Arkansas Graveler

09/18/2026

Come join us. This is an experience you won’t won’t to miss.

LAST CALL. 🚲

Registration for the 2026 Arkansas Graveler: Delta Blues Edition closes today.

Five days, 300+ miles, Delta gravel, live music, good food, and some of the best communities in eastern Arkansas.

If you’ve been thinking about joining us, this is the moment.
October 6–10, 2026

Registration closes today!!

09/18/2026

Today is the day. Decision time. At midnight CT this evening, registration for the 2026 Arkansas Graveler - Delta Blues Edition is closed.

We're not trying to rush you, but we do need to have a close date so we can finalize all of the details for our guests.

If you're registered, we can't wait to see you. If you're still thinking about it, think just a bit quicker.

09/17/2026

The packing list, and the one rule that makes it easy.

Your bag travels by truck all week. Weight is not the enemy. Forgetting the thing that makes night three bearable is.

One thing that is not on the list. Do not pack spares for every eventuality. There is a mechanic, there are aid stations, and there is a roving vehicle out on the route. Bring a tube or two, a plug kit and a multitool, and let us carry the rest of it.

Sleeping. A tent, unless you are renting one. A sleeping bag rated for the low forties, because October nights out here get down to the low to mid fifties and you will be glad of the margin. A proper mat. A pillow, or something doing the job of one. Earplugs. A head torch. Don't forget the head torch.

Riding. Three or four sets of kit. Helmet, gloves, sunglasses with a clear lens for the early starts. A rain jacket. Arm and knee warmers for the mornings. Laundry won't be readily accessible every day.

Off the bike, and this is the half people forget. Camp shoes. A warm layer for the evening. Long trousers. Flip-flops for the showers. A towel. And something you would be happy to be seen in at a blues festival, because on the eighth you will be at one.

The unglamorous column. Chamois cream and bug spray, more than you think. Sunscreen. Any medication, in its own bag. A small first aid kit. Any preferred electrolytes.

Practical. Charging cables and a battery pack. Cash, because the country stores are worth stopping at and not all of them take a card. A reusable bottle. Bin liners for wet kit. A pen.

On tires: nothing under 38c. 42 to 55mm is the range and we strongly recommend tubeless.

Expect highs in the upper seventies to low eighties and overnight lows in the low to mid fifties. Pack for the gap between those two, not for one of them.

Registration closes tomorrow at 11:59pm Central.

Visit arkansasgraveler.com to learn more and register.

09/16/2026

You drop your bag at a truck in the morning and it is waiting for you at camp that afternoon, waiting for.

That is the whole system, and it is worth more than it sounds.

The route is marked, so know where you're going. Two aid stations a day and a roving one, so you are never far from cold water and somebody with a pump. A mechanic, so a broken spoke is an inconvenience instead of the end of your week. Medical. A SAG vehicle running all day, so a bad afternoon has a very quick ending becomes a great evening.

Breakfast and dinner, so you never plan a meal. Hot showers at every camp, portable ones brought in where a site does not have enough. A cold drink waiting when you come in, included, so nobody is buying rounds.

Somewhere to sleep. If you do not own a tent you can rent one from two hundred and forty-five dollars for the week, and somebody will have put it up before you get there.

Add all of it together and here is what you have actually bought. For five days you do not decide anything.

You do not decide where you are going, what road to take, where lunch is, where you are sleeping, what is for dinner, or how your bag gets from one town to the next. You get up, you ride, and everything else has already been handled by somebody who thought about it before you got there.

There is a specific kind of tiredness that comes from making decisions all day, and most people have not been without it since they were about twelve years old. That is what riders are describing when they get home and say the week reset them. It was never the miles.

Two days of it works the same way. If a full week is more than you can take off, Half-Grav joins in Helena on the Thursday evening and rides to the finish, with everything above handled the same. A few places are 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

09/15/2026

Travel, start to finish. The details.

Getting in. Memphis is the closest airport. It is about eighty miles from Jonesboro, a little over an hour by car, and it has the most flights and the most competitive fares of anything within reach of the start.

When to arrive. Monday, October 5. There is a shakeout ride to loosen the travel out of your legs, and then Jonesboro opens up and welcomes everybody. That evening is worth being there for. Packet pickup is that day.

If you are riding Half-Grav, you are aiming for Helena instead, on Thursday morning, October 8. Packet pickup that afternoon, and the King Biscuit Blues Festival is on.

Getting out. Riders finish in Arkansas City on Saturday, October 10 and camp there that night. Sunday morning buses leave at nine, heading back to Jonesboro and Helena.

You do not have to solve getting home. Your bag and bike go with you, and the bus goes to the town your car is in.

Book your flight home for Sunday, early evening and you will not be rushing.

Driving in is straightforward from most of the mid-South. Jonesboro is central, Memphis is an hour away, and the whole route runs south from there.

Bringing somebody who is not riding. There are fifty non-rider places and we are building them a driving route of their own for the week.

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

More information and registration detail at: arkansasgraveler.com

Proud to partner with Arkansas - The Natural State

09/14/2026

On Sept. 10th, we hosted a live Q&A and answered over 50 rider questions.

If you missed it, don't worry. We have a replay available for you on our YouTube channel.

Replay link is in the comments and in bio.

09/14/2026

The Graveler week, itself, starts before the riding does.

Monday, October 5, in Jonesboro. Hundreds of people arrive from all over, most of them not knowing anybody, most of them quietly wondering what they have signed up for. There is a shakeout ride to loosen the travel out of your legs, and then Jonesboro opens itself up and welcomes the whole lot of you.

That is the whole plan. A town throwing its doors open for a few hundred strangers who came a long way to ride bicycles across farm country.

You will arrive not knowing anybody, which is the part people are quietly nervous about. What is waiting is a whole operation whose only job is that you are fine. Somebody has already worked out where you sleep, what you eat, how your bag moves and what happens if your day goes wrong. All you have to do on Monday is turn up.

Then it happens again five more times, in five more towns, all the way south.

Here is the thing about the Delta that nobody tells you before you come. It is not a place that performs for visitors. There is no scenic overlook with a gift shop at the bottom of it. What there is instead is people who are genuinely surprised and genuinely pleased that you came, in towns where a few hundred cyclists arriving is the most interesting thing to happen that month.

Riders come from dozens of states. Some of have never been to Arkansas. A few have driven through it once and not stopped.

You will arrive on a Monday afternoon knowing one or two people. Maybe more. By Saturday in Arkansas City, you will be standing on a courthouse lawn with several hundred people you do know, and you will already be working out how to do it again.

The route is the excuse. This is the reason.

If a full week is more than you can take off work, Half-Grav joins on the Thursday evening in Helena and rides the last two days to the finish. Whatever is left of it closes at the same time on the 18th.

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

Where is somewhere you went expecting nothing and came back talking about?

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

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