There must be something in the water.

In Bentonville, Arkansas, projects grow quickly, whether they start as a humble five and dime on the town square, or a 5-mile tangle of singletrack just north of town.

Today, I’m writing about another project that took root in Bentonville. Nobody, not even the women who started the project, imagined how fast it would grow from good idea, to thriving success.

“We had this meeting after the first of the year, and we were like, ‘let’s do it, we need to do this,’ and our first ride, we had 75 women show up,” Ashley Patterson told me.

That meeting eventually became the Women of Oz (WOZ), a mountain bike club for the women of Northwest Arkansas.