“I’m just a guy from Joplin who likes to ride bikes.”After celebrating 40 years of working with the Walmart family, Gary Vernon’s list of Bentonville contributions can be traced back to one simple fact: He loves riding bikes. Born and raised in Joplin, Missouri, Vernon has always had a thing for two-wheeled activities and currently oversees all things related to trail development as the senior program officer for the Walton Personal Philanthropy Group.
"I got into BMX when I was 12,” he shared. “In 1981, I was racing in Springdale and commuting back and forth. At the time, nobody thought of Bentonville becoming this bike hub.”
As Vernon got older and wanted to start racing motocross, he applied for a job at the local Walmart to build bicycles to help fund the hobby. “I had been working at bike shops and did a pretty good job fixing some old bikes, so they thought I was worth keeping. That became almost a 31-year long career.”
When you’ve lived in Bentonville long enough, it becomes common knowledge that Walmart’s home office is a stepping stone for growth within the company, but when it came time for Vernon’s tour of duty, so to speak, things were beginning to shift in Northwest Arkansas. Instead of a temporary stop on their resume, city leaders were looking for ways to retain the talent moving to town.
“In 2003, after 18-years in the field, I came here with my wife and two-year-old daughter,” Vernon explained. “And, what do you do when you’re a mountain biker and you move to a new area? Well, you look for places to ride your bike.” Duh.
Having grown up around the Ozarks, Vernon was familiar with scouting potential trails. He identified opportunities in creek beds, ATV routes, and undeveloped culdesacs. “I started riding my bike on all of that and kind of connected everything through the woods on common property,” he said. “I’d come trim a limb or two and pretty soon I had a rugged but pretty good mountain bike route.”
Around this time, rumors had begun circulating about the City’s plans to build a mountain bike trail. “I didn’t think much about it,” Vernon said. “But then I was driving with Grayson [his son] on Walton Boulevard and I looked over, and there was a trail going up the hillside.”
What happens next in Vernon’s Bentonville story is what movies or books like to call the “meet-cute”: An amusing encounter between two fated individuals from which their epic story begins. After parking his car and grabbing his infant son from his carseat, Vernon found a place to get through the fence and walked up the trail where he ran into a 23-year-old Tom Walton.
“I didn’t know who he was until he introduced himself and told me what they were doing,” he recalled. “Back in 2006, there wasn’t a model of a trail town, so this was a bold move for the City of Bentonville. I told him I wanted to be involved and started volunteering.”
“So, I was working at Walmart as a director in environmental and then volunteering on these trail projects. Tom would send me these texts to go look at a trail or ask if I wanted to go to an international conference. I never said, ‘No.’”
As many can attest, when you do what you love, it doesn’t feel like work. So it wasn’t a shock to learn that, after years of volunteering on trail projects and supporting advocacy groups like Pedal It Forward and Friends of Arkansas Singletrack [FAST], Vernon noticed half of the messages in his inbox weren’t related to his day job.
“In 2014, I sat down in my office and noticed half of my emails were for trail projects, and I thought, ‘I’m either going to get fired or I need to find a way to do this full time,’” he said. “So I wrote a job description and sent a note asking to meet with Tom and Steuart the next time they were in town together. Three months later, I was working at the Walton Family Foundation.”
Following the success of the first few bike trail projects, it became evident that building trail systems would become more than a passion project and could play a significant role in recruiting and retaining families like the Vernons. “When we first moved here, my wife joined these play dates and she’d meet these new moms who, at first, didn’t have any desire to move here,” he said. “Now, we have 220 miles from Bentonville to Bella Vista, and what we’ve done along the way is build this outdoor lifestyle that people want to be part of.”
For my family, the magic moment happened one Sunday morning at the Airship Coffee at Coler Mountain Bike Preserve. It was winter 2022, but to my surprise, chilly temperatures and barren trees didn't deter the weekend crowd. With my bike parked and a coffee in hand, I watched families, friends, couples and pet parents connect outdoors for a wellness walk, play date, bike ride or coffee chat. Having lived in tourist destinations, I assumed most of these joyful groups were visitors, because, like most tourist destinations, surely the locals are jaded to the recreational treasures in their backyard, right? Negative. After a few more visits, we learned this is the Bentonville way, and we started house hunting.
When I shared this story with Vernon he said, "What's interesting is, when I first met Tom and was volunteering on the trails with him, he was talking about wanting to create that. He had the vision as a 23-year-old man just back back from college and then Steuart moved back to Bentonville and we're so fortunate that those two and the rest of the family wanted to invest in Northwest Arkansas because they could they could have easily lived anywhere and they want to make Bentonville the best town in the world."
Today, Vernon is often invited to speak to city leaders eager to learn what’s in Bentonville’s secret sauce. While this place may have had some unique advantages in the beginning, including a relatively blank slate for trail building and a generous foundation with vision, the Mountain Bike Capital of the World earned its moniker through the collective passions of service-minded individuals like Vernon.
“If a large foundation walked into a community and wrote a check, you don’t come up with Bentonville,” he said. “Volunteerism is how I started, but I learned how to think big by working with Tom and Steuart. They had the resources and the vision, but it takes a community - a synergy. People move here and love it so much they want to give back; it’s this passion that’s addictive. I’m just one of many and I’m proud to be a part of it.”
It’s just really fun that trails were the start and now they're the anchor. What Bentonville has is pretty magical, because you can quickly become a local.