Bella Vista Fall Trail Events: Back 40 Turns Ten in 2026

On the evening of October 22, a handful of people who spent their Saturdays in 2016 clearing brush with loppers and weed eaters will sit down at OZ Trails HQ to talk about how a mountain bike trail got built. As NWA Homepage reported, the event is called the Back 40 Birthday Bash; it's free, and it's happening at OZ Trails Bike Park, where, this past June, a $8.25 million chairlift started carrying riders up a hill that used to require pedaling. That's not two unrelated things sharing a calendar. That's the same story told at two different speeds.

If you've lived in Bella Vista for any length of time, you already know the Back 40 exists. What's easy to miss, because the two announcements arrived on different news cycles months apart, is how the bike park and the birthday party are connected: the party celebrates the Back 40, whose original trail work helped shape the community where the park now operates. The city said as much itself, crediting the original trail work with having shaped Bella Vista into a place with more than 100 trails and the state's first ever lift-served bike park. Ten years of dirt work turned into a chairlift. That's the thing worth sitting with this fall, not just the list of what's on the calendar.

Nine Months, a Few Grants, and a Lot of Weed Eaters

The Back 40 opened in October 2016 after nine months of construction, and it was showcased almost immediately at an international mountain biking event, which tells you the ambition was there from the start even if the budget wasn't. The trail system now runs nearly 40 miles of singletrack, open to the public from 5 a.m. to 10 p.m. daily, free of charge, stitched together from beginner loops like Mulligan to technical sections like The Ledges, where riders duck under overhanging limestone bluffs for half a mile at a stretch.

As NWA Homepage reported, the city's anniversary announcement thanked the people who made it possible "from grants to ideas to volunteer labor out there on a Saturday with a weed eater or a pair of loppers." That's the tone of the whole project for its first decade: scrappy, community-funded, built by people who wanted better trails badly enough to build them by hand.

What a Decade Bought

Compare that origin story to what opened this June. OZ Trails Bike Park sits on the Bentonville-Bella Vista line at Highway 71 and Mercy Way, developed by Tom and Stuart Walton's Runway Group, and it is Arkansas's first chairlift-served mountain bike park. The lift itself, a Leitner-Poma high-speed quad, is valued at $8.25 million according to city records, and it can move up to 1,000 riders an hour up a 300-foot climb along roughly 2,500 feet of cable. About 75 percent of the 20-plus miles of trail are built for beginners and everyday riders, which is a very different ratio than the Back 40's mix of flowy cross-country loops and gnarly technical descents.

The park's general manager, Gary Vernon, put the moment into a single line at the ribbon cutting: riders can now load a chairlift and drop into world-class gravity trails right here in the Ozarks. The quote doesn't mention the decade of grassroots trail-building that came before the chairlift. The Back 40 proved people would drive to Bella Vista for singletrack. OZ Trails adds a lift-served experience.

Two Trail Networks, Two Different Price Tags

Here's where it gets useful if you actually live here and are deciding how to spend a Saturday. The Back 40 costs nothing. Show up, park at one of the trailheads off Lancashire Boulevard or Gainford Drive, and ride or hike until dark, no pass required.

OZ Trails Bike Park runs on a different model entirely. A full day with lift access is $59.99. A half day is $39.99. If you'd rather earn your descents on your own legs and skip the chairlift, a pedal day pass is $19.99. There's also a 30-day pass at $149 for anyone who ends up riding regularly once the season turns cooler. None of that includes the HQ building itself, the pump track, the dirt jump zone, or the art installations, which are free and open to the public whether or not you buy a lift ticket.

That split matters for anyone budgeting a fall of outdoor time in Bella Vista. The free trail network your neighbors built by hand a decade ago hasn't gone anywhere and still doesn't cost a dime. The new gravity park next door is a different kind of experience, backed by serious capital, with a price tag to match. Both are now part of daily life here, and neither replaces the other.

What's Actually Happening This Fall

Between now and mid-November, the calendar overlaps in a way that's worth having in one place:

• September 13 through November 8: Yoga by Ozzy the Bear meets Sundays at 9 a.m. at OZ Trails HQ. Drop-in is $15 and includes a lift ride for the day, or it's free with any park membership. Fifty spots per class.
• Through October 4: The Bella Vista Farmers & Makers Market runs Sunday mornings at Sugar Creek Center, with local produce, baked goods, and crafts, the last regular market weekend of the season.
• September 25 through October 10: The city's #BVBack40 Instagram contest asks residents to post photos from the trails during that window for a shot at prizes, part of the broader anniversary celebration.
• October 11: The Little Sugar MTB race puts its longest routes, the 50K and 100K, primarily on Bella Vista's own Little Sugar and Back 40 trail networks, with riders tackling technical sections like The Ledges before the final push to the finish.
• October 15: The Pumpkin Patch Arts & Crafts Festival opens at United Lutheran Church with more than 45 craft vendors.
• October 22, 5 p.m.: The Back 40 Birthday Bash at OZ Trails Bike Park, with a panel of the original trail designers and builders reminiscing about how the whole thing got started.

Read in order, that's a season that moves from produce stands to a mountain bike race to a party honoring the people who dug the first trail by hand, from September 13 through November 8, all within a few miles of each other.

The Part That's Easy to Miss

It would be simple to treat this as a list of things to put on the fridge calendar, and it's a genuinely useful one. But the more interesting fact sitting underneath the schedule is that Bella Vista is currently running two different economies of outdoor recreation in the same community. One is volunteer-built, free, open daily, and about to celebrate its tenth birthday with the people who made it happen. The other is backed by a Fortune 500 family's holding company, charges by the day or the month, and just opened its first restaurant with a rooftop deck over the lift line, run by the team behind Oven and Tap, Superfine, and Townie.

Both are real. Both are staying. And this fall, for the first time, you can watch the handoff happen in person, from a market table on a Sunday morning to a chairlift seat on a Saturday afternoon to a folding chair at HQ in October, listening to the people who started it all with a weed eater talk about what it's become.

If you're weighing what fall in Bella Vista actually looks like day to day, from a Sunday market stop to a chairlift pass to the trail network that made all of it possible, Nicole Falgout and Barbara Stefanis at Hello Home NWA spend their time in these neighborhoods and are glad to talk through what daily life here looks like, whether or not you're in the market for a house. Let's Find Your Place in NWA.