The Arkansas River Trail Doesn't Actually Loop. It Never Has.
Ride west from the River Market some evening, cross the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge, and keep going along the north bank toward the Big Dam Bridge. The pavement is smooth, the sightlines are good, and for a few miles it feels like exactly what the city has always promised: a continuous loop stitched together along both banks of the Arkansas River. Then you hit Cantrell Road in front of Dillard's corporate headquarters, and the trail stops being a trail. You're on a narrow city sidewalk, pedaling next to a street that carries roughly 23,000 vehicles on an average weekday, with nothing separating you from that traffic but a curb.
That stretch has a name among the people who ride it regularly. They call it the Dillard's Gap, and it has been there since the loop supposedly opened almost two decades ago.
The Arkansas River Trail is the backbone of outdoor recreation in central Arkansas, and the reputation is earned. The core loop runs about 15.6 miles between downtown Little Rock and North Little Rock, anchored by the Big Dam Bridge and the Clinton Presidential Park Bridge. The Big Dam Bridge itself spans 4,226 feet over the Murray Lock and Dam and is regularly described as the longest bridge built specifically for pedestrian and bicycle traffic in North America. From there, the Two Rivers Bridge extends the network another 34 miles west to Pinnacle Mountain State Park, and the whole system connects to more than 70,000 acres of city, county, state, and federal parkland.
That reputation is also why the trail carries the region's biggest cycling event. The Big Dam Bridge 100 returns for its 21st year on September 26, starting and finishing at Riverfront Park in North Little Rock, with routes from 15 to 105 miles that use the Big Dam Bridge and Two Rivers Bridge as the spine of the course. Thousands of riders will be on this trail system in just over two weeks. None of them will need to touch the Dillard's Gap to finish. The course starts and ends on the north bank in North Little Rock, uses the Big Dam Bridge and Two Rivers Bridge as its through-line, and never routes riders down through the Cantrell corridor near downtown Little Rock. That's worth sitting with for a second, because it means the trail's marquee day, the one day the whole system gets marshaled, closed to conflicting traffic, and shown off to thousands of out-of-town visitors, quietly avoids the one section that doesn't work.
The other 364 days a year, regular riders don't get that option.
The missing piece sits between the Gill Street Bridge and North Street, right where Highway 10 runs past Dillard's headquarters on one side and Episcopal Collegiate School on the other. Joe Jacobs, vice president of Bicycle Advocacy of Central Arkansas, has been raising this for years.
"The city promotes the river trail as being an attraction for people and a quality of life piece."
His point, plainly, is that the city keeps calling it finished when it isn't. Van Reid, who works at Shift Modern Cyclery, has pointed out that some sections along that stretch have dips close enough to the roadway that an inattentive rider could end up in traffic. For a long time, the story everyone told was simple: Dillard's won't let the trail cross its property, so the gap stays.
That story has shifted. City officials met with Dillard's leadership in the summer of 2025 and described the conversation as positive and productive, according to reporting from the Arkansas Times. Dillard's itself hasn't commented publicly either way, but the company's silence now reads less like refusal and more like a company waiting to see if the city can actually pay for what it's proposing. Because that's the part that's stalled.
On November 6, 2025, city public works staff presented the latest design at a public forum at Dunbar Community Center. The plan calls for a 14-foot shared-use path with a 5-foot grass buffer running along Cantrell in front of the main Dillard's building, still crossing one of the company's two driveways, but tunneling under the other. From there, the route would swing north behind the 1836 Club and a Dillard's data center, then cross a 100-foot bridge over the south bank of the river. Engineering firm Garver had already drawn five different versions of this fix, ranging from a widened sidewalk to a full tunnel-and-bridge combination. The tunnel-and-bridge option, the one presented in November, is the version cyclists have consistently preferred.
Here's the number that tells you why nothing has broken ground. Construction costs for this plan run between $12.75 million and just under $18 million, a floor that's actually higher than earlier estimates from the same design process, which started around $8 million. As of that November meeting, there is no funding identified for any of it. The city has said it doesn't have the money in its own budget and is looking for private partners, philanthropic or corporate, rather than pursuing state or federal grants the way it has for other trail segments nearby.
That approach has a real precedent, just not a local one. In Northwest Arkansas, the Walton Family Foundation's investment built out an extensive trail network across Bentonville and the surrounding region. Central Arkansas has no equivalent patron lined up. So the plan on the table right now is essentially a bet that someone with deep pockets will step forward for a stretch of trail that's been a known problem since the loop first opened. Nobody has yet.
If you're planning to ride the full loop before or after the Big Dam Bridge 100, the current guidance from the trail's own maps is straightforward. Heading east toward downtown, stay on the south side near Episcopal School. Heading west, stay on the north side near Dillard's. Use extra caution at driveway crossings and intersections in either direction, since this is still an active detour through a stretch that was never built for shared use.
None of this affects race day logistics for the Big Dam Bridge 100 itself. Registration for the September 26 event is open through September 25, with distances of 15, 26, 50, 75, and 105 miles, plus tandem, e-bike, and virtual options, and packet pickup at the Statehouse Convention Center the Friday before. If you're a regular commuter or weekend rider rather than a race participant, the Dillard's Gap is the thing to plan around, not the event.
What makes this story worth knowing, beyond the practical detour, is what it says about how a place like Little Rock actually gets its public infrastructure finished. The design work here is done. Garver's engineers produced workable options years ago, the city already paid roughly $170,200 for the current design contract, and the 2025 meetings suggest Dillard's is no longer the roadblock it once was. Every piece except the money is in place. And the money isn't coming from the usual channel, the state and federal grants that funded other segments of the same trail system, because the city has chosen to wait for a private donor instead.
That's a different kind of stuck than "the neighbor won't cooperate." It's a bet on goodwill that hasn't paid off yet, on a stretch of pavement that residents have been riding around for nearly 20 years. The Big Dam Bridge 100 will draw its usual crowd this September 26, and the finish line photos will look exactly like they have for two decades. The gap will still be there the Monday after, waiting on whoever decides to write the check.
If you live near the trail, ride it, or you're weighing whether a house close to the river corridor fits how you actually spend your weekends, that kind of on-the-ground detail tends to matter more than a listing photo ever will. Bluebird Real Estate works across central and southwest Arkansas and can talk through what a specific street, trail access point, or neighborhood actually looks like day to day, not just what the map says. Reach out anytime you want a straight answer about a place you're already thinking about.
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