Search for “downieville” on The Radavist

Reportage By: john watson

Curtis Inglis and His Retrotec Twin Top Tube Funduro 140mm Hardtail 29er

While Curtis Inglis from Retrotec Cycles was in Santa Fe, John took along a camera for some of their rides and documented Curtis’ new twin top tube Funduro. This 140mm-travel hardtail 29er is one that Curtis built for himself to display at the 2023 MADE bike show and was the perfect choice for sampling Santa Fe’s side country riding.

Curtis and his bike undertook one of the more technical rides in the Southern Rockies, and John was there to document it all. Check out a stunning gallery of the bike and the singletrack that makes Santa Fe such a great MTB destination below!

Radar By: Travis Engel

The Ten Best Horror Films for Adventure Cyclists

Just like the rows of bagged candy at your grocery store, or the fountains of pumpkin spice latte at your coffee shop, you can’t escape Halloween once October hits. Not even here at The Radavist. Travis Engel has jumped on the spooky-season bandwagon with a list of scary movies (and one scary short film) that will strike a nerve for anyone who likes riding to the middle of nowhere…

Reportage By: Billy Sinkford

100-Mile Love Song: The 2023 Lost & Found Gravel Festival

After an almost-decade long run, the Lost & Found Gravel Festival continues to provide adventurous-minded riders with dynamic and challenging terrain in northern California’s Lost Sierra Mountains. Registration for any of the event’s 100-mile, 60-mile and 35-mile courses goes directly to supporting the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship‘s Lost Sierra Route, a route that seeks to connect 15 mountain communities and foster economic prosperity through recreation. Billy Sinkford joined in for the mixed terrain fun this year and shares moments from the race along with photos of the Builders’ Bazaar.

Reportage By: Jacquie Phelan & john watson

Vintage Bicycles: Jacquie’s Singlespeed Wilderness Trail Bikes Phoenix

We’re running with an alternative format for this week’s Vintage Bicycles feature! It’s one we hope you enjoy as it was penned by the original owner of this stunning singlespeed WTB Phoenix, Jacquie Phelan. Jacquie was an early MTB pioneer in the Marin constituency and along with her racing accolades is, perhaps, most known for starting the Women’s Mountain Bike & Tea Society (WOMBATS). In her own words, she hasn’t retired from racing and still loves to mix it up on two wheels. Read on for her retelling of how this bike faired at the 2008 Napa Single Speed World Championships (SSWC)…

Reportage By: Eric Arce

The Histories We Traverse: Biking and Learning Across the Sierra Nevada

The trails we ride often have stories that long pre-date mountain biking. On a road trip from Los Angeles, to Mammoth, and finally Downieville, Eric Arce takes time to understand some of the troubled history behind these popular riding destinations in the Sierra Nevada.

Radar By: Kurt Gensheimer & Eric Highlander

Lost and Found 2022: A Triumphant Return

There’s more than 4,000 miles of graded dirt roads in Plumas National Forest connecting a dozen quaint and remote mountain communities across Plumas and Lassen County, California. The landscapes are stunning, from majestic mountain meadows bursting with wildflowers to craggy granite peaks and glacially carved mountain lakes. Hidden cabins and remnants of the Gold Rush can be found everywhere along the way. The only thing you don’t see much of in the backcountry of Plumas County is people, which is why this region is quickly becoming known as The Gravel Capital of the West.

Reportage By: Paul Component Engineering

the 2021 Sierra Nevada Brewing Co and Paul Component Engineering Sierra Trail Chasers Benefit SBTS and SORBA

It’s no secret that Pale Ale is Paul from Paul Component Engineering’s favorite beer, and this will be our 4th year collaborating on a custom bike for Sierra Nevada Brewery to show off at Sea Otter and give away to a lucky winner. This year we decided to raise the bar by building up TWO bikes, and using them to help out two of our favorite trail stewardship!

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The Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s $5 a Foot Fundraiser is Back and Benefits Connected Communities

Do you like what you see here? Well, you could win this fully decked out, dream Hightower build from Santa Cruz Bicycles by partaking in the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s $5 a Foot fundraiser:

“Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship’s 5 Bucks a Foot fundraiser is back with a customized, Santa Cruz Hightower up for grabs! Sure, there’s a bike shortage, and yes, it’s nearly impossible just to get some bike parts these days. Yet, we got lucky enough to assemble this bling’ed masterpiece: a one-of-a-kind Hightower (size Large) decked out with parts you can’t even get your hands on these days. And if you want to come pick it up in-person*, you can receive complimentary lodging at The Lure Resort in Downieville, CA for the weekend. Come out and ride the Downieville Downhill on your brand-new bike!

