The Best Time for Riding Bikes

The beginning of fall may be tough to pin down this year, what with it having kind of snowed already between two 90-degree days, but no matter when it begins--or began--fall is the best season for riding your bike. You may know this already. If you didn't know, then get a long-sleeved wool shirt and get ready for your year's best quarter. 

Spring is a pretty good riding season, but it can sometimes be wet and windy.

Summer is a most excellent riding season, but often summer's heat makes riding a little uncomfortable.

Winter is a pretty darn good season for riding. You need warm clothes, a GoPro, and whiskey. But, unsurprisingly, it can, at times, get a little to slippery to ride in traffic.

Autumn, however, is just about perfect. The air everywhere is the cool breeze you've been craving all summer. This already fairly gorgeous part of the country in which we live gets even a little more gorgeouser. It's dry, crisp, and dark orange, just like a lot of great beers. Get some gloves and get out there.

Worth 10,000 Words, Presumably

Our weekly Tuesday Night Joyride.

A customer's Texas-themed tattoo. Yup, that's Waco on fire.

If you really want to save, skip the loyalty gas card and get a bicycle.

The Monday crowds at Buffalo Creek.

He whips his hair back and forth (whips it real good).

This smurf house was found at Buffalo Creek. No one was home.

One Surly deserves anothers.

Video of the Week

You Don't Have to Pay $40 to Ride a Cross Bike, it Turns Out

It's much easier to feel lonely than it is to get alone when you live in the city. There are ways to find vestiges of privacy in your home--by watching tv in the basement, building stuff in the workshop, or etc.--but the feeling of being alone isn't quite the same when you know there is someone upstairs. 

On most bike rides, I'm accompanied by at least one other human being, if not by five or ten, and that's an arrangement I don't want to change. However, there is something restorative and imperative that happens when you go on all-day ride by yourself. Over a lengthy period of time, not much could be worse than my own uninterrupted company, to be sure, but it's vital that it happens on the occasion. Why? I'm usually just thinking about stupid cat videos or singing the Genie's song from Aladdin to myself when I'm alone. It's the same dumb stuff I think about when other people are around, but when alone I can think dumb stuff ad infinitum. This mental decompression is somehow important to my well being.

Last Monday, my Surly Straggler and I took the bus to Boulder. This allowed for some quality reading time, but then also involved an entire ride's worth of heavy book portaging. I should've taken a few zines instead of Les Miserables.

The bus dropped me off in Boulder, and I got out of Boulder as quickly as one can buy a burrito and get out of Boulder. If you've never been there, you should know that proper etiquette when introducing one's self is to state your name followed by your race category. 

I took the Boulder Canyon bike path out of town, which winds alongside the road and the river up into the foothills, where I was mostly alone except for a few rock climbers above. (Note: a river magnifies space in such a way that it plays odd tricks on one's sense of aloneness , as one can be near a river with quite a few other people and still feel alone.)

There's a very pleasant pair of loops called Betasso Preserve a few miles up Boulder Canyon. I don't think I've ridden a cross bike on singletrack before, and I have to say I really like it, really, quite a lot. Despite the small volume tires, the bike rode like a buoyant tube over the crests of a wave pool. On future rides, be they solo or club rides, I'll be riding that Straggler more often, for sure. 

The remains of a car that presumably went over the cliff in the upper right corner lean against some nonplussed trees.

After completing the Benjamin Loop at the north end of Betasso, I caught the link trail to Fourmile Canyon Drive. Fourmile eventually turns to gravel, and climbs for what feels like ever. It was a two burrito climb for me.

One thing is sure about Colorado: if you ride far enough away from city limits, no matter the time of day or the season, you're sure to encounter men in hats cutting wood with chainsaws. It's a guarantee. I would've taken a picture to prove this, but these appear to be the kind of men that you stop and photograph only if you can ride quite a bit faster than I.

As I climbed Fourmile, I heard at very regular five-minute intervals a loud gunshot-type noise. Having grown up in redneck country, and living in the part of the city I now live in, you'd think I'd be better at identifying what is a gunshot and what is not, but I just can't tell the difference. I therefore assumed that what I was hearing was some kind of construction noise. Just before I turned onto the Switzerland Trail that it was a one-armed man shooting a black powder rifle at what had once been a motor vehicle, five minutes being the duration it takes a one-armed man to load and level a black powder rifle, presumably. 

All throughout my ride of aloneness, I saw impressive evidence of last year's flooding. Switzerland Trail is marked as an "alternate evacuation route" for such floods. Suffices to say that if you drown on the Switzerland Trail, you would've needed an Ark to survive. Switzerland Trail is rocky doubletrack that goes up. That's all it does.

Just when you think you've reached the top of Switzerland Trail, you find it goes up some more. You aren't done going up until you see this:

Switzerland Trail finally intersects with Gold Hill Road and then becomes Forest Service "road" number 93. Forest Service "road" number 93 is mostly flat and quite a lot of fun. It's rough. It rocks n' rolls. If I hadn't been so worn out from Switzerland Trail, I'd have turned around and ridden it again. Eventually 93 "dead ends," according to a small brown vertical forest service sign, but it's not true. It gets very rocky, 

93 eventually does kind of dead end, and you have to hike maybe twenty very steep meters to get up to this very steep dirt road, which will in turn dump you right out onto Lefthand Canyon road. 

