Arkansas Graveler

Arkansas Graveler America's Most Hospitable Gravel Ride. Experience the country roads, community, and culture of the Natural State.

The shortest day of the week is not an accident.Day three runs 25 miles from Mississippi River State Park into Helena. I...
09/11/2026

The shortest day of the week is not an accident.

Day three runs 25 miles from Mississippi River State Park into Helena. It is the only day under thirty and it is deliberate, because of what is waiting at the end of it.

You'll arrive in Helena on Thursday, October 8. That is opening day of the King Biscuit Blues Festival, and a one-day admission is covered by your registration. No separate ticket, no gate line. You clean up and walk in.

The festival exists because of a radio show. In November of 1941, Sonny Boy Williamson II and Robert Lockwood Jr walked into KFFA in Helena and talked a flour company into fifteen minutes a day. What they got was the first blues program on American radio. Muddy Waters listened to it. B.B. King listened to it. Men came in from the fields at noon to hear it.

Sunshine Sonny Payne hosted it from 1951 until he died in 2018. KFFA received a Peabody for it in 1992. It still airs weekdays from 12:15 to 12:45, live from the Delta Cultural Center in the restored 1912 depot, a short walk from where you will be standing.

The festival grew out of that broadcast in 1986, put together to bring downtown Helena back.

Levon Helm was born in Phillips County and learned his time at that station, from Sonny Boy's drummer, James Peck Curtis.

You will not walk in alone. By Thursday you have been riding beside these people for three days, eating with them, sleeping in the same field. A few hundred of you go in together, carrying the same week, and you keep finding each other in the crowd all night. That is a different thing from buying a ticket and standing in it by yourself, and it is the difference the whole ride is built on.

Stop by Delta Dirt Distillery and say hello to the Williams family while you enjoy the most unique cocktail you may ever have, one made with Arkansas Delta distilled spirits.

Helena during King Biscuit has music on the corners as well as on the stages, and the corners are where people end up playing with strangers. Your bag travels by truck all week, so weight is not really your problem. If you play something, bring it.

Half-Grav starts here. You join us in Helena on the Thursday afternoon or evening, pick up your packet, and the festival is on. Friday you ride to Stuttgart, eighty-one miles, and the duck calling contest is that night. Saturday you ride ninety-six miles to the finish in Arkansas City. Sunday you take the same shuttle home as everybody else.

Two days of riding, and they are the two longest days on the calendar. Same camp, same food, same people, and the same van running behind you on both of them, which is exactly why the support matters more here than anywhere else in the week. Four hundred dollars.

There were fifty of those places. There are not many left.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central.

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

Riding this weekend? Show us where. Tag or use and we will share it.

You do not need to own a tent.You can rent one for the week with set-up included from our partners at Pork Belly Venture...
09/10/2026

You do not need to own a tent.

You can rent one for the week with set-up included from our partners at Pork Belly Ventures. $245 for single occupancy, $295 for double. Somebody puts it up before you arrive, so you roll into camp and it is already standing.

Reserve a tent here: https://pkbelly.com/Event/info/ArkansasGraveler2026

You will ride the day's route, roll into a town you have never been to, and your tent will already be standing and your bag will already be next to it. Somebody did that while you were riding.

And if camping is genuinely fine with you but you have never done it on a trip like this, the part that surprises people is how little of it you actually do. You are on the bike in the morning and at a table in the evening. The tent is where you sleep, not where you spend the week.

Hot showers every day, at every camp, brought in where a site does not have enough of its own.

Your bag arrives before you do.

The reason we push camping at all is not cost. It is that the evenings are the whole point of this ride, and they happen where everybody is. A couple hundred people in a field after a long day is a different thing from everyone scattering to their own rooms.

Plenty of people turn up having never camped. By Wednesday most of them are planning their next trip.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. Half-Grav is nearly full. The full week is not.

Learn more at arkansasgraveler.com and reserve your tent at https://pkbelly.com/Event/info/ArkansasGraveler2026

There is a van, and it is out there all day, every day.That sentence does more work than anything else we could tell you...
09/09/2026

There is a van, and it is out there all day, every day.

That sentence does more work than anything else we could tell you about this week, so here is exactly what it means.

There are no cutoffs. Nobody gets pulled for being slow and nothing closes behind you.

On the long days there is a version of the afternoon where the arithmetic stops working. You are forty miles in, the wind has been in your face since nine, and the numbers say you are rolling into camp well after dark. We do not let that play out. Somebody drives up, your bike goes on the rack, and we move you far enough up the road that you finish the day with everybody else.

That is not a rescue. It's assist. It is the same van that has been running since breakfast, doing the thing it is out there to do.

If you cannot finish a day at all, you get in and ride to camp. That happens on every edition, nobody keeps a list, and plenty of those people ride the whole of the next day.

There is no timing, no categories and no results sheet. Fast riders are in by lunch and nobody minds either way.

If you can ride 50 miles on gravel and get up and do it again the next day, you can do this week.

With no clock running, you can spend an hour riding beside somebody slower than you and it costs you nothing. On a course with a clock that hour is a sacrifice and you feel it. Here it is just an hour, and it is usually the reason you have somebody to eat with that night.

You will have a bad morning at some point. Everybody does. Don't worry about that.

The difference here is that nothing happens as a result. No place is being lost, nobody is waiting on you to justify yourself. You get to the next town and there is a chair and a meal and somebody who had the same morning.

Riders are coming from 28 states this year, ages 25 to 79. Everybody eats at the same time off the same table. There is no other tier to be in.

None of that changes if you are only there for two of the days. Half-Grav riders eat at the same table and get in the same van.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. The Half-Grav places are nearly gone. The full week has room.

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

A day on the Arkansas Graveler, hour by hour.We have used Thursday, October 8, Marianna to Helena, because it is the sho...
09/08/2026

A day on the Arkansas Graveler, hour by hour.

We have used Thursday, October 8, Marianna to Helena, because it is the shortest day of the week and the one with the most in it.

6AM in the morning, coffee at camp in Marianna. It is on until eight.

7AM, breakfast, and your bag goes on the truck. It is numbered against your rider number and it will be at the next camp before you are.

8AM, the start window opens and stays open half an hour. You go when you are ready. There is no mass start and there is no last rider. Some people are gone on the first minute and some are still on a second cup.

8:30AM, aid one is open at Confluence, and it stays open until noon: cold drinks, snacks, and on-course mechanics.. There is a roving one out on the route as well, so if you are having a bad stretch somewhere in between, somebody comes to you. And there is a van running the route behind you all day, which most people never need and everybody is glad is there.
9AM, two stops worth getting off the bike for, both on course: the Delta Dirt Distillery, then the Delta Cultural Center.

9:30AM, the first riders are into Helena and the finish line at Storm Creek is open.

11AM, lunch at the venue, on until three. A shower, and your bag is sitting there waiting.

12PM, yoga if you are interested, and there is always Horners’ Neck Lake if you're interested.

3PM, the shuttles start to the King Biscuit Blues Festival, which happens to be opening that day. A one-day admission is covered by your registration, so you clean up and walk in. Dinner is there, and so is the live music, until nine.

9PM, quiet time back at Storm Creek.

The nice part is that all of this already handled. The route is marked, the aid stations are stocked, the food is cooked, your bag is waiting, and there is a mechanic, medical and a van running all day should you need it.

You get up, fuel up, and you ride.

The only two decisions left on that Thursday are good ones. Which stage you head for at King Biscuit Blues Festival, and what time you stop at Delta Dirt Distillery.

Thursday, October 8 is also where Half-Grav starts. Packet pickup is at Storm Creek, ten until two.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10.

Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. Half-Grav is nearly full. The full week is not.

More More information is available at: arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

Thank you to everybody who showed us their weekend. Some of you have found roads we would like to ride...and now more ab...
09/07/2026

Thank you to everybody who showed us their weekend. Some of you have found roads we would like to ride.
..and now more about the Graveler!

Most days on the Graveler you are finished riding by early afternoon.

