The Radavist

The Rivendell Ramboullet, a multi-purpose road bike with long reach calipers and clearance for up to a 38c tire. It’s a super practical light tourer and everyday ride, made even more practical with S&S couplers.

I love seeing frame builders gain notoriety through supporting grassroots cycling teams. Not to say that Aaron Stinner wouldn’t be as popular today without building the Mudfoot racing cyclocross frames, but it certainly helped.

During my visit to Santa Barbara during the ATOC, Jeremy Dunn and I spent the afternoon with Aaron, riding bikes, photographing bikes and making a mess at his house.

Aaron is lucky enough to have a decent sized workspace set up in his garage and he’s even luckier to have a great ride just seconds from his front door. As his queue stacks up, Aaron continues to crank out road, cross and MTB frames for customers, who happen to be mostly from California. Many of which are looking to race on a steel frame, made in their home state, rather than buy overseas production.

Stinner Frameworks is still new in the grand scheme of things, but if Aaron continues at the current momentum, he could vary well be the next big thing…

In the past few years, Brian Chapman has shifted interest in frame building. Initially, he was half of Circle A Cycles but recently, he began building under the moniker, Chapman Cycles.

The work Brian is producing at Chapman Cycles is exceptional. Not that his work at Circle A was lacking in any regard, but going out on his own allowed Brian to really pursue his vision of what cycling truly means to him.

When I look at David Wilcox’s road frame, I see Chapman Cycle’s future, even though this bike was built years before Brian began building for his new venture. Geometrically speaking, this is a road bike with a traditional geometry, but functionally, it’s much more.

Rack, fender mounts and clearances for up to a 33.3 slick, this bike is a “long ride” road. It was built for the Oregon Manifest, specifically for David Wilcox, or as he’s known in the Northeast, “the Wilcox“.

Much like Chapman Cycles, David has gone off on a journey of his own. He just happens to be towing the new and improved Rapha Mobile Cycle Club, Tillie along with him. On his new path, he’ll be meeting up with countless group rides where, more often than not, watts and carbon are the nomenclature, not steel and plump tires.

Eventually, someone notices the brazed Circle A Cycles on the downtube, the large tires and mid-reach calipers. Or maybe they notice the spokes that were brazed onto the chainstays for chain slap protection and around the internal routing exit-port for a little added “pop”.

At that moment, David becomes the “hero” of the ride and all other technology present becomes obsolete… Well, almost.

Last weekend, I planned a route, dissected from our Super Bro Weekend ride. Four of us showed up and after five miles, my knee decided it wasn’t ready for the big day, so I bailed, only to return later in the day to shoot David’s bike amidst the rolling hills of the Austin area.

Yamaguchi’s framebuilding school has turned out some incredible talent over the years. While many enroll with hopes of becoming the next hot thing, some go to just learn the art. Chris Chou, a guy who probably has the most bikes featured on the Radavist, ever, went to Yamaguchi a few years ago to build a light tourer.

Like all Yamaguchi school frames, this bike was made from True Temper tubing and brazed by Chris over the course of a few weeks. When he was finished, he sent it off to Fresh Frame for paint.

Because Chris had never built a bicycle before, the original stem developed a stress riser, so Chris had his then housemate Ian at Icarus make him a stem. From there, the Nitto bars and Campagnolo 10 speed group add a considerable amount of class to what many would consider a utilitarian bicycle. PAUL e’rything, a Crane Bell, Mellow Johnny’s stem cap, my old Pentabike bar end and there’s a lil #JahBlessed going on with the Salsa Rasta Skewers and Ride Jah Bike button.

SON’s Edelux system and a Supernova E3 rear, lights the way and an Ostrich saddle bag holds the daily commuting needs. Cole rode this bike during the Yonder Journal (dis)Enchanted Rock Brovet and slashed a tire pretty badly on a river crossing, so Chris threw a Conti on, leaving the tires mis-matched, which I would add to the character of this bike.

I really love photographing bicycles like this.

The Mountain Plays Burzum
Words and Photos by Cani Sciolti Valtellina

“Hey, whenever I look at your Tumblr or Flickr I envy you so much…”

This is the same old sentence that comes out from the mouth of my Tuscany friend Fano every time we meet. That’s because we can easily open the door and ride on the Alps, where we live, and where the history (and the present) of cycling has been written in sweat, tears, pain, joy and suffering. To ride the Alps are probably one of any cyclists’ biggest dream. Or at least it was Fano’s…

Two Years on a Bike With the Fuji X-Pro1
Words and Photos by Kevin Sparrow

A follow up to: Kevin Sparrow Discusses the Fuji X-Pro1 and Cycling

It has been over two years since I switched over from Canon DSLR to the Fuji X-Pro1 and I haven’t looked back. I’ve traveled all over the world with this camera. I rode from Paris to Lausanne with her slung around my back. I’ve shot photos for commercial clients and for publications. This little camera has more than met my expectations as a professional use camera.

