mark is the only analog. Wait until we get into tomorrow.
It’s still early and we get our first peek of downtown. It’s freshly washed from the thunderstorm and it’s lovely.
Bentonville was founded in 1837, named after a Missouri senator, and for a long time it was just a quiet Ozark town with a square and a courthouse the Union burned to the ground in 1862. Then in 1950 a guy named Sam Walton opened a five-and-dime on that square. You know how that one ends. Walmart’s HQ is still here, the original store is a museum, and the company put this corner of Arkansas on the map in a very specific, fluorescent-lit kind of way. But the wild part, the part that matters to us, is what happened next. Sam’s grandsons, Tom and Steuart, got obsessed with mountain biking. And instead of going to Whistler like normal rich kids, they decided to build the trails here. Since 2007 the Walton Family Foundation has shoveled something like $74 million into dirt, and somewhere along the way it turned into 500-plus miles of trail spidering across northwest Arkansas, branded the Oz Trails. Every one of them connects. You can ride from your AirBnB to coffee to lunch to a black-diamond rock garden and back to dinner without putting a wheel on a road shuttle. Bentonville calls itself the Mountain Biking Capital of the World, and yeah, having now ridden it: that checks out.
We decide, as one does, to start on the American Trail. No one is out. It’s just us. We rip into the fresh meat of the trail, not too muddy, believe it or not. All I can hear is us all breathing. First ride, everyone max stoked. Magic Marys tearing into dirt. I check the firm switch on the Fox shock. Good, we plush. And the trails themselves. Mega groomed, zoomy, flowy, with just enough tech to keep you honest. Well designed. Fun as hell. I eat shit, we keep going.
Eventually we wind our way out of Slaughter Pen and head back downtown to check out Phat Tire Bike Shop, and they point us at Homegrown for food. Turns out this is a genius recommendation. It takes a mile or two of pedalling, and we are sitting at breakfast crushing beer-mosas and egg scrambles. Is this even real? I mean, I know we aren’t the first people to experience this, but damn it’s rad when it’s you vs. reading it in some mag (maybe like you are now). All I can say is: fucking go to Bentonville.
At this point it gets blurry. Maybe it’s the beer-mosas talking, or just the entirety of how rad this place is sinking in. I remember more trails, jumps, hips, tech, stream crossings. The miles are stacking up. At some point Vbergh exclaims his bike is shit and doesn’t work. ¿Qué es eso doesn’t work? A quick inspection reveals he’s missing the entire bolt stack holding the rear triangle of his Santa Cruz Vala together. Yeah, broken for sure. We look for it, no bueno. Why am I speaking Spanish now? But we did see some folks who had rented Valas, so let’s figure out where they rented them and go there. They must have a bolt. Turns out it’s Mojo Cycles. We pedal (slowly) over there and they pull the bolt off a brand new bike and set up Vbergh. Are you fucking kidding? They saved him from having to go analog too soon in the trip. More on that later. At some point during all this craziness, Z took a digger, and he doesn’t tell us at the time, but it’s bad. Handlebar to the gut. You’ve been there. There is nothing as bad as this. You would rather get hit in the head with a baseball bat than this. He’s muscling through, but we can tell all is not well in Z-town.
Friday Night
With Vbergh’s bike dialed in, and all of us exhausted, it’s time to head back and get cleaned up. We have dinner reservations at the Preacher’s Son downtown.
6:00PM we Uber over. We pre-game with some beers and take pics with the bartender to send to our wives. I am not sure why we did this, but we commented something like oh, we are in fucking trouble now, boys. Wives barely noticed. We aren’t as cool as we thought. Ok, so beers at the Taproom, then we mosey over for the rooftop bar at the Preacher’s Son. Margs. Yum.