You spend months thinking about the miles and no time at all thinking about what happens after them, and then you are standing in a field at two o'clock, showered, with nothing you have to do until dinner.

You have that afternoon because the days are built to give you one, and because nobody is going to leave you out there chasing dark. There is a van running all day. If your afternoon goes badly it brings you in, and you are in a chair by four like everybody else.

We put things in those hours, and the things are mostly an excuse.

Co****le, where you get pulled into a game by three people you have not met yet and are on a team with by the second round, which is how half the friendships on this ride start. Fishing, which is two people sitting near each other not talking, and which turns out to be its own kind of conversation. Paddling, which uses none of the muscles you have spent all day abusing, and which somebody will talk you into on an afternoon you had planned to spend lying down. Music in the evenings.

Some of it we are not going to tell you about beforehand. Camp was better when you did not have the schedule.

There is are all kinds of cold beverages waiting when you come in and it is included, so nobody is buying rounds and nobody is keeping track of who owes who. That sounds like a small thing. Anybody who has stood in a group where somebody is quietly counting knows it is not.

In Stuttgart we hold our own duck calling contest. Hayes Kibe, who is fifteen years old and the reigning world champion, will be there, which means none of us are winning it.

Watching somebody do something brave and slightly ridiculous in front of everybody is the fastest way there is to stop them being a stranger. That is what the contest is actually for. Nobody signed up for this ride to learn a hail call.
..and yet, most of it you will not do.

You will mean to. You will look at the list and plan a full week. Then Wednesday happens, and you find a chair in the shade next to somebody you met the day before, and you stay there for three hours, and that is the afternoon you describe when you get home.

The schedule is full. None of it is mandatory. Everything on it exists to put you next to somebody, and once it has done that, it has done its job.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. Half-Grav is down to its last handful of spots. The full week still has room.

The duck calling contest is on the Friday night in Stuttgart, which means Half-Grav riders are there for it too.

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

We're hosting a live Q&A with Bobby Finster, Event Director and Route Director, on Thursday, September 10 at 7:00pm Cent...
09/06/2026

We're hosting a live Q&A with Bobby Finster, Event Director and Route Director, on Thursday, September 10 at 7:00pm Central to answer questions about the Arkansas Graveler.

Not a webinar with a script. A Q&A.

We have been collecting what people have been asking in the comments, in the group and in our inbox for weeks now. Thursday is where we share the answers.

If you have got something that is not on that list yet, bring it. There is time on the call for whatever is still on your mind, whether you are deciding on the full week, Half-Grav, or whether any of this is for you at all.

Registration for the ride closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. If there is one question standing between you and signing up, Thursday is the night to ask it.

Sign up for the Q&A: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_ItWuIY0PSF6reIhfz41CKg

Thursday, September 10, 7:00pm Central. Live.

The question we get more than any other is whether the Delta is flat.Day one is 71 miles with 2,331 feet in it, about a ...
09/05/2026

The question we get more than any other is whether the Delta is flat.

Day one is 71 miles with 2,331 feet in it, about a third of the week's climbing. That is Crowley's Ridge, standing 250 feet above the plain with beech trees on it, which has no business being there.

After that it does flatten out.

In the mountains you earn a climb and then you coast. Recovery is built into the day whether you want it or not.

Out here there is coasting, just not a lot of it. You pedal most of every minute you are on the bike, and there is nothing to hide behind when the wind decides what kind of day you are having.

The last two days are the hard ones. No hills to blame it on. Just distance and the wind.

We spend most of our time talking about the evenings and the tables and the people. That is the honest emphasis.

It only works because of this part. You do not feel that good about a chair at three in the afternoon unless you earned it.

October 6 to 10. Registration closes September 18

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

Most of you are riding this holiday weekend. Wherever that is, show us.

Tag or use and we will share it. We would rather look at where you are actually riding than at another photograph of our own route.

There are two ways to experience the Arkansas Graveler, and here is what each one includes...The full week is five days,...
09/04/2026

There are two ways to experience the Arkansas Graveler, and here is what each one includes...

