The Mississippi River Trail (MRT) follows America’s backbone, the Mississippi River, from its headwaters in Itasca, Minnesota to the Gulf of Mexico, offering approximately 3,000 miles of on-road bikeways and pedestrian and bicycle pathways.The Arkansas section of the MRT traverses “real” Delta country, taking bikers from Memphis through Helena and into the St. Francis National Forest. The route takes bikers through vast expanses of flat farmland, covered with fields of cotton and rice. Not many people outside the region realize Arkansas’ prominence as a rice producer, but those fields criss-crossed by small ridges of earth are cultivated rice paddies into which water is fed on a seasonal basis for crop production.