We are building a legacy trail – the 300+ mile Lost Sierra Route – through our Connected Communities Project. The building and maintenance of “A Trail for Everyone” will employ local residents and help our small businesses thrive. For every $5 you donate to 5 Bucks a Foot between Tuesday, June 8 to Friday, July 9, 2021, you can directly contribute to this project and possibly win this sweet ride.”

Hop on over to Sierra Trails to enter to win and help out the Connected Communities initiative.

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PAUL x Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship Box Set Giveaway

Our friends at Paul Component are looking to help out the team at Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship through a wicked giveaway! Check out the press release below…

When we saw the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship announcement that all events for 2021 were canceled due to Covid, we were crushed. Anybody who’s been to the Downieville Classic, Mountains to Meadows, or Lost and Found knows we LOVE supporting these events with our aid stations, and partying with some of the best bike weirdos in the world, in one of the most beautiful areas in the world.

SBTS rely heavily on these events to help raise funds and awareness for all the amazing trails they build in the Lost Sierra, involving, employing, and assisting the local small communities in the process. It’s truly inspiring to behold the hard and meaningful work they put in, and a cause we will trumpet until we’re out of breath.

What can we do to help? Well, we’ve decided to offer up one of our few remaining Limited 30th Anniversary Box Sets as a prize to one lucky person, chosen at random, who donates to SBTS by March 14.

Consider donating the amount you would normally spend for entry fees and this will help keep the trails and community in good shape for 2022 when we’re all back out there shredding and partying together!

So how do you win?

-Head over to the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship website and donate any amount you can afford.
-Forward the confirmation email you receive from SBTS to travis@paulcomp.com. That’s it! Paul will choose a winner at random after March 14th in some bizarre way, so stay tuned!

Want to see what the SBTS is all about? Check out our Reportage from over the years in the Related column below.

Radar By: California Travis

From Henceforth: November 2nd Shall Be International Singlespeed Day

Intro by California Travis:

Every Monday at 11 am, the entire PAUL Component shop staff has an “All-Hands” meeting to catch up on any changes or shop news or projects. For the last few months, this has been in the backyard with masks and everybody yelling across the yard to each other. It’s weird but no weirder than our usual shop vibes. Last Monday, Paul announced that November 2nd is International Singlespeed Day. We all looked at him like “Huh? Says who?” Then he said it was him and his friend Amanda’s birthday that day, and it was Amanda’s idea, and why the hell not?

Having never created an International Holiday before, I wasn’t quite sure what to do, so I got on the phone with a bunch of framebuilders and friends and said “Hey. It’s Paul’s birthday on November 2nd, and he wants everybody to ride singlespeeds. You down?” And of course, everybody said yes, I mean what the hell else are you going to do right now? So how do you join us? It’s pretty simple really, go for a ride on your singlespeed, wherever you live, post a photo on Instagram and hashtag it #InternationalSinglespeedDay, and wish Paul and Amanda a happy birthday if you want. Don’t have a singlespeed bike? Zip tie your shifters, or take the battery off your derailleur, maybe? Get creative, there are no rules!

Post your singlespeed bikes up in the comments too.

We asked Paul what the big deal is and this is what he wrote… Read on below!

Radar

A Look at Paul Component Engineering’s New Sprinter Van Wrap by Chris McNally

Paul Component Engineering has a lifelong legacy of making parts you can rely on, for just about any bike. This legacy is only possible due to the fact that the team at Paul live, eat, dream, drink, sleep, and travel for all things bike! Part of their tradeshow and bike race fleet is this Sprinter van, which recently got a facelift thanks to Chris McNally. Let’s take a look at this van’s new vinyl wrap in detail below.

Radar

The Radavist 2020 Calendar: May

This is the fifth layout of the Radavist 2020 Calendar, entitled “Castilleja” shot with a Sony A7ii and a 24-70 lens in Downieville, California.

“For May this year, we dove into Jason Fitzgibbon’s Downieville bikepacking story and picked two favorites from his recent gallery here on the Radavist. See Jason and Colton’s full gallery here.”

For a high-res JPG, suitable for print and desktop wallpaper*, right-click and save link as – The Radavist 2020 – May. Please, this photo is for personal use only!
(*set background to white and center for optimal coverage)

The mobile background this month is also one of Jason’s, featuring the Sierra Buttes. Click here to download May’s Mobile Wallpaper.

