Bella Vista a trails destination
Largely hidden among the hills and hollow of the community’s eastern side is a trail system unlike any other, almost reaching the state line on its north end and going as far south as Blowing Springs before winding right back up and around.
With last year’s construction of the Back 40 trail system — roughly 40 miles of trails running throughout Bella Vista’s East Side — the city has almost instantly become a destination for hikers and mountain bikers.
“The actual results and the use of the trails has frankly exceeded our expectations,” Mayor Peter Christie said. “They’ve achieved international acclaim.”
Christie said he’s personally aware of people who have come from various states as well as Canada, the United Kingdom and South America to check out these trails. With any luck, he said, the trails could attract new residents.
“The strategy is to have them come here and enjoy it so much they want to live here,” he said.
The POA’s chief operating officer, Tom Judson, said this seems to be what’s happening.
“It used to be people want to get a home on a golf course or a lake — and that’s still true,” he said. “But now we’re also hearing ‘I want to get a home on the bike trail.’”
He personally knows of four lots, he said, that were bought specifically for access to trails.
Bella Vista resident and former Stillwater, Okla., resident Sheila Ford, moved to the area with her family and the family business. In March, she said, they moved out of Bentonville and into Bella Vista.
“We all like the trails a lot, that’s what brought us to this area,” she said. “We’d been looking at North Carolina, Oregon, places like that.”
It didn’t hurt, she said, that this area also kept them closer to family.
She and her husband, Bill Ford, moved along with their son, Tyler Ford, who helps with the family business, Ozark Mountain Bagel Co. She runs and hikes, she said, and her husband and son both run, hike and bike — all made a bit easier now because their new home sits right against a trail.
“We literally go out our back door and jump on trails,” she said. “I love trail running, makes me feel like a little kid. When I trail run, I just run for the joy of it.”
She was surprised, she said, to see today’s Bella Vista. Her family had a timeshare in the village when she was very young, she said, and she couldn’t recall much of anything aside from retirees and golfers.
The current Bella Vista, she said, has a wide array of activities, and she fell in love the first time they visited.
“As far as I’m concerned,” Ford said, “we’re not moving again.”
The trails that drew the Ford family to Bella Vista are still young, and no shortage of sweat went into their rapid construction.
Erin Rushing of Northwest Arkansas Trailblazers was part of Alta, the design firm that set up the master trail plan — which calls for roughly 172 miles of trail — before he joined Northwest Arkansas Trailblazers, a firm that was heavily involved in the trails’ construction.
“It was neat going through the Master Plan process then to really dial it in and say ‘let’s go do forty miles,’” he said. “It’s opened up opportunities within Bella Vista to see all the natural beauty that’s there. The rocks, the bluffs, the waterfalls.”
Prior to this development, he said, a lot of this land was hidden from view just off the road. Moreover, he said, this created an opportunity for physical activity and even human-powered transportation that didn’t exist before.
And the system itself is something special, he said, for a number of reasons. Its sheer scale, he said, is nice, but it also features a variety one might not see elsewhere. Because of that scale and the need to have these trails finished in time for the upcoming International Mountain Bicycling Association world summit, multiple trail-building firms were brought in.
Construction started in January, he said, and was finished by October.
Each firm, he said, brought its own style of trail-building, and someone who’s paying close enough attention can tell different sections were cut by different crews.
Additionally, he said, Bella Vista offered a unique property situation that allowed trails to wind through town.
“You are in a residential community, but when you’re riding the trails you don’t feel like you’re in a residential community,” he said. “Us having access to build trails on POA property is unique. I don’t know of anything else like this that’s been done to this scale, where you just drop 40 miles of trail in a neighborhood.
The trails, Mayor Christie said, are built on POA common property with a 25-year lease of a 20-foot wide strip, or ten feet on either side of the trail. This allows public access on this land, he said.
Funding for design and construction, he said, came courtesy of the Walton Family Foundation, while maintenance costs are to be split between the city and POA, with $20,000 budgeted for each entity.
That maintenance, he said, is very important, particularly as these trail systems grow.
“You can’t just high-five and say ‘yeah, we’ve got trails.’ You have to plan for the future,” he said.
Another section of trail, he said, is currently in the design process on the opposite side of the highway, and the city is considering extending the Razorback Greenway, which currently ends at the North edge of Lake Bella Vista, to the state line.
“When we start to build them is anyone’s guess,” Christie said.