I’ve been a long fan of Cadence for some time now. Over the years, they’ve been huge supporters of PiNP and The Radavist, so when the new Flow kits dropped, I wanted to do something special to commemorate them. I knew from Cadence’s Instagram that they had just ridden from SF to LA and TCB Courier‘s John Daniel Reiss was trucking along taking photos, so I reached out to them to do a Reportage on the trip… Below you’ll see the ride unfold.

A while back, I posted about Ian Sutton of Icarus Frames trying to sell this prototype track machine here in Austin. Turns out, my buddy – and part time intern – Andre picked it up. Rather than go with a classy, wet coat, he got it painted dark black with a clear sparkle top coat. Something that neither Ian nor myself saw coming…

I’ll admit, both of us were apprehensive, but when I saw the bike in person, I knew exactly what Andre was going for and Circle A killed it!

Andre built the bike up with all Zipp components: seatpost, bars, bartape and stem. For wheels, he went PAUL track hubs to H+Son Archetypes and SRAM Omnium cranks. It’s a standard, classy build on a very unique frameset. Since he works at Mellow Johnny’s he had the mechanics dial everything in.

The Cervelo fork and its tight clearances are right at home with this frame, that barely squeezes in a 23c tire. It’s a mean steed with a bit of sassy sparkles.

Ride safe Andre!

When Erik and I committed to riding the Oregon Outback, we didn’t want to absolutely kill ourselves, but we wanted it to be tough. On paper, 360 miles is totally doable in three days without crushing your spirit. Hell, I think we could have done it in two and we still would have been ok but that’s not the point.

I had a responsibility. One that I take seriously and that’s documenting this trip. Granted, most of the time, I didn’t want to stop to shoot a photo, or hop off my bike, I just wanted to keep going…

The second day of any big ride is usually the toughest. Your body just assumes it’s going to be on the defensive for an unknown amount of time and begins to push back. Usually, that is. For Erik and I, we awoke in the Silver Lake Community Park f-u-c-k-i-n-g freezing. The weather said it would drop to 45 degrees as the low, so he and I brought hammocks and 40 degree bags in the interest of space and weight.

At 4am, my phone said it was 28 degrees. A cold front had moved in.

I was shivering uncontrollably, had I known it was going to be that cold, I would have brought a sleeping pad and a tarp, both of which I’ve used to alleviate the loss of body heat that happens in hammocks at such low temperatures. But alas, you reap what you sew. We would be cold on this trip.

All our field guide said about mile 120-240 was that we’d be crossing altitude desert and would be without water for up to 80 miles. I brought an Arundel Looney Bin to hold a 48oz Nalgene, which, after making breakfast, I filled up. Along with my two large Purist bottles. We had to get moving. Fast… It was 6:30am.

Continue reading in the Gallery captions.

With the success and failure of Erik and my last AWOL ride on the Diablo range, we started looking for another mission to continue the story. This couldn’t be just any camping trip, it had to be hard. Like, really, really tough and big and stuff.

Then it dawned on Erik (I was too busy to actually look for anything) – we’d do Velo Dirt’s Oregon Outback. Erik contacted me in his Swedish voice “ok mannn, we’re going to do this really fucking tough ride, called the Oregon Outback, are you in?”. Me: “Of course!” – not wanting to sound like a sissy. At the time, I was probably traveling for something and I didn’t even know what the Outback was. I just assumed it was a chill weekend getaway…

The Sequoia and Kings Canyon Loop
Photos by Sean Talkington and Ryan Wilson words by Sean Talkington, photo captions by Ryan Wilson.

About a month ago I received an email invite from Ryan Wilson to join in with a small group riding Kings Canyon Loop. I had never really ridden with Ryan and had no idea what Kings Canyon was, but seeing so many of his bitchin photos in the Western Sierra on Instagram was more then enough to lure me into a day of riding. What I didn’t know was that this guy goes out on some REALLY HUGE days to take these shots of scenic wonder and most of the time he does it alone.

Dissecting my Oregon Outback photos has taken two full days and rather than dumping everything into one huge gallery, I thought I’d break it up a bit into something that everyone can discuss separately: bikes.

People obsess over setups for rides like this. From frame material, to geometry and wheel size, I saw everything.

Erik and I were on stock, straight out of the box, AWOL Comps. Erik painted his to look all crazy. Mine was just black. I had bikepacking bags and my Swift Ozette rando bag, Erik used panniers and the new AWOL rack. Most people used Porcelain Rocket or Revelate bags on their flat bar MTB.

Personally, I felt like a drop bar bicycle offered more riding options and were inherently faster than a rigid or a hardtail MTB. That said, most of the field were on MTB rigs of some sort. There was one fatbike, a few 29+ but for the most part, the rigid 29r ‘adventure’ bike platform ruled all.

A lot of these bikes were built specifically for the Outback, which is insane!

As I began sorting through all of my photos, I realized that my favorite thing about this ride was getting to know complete strangers. Watching their struggles unfold and seeing how they coped with the incredible feat that was upon us.

These Bikes and Faces of the Oregon Outback will forever remain engrained in my riding psyche. The rest of the story will unfold shortly. Until then, enjoy this Gallery.