Reportage By: Jason Fitzgibbon & Colton Jacobs

Drawn Out: a Semi-Casual Expedition Through the Lost Sierra

Tucked away in a sparsely populated region of Northern California, at the northern terminus of the Sierra Nevada range lies a land of dense, rolling forests, deep canyons, cold clear streams, and jagged peaks that tower over teal, post-glacial lakes. And weaving their way through this serenely beautiful landscape is a network of ever-growing trails, the vast majority of which can be traversed by bike.

Reportage By: cameron falconer & ian matteson

ENVE Foundation Launch: Falconer Cycles NFS, Normal Full Suspension and/or Not For Sale

With the pandemic putting a halt to NAHBS and our post-NAHBS framebuilder ride/showcase in Sedona this year, we decided to pull something together with our friends at ENVE to commemorate their new Foundation MTB wheel launch. When ENVE moved into its new carbon manufacturing and testing facility, they worked hard to push the progression of carbon wheel design and manufacturing. Over three years later and thousands of hours developing, today they launched their Foundation Collection, a completely new wheel line that marks a new milestone in wheel design. In short, for those of us who aren’t interested in graphs or projections, ENVE launched a $1600 made in the USA wheelset and to help showcase these new wheels, we pinged three frame builders to showcase these wheels. The first is the Falconer Cycles NFS, Normal Full Suspension and/or Not For Sale. Below are words, penned by Cameron Falconer describing the project.

Reportage By: Spencer Harding

Happily Stuck in Hardtail Jail: A Look at Spencer’s Orbea Loki

To fill in the gaps between normal, group-ride-oriented bicycle stories, we’re featuring a few rides from the staff over here at the Radavist, beginning with Spencer’s Orbea Loki.

When it was finally time for me to accept that my fatbike just wasn’t that good of a trail bike, I looked to the next best thing, a plus bike. I finagled my way into Interbike a few years back and made it my mission to ride all the plus bikes at the dirt demo. Turns out they were damn fun, the Advocate (now Esker) Hayduke was the winner of the day in my eyes, right in front of the newly updated Karate Monkey. At the time I worked for a guide company that had a fleet or Orbea’s bikes, and they sent our company a closeout list with some discounted bikes at cost. I saw a swoopy aluminum 27.5+ hardtail that looked like it might just be the ticket. I figured I could fit an XL and hopefully, that would give me the most framebag space since I planned to use this as that ever-fleeting idea of a quiver killer.

Reportage By: spencer harding

A Tour of Ken Wallace’s Bisbee Bicycle Brothel

On my way to crashing the beginning of SSAZ down in Bisbee I made a stop by a place I have been wanting to make an excuse to shoot for quite some time now. Now, Bisbee isn’t on the way to anywhere and you really need to make a point to end up there, I think I heard a rumor that Paul Price called it “Like a Downieville in the desert.” Bisbee is was a mining town turned that turned into an artist haven when the copper mining started to dry up. The hours at the Bisbee Bicycle Brothel are loose and you can just give Ken a call if you want him to open up for ya. Now when and if you end up in Bisbee, you probably aren’t expecting much of a bike shop, but oh would you be oh so wrong.

Reportage By: John Watson

Believe the Hype: Hardtail Riding with the Zipp 3ZERO MOTO 29er Wheels

When someone makes a big marketing claim, one that promises “compliance”, superb strength, and a ride quality unlike anything else on the market, I can’t help but roll my eyes. This reaction is a sentiment that I’m sure you, the readers of this very website, also feel! The cycling industry is always coming out with the next best thing and trying to get you to buy it. That’s why when I take on something to review, I like to really give it a go because if I’m going to tell you something is worth your hard-earned money, it damn well better perform.

Please don’t mind this introduction, I just wanted to explain how long I’ve been thinking about writing this review and how it’s going to seem that I was paid to sing the praises of these wheels. Spoiler alert, I was not and yes, these wheels really do live up to the marketing hype!

For the past 10 months, I’ve been riding the Zipp 3ZERO MOTO 29er wheels on my hardtail and I am a firm – pardon the pun – believer that these wheels are the best thing to hit the MTB market in some time.

Radar

Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship Launches Connected Communities

This just in from our friends at the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship:

Sierra Nevada Conservancy awards $360,525 planning grant linking 15 communities by trail

To fulfill the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship (SBTS) mission of building sustainable, recreation-based communities, Connected Communities will change the economic future of Sierra, Plumas, Lassen and Butte County forever. Linking 15 California mountain communities across four economically disadvantaged counties by approximately 300 miles of new motorized and non-motorized trails, the Lost Sierra Master Trails Plan and Connected Communities project will be a historic collaboration between federal land managers, regional government, local businesses and concerned citizens.