OZ Trails Bike Park: Arkansas's First Chairlift Bike Park
OZ Trails Bike Park opened this summer on the Bentonville/Bella Vista line — a chairlift-served mountain bike park with 20+ miles of trails. Here's what it means if you're thinking about NWA.
If you needed one more reason NWA doesn't feel like the rest of Arkansas, this is it: we now have a chairlift-served mountain bike park. OZ Trails Bike Park opened June 12 on the Bentonville/Bella Vista border, and it's the first of its kind in the state.
The park sits on 200 acres with more than 20 miles of trails built for every skill level, served by a high-speed quad chairlift so you're not grinding uphill between runs. The base area is shaping up into its own little destination — bike rentals, retail, a community plaza, public art, and a restaurant called Ozzy's Ride and Dine with rooftop seating that looks out over the lift line.
I've lived here 47 years, and I still don't think people moving in from out of state grasp how much of this is normal here. Bentonville built its reputation on mountain biking over the last decade — Slaughter Pen, Coler, the connected greenway system — but a lift-served park puts it in a different category. This isn't a nice-to-have amenity tacked onto a growing city. It's the kind of thing riders plan trips around.
If you're weighing NWA against other places, here's the honest version: you don't have to be a serious rider to get why this matters. It's one more data point in a pattern — Crystal Bridges, The Momentary, the greenway, Beaver Lake, and now a chairlift bike park — that says outdoor recreation here isn't an afterthought, it's core infrastructure. That shows up in daily life whether you ride or not: trail access next to neighborhoods, a built-out greenway for walking and biking to work, and a local culture that treats being outside as normal on a Tuesday, not just a weekend thing.
Worth a visit before you even think about a move — it'll tell you more about the pace of life here than any listing photo will.
