First Annual Ghost Ride (and Sale) with Joyride Brewing Company

Maybe you know about our weekly Tuesday night rides with Joyride Brewing Company, and maybe as you read this right now you're hearing about this weekly ride for the first time, and thinking back on all of those wasted Tuesday evenings you've spent this year watching Game of Thrones and drinking a shot every time you see a character's insides. Okay, well, actually that sounds like maybe your Tuesday nights have been okay. However, our weekly rides with Joyride have been pretty darn great. 

Whether you knew about these rides or not, you should consider joining us on Tuesday, October 28th. We may continue to ride on Tuesdays after that, but the potential for clement weather will only decrease, so we want to finish October with a bang. Thus:

Here's what you have to do: put on a costume, put lights on your bike or person, ride to the bike shop, and get free stuff. You might even win a costume contest. Then all you have to do is ride your bike. It'll be great. We'll ride casually around the 'hood and end our ride at Joyride, where we shall commence with the beer drinking.

Cotemporaneously, our Ghost Ride sale will begin on October 28th and run through November 2nd. Many things in the store will be on sale.

See you on the 28th.

Yeah bikes!

Video of the Week

Does Surly's Ice Cream Truck Deliver the Sprinkles?

We've been anticipating the release of Surly's new fatbike for awhile now, and this past week it finally arrived. It was a scary day, because on that day a bicycle that had long been a weightless and flawless imagination was manifest in imperfect reality. Nonetheless, we put the bike together and took it for a ride. And then another ride, and pretty quickly thereafter a third ride.

Fatbikes can be tough to talk about. When something new comes along, many folks who loved the old can feel threatened by the new ("Snowboards are everything that's wrong with the world," said the early 1990's). This feeling is understandable; we are so lucky to find a few things that we truly love in life that we can become very sensitive any time the thing we love is threatened by even the smallest alteration.

Some people have taken to commuting on fatbikes, which probably seems inefficient to many. The thing that's difficult to remember is that if they like commuting on fatbikes, then the rest of us should just shut up about it. 

This "live and let live" conversation is one I had to sit myself down and have with myself after my first ride on the Ice Cream Truck. What I mean by that is I may start commuting (amongst other things) on the Ice Cream Truck.

Eater of worlds.

As I descended Apex trail in Golden, all I could think about (amidst all the giggling) was how much shame I should feel for loving the Ice Cream Truck as a trail bike. It's easy to have the perception that the best riders or the most knowledgeable bloggers or the people who are best at life would only ride squishy carbon bikes with 650b wheels. Why? If the Ice Cream Truck is an incredible technical climber and makes me giggle like an insane leprechaun all the way down the front side of Apex, then why shouldn't I love it as a trail bike? If Surly's Bud and Lou tires (26 x 4.8, by the way) can corner at mind blowing speeds and float smoothly over rocks the size of quarts of ice cream, then why should I only ride this bike in the snow? Fine, I'm not going to.

So here are our first impressions: unsurprisingly, it does feel a little heavy on climbs. However, when riding with friends, I was in about the same place in the pack that I normally am. I don't ride with a computer, but the Ice Cream Truck didn't turn me into any more of a straggler than I am already. In terms of it's ability as a technical climber, man, it's pretty unparalleled. You can pause halfway up a slippery rock slab to pump your fist triumphantly and then get going again without losing traction. The side-knobs on the Bud are so effective that if you get too near the uphill side of the trail, the knobs will catch and you will end up in the sage, going straight up the mountain. When climbing steep, loose sections covered in moon dust, you'll still have the lungs to sing your favorite Queen song while you pedal.

There is no good way to describe how the Ice Cream Truck descends. It's smooth, fast, and frequently airborne. Forget about brakes. Forget your fears. Forget you are anything but a wraithlike figure moving down a hillside at incomprehensible speeds. You will be Scrooge McDuck swimming through your sprinkle vault.

We may have more to say about this bike once we've come down off our sugar high, but for now we are still licking the last bit of chocolate residue out of the crinkly foil packaging. 

Video of the Week

Amazing. Especially the last 3:45 on.

Surly's Ice Cream Truck is Here

The Very Rad Ice Cream Truck Ops

As you may know, there's been some hype about Surly's new fat bike. There's been a lot of hype about fat bikes in general, and you may or may not already have your opinion about them. If you already know what you're looking at, and are of the opinion that you'd like to look at one in the steely flesh, well now you can come to the shop and do just that. As of now, we have Ice Cream Truck Ops (Ops-es?) in stock, and the even slightly more rad Ice Cream Trucks will be showing up tomorrow, Tuesday, September 30th.

The Even Slightly More Rad Ice Cream Truck

If you're unfamiliar with fat bikes, there are 10,000 websites on the internet devoted to them, and you can surly find more information about them than you'd ever care to read. Instead of trolling the internet, though, you should really just ride one. We'll have demos available, so you'll be able to try this thing out on the trails. Then you can form your very own personal opinion about fat bikes, which will be more valuable to you than the opinions of 10,000 others.

If you want to know why Surly made another fat bike, here's a pretty good explanatory video.

If you're wondering if you should buy a fat bike, Surly has a pretty good blog post about that very thing here.

You can also read about our first experience with a Surly Pugsley here.

In a week or two, we'll post our initial thoughts about the ICT on this very blog. Our very limited experience with the Ice Cream Truck Ops has made us feel kind of like this:

And also like Cooper:

Yes, the Ice Cream Truck is on the way. Grab a napkin and wipe the drool off your chin.

Our Hearts are Analog

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.