The full week is five days, October 6 to 10. Jonesboro to Arkansas City, 329 miles, all six host towns, every night of camp.

Half-Grav is two days. You join in Helena on the Thursday evening, October 8, ride to Stuttgart on the Friday and to the finish on the Saturday. It a bit long on the days, but longer on excitement with the King Biscuit Blues Festival and the Graveler's final party in Arkansas City.

Both of them include:

A fully marked route. Aid stations with cold drinks, snacks, mechanics. Medical. A SAG vehicle running all day.

Breakfast and dinner every day you ride.

Your bag moved town to town on the luggage truck, numbered against your rider number, waiting at camp before you get there.

Camping every night, and hot showers, brought in where a site does not have enough of its own.

Cold drinks at the finish line, which means nobody is buying rounds, unless you want to!

King Biscuit Blues Festival admission on October 8, which is opening day.

The bus back on Sunday morning.

What is not included is a tent, though you can rent one with set-up from $245 for the week, and it will be standing when you arrive.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. The fifty Half-Grav places are nearly gone. The full week has room.

All of the details are at : arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

The last two days of the Delta Blues Edition are 81.5 miles and 96 miles, back to back, with three days already in your ...
09/03/2026

The last two days of the Delta Blues Edition are 81.5 miles and 96 miles, back to back, with three days already in your legs and no hills to blame it on.

We are not going to soften that. It is the honest shape of the week, and it is most of the reason Saturday afternoon in Arkansas City feels the way it does.

Here is something we have not said out loud yet.

On Friday, October 9, and again on Saturday, October 10, if the day in front of you is longer than what you have left, we will bump you up the road and you ride in from there. Same road, same aid stations, same support for the rest of the day. You come into Stuttgart on the Friday, and into Arkansas City on Saturday with everybody else.

Friday and Saturday are separate decisions, and taking one has nothing to do with the other.

Half-Grav riders, those are your two days. It works the same way.

Why are we sharing this? It's simple, really...

A rider standing around at seven in the morning, already knowing they do not have that day's miles in them, saying nothing, because asking feels like quitting? That's not how the Arkansas Graveler works.

It is on the table now, in September, while you are still deciding whether any of this is for you.

Nobody is timing you. Nothing closes behind you. There is no list of who rode every mile and there never has been.

We think you've got this.

If you don't, we've got you. We will bump you up the road, and you will still ride in on the two longest days.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. Half-Grav is nearly full.

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

Dinner on the Arkansas Graveler is not catering in the sad sense of the word.Each of the five nights we do the cooking, ...
09/02/2026

Dinner on the Arkansas Graveler is not catering in the sad sense of the word.

Each of the five nights we do the cooking, and what goes on the table comes from where you happen to be standing. Local growers, local suppliers, the things a place is actually known for. The menu changes as you move south because the Delta changes as you move south. Where a thing is grown or made close by and we can get hold of it, we use it.

Marianna, where riders stop for breakfast on the morning of day three, is home to the first James Beard award ever given in Arkansas. Helena has been making hot tamales since the 1890s, not quite Mexican and not quite Italian and entirely their own thing. Stuttgart grows close to half the rice in the United States. You will be eating in the middle of all of it.

By Thursday you are sitting down with people whose names you did not know on Tuesday, and you are saving them a seat. Dinner runs long. Whenever you get in, there will be good food, and even better people to sit with, enjoy it, and share the day’s stories.

People roll in at different hours and the evening just carries on around them.

Breakfast and dinner at camp every day. In between there are two (or three) on-course aid stations, stocked with cold drinks, snacks and real food rather than gels. We do not put lunch on the schedule, and that is deliberate. You ride through towns with cafes and barbecue joints and gas stations that will surprise you. Stop at one. Sit down for half an hour. Make some new friends. It is part of the day rather than a detour from it.

Five days, six towns, October 6 to 10. Registration closes Friday, September 18 at 11:59pm Central. The Half-Grav places are nearly gone. The full week has room.

Learn more and register at arkansasgraveler.com

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Cherry Valley, AR
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