How The Walmart Family Is Building The Mountain Bike Capitol Of The World 🌎: Bentonville

As mountain biking's popularity continues to grow, increasing exponentially its potential economic impact, communities like Bentonville Arkansas have decided to invest into the sport and use trail building and development to completely re shape the lives of it's citizens. In this episode we chat with Gary Vernon who is the head of outdoor recreation and trail development for the Walton foundation. We discuss the lessons they have learned and the way the town has changed after over 150,000,000 dollars of investments from the Walton Family.


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0:00 Intro
1:02 What Is Bentonville
3:18 Why They Decided To Build The Trails
6:25 The Decision To Market The Trail Network
9:12 What Is The OZ Trails
10:55 Does Asphalt Belong In Mountain Biking
16:40 The Economic Impact Of Something Like This
21:50 How Important Have Ebikes Been?
25:28 Bentonvilles Biggest Success & Failure 
31:27 How Trails Effect The Community Outside Of Biking
34:15 The Future Of Bentonville & Trailbuilding
39:06 Accident Reports
42:26 Economics Of Machine Built Vs HandBuilt Trails
46:43 How Has Bentonville Helped Other Communities 
50:58 Industry Moving To Bentonville
54:18 How Has Mountain Bike Culture Effected Walmart?
56:13 This Sounds Great But Can It Work Without Walmart?
1:03:00 Maintenance Cost Of The Trails
1:07:24 Three Biggest Mistakes Communities Make