Gaston's White River Resort, Three Mike Zero, and the Grass Strip in Arkansas Where You Taxi Up to a Trout Dinner With the River Running Right Off Your Wingtip

Gaston’s White River Resort is a private grass airstrip in Lakeview, Arkansas, identifier 3M0 (“three mike zero”), where a 3,200-foot turf runway runs parallel to the trout-rich White River in the Ozarks. Pilots fly in, park on the lawn wingtip to wingtip, and walk straight to riverside cottages and a destination restaurant famous for its rainbow trout. It’s a fly-in resort built by a pilot, for pilots - one of the most distinctive aviation getaways in the country.

Where Is Gaston’s and What Makes It Special

Gaston’s sits in north Arkansas, tucked below Bull Shoals Dam on the White River. The grass strip runs dead parallel to the water, with the river off one side and cottages with white trim and green roofs tucked under the trees on the other.

The airplanes park right on the grass, like cars at a lake house. Because that’s essentially what this is - a lake house you happen to reach at 110 knots. On final, you cross the river low over the water before the turf comes up beneath you.

The Gaston Family Story: From Six Cabins to 400 Acres

In 1958, a man named Al Gaston bought 20 acres on the White River along with six little cabins and a couple of boats. It wasn’t a resort - it was a simple fishing camp.

His son, Jim Gaston, took it over and saw something bigger. Over the next fifty years he grew the property from 20 acres to close to 400 acres, and the six cabins became dozens of cottages.

Crucially, Jim built the runway. He understood that a pilot who can fly anywhere on a Saturday is always looking for a reason to point the nose somewhere. Give that pilot a grass strip, a trout river, and food worth landing for, and the ramp never sits empty.

Jim Gaston passed away in 2015, but the staff and the decades-long regulars will all tell you the same thing: the place is his fingerprint, top to bottom.

Why the White River Is a World-Class Trout Fishery

The magic starts with the dam. Water released from the bottom of Bull Shoals Dam comes out cold - in the low 40s Fahrenheit, year round. That constant cold transformed the White River into one of the greatest trout fisheries in North America.

The river holds trophy rainbow trout and brown trout, including the kind of big browns anglers talk about in hushed tones. The trick is that a fishery that would normally require a bush plane and a week in Montana sits right off the departure end of a grass runway you can reach in your own airplane on a Sunday.

Flying Into 3M0: What Pilots Need to Know

The strip demands respect. It’s grass, it sits down in a river valley with terrain around it, and it is not a 4,000-foot paved runway with flat cornfields off every end. You come in over the river, dealing with trees, rising ground, and density altitude that lengthens your ground roll on a hot Arkansas afternoon when the turf turns soft.

Plan the arrival and fly the numbers:

Fly the approach on speed - not five knots fast, not ten fast. Every extra knot is runway you’re giving away, and this strip has none to spare.
Know your airplane and your loading. A low-time pilot in a loaded aircraft on a 90-degree day should study this strip before landing on it.
Call ahead and, if you can, fly in first with an experienced pilot in the right seat. There’s no shame in it.

Respect the grass, the terrain, and the density altitude, and the payoff is a landing unlike any other - rolling out with the river sliding by on your left and the cottages coming up on your right.

The Restaurant, the Deer, and the Details

Jim knew you had to give a pilot a reason to come, and the restaurant is it. It sits up over the river with big windows, and you walk in off the grass in your flying clothes without a second glance - because half the room flew in too.

The move everyone recommends is the trout. You’re eating rainbow trout twenty feet from the river that grows it, and the kitchen has a genuine destination reputation. Afterward there’s a nature trail, plus a private collection of airplanes and antiques Jim gathered over the years.

Then there are the deer. They wander out of the treeline in the evening and graze alongside the taxiway while a Bonanza rolls past. The wildlife has simply decided the airplanes are fine, and an airplane parked on the grass at golden hour with two deer behind the tail captures the whole feeling of the place.

Little touches reinforce it everywhere - airplane weathervanes, propellers worked into the decor - a constant, gentle reminder that you arrived here on wings.

A Place Families Come Home To

The heart of Gaston’s is its regulars. Some families have been flying in for three generations - a grandfather who arrived with a paper chart and a wet compass, a father who taught his kids to fish off the bank, and now those kids flying their own airplanes in with children in the back seat, to the same cottage and the same cold water under the same dam.

That’s what a place like this really is. It’s not the grass, and it’s not even the trout. It’s the fact that you can build a family tradition around an airport - that a runway can become somewhere people come home to.

This is what people mean, underneath the joke, when they talk about the “hundred dollar hamburger.” It was never about the food. It’s that a small airplane and a grass strip can drop you into an entirely different world - a river valley in the Ozarks - in the time most people spend fighting traffic to the grocery store.

Key Takeaways

Gaston’s White River Resort (3M0) is a private 3,200-foot grass strip in Lakeview, Arkansas, running parallel to the White River.
The resort grew from 20 acres and six cabins bought by Al Gaston in 1958 to nearly 400 acres under his son Jim Gaston, who added the runway and died in 2015.
Cold water from Bull Shoals Dam (low 40s°F year round) makes the White River a premier rainbow and brown trout fishery reachable by air.
The strip requires real planning: terrain, trees, soft turf, and density altitude mean you fly the numbers, fly on speed, and call ahead.
The restaurant’s trout is the signature meal, and multi-generation regulars make Gaston’s a fly-in destination people return to for a lifetime.