The Radavist

Today we are back with part two of Spencer Harding‘s ENVE Grodeo and Builder Round-up coverage. If you missed the builds featured in yesterday’s post, we’d recommend going back and giving them a gander—3D-printed parts (most ti but some steel, too!) seems to be the unofficial theme for the year but there’s plenty to see across the creative spectrum! Today, we finish up with the remaining frame builders in the showcase—with a few more overseas features—then we head out on the weekend’s main event, a 92-mile gravel ride on some of the best dirt in the northern Wasatch Mountains. Let’s dive in!  

Every summer, ENVE Composites hosts a massive open house at their HQ in Ogden, Utah with an accompanying gravel ride. The 2023 ENVE Grodeo, which went down just one week ago,  featured an impressive list of 24 frame builders from around the world. Spencer Harding was on the ground documenting all of the beautiful bicycles and riding festivities and, below, he presents Part One of his event recap with a stacked gallery of bikes, some snapshots from the builder ride, and Trackline time trail at the Grodeo. Let’s get to it!

After 2020, I wasn’t sure when I’d be back at events documenting bikes, races, and places. So far in 2021, things seem to be picking up steam and this weekend I found myself in Ogden, Utah at the ENVE Builder Round Up Open House and Grodeo gravel race…

Last month’s Open House at ENVE was a bit of an experiment. The brand wanted to explore possibilities of showcasing framebuilders that have been building with ENVE wheels and components over the years, while offering up an option to ride in Ogden, Utah where they’re based through an event they’re dubbing Grodeo.

We’ve got over 17 years of Beautiful Bicycles in our archives and each year we like to look back at the previous twelve months of coverage and decipher what you, the audience, liked the most. To do this, we look at the page views for each and every Beautiful Bicycles gallery. Then we look at comments and internet chatter. Once we cull all this data, we’re left with a solid list of bikes. We love compiling this data as it helps us determine what bikes you like to see the most and thus, informs what bikes we document in the future.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

No matter how innovative or controversial a given mountain bike technology may be, it’s usually just a means to an end. A way to add efficiency or capability. Sure, these technologies can often make for utterly spectacular rides. But bikes themselves—especially full-suspension bikes—rarely add any soul purely for soul’s sake.

That may be why we love to highlight bikes like the REEB SST, Chromag Darco, and, of course, the Starling Murmur. These bikes have esoteric quirks usually found only on hardtail, gravel, and town bikes. And they just happen to also offer utterly spectacular rides.

But when Travis Engel noticed function-first stalwarts, Pivot and Specialized suddenly teasing in-house experiments in lugged carbon fiber, he wondered if there might be a new search for soul afoot…

While the 2023 Enve Grodeo was chock-full of some of the snazziest bespoke all-road bikes from around the world, Spencer Harding’s eye was caught by an eccentric build noticeably absent from the show floor. Fortunately, he was able to get the bike’s owner, Clint, to stop throwing skids long enough to snag a closeup. Pulling influence from some strange corners of the bike world and outfitting the frame with some amazing and unique parts, Clint’s SaltAir stood out for more reasons than its single rear cog. Clint rode this pink dream on all 92 miles of the Enve Grodeo, a feat in itself regardless of it being a fixed gear 26-er. Let’s have a closer look!  

We’ve got a few more galleries to go through from this weekend’s ENVE Builder Round Up and today we’re featuring the wonderful work of 22 Bicycle Co, Ritte, Speedvagen, Alliance, and Utah’s own, Salt Air. Enjoy!

It’s that time of year again! ENVE’s Open House, aka the Builder Round-Up and Grodeo event is this weekend in Ogden, Utah, so I packed up my bike portrait kit and drove up through beautiful summer monsoons to document a selection of bikes from this year’s event. Check out a thoroughly documented stable from the Round Up below, beginning with Chumba, Falconer, Firefly, Mariposa, Scarab, Sklar, and Tomii…

This year’s Chris King Open House chose 18 builders from all over the world to display their new colors for 2020: Bourbon and Violet. Thanks to ENVE, Santa Cruz Reserve, SRAM, Brooks, and Spurcycle. these bikes were built out appropriately for such a showcase. Below is a gallery of half the bunch, in alphabetical order for your enjoyment, with each builder’s description of the bikes. Make sure you comment on your favorite because there is some gold in these galleries!