How Bentonville earned the score

Let’s meet Bentonville, Arkansas

Bentonville is best known as the birthplace and headquarters of Walmart. The Walton family’s love of biking has helped this community drastically alter its image. Infused into the growth of the biking community is a corporate giant helping develop the city. Make no ifs, ands, or buts, the Walton family has greatly helped this community.

New trails, new community

Bentonville and all of northwestern Arkansas feel like an idealistic small town where everything is built on being able to bike there, from the grocery stores to the diners to the museums. The Waltons helped trail blaze 163 miles of trail alone at a cost of $74 million to, in, and around Bentonville. The Oz Trail Network from the other corporate giant, Tyson, added another 300 miles of mountain bike trail. Together, according to the Bike Bentonville organization, in 2017 alone these trails helped bring in $137 million to the region per year. Think how many businesses can be supported by that kind of investment.

Before the investment

Before the investment into the region’s bike paths, “Folks around here will tell you that no one came downtown about ten years ago, and now you see people everyday,” says Aimee Ross, director of Bike Bentonville. Yet today the once-quiet city center is bustling with life. Downtown fills with food trucks, vendors, a farmers market, museums, niche interest shops, an upscale bagel shop, and of course a bike rental store. Families, groups of friends, and riders returning from a day on the trails all converge on the square. Groups of muddy mountain bikes leaned against the local diner have become the city’s most honest piece of public art.

Downtown can now support high-end restaurants like Hive at the 21c Museum Hotel and institutions like the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, located right along the Art Trail. It is a rare thing to feel like you are in a European city in the middle of Arkansas, but Bentonville manages it. You can ride everywhere and the arts are everywhere too.

Bentonville is still growing

It is drawing in large cycling events like the UCI Cyclocross World Championships. Regional events like the Bentonville Bike Fest fill the whole region’s hotels and keep the bike fleet rotating. The Momentary, a contemporary arts space in the 8th Street Market District, adds another cultural layer that no comparable trail town can match.

As of 2026, there are still 2-3 miles of new trail being created per week. Travel + Leisure named Bentonville one of its 50 Best Places to Travel in 2026. At this rate, it is already what the original field note predicted it would become, the mountain biking capital of the world.

In this observer’s view, this is exactly what patient private capital should be doing. Forget taxing it into oblivion; convince it to build better communities. The Waltons loved biking and the arts, so they poured significant money into both. A whole community became more profitable and more distinctive. Thank you, Waltons. Well done.

Creative city development

In this case, it was the vision of the Walton family, who invest heavily into biking trails, fund Bike Bentonville, and fund the arts around Bentonville to allow others to capitalize on this source of tourism, making life in town that much better for everyone who lives or visits here. The pattern here is simple to name and hard to copy. A distinctive hook, the mountain bike trail, was funded until it reached a scale no rival could match, and then the arts, the dining, and the downtown were allowed to grow up around it. Every piece reinforces the others. Riders come for the trails, stay for the museums, spend on the square, and come back the next season, and the whole loop keeps compounding.