A rider pulls into the Lake Ann Trailhead on a Saturday morning and has to make a decision that didn't exist a year ago. Turn left and it's the Back 40, the way it's always been done: earn every foot of climb, string together singletrack for as long as your legs hold out, and reward yourself with a beer at the end. Turn right, drive fifteen minutes to Mercy Way, and the climbing is done for you. A chairlift takes you up. You just point the bike downhill and go again.
That choice, effort versus laps, is new to Bella Vista this summer, and it's changing what a Saturday here actually looks like.
The Back 40 was never built to have competition
For most of its life, the Back 40 has been Bella Vista's one trail identity: a free, public network open from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily that adds up to nearly 40 miles of singletrack woven through the city's common grounds, according to the city's own trail page. The signature loop alone runs 21.4 miles, and the system is stitched together by named sections that longtime riders talk about like landmarks: Mulligan, a gentle beginner run under a mile long, The Ledges, a technical stretch that crosses exposed karst rock, and Rago, recently rebuilt with new rock features and jump lines. Access points like Bear Hollow and Tower trailhead sit inside neighborhoods, which is part of the point. You don't drive to the Back 40. You roll out your garage.
The network also connects outward. Riders can link the Back 40 to the beginner-friendly Little Sugar Trail System, where the roughly two-mile Tweedy Bird loop stays wide and easy for new riders, or continue toward Slaughter Pen and the Razorback Greenway through Blowing Springs. None of that changed this year. What changed is that the Back 40 is no longer the only model in town for how a ride gets structured.
What actually opened on June 12
On June 12, 2026, OZ Trails Bike Park opened at the intersection of Highway 71 and Mercy Way, right on the line between Bentonville and Bella Vista, becoming the first chairlift-served mountain bike park in Arkansas. The timing was deliberate. It landed in the middle of Bentonville Bike Fest, described by the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as the Mid-South's largest cycling festival, which brought thousands of riders through the region that same week.
The park is built on just 300 feet of elevation but packs in more than 20 miles of purpose-built gravity trails, and about 75 percent of them are designed for beginners and everyday riders rather than experts, according to KUAF's Ozarks at Large. The lift itself is a detachable high-speed quad that can move 1,000 riders an hour, and the park includes a bike school built with input from five-time world champion Annika Beerten, aimed at everyone from small kids to adults who've never left pavement. The project comes from Runway Group, the holding company started by Tom and Stuart Walton, and it adds a fourth name to a regional trail roster that already included Slaughter Pen, Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, and the Back 40.
One longtime Bella Vista rider summed up the difference for KUAF after his first few runs down the lift-served trails:
"There's just a little bit for everybody."
That's the mechanism worth paying attention to. The Back 40 rewards time and fitness. The new park removes that gate entirely, so the same afternoon that used to require three hours of self-propelled riding to earn a handful of descents now delivers ten times the downhill time in the same window, according to riders interviewed at the park's opening. It doesn't make the Back 40 obsolete. It gives Bella Vista two different answers to the same question, and for the first time, both answers are a short drive from home.
| Back 40 | OZ Trails Bike Park | |
|---|---|---|
| Access | Free, public, 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily | Chairlift-served, opened June 12, 2026 |
| Signature terrain | The Ledges, Rago, Mulligan | Gravity trails color-coded by difficulty |
| Effort model | Self-propelled climbs | Lift does the climbing |
| Apres-ride | Gear Garden, Blowing Springs Park | Ozzy's Ride and Dine, on-site rooftop |
Gear Garden picked this exact summer to expand
The other half of the story is what's happening at the older hub. Gear Garden, the seasonal beer garden the Bella Vista Property Owners Association runs out of Blowing Springs Park, is in its fourth year since opening in 2021. It soft-opened for the 2026 season on March 20 and held its grand opening on April 25, an event food and beverage director Brandon Rascoe described to the Bella Vista Weekly Vista in blunt terms:
"That first night of the soft opening was jam-packed, without any advertising at all."
That response pushed Gear Garden to add hours this year, opening Wednesdays and Thursdays from 3 to 8 p.m. on top of its Friday through Sunday schedule, and it runs that way, weather permitting, from early spring through November, according to the venue's own site.
Part of what makes Gear Garden hard to replicate is scarcity. It pours an exclusive Trailhead Lager brewed with Bentonville Brewing Company that's available at exactly five places on earth: Gear Garden, BV Bar & Grill, Highlands Pub & Patio, Lakepoint, and Bentonville Brewing's own taproom. Food trucks rotate through, including Chicken Lai Lai for Asian-inspired fried chicken and Crazy Willy's Ice Cream, and live jazz plays every Sunday afternoon.
For anyone reading this the week it's published, there's a specific reason to stop by in the next few days. From August 11 through 13, Gear Garden is running its Back to School Bash, collecting donated mechanical pencils and expo markers alongside its usual live music and food truck lineup.
Two hubs, not one, for the first time
The practical shift for anyone who lives here is that Bella Vista's outdoor weekend no longer has a single center of gravity. Riders who want a long, self-propelled day still point toward the Back 40 and finish at Gear Garden the way they always have. Riders who want maximum descents in minimum time, or who are just learning and want a controlled beginner slope instead of a technical rock garden, now have Ozzy's Ride and Dine and the lift at Mercy Way as a legitimate second option that didn't exist before June.
That's not a small distinction. It means the two systems aren't competing for the same rider so much as splitting the rider base by what kind of day they want, and a resident planning a Saturday now has to actually choose between them rather than defaulting to whichever trail happens to be closest.
A few ways that plays out in practice:
- A family with a new rider might spend Saturday morning on the lift's beginner-graded runs, since 75 percent of the park's trails are built for exactly that skill level, then swing by Gear Garden in the afternoon for Jazz Sunday and a food truck dinner.
- A rider chasing mileage might still start at Lake Ann or Bear Hollow, work through Rago and The Ledges, and end the day with a Trailhead Lager, the same loop that's defined Bella Vista riding for years.
- Anyone splitting the difference can do a short lift session at Mercy Way in the morning and a longer Back 40 ride in the evening, treating the two systems as different tools rather than competing destinations.
None of this required leaving town. That's the part worth sitting with. Two very different trail experiences, one that takes hours of effort and one that removes the effort entirely, now sit within a short drive of each other inside the same community, and the choice between them is new this year, not a feature Bella Vista has always had.
If you're weighing a move that puts you closer to Blowing Springs, the Back 40 trailheads, or the new bike park at Mercy Way, Amanda Gainey knows this stretch of Bella Vista well enough to help you figure out what's actually within reach.
