Shore Line Shuttle puts mountain bikers on the fast track to fun by making it easy on visitors to Northwest Arkansas to jump on a mountain bike trail for a thrilling ride through the Ozark Mountain hardwoods.
The mountain bike shuttle picks bikers up at Slaughter Pen and transports them to Coler Mountain Bike Preserve, then picks them back up and returns them to Slaughter Pen. It assists people in riding both mountain bike systems in one day without the hassle of loading bikes, transporting them and parking; and, parking is definitely crowded on these popular trails.
“It takes all of the complicated parts of those experiences out of the equation,” says James Mattox, owner of Shore Line Shuttle. “It’s particularly important for someone that’s not from here.”
Mattox knows because he’s not from here. He moved to Northwest Arkansas in September from Wisconsin, where he owned a successful bike shop.
But let’s reverse to his college years, spent at Missouri State in Springfield. He lived there for close to 10 years working for an outdoor store and spent a lot of time in the North Arkansas Ozarks rock climbing, hiking, and biking.
“That’s where we went almost every weekend,” he says. But mountain biking was not at that time what it has become today with the new OZ Trail system in Northwest Arkansas. Fast forward to his time in Wisconsin and he was still traveling to Arkansas to ride the trails, which were multiplying fast as cities and groups invested more and more into building world-class trails.
“We would come with a group of 10 and we had a challenge just to all park at Slaughter Pen,” Mattox explains. Getting to Coler was even harder. Bikers either drive and park or ride their bikes from one trail system to the other on a six-mile round-trip road ride. “We didn’t come here to ride a road,” he explains. “We came to ride trails.”
Mattox saw the need for the shuttle service and acted on it.
My wife and I had been discussing moving somewhere to raise our kids,” Mattox says. They weren’t too keen on the Wisconsin winters and were interested in a places they could mountain bike year round. “That put Bentonville on the map,” he explains. “I got my wife down here a couple of times and she loved it. Then COVID hit and we decided to close our hugely successful business and make the move.”
He retained one item from his bike shop though, an extraordinary shuttle vehicle. Using Shore Line Shuttle means going in style via an ex-military M1078 troop carrier. It’s hard to miss rolling down the street with 46-inch tall tires, bikes mounted along the back, and 12.5-foot OZ Trail flags flying from it. The iconic vehicle definitely separates him from the average Econoline vans usually used as shuttle vehicles.
Currently, Shore Line Shuttle operates 9 a.m. to 7:30 p.m. on Friday and Saturday. Basically, Mattox picks up at the top of the hour at Slaughter Pen and picks up at the bottom of the hour at Coler.
“We’re going to let the demand tell us what the hours need to be in the summer,” he adds. “If demand is there and we see a need for more during the week then we’ll be flexible.”