Over millions of years, the flow of water across what’s now the southern Ozarks carved out a spectacular array of bluffs, valleys, and ridgelines. Today the rugged landscape straddling Arkansas and Missouri (and a bit of Oklahoma) is a haven for outdoor adventures and immersive cultural activities.
Art aficionados should prioritize a trip to Bentonville, Arkansas, and the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. The museum, which houses one of the country’s most significant collections of American art, recently added more than 100,000 square feet of new galleries, dining areas, art-making studios, and landscaped grounds, plus a plaza with a splash pad and a playground for kids.
Trail enthusiasts flock to Bella Vista, near Bentonville, the (credibly) self-proclaimed mountain biking capital of the world. The brand-new OZ Trails Bike Park is Arkansas’s first chairlift-served mountain bike park, where adrenaline seekers—and their bikes—ride the lifts to access some 20 miles of heart-pumping gravity trails for all levels. Its downhill trails operate like ski runs, dropping about 300 feet in elevation from the chairlift’s top terminal to its base.
Also new in Bentonville, the 8th Street Gateway Park is a 98-acre oasis with six miles of beginner mountain bike trails, nearly six more miles of paved greenways, and a skate park designed by the same team behind the park at the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris. There’s also a playground, a great lawn, and often a phalanx of food trucks. A new hotel, the Compton, makes a fitting base, with a dedicated cycling concierge, a bike valet offering post-ride towels, and foam rollers in every room. The bike park’s phased opening wraps up in November 2026.
A 60-mile drive across the Missouri border brings travelers to Dogwood Canyon Nature Park. Here, the Ozarks’ limestone cliffs and valleys unfold across 10,000 acres, where herds of elk, bison, and longhorn cattle roam, and visitors hike and bike a vast network of trails, some of which pass millennia-old burial grounds.
To the east, Ridgedale, Missouri’s lakefront Big Cedar Lodge is like a year-round summer camp for families. The property includes the 20,000-seat Thunder Ridge Nature Arena, which has hosted performers such as the Rolling Stones and Morgan Wallen, set against a backdrop of rolling Ozark hills. And at the Top of the Rock preserve, a golf cart tour follows a paved route past dramatic rock formations, through covered bridges, and into caves full of bats. —Emily Hochberg
Source: www.nationalgeographic.com
