A Tale of Trail

or: How Mountain Bikers Saved the Forest.

Bike to the Future

Every day we live in a world shaped by the values of our forebears.  Blankets of pavement painted with wide lanes, signed for high speeds, and striped into vast fields for parking tell the story all too well: our predecessors loved their cars.  Had our ancestors foreseen decades of highway fatalities, morbid obesity, oil wars, and societal ostracization, perhaps we would live in a different world today.  Regardless, as these consequences have become increasingly clear, our affections have begun to shift, and it’s our turn to shape the physical and cultural landscape that future generations will inherit.  The Chapel Hill Bike Plan will produce a document that our descendants may never read, but the message we paint on our streets in lanes and paths will shape their world nonetheless.

Help decide where, how, and when our small corner of the world will change at the first public forum for the Chapel Hill Bike Plan: Thursday, May 9th from 6 to 9 pm at the Chapel Hill Public Library.

For folks that want to ride to the event in party formation, there will bike a bike pool leaving from BAB at 5:30pm on the day of the event.

Also, I’m a member of the host committee for the event, so feel free to contact me if you have any questions.

 

 

Scenes from Endor

One of the great things about living here is that outdoor adventure is easy to find.  In fact, it’s often right outside your door:

 

 

 

Stoopid Tall

This one’s been making the rounds, but it’s worth the repeat:

Rip9 RDO

Please welcome the newest member of our Niner Demo Fleet: the Rip9 RDO!

And, please forgive it’s hideous/magnificent colorway: Easter Sunday Niner.  When I bought these purple Industry Nine wheels a year ago, I knew they would travel from bike to bike over time, but I never envisioned this.  Kinda gross, kinda awesome, totally hypnotizing.

By the numbers, the Rip9 RDO is squarely in the all day, everyday trail bike category: slacker angles and longer travel than it’s XC siblings, but with all the get up and go you’d expect from a sub-26lbs. full suspension bike.

While I could easily ramble on at great length about it’s incredible ride qualities, my most flowery prose would pale in comparison to the experience of actually riding this bike in the woods, so I will abstain for the time being and simply invite you to take this aptly named bike for a spin out on the trails.*

*Offer only applies to folks 5’9″ or less.  Other restrictions may apply.  Contact your barely authorized bike nerds at Back Alley Bikes for more details.

Bermtastic

 

Neal, Jay, and Richard spent a good chunk of last week landscaping the hell out of our driveway, and now we’ve got the coolest parking lot this side of the Mississippi!

Fishing for Compliments

With a lot of work and long hours, we are quickly settling into our new home in Carrboro.  The parking lot berms are flowing, the stereo is pumping, and the wrenches are spinning.  As with all moves, home or business, things get lost and scrambled in the shift, and while most of the important things have been excavated, we are still missing one vital component: our Google presence.

It’s a weird world we live in, but like most businesses, large and small, our lifeblood is folks who find us on the internet, and since the move we have all but disappeared from Google’s algorithmic gaze.  Until the end of March, a simple Google search for “bike shop chapel hill”,  “bike shop carrboro”, etc. would yield a short list of local shops along with their customer ratings, and we were right up there with the best of them, but this “inter-city” move has proven a bit too complicated for the great oracle to fully conceptualize and all of our glowing reviews have vanished!

In the past, I’ve refused to fish for reviews, but these are exceptional circumstances and we’ve got to keep the doors open!

So, even though I feel like a slimeball for asking, here it goes: Please write a Google review for Back Alley Bikes.  It doesn’t even have to be a positive review, just an honest one (nobody’s perfect, after all).  Yelp is helpful too, but Google is the one that we really need.  Pretty please?

In case you need some motivational banter, there’s this: