The Radavist

Yesterday, we took a peek inside Flat Track Coffee and Cycleast. While hanging out there, getting caffeinated and catching up with the shop employees, I got to chatting to Corey, one of the mechanics at Cycleast. Specifically about the sword on his Crust Bikes Evasion…

The cold. Oh, the cold. Never before had I experienced 10º temperatures at night and 70º during the day. There I lay, in chrysalis, asleep in my bivy thinking to myself, “this is miserable.” That was two years ago, at the foot of the second tallest sand dunes in North America, nestled between the Last Chance and Amargosa Mountains in Death Valley National Park. Needless to say, it took a while for me to want to tour this unforgiving place again. There’s something transformative about touring in the Mojave Desert. The dryness, the elevation, the sand, the silt, the wind, the washboard roads; insurmountable obstacles really bring out the truest human condition, that Lovecraftian urge to get out and test one’s limits. Push it a little bit further and come out the other side. Had I known that this love for the deserted, the dusted, and that grandiose dolomite was merely biding its time as I shivered uncontrollably in my bivy sack two years ago, I might not have been so absolute in my cynicism. It was time for emergence.

This bike is the direct result of many experiences, beginning with my 44 Bikes touring bike and culminating with the Moots Baxter I spent a great deal of time on last year both fully-loaded and set up in what I could call expedition mode. After a lot of back and forth, I realized that I like 29+ bikes for bikepacking and yeah, titanium is really nice for desert riding. These mental musings came to the full realization after spending some time talking with Adam from Sklar Bikes this summer in Bozeman.

In 2015, I was able to partake in the launch of the Cutthroat, Salsa’s Tour Divide Race Bike, a unique drop bar 29er and since then, I’ve had zero contact with it. That is until I unboxed the brand new 2020 Cutthroat, which is full of new updates and boy is it a long list. While I plan on reviewing this bike in more detail further down the road, I wanted to give you a look at the new model on its launch day. Read on below for a first look at the new Cutty.

Shuttle runs. It’s part of the larger conversation about cycling as a recreational sport and as a medium of fitness. Honestly, it’s one reason why I’m in support of e-bikes. The way I look at it, 5 riders on e-bikes usually mean one or two fewer trucks speeding on the fire road going up… and down! The discussion of lithium batteries is another quagmire, but what exactly are riders to do when there aren’t options out there? Climb up a road for 12 miles on a full suspension bike? Those bikes are designed to go downhill, down to the single, or sometimes complete lack of water bottle mounts. Of course, you can do these climbs but the reality is, people will always opt for a free, or cheap ride.

What about cities that embrace cycling? That look at this particular form of recreation as a resource? Well, they’re onto something.

Throughout the Spring I was unfortunate in that I had to miss all of the El Grupo Bikepacking overnight trips except our final one, the big end of season trip.  Colin had devised a modified Craters and Cinder Cones loop so that we could do a half loop as an overnighter.  Now, most of our trips are totally self-supported, but as Colin was still recovering from his Achilles injury, he planned to drive the van and meetup to camp with us.  Nonetheless, the kids still carried all of their gear, but we were lucky to have a little water and snack angel along the way.

We shoot a lot of bikes here on the Radavist. A lot. From my estimates, including tradeshows, and events like the Chris King Open House, or the Moots’ Employee Bikes, and even the Speedvagen Build Off, we shot 220 or so bikes in 2018. That’s a lot of bikes. A lot of details. A lot of component selection, build styles, and uses. From road, to mountain, and everything in between, noting the permutations that exist in this ever-so-special era in the cycling industry, I really feel like we’ve shown you just about everything you could see this year.

Out of those 220 bikes, I looked at the data in the form of traffic metrics, social chatter, and comments to pick the Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2018. While many bikes had a lot of comments, some had higher traffic or social media shares. Compiling all the numbers, a very compelling list was formed. Not included in this lot are bike reviews, of which Morgan’s review of the Midnight Special and Kyle’s review of his Chubby Cosmic Stallion took the highest metrics from all others on this list. I guess they’re in a league of their own!

At any rate, check out the complete Top 10 Beautiful Bicycles of 2018, in no particular order, below!

Quicksand, Camaraderie, and Existential Optimism in Canyon Country
Words and photos by Spencer Harding

Sometimes you plan a trip months in advance and mother nature decides that the normally dry ground you planned to ride your bike will now be a raging soupy brown milkshake of a river. 

Sometimes you help a random couple push a broken down vintage Jaguar in the middle of nowhere in the rain. 

Sometimes you get stuck in waist-deep quicksand in said raging soupy brown milkshake river and have to yell for help until your friends come to rescue you covered in cockle burrs. 

Sometimes you ride your bike even though the map says you are underwater in Lake Powell. 

Sometimes you decide to drag your bike and raft upstream for some damn reason.

Sometimes your overnighter was shorter mileage-wise than an average grocery run. 

Sometimes in desperation, you make a pipe out of the darndest things and then eat it.

Sometimes you realize maybe you should have left the damn bike at home this time.

Sometimes you decide to go for a leisurely ride to see pretty fall colors on the way home, which turns into a two hour long hike-a-bike ending with Y’all running from a snowstorm.

And finally, sometimes none of these things matter because the people and places around you are so dang beautiful…

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A Solstice Ballad for My Hometown
Words by Tenzin Namdol, photos by Ultra Romance and Thomas Hassler.

