Bella Vista

It took five separate professional trail-building companies two years to build Little Sugar, which is the sort of staffing normally reserved for highway interchanges. Gravity Logic, Rock Solid Trail Contracting, Jagged Axe, Rogue Trails, and Progressive Trail Design all worked the same stretch of Ozark hills, and the finished system includes 8 tunnels and 3 steel bridges, paid for by a Walton Family Foundation grant to the City of Bella Vista. Together with the Back 40, the network here runs to 125 trails and 127 miles of singletrack just shy of the Missouri line, one of the largest connected systems in the country.

The map traces that whole web through the contours of the Ozark plateau. The contour lines show the terrain that shapes the riding: flat-topped ridges dropping into steep hollows, drainages that trails dive into and climb back out of, and the bluff lines where the rock breaks through. It reads less like a single mountain and more like a maze, which is exactly what riding here feels like.