More on the Buffalo Outdoor Center: Go back in time with photos from five decades of outdoor adventures.
After a lifetime of paddling and a half-century of promoting and protecting America’s first national river, Mike Mills recently recalled the best $20 he ever spent.
The year was 1996, and Mills’ business, the Buffalo Outdoor Center in Ponca, was already 20 years old. The internet, however, was just rising to prominence, and Mills barely knew what a domain name was. “I went to a guru in Harrison who was on the internet,” he said. “I asked what a domain cost, and at that time it was $20. I asked if buffaloriver.com was available.”
The answer was yes. “I said I’m just going to take a gamble and spend $20, and what buffaloriver.com did was give me equal footing to all resorts anywhere, and it today remains the No. 1 resource for information on the Buffalo National River.
“It’s the best investment I ever made, other than my wife, Rhonda,” he said.
“If I’d been smart, I’d have spent $200 and bought ford.com and arkansas.com and florida.com and become a multimillionaire. But still I was lucky. … When I moved to the Buffalo, I knew my life was complete. I thank God every day for letting me live and work here.”
Mills, who is 75, is celebrating Buffalo Outdoor Center’s 50th anniversary this fall. He and his son-in-law, current owner Austin Albers, sat down virtually with Arkansas Business this month to celebrate the milestone.
They also reflected on how a one-man canoe rental business with $20,000 in revenue 50 years ago grew into an operation with yearly revenue of about $4 million.
That evolution, which turned the center into one of the state’s most enduring outdoor hospitality businesses, is a tale of organic growth, dedication to quality and employees, and thoughtful innovation. Over the decades, Mills and Albers hit on a blend of recreation, lodging, retail sales and conservation of the Ozarks and the Buffalo.
These days the area draws millions of visitors a year — canoeists, hikers, trail bikers, honeymooners, RV lovers and even backcountry aviators.
Humble Beginnings
But when Mills started it after graduate school at the University of Arkansas, “Buffalo Outdoor Center” was more an aspirational name than a description. After two years managing the Lost Valley Lodge resort in Ponca, he bought the nearby Lost Valley Cafe, a residence at the time, and made it his business headquarters.
“We were just a canoe rental business, but I dreamed of … being a true outdoor center,” Mills said.
Back then, only three roads led to Ponca, a dot on the Newton County map west of Jasper and southwest of Dogpatch. Only Highway 43 was paved. “When we first went into business, we were on a four-party phone line. We had to know which ring to pick up.” Paved roads from Mount Sherman and Boxley came in the late 1970s, and Buffalo Outdoor Center became a National Park Service concessionaire in 1979, renting canoes and selling the occasional hat and T-shirt.
“It became obvious to me that we weren’t going to make a living just renting canoes,” Mills said. “So I took the job as director of tourism for the Arkansas Department of Parks & Tourism, which gave me a tremendous education.”
He sensed tourism was destined to become one of the state’s largest industries, and was prophetic. The industry had a record total economic impact of more than $17 billion in 2024, supporting 70,000 direct jobs. Key historical factors were a 2% statewide sales tax on lodgings and attractions added in 1989 and a one-eighth percent sales tax for conservation approved in 1996.
Visitors spent an estimated $10.3 billion in Arkansas in 2024, and tourism tax receipts hit an all-time high of $26.66 million. The lion’s share of the tax money goes to promote the state and keep visitors coming.
Mining the Gold
Mills’ three-and-a-half years as tourism director gave him contacts and relationships to work with. “I realized that in Ponca, I was sitting on a gold mine, and all I needed was to go home and mine the gold, and that was via building cabins.”
Armed with raw data on cabin rentals in state parks, he grabbed his calculator. “I figured out how to borrow money, what the payback would be, and what the occupancy needed to be to make those payments,” Mills said. “So in the mid-’80s, I built my first six cabins. That’s when we changed from a seasonal business of the canoe season into a year-round business.”
