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The 2024 Mid-Atlantic Bikepacking Summit brought together 100 participants over four days in the beautiful Laurel Highlands region of Western Pennsylvania. The event celebrated riding in beautiful landscapes, inclusive community building, and shared learning among backpackers of all levels. Read on below for a captivating summit recap from Bikepacking Roots Executive Director, Noelle Battle.
We’ve got a wonderful Readers’ Rides today, that doubles as a review, sent in from our buddy Jason Fitzgibbon, who submitted his UNpaved Cycles Vertigo single pivot steel full suspension. Read on as he supplies a beautifully documented review of this bike…
Josh, Cari, and John were in Fairfax for a few days during the Camera Corner premiere, and before the Saturday screening, John shot Wende Cragg’s 1978 Breezer Series I, also known as #6, fresh off its world tour…
After riding the PNW Components Coast handlebar for almost a year, John’s got a lot of praise for them, along with a few notes. Let’s check out this short-reach drop-bar below…
Rodeo Adventure Labs was founded as an open-to-anyone team a decade ago by Stephen Fitzgerald and a group of friends in search of less rules and more fun on bikes. Since becoming a production bike company with an emphasis on versatility, customization, and—always—refined design, Rodeo has retained a culture of questioning the norm. Today, Hailey Moore shares a long-form profile of the high points and headwinds Rodeo has navigated over the past ten years, and exciting insights into how the company is thinking about its future. To accompany this Shop Visit, we’re also sharing people-and-bike portraits of the folks behind Rodeo Adventure Labs in a separate Radar.
After spending a year going back and forth between bikes with and without SRAM Transmission, Travis came to a realization. In today’s Dust-Up, he writes about why Transmission compatibility will be mandatory on his next bike purchase, why that worries him, and why he needed that asterisk.
Today, we have a conversation with the one and only Austin Killips. This year, she set a new overall record for the Arizona Trail and now a new women’s record for the Tour Divide. Spencer got the chance to ask Austin some questions as she prepared for the Colorado Trail to round out her Triple Crown. See what Austin had to reflect on and look forward to below…
On his way to last month’s MADE bike show in Portland, OR, following a weekend in Fairfax, CA, for our premier of the Camera Corner documentary, Josh spent an afternoon with long-time friends of the site – artist Chris McNally and designer Jessica Chan of Tunitas Creative – and documented their collaboration on this month’s Group Ride giveaway item.
Below, get to know the San Francisco-based artist/designers and take a detailed look at making one-of-a-kind Day Totes up for grabs this month for Group Ride subscribers, as well as $150 gift cards from our friends at Ripton.
A few weeks back, during our State Bicycle Ti All-Road review, a conversation about titanium unfurled in the comments. The Radavist is uniquely positioned to have this discussion as we’ve amassed more Beautiful Bicycle galleries than anyone else on the web, and a large portion of these feature titanium frames. In the eighteen years of documenting cycling culture, we’ve also amassed a large contact list in the framebuilding world.
In an attempt to demystify the material, we reached out to No. 22 Bicycle Company for a bit of Ti Talk.
The Apogee One, which we featured in our MADE coverage last year, is now open for pre-order. The kit includes the front triangle, rear swingarm, Free-Float Module, and shock. The Free-Float Module is a unique aluminum assemblage that contains the frame’s kinematics and shock while freeing up the front triangle for lots of framebag space and keeping the center of gravity low. These bikes are made in the Pacific Northwest.
The Apogee One Founders Edition is a run of 25 and retails for $3,995. See more at Apogee One.
It’s hard to gather massive data about how careful or careless our industry is with waste. A lot of manufacturers take transparent sustainability pledges, but a lot more don’t. Bike shops, on the other hand, have open doors. So, Travis surveyed several dozen bike shop recycling programs (and got a few dozen responses) about how their waste is managed. Answers ranged from recycling to donations to landfills to something involving art projects and Burning Man.
We’re in a seemingly new era of bicycle framebuilding with the proliferation of 3D-printed components. While this movement might feel “unprecedented,” a similar thing happened with framebuilders in the mid-1980s and into the 1990s with technology borrowed from the Beretta gun manufacturer in Italy.
In what has to be one of our most intriguing Vintage Bicycles articles to date, John hops on a phone call with Tom Ritchey to discuss a rare 1990 Eisentraut mountain bike that Tom had recently acquired and the technology that made it possible.
In her review of the Hyperlite Mountain Gear Splash Bivy, Hailey Moore writes about why she prefers bivies over tents and offers her assessment of this featherweight dyneema bikepacking, or backpacking, sleeping kit companion.
Located in the heart of Paris, France, Stolen Garage is an innovative multidisciplinary space, or “lieu hybride,” in French. It brings together a variety of disciplines under one roof. The venue combines a café/bistro, bike shop, fully-equipped repair workshop, and a custom frame building and painting studio.
To accompany Josh’s photographic documentation of the Stolen Garage space, we tapped co-owner Finlay Skillen to pen an overview of their background and unique approach to building community and inspiring creativity around a love for bicycles in Paris.
While John was checking in with Ritchey before Sea Otter, he got a sneak peek at the new Tom Ritchey-built Bullmoose bars and bi-plane forks Tom was working on for owners of these original 1980 Ritchey Mountain Bikes. Tom said he was inspired by both John’s and David Harrison’s restoration work on these non-serial 1980 frames that were sold without Bullmoose bars or forks.
Well, the news is live today that Tom Ritchey will be debuting this collection in person at MADE, so let’s check out the full 411 below!
This June, Meaghan Hackinen set out to compete in the Tour Divide. While no stranger to big rides or bikepacking races, this would be Meaghan’s longest off-pavement adventure yet. After a neck-and-neck race with Ana Jager, Meaghan reached Antelope Wells in a time of 15 days and 23 hours, winning the 2024 women’s division (7th overall) and setting the fastest women’s time for a grand depart.
In this reflective essay, Meaghan weaves together snapshots from her experience while exploring the invaluable but less visible support network that helped her achieve this Tour Divide win.
Supporting photographs from Seth DuBois, Alexandera Houchin, and Megan Dunn
We looked at the restoration of this 1984 Ritchey Annapurna through a series of videos earlier this year, and today, we’re sharing a full Beautiful Bicycles gallery documentation of it, along with a brief quote by Tom Ritchey himself. John takes a look at this esquisite emblematic example of the quality work leaving the workshop of Ritchey below!
We’ve ridden a handful of Fusion Fiber wheels, and we always wonder when this unique approach to carbon fiber might make the leap to other components. Well, we can keep on wondering, but the prototype handlebar that Forge+Bond sent to Travis last month has us thinking about the future.