While the God-fearing Christians of the lower Connecticut River valley ended their day cleaning off their lawn care equipment, a small group of Wiccan-observing, season-worshipping heathens rolled their tires through the forested glades of the Nutmeg Country triangle in honor of the Swift Campout. We smell of essential oils and the crystals around my neck jingles at each pedal stroke. The leaves on the trees have matured from their Spring-emerged highlighter green to a darker, more robust hue, properly at the ready for the next summer storm. The back-to-back Nor’easters these trails have endured in recent months have left branches and huge fallen trees in the path as we head for the lean to’s in Cockaponsett State Forest- a mouthful, I know, especially paired with the Pattaconk Lake that nests inside. This area is full of names like that: Hammonasset Beach is a rock throw away from Benedict’s home, the Quinnipiac flows into New Haven harbor several miles away. Connecticut is a colonized spelling of the Native Algonquian, Quinnehtukqut, which translates to “place of the long river”.

Just a few, short years back, when people shifted their nomenclature from “bicycle touring” to include the term “bikepacking,” there weren’t many brands or shops for that matter, that catered to outings such as overnighters all the way through extensive tours. At least not compared to today’s offerings. Just about every day I read about a new product that claims to make our time on a loaded bicycle easier, or more pleasant, and as you can imagine, there is a lot of filtering that has to happen in order to cull this seemingly endless parade of new products.

That’s where the local bike shop model comes into play. My favorite part about visiting any city are the shops that make these places tick and in Portland, Oregon, there are so many shops around that specificity is the name of the game for survival in the ever-struggling retail economy.

One of the ways shops – and brands for that matter – have found the key to survival is by carefully cultivating a selection of products that have been thoroughly vetted by either the shop’s staff or close friends of the shop. The only way to determine the feasibility of a product is to actually use it, right? I’ve noticed this happening a lot, the culling down of the bike shop. In many ways, this makes for an easier retail experience, from the customer’s perspective and the owner’s.

I’m up in Portland to document the Vanilla Workshop Build-Off bikes and hang out in town for a few days. We’ll go into the event in-depth later, but the gist is, there are six bikes on display designed by various brands and individuals, of either completely new concepts, or simply a new paint scheme. The attendees and web-users will get a chance to vote on the best bike and that will become the next ready-made bike.

One of those bikes is perhaps the most unique builds to come from the Speedvagen brand. The team began with the idea of the Urban Racer – a stripped down, fast-paced, innercity bike – and expanded on its usage to the city and beyond. After design meetings and prototype, the GTFO was born, a bike designed to get you out of the city as fast as possible for an overnighter.

The GTFO will come with Syntace dropouts, making it easy to run either geared or singlespeed, in two models; the PRO model will come complete with Andrew the Maker bags, a painted to match bullmoose cockpit, and ZIPP wheels, or the normal package, which comes sans bags, a standard painted to match stem, and EA70ax wheels.

If this bike gets the “people’s choice” vote, it’ll join the ranks of the OG-1 and Urban Racer in Speedvagen’s Ready Made program and price will be determined then. We’ll be posting at a later date with details on how to vote!

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Snowbirding in Tucson at Tranist Cycles
Photos and words by Spencer Harding

This past March I wound up down in Tucson for some guiding work and planned some extra time to be there a little early to hangout with the nexus of bikey humans that seemed to congregating there. I happened to stop in at Transit Cycles for their monthly shop ride. The ride is co-hosted by Carl from Dragoon Brewing (find him for your first-beer-for-$1 token!) and the ride was a sporting 2 or so miles to the brewery along a bike path from the shop, my kinda ride really. It was an eclectic crowd with mainstays of the Tucson community, plenty of snowbirds from all over the country, and even a very pregnant pannier riding doggo.

Transit Cycles is nestled in the very southwest chic Mercado San Agustine on the west side of downtown Tucson. The shop is the culmination of the owner Duncan’s childhood dream to own a locally run bike shop. After bouncing around the west coast and finally ending up Tucson, Duncan opened Transit early in 2014. He was excited to offer the only place to buy cargo bikes in the city and a focus on adventure/touring bikes.

Today the shop is small but filled with many wonderful vignettes, from Mo’s personal artwork to a collection of more types of chain lube than I thought existed. The shop is currently just two employees, Duncan and Mo. A rarity in the cycling industry with a POC shop owner with a female head mechanic, a conscious decision to make space for gender as well as race. Outside of their monthly shop ride, Transit is a regular host to Swift Industries Stoked Spoke series, WTF rides, and intro bike-packing overnighters.

Next time you pass through Tucson, you know you want to escape winter everywhere else, make sure to swing by Transit Cycles and see what rad stuff is happening!

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Scotty 2 Hotty is a local staple here in Los Angeles. He’s what I like to call an autodidactic raconteur or a self-taught man with lots of informative ramblings. For those of you who have ventured into Golden Saddle Cyclery, you’ll probably recognize him as a patron of the bike shop and literal sponge of knowledge. While Scotty is a farmer and a consultant for soil nutrition, his passions in life exist far beyond the liveliness of plants. His favorite subjects include but are not limited to fishing, gliders, obscure bicycle parts, firearms, fishing, boating, Shimano, both reels, and bicycles.