Mills listened to customers, who wanted honeymoon cabins, space for families and meetings, weddings, corporate retreats, family reunions and couples’ getaways. He also sought out off-river activities that could attract people when the Upper Buffalo ran too low for canoeing.
The first honeymoon cabin was a big hit quickly, and the center now has six. Family cabins and dedicated meeting facilities followed. Then RiverWind Lodge went up, featuring guest rooms, a kitchen, meeting facilities, a hot tub and outdoor gathering spaces. After Albers took over, Buffalo Outdoor Center acquired the former Cedar Crest Lodge in 2019, rechristening it Ponca Creek Lodge.
The operation has never been bigger, with two lodges, 25 cabins, a downhill mountain bike course, a zip line canopy tour and an RV park. It has 46 full-time employees, a number that grows into the 70s in peak seasons.
Diversification insulated the business from seasonal and bad-weather dropoffs, and the added activities generate more revenue per guest. They’re also a lure beyond the spring, late-fall and early-winter float seasons.
The outdoor center’s visitor estimates have grown from about 250,000 annually 15 years ago to about a million a year. “Now, at 50 years, it’s way beyond what I ever imagined,” Mills said.
Family Business
Albers grew up 9 miles from Ponca, bound for a career elsewhere in corporate America. But after he started dating Mills’ daughter, Hailey, they began spending weekends helping in the business in 2009.
“Mike called it work; we called it play,” Albers said. “About six months after Hailey and I got married, Mike and I started visiting about what it would look like for me to come over here. So in early 2011, I left the financial industry and came over here as general manager.”
Within his first year, Buffalo Outdoor Center built a new 5,000-SF retail center and new offices. “It was my first big project here and his last big project,” Albers said. “But that was without knowing that six months later the RiverWind Lodge he had previously built was going to catch fire and have to be replaced.”
They overcame that hurdle, and continued a smooth transition. Albers even joined the Arkansas State Parks Commission when Mills retired from that role in 2018.
Mike and Rhonda Mills took up RV traveling about a decade ago, and that sparked another business line. They put in an RV park in 2016.
“From there, we put in our backcountry aviation section,” Albers said. “We’ve got an airstrip with a hangar and a lodging facility for people with backcountry airplanes.” A pilot himself, Albers often commutes to work by air, awed by the waters, bluffs and woodland scenes below.
Albers is now president and owner of the outdoor center. Mills calls himself the founder and a canoe operator. “I operate my own canoe,” he explained with a laugh. But he’s still serious about his lifetime passion.
As a boy, Mills paddled silently while his father, an Army officer and outdoorsman, fished.
“I learned to do an eddy turn before I even knew what an eddy was,” he said, describing maneuvering a canoe from the fast-running downstream current into an eddy, the calmer water flowing backward behind a big rock or a river bend.
His outdoor skills paid off later, too. “I was in college during the late ’60s, early ’70s,” he said. “That was the back-to-nature, ecology movement in that generation. Having access to a tent and a canoe, man, I was popular. I could get a date with any girl on campus and go canoeing and camping.”
Jimmy Driftwood Said It
Retail sales are Buffalo Outdoor Center’s biggest revenue stream after lodging, with river operations third.
“The first Buffalo Outdoor Center was 1,000 square feet, and that included restrooms and offices,” Mills said. “A few years back we were approaching a million dollars in retail sales in our new building, which gave us an opportunity to display much more merchandise.”
Mills said he’ll never forget a Fayetteville father and his 9-year-old son first seeing the space. “He looked up and said, ‘Dad, this is just like Bass Pro.’”
Mills finds it hard to sum up what the Buffalo River has meant to him.
He quoted Jimmy Driftwood, the Stone County native who wrote classic folk songs like “The Battle of New Orleans” and “Tennessee Stud.”
“Driftwood said the Buffalo River was God’s gift to Arkansas and Arkansas’ gift to the world,” Mills said. “And that pretty well states it. There’s just nothing anywhere like the Buffalo River. I’ve canoed 90 different rivers, and in its own way, the Buffalo River will compare with any of them.”
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