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Photo by Ryan Vannoy
We’re riding along with the bikes in the bed of a truck eating the fat end of a wedge of dust as it explodes from the back of the vehicle ahead. This is before the Blade Runner light, before that blood rich red captured the sun, and after, no during, the airborne everywhere terror. The most recent one, the one that I’m worried there are not enough of us who believe in it.
I’m a diehard fan of tough and playful hardtails. My affinity probably started with an invincible brick of a Schwinn BMX back when I was 13. It eventually evolved—I ditched my full suspension bike for the first generation of Surly’s infamous Krampus, morphed into the slacker front and tighter rear of a Carver Gnarvester, eloped with Tony’s personal Breadwinner Goodwater for a week, and then fell in love with Cjell Monē’s La Roca.
Last Autumn, I found myself wondering, “How do I pack for a bike ride through Narnia?”. I had just been asked to sample a small section of the wonderful Oregon Timber Trail by my friend Gabriel. I packed a grocery bag full of Voile straps, my foul weather gear, a laminated local mushroom-foraging pamphlet, and prepared to step through the magic wardrobe.
BINGO Components is a new company that is looking to make problem-solving products for your bike, beginning with the B1 headset spacer. These 5mm thick 6061 aluminum alloy spacers are anodized black and feature two loops to attach stem caddy-style bags.
You can run them above or below the stem and it even works with shorty MTB stems. These are made in Oregon and retail for $20 at BINGO Components.
Where do we even begin here? Boone is what I would consider a friend. Someone I met years ago in Portland who is now in Bend and still doing what he loves: making rad shit. Right now, however, he’s making rad shit for himself. When he and I first met, he was working for Argonaut Cycles but that wasn’t his first framebuilding job. As with everyone making bike frames, there’s a story to tell, and that’s what we’re doing here today, so sit back, turn on some metal, and check out the wild shit inside Boone Metal Fab.
“Gravel bikes are just XC bikes from the 1990s.” “What is this, a 90s XC bike?” “Everything old is new again!”
Read any “gravel” bike review here and you’ll see some version of one of these statements in the comments section. People love to say that modern gravel bikes are just mountain bikes from the 1990s. Well, I hate to break it to ya but they’re not. They might be the same in that a 1996 Lemond road bike is like a 2020 Specialized Roubaix. It has two wheels, a crank, bars, seatpost, and a saddle, plus a lot of other parts but let’s be honest, nuanced bike design is a lot of what we cover here at the Radavist.
This is a 1996 Ibis Mojo built up like a “gravel bike” and yeah, it might be similar in spirit but there’s a lot going on here. Let’s take a closer look…
Well, it had been since March since I left our quaint little town of Santa Fe due to the pandemic. All of my photoshoots, rides, and trips were either postponed or just canceled for the year up to this point. Which, as you all know quite well, can be quite the shock when you spend much of the year on the road! One of the postponed jobs that didn’t roll off the face into the abyss was shooting the new Argonaut Cycles frame and assemblage process. So that found me in Bend, Oregon for a few days and I had a hankering to ride something new…
Right about now, people are dreaming about dry trails and end-of-season conditions. Well, the team at Freehub just posted a video from late 2019, featuring the Free Radicals and three friends, who spent a week in the backwoods of Oregon.
Start ’em young! … and not just with racing, because there’s so much more to cycling than racing! In the Summer of 2019, the Oregon Chapter of National Interscholastic Cycling Association (NICA) took 18 of its riders bike packing along a section of the Oregon Timber Trail (OTT)…
When we lost our image server bucket from 2014-2016, it was a devastating blow to the visual catalog of bike portraits, rides, events, and other cycling ephemera. I felt like a piece of my own body was taken away since so much time, energy, and in this case, physical effort was put into making that content.
That era, even though it was only a few years back, was a unique time in cycling. Instagram hadn’t quite caught on yet, not at the capacity it carries today. The whole gravel and bikepacking trend was just ramping up.
Erik Nohlin was working on the now-defunct Specialized Adventure lineup, including the AWOL – he was riding the “secret” Poler edition prototype at the time – and I was just beginning to fine-tune my abilities as both an athlete and photographer. I will admit, resurrecting stories like this is painful, partially because I feel like as a website, we’ve grown to present more refined ride Reportage, and also because it was a different time in my personal life. Yet, so many people request that these galleries get a re-up, so here we are on a Throwback Thursday post, digging up old content and re-presenting it. Rather than just re-inserting the images themselves, I culled the selection down and compiled all three ride reports into one. Enjoy!
A lot of people are qualified to talk about long-travel enduro bikes. You can find me dangling by a thread at the bottom of that list, hanging there with a confusing mix of unfounded self-confidence and extreme midwestern imposter syndrome. I’ve lived near mountains extremely briefly and before that, the closest hill was a highway overpass. At the very least, I can offer you a unique perspective on a big bike. There’s a review in here somewhere, embedded in a long-winded story.
This video is a tribute to all the slightly-stressed grandmothers whose grandchildren are off riding bikes in distant lands…
Path Less Pedaled completes the 2019 Ochoco Overlander in part two of their video coverage. In this segment, they head back into Prineville, Oregon.
Path Less Pedaled rolls out to Prineville, Oregon with the Beaux Jaxon for the Ochoco Overlander event.
Rideable follows Steven Mortinson and Brian Donnelly as they ride two cheap bikes to the Oregon Coast and back with a surfboard in tow.
Tomas Quinones was at the right place at the right time with the right equipment and saved an elderly man and his dogs from dying from exposure in the Oregon desert.
This is the unofficial mantra of Rivelo in Portland, Oregon, the only Rivendell bike shop in Portland. Crazy, right!?! That’s what I thought too! Rivelo is also the only bike shop in the world that only carries Rivendell. There are no All-City, Crust, Rawland, Velo Orange, Soma, or any other bikes but Rivendells. While many bike shops carry brands that have all been inspired by Rivendell or maybe even wouldn’t exist without Rivendell. Rivelo makes it a point to just carry Rivendell. They aren’t scared of 1″ threaded headsets and rim brakes, that’s for damn sure!
The Skid Lizards are Oregon-based friends with bikes, bags, and jobs. Flies fear them; fish do not. This mission would involve exploring the Metolius River’s length, purity, and gravel – from head to tailwaters and back again.