Then we descend for dinner. I am not sure if it’s that we are starving or this place is outrageously good, or both, but we all love dinner and the 4 Old Fashioneds we down with it. I have the rigatoni (unreal) and the other guys get the salmon (I hear it was amazing), which Mark finishes in 32 seconds. Hungry? We are all having so much fun. The food is good, the people are amazing, everything is going so well that we end up in the basement at the speakeasy.
This is the train wreck happening in slow mo. Things are starting to rotate. It was the pre-game, the margs, the elation, and those fucking Old Fashioneds, catching up.
So we order more. Darius helps us out, er, maybe that’s the wrong way to phrase it. Adding more alcohol to our already 9.6% BAL is not going to help us. Z is now in lots of pain, and he shows us his belly. Dude, it’s the largest fucking black-and-blue bruise I have ever seen. We need to get to the hospital. He’s manning up, but Vbergh and I decide, dude, we gotta do the right thing. It’s hard to rip singletrack if you are dead.
I am just going to outright say, right now: so sorry to the staff of Northwest Medical Center, Bentonville. I am not going to dive into the details, because, for the love of god, one of us may need to run for office one day. But let’s just say they fucked up letting all 4 of us be in one hospital room for a couple hours. Between the now 10% BAL (or it seemed) and Mark’s fucking rotten gut that emitted gas on a frequent, almost metronome-like cadence of part tire-fire, part okra, part eggs, part leftover Chinese food, he basically put a full-fledged sticky layer of stank across that entire room. The good news was Z was ok. Just really bad bruising, no breaks, no internal stuff. He’d live to ride another day. We took an Uber home and decided we needed another beer before bedtime. I sat in the hot tub thinking jesus H, that was an absolutely epic and insane day. What could tomorrow even be like?
Saturday
Saturday, 8:00AM, uh no way, back to bed. 10:00AM, nope. Finally by noon we had our shit together enough to entertain the idea of a ride. Z was going to sit it out (as he should have). And guess who took his eMTB. Mark. The legend. Virgin ride on the electric zoom zoom. After yesterday’s analog suffering he’d earned every one of those 800 watts.
We head off through Slaughter Pen again and out to Handcut Hollow to find some singletrack. Today will be big.
Handcut Hollow is quintessential Oz Trails. Built in 2020 and 2021, it’s all hand-cut, as the name says. No big machine-built berms here, just narrow corridors hacked into the woods east of I-49 to connect a chunk of country the rest of the network hadn’t touched. About 16 miles of it now, depending on who you ask, all run by a group called Trailblazers. The Traverse Loop has something like 75 switchbacks. There’s a climb called Zone 4 that the builders were specifically asked to make as hard as humanly possible to pedal up, and to date no one, including the pros, has cleaned it in one go. There’s a giant axe sculpture out there. There’s a restored 1800s schoolhouse on the property. There’s a brand new dirt jump line some volunteers stomped in last year. The whole place feels like it was built by people who actually ride, because it was.
We decide to start on the Traverse trail. Absolutely gorgeous singletrack. Zoomy, but with interjections of tech. Cool switchbacks, smooth parts, rocky parts, bridges, steep up, steep down. The switchbacks up are steep and challenging, reminding me of the Front Range of Colorado. Get momentum, keep compact, muscle up, recover. Meanwhile Mark is yelling “Like a boss!” on every climb. eMTB payoff for yesterday’s analog suffering. But on the down, these same switchbacks are mega tight, keeping you on your toes. Release, rail them, and enjoy the speed. Just unreal perfect. Perfect trail.
We get up to the hub and do some rips on the various options. Chat with some folks. More rips. It’s just so much fun out here. We are hooting and hollering out loud. Super, super fun. We decide it’s time to cut out and head back on the Traverse. We take the long way, another 5 miles at least of perfect singletrack, until we hook back up with the main road into town. We end up at Archie’s Sandwichery and get sandwiches bigger than our heads, no, seriously. We are exhausted, something like 20 miles in, just so much fun. Post sandwiches, we head back and hook back up with Z.
