This February, the Ozark Off Road Cyclists (OORC) celebrated its 19th running of the Buffalo Headwaters Challenge, an annual bike bash based in Red Star, Arkansas, a rural community 50 miles southeast of Fayetteville in the Ozark National Forest.

Part party, part group ride, the Challenge is an intrinsic part of Northwest Arkansas’ mountain bike history. Long before the Walton family turned Bentonville into an urban bike playground, there were the Kuffs and the Whites, two back-to-the-land families who scratched singletrack into their backyards, then challenged their friends to ride from one homestead to the other.

Ira White was just a teenager when he first rode from the Kuff family’s homestead in the Upper Buffalo Headwaters to his family’s homestead one ridge south in the Big Piney Headwaters. Back then, in the early 2000s, the trails in the Upper Buffalo where Kate and How Kuff lived were more primitive than the Forest Service-recognized, International Mountain Bicycling Association (IMBA) Epic trail system that exists today. Some of the trails followed old logging roads and four-wheeler tracks that How and the White family had painstakingly cleared. Other trails were freshly benched. They were hand cut and narrow, steep and technical, but above all, they were remote.