You can descend Lefthand Canyon road at about four billion miles per hour, even if you're running a single gear with a ratio that could be described as "34 : something embarrassing." There is some flood damage on Lefthand, but the Straggler didn't care to slow down for the rough sections.

Riding by yourself can be a challenge. The instant things get difficult, it's tempting to call it a day despite extensive preparations. The urge to quit can be a healthy thing to have to face and defeat. That said, I'm spending this Monday on the couch. So there.

The last time I rode this route, I was on one of the largest group rides I've ever been on. Both days were pretty extraordinary. Do stuff alone or do stuff with other people. Just do stuff.

Your Mom was Right to Make You Play Outside

The average American watches 5 hours of TV per day. 

Adults spend 11 hours per day with digital media. Three of those hours are spent on social media websites.

In the year 1996, David Foster Wallace wrote a (very long) novel titled Infinite Jest, which was about an entertainment video cartridge that was so entertaining that anyone who watched it died. They could/would not choose to look away. If you must read or watch something on the internet today, here are some suggestions. If you can, read/watch these things some other time and get yourself outside. Like, right now. It will be getting dark earlier today than it did yesterday.

Here's a marvelous example of what happens over on the Surly Blog. Some of the finest words ever said about racing.

Here's a video that will make you feel better about being a human.

Here's another video that kind of explains what it's like to try to work on bicycles, build almost anything, or do something nice for someone (some explicit language is involved).

Now please go outside.

The Monarch Crest Trail is Stupid

It's likely that you've been hearing for years about how the Monarch Crest trail is stupid. If you've never ridden it, you may be wondering what exactly could possibly make it so stupid.

The first dumb thing is that you should probably take the $20 shuttle from Poncha Springs, which leaves at 8am. What that means is that you more than likely will need to get to the Salida area at least the night before, and what that means is that you'll probably end up camping in some dumb, ugly mountainous place where you can see all the stars and meteorites and wildlife and stuff. There is not even one streetlight or like blasting stereo in the distance to help you keep your bearings whilst wandering around after dark. At night time, the mountainous places near Salida tend to look something like this:

Nothing to see but the eyes of the stupid predator about to eat you.

You'll end up sleeping next to a stream or a lake or something else irritatingly pleasant, and circumstance will more or less force you to have some kind of campfire and the campfire will more or less force you to have some kind of conversational interaction with whomever you've brought with you. There is no TV to watch, no Facebook to pet, and nothing to buy. It's downright communist out there. 

After your long night of aggravatingly good sleep, you'll have to wake up and prepare for the entire day you're about to waste on a mountain bike. You'll have to pay extra close attention whilst packing to make sure you've dutifully included all of the items on your checklist, such as a can of beer, an asiago portobello sandwich, Toblerone, et al. 

Then you'll have to ride your bike all day through some of the ugliest country out there. 

You can't even hear the light rail station from here. It's so stupid.

Honestly, this crap is 100% un-shredable.

These people wish they'd stayed home and spent the day changing furnace filters and sweeping dust out from under the sofa with a paper towel rubber-banded to a yardstick. 

This person is keeping himself entertained by imagining he's watching cat videos.

This person is drinking away the regret he feels about coming on this ride.

We don't know why this person is smiling. He is probably deranged.

Prepare yourself for grueling hike-a-bikes across vast, barren moonscapes.

You, like these people, may tire of staring at dusty, blown-out trail, and may have to stop and gather and convene about whether to slog on or just mix up the poison Kool-Aid and end it.

So if you're one of the very few insane people in the world who feel like riding your mountain bike all day on tacky soil for very little money, then please be our guests and go ahead and ride the Monarch Crest trail, but don't say we didn't warn you. 

Merino Wool Pre-Order

Don't forget that you have one week left to submit your order for our customized merino wool gear. The deadline to order is SUNDAY, AUGUST 17th at 4:00pm. Garments will not be available in the store, so that will be your last chance. If you like any of the mock-ups below, give us a call or stop by the store to make your order. It'll take a while after the orders go in for the printing to happen. We're not sure when we'll be able to get the final products to you, but we're betting it will be 6-8 weeks(ish).

Have you worn merino wool before? If you haven't, get the notion of scratchy, heavy wool out of your mind. It's the softest, most comfortable, least stinky thing you will ever wear. If you were Obi Wan Kenobi, merino is the material you want to die and then come back as a Jedi ghost in.

The t-shirts will be coming from our pals at Icebreaker. We're working on getting sizing charts for their Tech T's. Men's shirts come in black and red, women's in black and patina. T-shirts are $70 apiece.

The merino jerseys and hoodies are made by Surly. The long sleeve jersey is the only item that is available in women's sizes. Please use the men's sizing chart for the short sleeve jersey and the hoodie (and, if you're a man, the long sleeve jersey, obviously).

Short sleeve jerseys are $125. Long sleeve jerseys are $145. Hoodies are $180. 

Here's the sizing chart for everything but the t-shirts:

lease hit us up with questions. A few of the Surly items are in stock in the store, if you want to try one on for size.

Video of the Week