After a couple beers, we decide we need to do two things. 1) ride. 2) get more beers. This time, Mark, Vbergh, and I are analog. And yeah, this is what I meant earlier. The Mojo bolt held just fine. This was just the perfect time to interject analog. Dice up the day, change the feel. Z is back on his rig, and we head back to Slaughter Pen for some rips at the tech and flow hubs. We ride into town and get at it. We make short work of it. It’s drier now than before. We move through the network methodically, picking off the stuff we missed yesterday, re-riding the lines we loved. We skip the blacks. We’re exhausted and there’s no need to push it. And honestly? We still barely scratched the surface. It would take months to cover it all.
The thing about these trails: they aren’t just trails, they’re riding art. And the soil is the wild part. It’s not Colorado loam, smooth and flowy. It’s not Texas or Utah chunk, rocky as fuck, every move technical. It’s somehow somewhere in between, like they imported the best of everything by hand on some giant truck. An impossible combination. Amazing.
The Hub
I’m tired now. 20 miles of eMTB and another 10 of analog, and I am smoked. We all are. It’s time to hit the Hub.
The Hub sits a couple blocks off the Bentonville square. Bike shop, coffee bar, full bar, kitchen, a big-ass patio, and a 100-person crowd that on any given afternoon is two-thirds people wearing SPD cleats. It’s exactly the kind of bar a bike town should have, and most don’t. The story behind it is the actual gem, though. It was started by a guy named Nathan “Woody” Woodruff. He was building trails as a high schooler in Fayetteville, and in 2006, while trying to finish a master’s in teaching and running a lawn-care side hustle, he got tapped by the Waltons to design and build the original Slaughter Pen system. He said yes, started a company called Progressive Trail Design, and twenty years later that same outfit has the contract to build the mountain bike course for the 2028 LA Olympics. So we’re sitting at his bar, post-ride, still gritty, drinking the beer of a guy who basically built the entire reason we drove ten hours to be here. Wild.
We head inside as a thunderstorm starts pummeling the place. We order some beers and some chicken tacos. Now I just want to point out: these are some of the very best tacos I have ever had. Vbergh nods in agreement. Look, we are from Austin. We don’t just throw around compliments like this willy-nilly. We take tacos fucking seriously. We down a plate of them and order two more. Demolished along with a couple more beers.
There’s a break in the weather, so we all start riding home in the dark, the sky lit up by lightning. One tail light, one headlight. Otherwise pitch black, except for those lightning streaks. The smell of fresh rain on pavement, all of us giggling, freewheels buzzing. I love this. These guys. Love them. And… now I love Bentonville too.
Sunday
Sunday 9:00AM. 10:00AM. Noon. You see the pattern. Look, our legs are toast, our livers are fried. We all feel like utter shit. Like, somewhere between that utter good shit and that utter bad shit. I can’t tell if I’m tired or hungover or both. Both I guess. We end up dragging ourselves out to the Bentonville Brewery for lunch, and well, you guessed it, down some beers. The wind is blowing, it’s a perfect temperature, the place is spotless and amazing. Folks ride their e-cargo bikes to the brewery, have a cold one, and head out. Young families everywhere, kids ripping the scoot-bike track. Bentonville is bike lifestyle. I’m jealous. This is a special place. As I ponder this, the Kolschs are going down easy.
That’s a wrap, folks, no more legs left. 4 guys utterly exhausted. Big rides, crashes, broken bikes, bruised bodies, food, beer, atmosphere, mud, sun, and some of the sweetest trails I have ever ridden. Thank you, Bentonville. Thank you, Arkansas. As we drive home in Vanimal, I think to myself, I hope this is the new normal. An idea, a van, a bunch of bikes, and an incredible adventure. Oz delivered.
Editor’s note: This trip was supposed to be five of us. My brother Dan was on the list until a medical emergency right before we left almost took him from us. Real serious. He’s alive, he’s healing, and that’s the only stat that matters. We missed you out there, brother. There’s always next time. Love you, Dan.