The Radavist

Featuring their innovative Suspend the Rider (STR) rear Future Shock system, Specialized’s Diverge STR has achieved a new echelon of comfort and efficiency in the gravel world. Spencer Harding dives into the nuance of the system and all that it entails and offers. Is the juice worth the squeeze? He thinks so, even if that fruit is pretty pricey. 

Living in the Phoenix, AZ metro area, I get to connect with a variety of interesting folks who travel here during the winter months. Like Western Sandpipers, Sandhill Cranes, Golden Eagles, and other airborne travelers of North American migratory flyways, humans also flock to warmer climes in the Sonoran Desert’s overwintering sites. On a recent trip to my neighborhood caffeine dealer, Cartel Roasting Co, my jaw dropped when I saw Richard’s handmade cruiser parked out front. Visiting from Winnipeg, Manitoba with his wife Michelle, the couple snowbirds in Arizona to connect with friends and ride bikes. Before I knew it, Richard and I had talked for nearly an hour about his love of vintage bikes, cycling for physical and mental health, and his recent forays into building his own framesets. Let’s take a look at his most recent creation below!

As a salute of solidarity to everyone who keeps getting out on the bike through winter, Hailey Moore shares three tales of off-season travails from riding through this most testing season.

Growing up in rural Iowa, you would’ve never been able to convince me bikes would be a way to go camping. I suppose you would’ve also had to convince me that bikes were cool in general. Either way, my younger years weren’t spent in a saddle cruising down the now coveted gravel roads. Iowa isn’t really on a whole lot of folks’ radar for bikes….heck it’s what most people consider a flyover state. But, back in 2016 I decided to race JingleCross on a whim and was pleasantly surprised to find out it was in Iowa. The only bike I had to race with was my pink Cake fat bike. While putzing around waiting for my race to start, I was approached by two guys who recognized my bike and were familiar with Erik Noren’s work. Logan and Thaddeus told me they had just opened a shop in Cedar Rapids called Goldfinch Cyclery and it sounded like a dream.

Curating custom bikes for people is something I’ve done, dare I say, “since forever.” For nearly 20 years the most common way a custom project lands on my plate is someone desiring a build akin to my current ride. In the early years, it was track bikes, singespeeds, and classic road bikes. More recently, popular interest seems to have shifted to e-bike conversions capable of carrying small humans, bulky gear, or a combination of both.

Saying we woke up would imply sleep, which is a luxury the night before the Concours de Machines race hadn’t afforded us, owing to thick black clouds of mosquitoes that infested our van. I lit a church of citronella candles and closed all the doors and windows, while Josh rolled himself up in a sheet and slept outside on a decrepit shezlongé that sat outside the factory. Mosquitos spent the night screaming and raging in our ears while doing their best to tear us limb from limb. At 4 am they sat lining the window sills, fat and bloated, drunk on our blood.

I killed a dozen of them with an old sock in one limp sleep-deprived swipe as a tokenistic act of vengeance, knowing they’d be saving their strength for another assault the next evening. I stood in Andreas’ elegant la fraise workshop contorting my body to scratch bites between nerve endings on my back, craving coffee as the pilotes clip clopped in on road shoes. For many of them, road shoes were a terrible choice. The 204km route billed as a road with some cobbles and gravel somehow encompassed 1466m of short sharp climbs in an oppressively pancake-flat landscape, as well as some muddy singletrack. The singletrack must have caught teams rolling on 28c slick tyres off guard, and would prove catastrophic for some.

This is the second of two reports from the 2022 Concours de Machines. Be sure to check here for the first installment!

In 2018 I was invited to take part in the third edition of Concours de Machines as Dear Susan, in the medieval town of Bruniquel in the south of France. The Concours is a recent(ish) revival of a frame-building contest first organized in 1903 that ran up to the late 1940s. It was traditionally hosted in different locations around France, the goal of which was to demonstrate the superiority of artisanal “constructeurs” and their machines, over production bikes.

Before accepting the invitation, there were some red flags for me. For instance the idea of “better;” how you can numerically score one bike against another, especially if they’re designed and made around a particular rider for a particular course? There’s so much that just comes down to preference! Reading further into the scoring system, the seemingly arbitrary categories actually became quite liberating, in that scores were given based on abstract criteria rather than what constituted a good or appropriate bike. Limitations included things like: “the bicycle must have wheels with tyres, and a system with which to steer,” as well as point scoring sections like: “the bicycle must be able to power its own lights and it must have bags to carry everything you need for an overnight trip.”

This is the first of two reports from the 2022 Concours de Machines. Be sure to check back tomorrow for the second installment!

Back in June of 2021, I found myself way up north in Duluth, Minnesota. I was there with my teammate Kait Boyle for a Backcountry Bike Challenge fundraising event for the local advocacy organization, Cyclists of Gitchee Gumee Shores (COGGS) and to ride the Duluth Traverse. COGGS had been working on the 45-mile-long Duluth Traverse for years, building and linking together trails on the highlands above town, and we wanted to experience what they had created. But this was also a trip back to where I spent quite a bit of time as a kid that grew up just a couple hours to the south near Minneapolis, albeit in a decade when there were far, far fewer trails in the area. I’ll save the story of just how impressive the Duluth Traverse is for another time since you’re probably here to read about Wildflower Bicycles’ beautiful bikes rather than beautiful trails. But first, let me share why I was especially excited to visit the shop of a new-to-the-Midwest frame builder and the only one in the Duluth-Superior area.

Perhaps you remember Beau? That crazy fella who rode his bike from Boulder, Colorado to Mexico City in the middle of the summer that we profiled last year? Well, John reconnected with Beau after his tour and asked if he had any stories he’d like to share. Little did we know we’d get a tale like this… Also, Beau is doing another postcard project, so read on below for those details as well!