The Radavist

We’re back today with Josh’s second installment of coverage from the Bespoked Handmade Bicycle Show! Let’s jump right in below with more recapping and a gallery of beautiful builds from Prova Cycles, Clandestine, Black Sheep Bikes, Etoile Cycles, Dawley Bikes, Avalanche Cycles, Coal Bikes with Black Cat Custom Paint, Fahrradbau Stolz, and Sour Bicycles…

While fully loaded touring and sleeping under the stars provide an enticing self-contained experience, there is a unique allure to the quintessential hut trip. Hut-supported routes are rare here in the U.S., but our rag-tag group of cyclotourists has taken advantage of the proximal classics, including the San Juan Hut Durango-to-Moab and Telluride-to-Moab routes. When the Aquarius Hut Trail Network was announced last year, our exploratory interests were piqued. Home to the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, southern Utah has become one of my favorite destinations from time spent riding and touring in our 4×4 in its rugged backcountry. Even so, the beauty of the riding and surrounding landscapes still bowled me over.

We have a lot of thoughts about both the route and the huts—read on for a full review of this majestic trip…

As residents of the desert state of Sonora when not touring, Radavist contributors Daniel Zaid and Karla Robles decided to pay a visit to the lush state of México further south. Daniel teams up with Nicolás Legorreta, the physicist, cyclist, and nature enthusiast behind the bike bag company Peregrinus Equipment. The two embark on an overnight tour, starting at the 15,000’+ reaches of the volcano Nevado de Toluca and making their way back to Nicolás’ home of San Simón el Alto. With a route that’s all downhill, what could go wrong? 

When I first started gathering the necessary gear to give bike touring (or “bikepacking” in the parlance of our times) a go, the concept struck me as an opportunity to escape from the predictable, mundane, “rinse-and-repeat” order of everyday life. An opportunity to embrace a new kind of freedom of aimless wandering through paths and tracks out in the near-endless natural landscape. After a couple of trips, though, I found the reality of touring isn’t the carefree meander I had envisioned. It can involve weeks or months of planning, trail markers, GPS tracks, resupply points… Which is not to say that escaping on a multi-day trip isn’t freeing, it is – very much so – but maybe not in the conventional sense of the word. I think author Robert Moor says it best in his written exploration of travel, On Trails:

“But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what the trail offers. Quite the opposite – a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic. To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; but the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of the path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.”

Two Kleins in one week? What are the odds? Today, we’ve got a killer Vintage Bicycles feature, penned by Mike Wilk and photographed by John Watson, showcasing Tinker Juarez’s 1993 “Team Storm” painted Adroit EX. If you were a grom or an adult back then, you’ll recognize this bike. Without further adieu, let’s get to it!

I’ve always wondered if there was something special about the water in Fort Collins that makes it a hotbed for legendary bicycle frame builders. Is the Poudre River’s clean mountain water that so famously supplies New Belgium, Odell, and numerous other local breweries in some way responsible for the wildly beautiful frames made by the likes of Black Sheep Bikes, Oddity Cycles, or Moonmen Bikes? Well, the answer is probably not, but Fort Collins’ water is delicious and it’s a great place to build bikes. A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of visiting with the Choice City’s newest framebuilder, Will Bender, of Bender Bicycle Company. Will has been making frames part-time for a handful of years now, with some truly beautiful machines under his belt, and he just recently moved into a new shop space to start building full-time.

Below, let’s take a look at Bender Bicycle Company as well as some of Will’s recent customer builds!

I still look back at my time in Austin, Texas, with the fondest of memories, thanks to the many people I met while living there. I got to know the most amazing, down-to-Earth, truly unique souls in the five years I called Austin my home. Many of which I’m still quite close with today. A few have since moved on to other cities and are doing big things in their respective new homes.

One of which is Taylor Wallace, a fella I met at Flat Track Coffee years back and have since gotten to see the life he’s made for himself in Bozeman, Montana, where I’ve been visiting for a little over a week now. Taylor owns a coffee company which he operates with his brother, Gavin, called Roly Poly Coffee. We haven’t featured many coffee shops here at The Radavist but Roly Poly, as an extension of Taylor himself is much, much more…

Vintage mountain bikes have a special place in our hearts over here at The Radavist. From vintage klunkers to fillet-brazed beauts, it just seems like bikes from the early years of mountain biking were ahead of their time in a lot of ways. When the pandemic hit, I found myself browsing forums, eBay, and emailing collectors to build up some vintage rides. I was inundated with all the tech that was coming out, yet wasn’t available to consumers, and just felt like revisiting my passion for old bikes would reinvigorate my love of 26″ wheels and friction shifting. This Ritchey is the most recent of three bikes that I built up over the past few years in the pandemic and was by far the biggest undertaking for me. The process included painting some Tom Ritchey fillet Bullmoose bars to match and fixing some shoddy paint on the frame itself.

This bike needed a complete build kit, as I bought it as a frameset, so I spent a lot of time speccing the build while utilizing some of the NOS components I’ve been sitting on for a few years. The end product is something I’m truly proud of and Cari and I had a lot of fun with the photos here, so enjoy!

We’ve all heard the term “Klunker” before, but as a modern misnomer in cycling, it’s been used to refer to coaster-brake actuated cruiser bikes. This, my friends, is a true-to-form klunker, using gears and brakes, but it was built upon a cruiser chassis. For today’s Vintage Bicycles tory, we have Tasshi from Vintage MTB Workshop sharing the story of Steve Cook’s personal Cook Brothers Racing Cruiser, so read on for all the nitty-gritty on what makes this wild bike so unique and how it would shape the future of mountain biking…

A bike’s stance dictates how you’ll ride it. When you see bikes like this, you don’t think of speed and efficiency. Coming off of a lightweight carbon gravel bike review and jumping back onto this Bombtrack Beyond 2 made me think about my headspace while riding a bike. For me, bikes like the Beyond 2, AWOL, Sutra ULTD, and Otso Fenrir instill a feeling of unintentionality when riding. They’re machines for meandering. While they are all touring bikes, designed for front and rear racks, they are so much more. I’ve put in many meandering miles on this bike and am ready to break it down for you, so read on below.

The intersection of cycling with other outdoor activities is where my mind has been for the past few years. Bikefishing, bikerafting, bicycle touring, and the like all bring together cycling with outdoor recreation. A few retail environments come to mind that encourages not only cycling but these adjacent activities. Most prominently in my mid-term memory is Circles in Nagoya Japan, and recently, I found myself at Campfire Cycling in Tucson with camera in hand. While there, I documented a few of the shop employee’s personal bikes, as well as the space itself. Let’s take a look below!

Across the road from a sprawling old corral with a dozen or more cattle pens constructed from creosote-laden boards and discarded railroad ties stood a small stone monument. It commemorated an earthen dam, behind which was a very small but empty reservoir at the foot of a butte called Coyote Peak.

“If it were not for strongmen like Bob Crowder,” the metal plaque read, “with the fortitude and ambition to develop water in these vast desert areas, there would be no game and no livestock today.”

In escaping the concrete canyons of New York City, the idea of new horizons, and the promise of unfamiliar faces drew me into what became a 4,112-mile bicycle tour across the deep south and southwestern United States.