Horseshoe Bay > Earls Cove > Saltery Bay > Powell River > Comox > Nanaimo > Horseshoe Bay. 24 hours, 4 ferries, 245km and 11 hours 48 minutes of cycling, 2 burritos, 2 coffees, 2 Mars bars, 1 bag of gummies, 1 Coca-Cola, 8 litres of water and one body of water (Strait Of Georgia)…
I think I can appreciate craftsmanship when I see it. The Dream Factory is a short documentary about the Fender Custom Shop.
Corey Taylor (Slipknot and Stone Sour frontman) has an amazing radio show on Apple Radio. Each episode of A Series Of Bleeps has a theme that he follows through with discussion and track choice. It leans towards the heavier, rock/metal side of music but there’s more to it than that. Some episodes go deep into…
It wasn’t just when Sven Martin needed a helivac after bending (and snapping) his forearm around a tree. It wasn’t just carrying Jon Cancellier the last hundred meters to the finish line of the last stage after he had broke his foot. (Which was also the same day as the above happened. #carnage) It wasn’t…
I’m finding myself really drawn to things like this right now. Partly out of curiosity for attempting and accomplishing big feats like riding the Baja Divide, partly out of…just wanting to hit the road myself and just go really simple for a while. It’s not that my life is complicated, I’ve worked ‘hard’…
Riding 500 kilometres over the festive holidays affords time to reflect. Toshiki Sato from Tokyo took us into his mindset this Festive 500 with “River”, winner of our Best Film prize.
This is a must-watch documentary series for anyone even remotely interested in design. In fact, if you’re inspired by the passion and backstory of creative people then this is the show for you. Each episode of Abstract aims to take the viewer into the worldview of designers with very different backgrounds and who use different…
Hope Mill, like many such industrial buildings of its era, is located right in the centre of Barnoldswick, surrounded by row after row of back-to-back terrace houses, uniform dwellings that accommodate some of the town’s 8,000 residents. The streets are narrow, the roofs all matching slate, there are as many bicycles zipping about…
“Don’t Vlog. Don’t do it, you don’t need to. You don’t need to film Dakota Roche’s angry menu face.”
Following on the theme of amazing content, Brent Hillier’s podcast, Front Lines MTB podcast has been on my mind (and ear phones) a lot lately. I love the opening lines of each podcast, “The podcast for the people who truly make mountain biking happen. Not the riders, racers or product designers but the builder’s advocates…
Eskapee.com might be one of the best things to happen to the universe of digital bicycling content in a while (‘a while’ referring to at about a year or so because things happen so fast on the internet). It’s an incredible outlet who’s purpose “is to tell the real mountain bike story. Stories we hope…
Just a collection of images from a recent trip to the UK.
This place isn’t an artisanal cidery with faux rustic charm, this is a working farm and there is absolutely zero airs and graces gone into it. It’s rugged, raw and bloody delicious. the photos I shot aren’t of the most bucolic parts of the barn, in fact, it’s impossible to really show how perfectly unrefined this place is.
This place, especially when it’s sunny, is so very pretty. I felt like a tourist in my own country, which I suppose I am now that it’s been so many years since I lived there.
Patrick Lucas is a community planner and founder of the Aboriginal Youth Mountain Bike Program. This is Patrick Lucas’s presentation at Sam Sullivan’s 27th Public Salon on 18 January 2017 at the Vancouver Playhouse Theatre in Vancouver, BC. It’s really worth watching. I had the pleasure of meeting Patrick in 2013 when we were both…
Wow, four years ago Dave, We Are Union Co. and I set out on a two-week backyard adventure from Whistler with the goal of looping the lesser known and snow-free winter riding areas of BC. We loaded a couple Chromag Stylus’ with Bob Trailers and off we went. We wanted to escape the winter…
A couple years back Grant Robinson, Jon Matlock and I put together a small magazine. We all needed an outlet for ideas, an aesthetic, and philosophy that wouldn’t fit anywhere else in mountain bike magazines. We didn’t really care to make a mountain bike magazine or even a mountain bike magazine. We produced one issue…
*This piece originally appeared in Cranked Magazine issue 1. Illustration by Wacek “Waki” Kipszak. Meet The Trolls: A partially enthographic and wholly conjectural investigation into a mountain biking’s newest terrain and the real riders that virtually ride there. Mountain biking is a multifarious activity and there appears to be no singular definition of what…
Winding seal, unfeasible hill; Dirt and rock, for my luck I knock. Roofs corrugated, walls brightly decorated; Unfinished stories, hopes of wealth and glory. Honest buildings gaily painted, it’s patrons long time acquainted; Minor doorway barely there, within shelves stocked with wares. Mans face oil creased, leans on wall firewater greased; Hub of the…
A short story about good intentions, bad worms and unforeseen consequences Wayne Reid felt so pleased with himself that he vowed to leave his apartment for the first time in days. He would put on a clean T-shirt (or at least salvage a used one from the laundry bin), attempt to run a comb through…
Q: How do you become a better rider? A: Dick about more. There’s no mystical medicine that can make you a better bike rider. No shaman can miraculously bestow skills upon you. It takes a bit of hard graft to become a better rider. But hard work doesn’t have to be entirely joyless. I…
January looked like this. And incredible amount of fun and this video captures a lot of the vibe.
Here’s a few photos from the event where you only need one gear but having two livers would be nice.
I’m a nerd for the history and tales behind trails probably as much, if not more, than I am for riding them. So when Alison Taylor (the editor of Crank’d Magazine) asked me to write a story about the history of trail building in Whistler I jumped at the chance.
#159 is like the cookbook of how to make something of worth and truly rad. I feel like I was lifted off the ship and pulled put through the sky so I could look down upon the ship and see it as a tiny speck in the ocean, it’s relatively to it’s surroundings, where it has been and where it should go.
So, is racing, mountain biking and is mountain biking, racing? I’d agree with the former but the latter? That would require a few more qualifiers.
On one hand this is a fun little video about one guy’s amazing stag do. On the other hand it’s about friendships, celebrating a lifetime of friends and making every moment count.
It happened. I spoke too soon and one of the big dogs went down. Or should I say, got put down. Dirt was a leading light since the day it launched 18 years ago.
The following is another on of my Dirt Magazine Whistler Diaries column. This one was scribbled in 2010 so some of the references are a little obsolete – which kinda works with the subject matter, actually – but I was reading Cam McRae’s piece about standards and built-in obsolescence in the bike industry on NSMB.com and…
It’s Bike Park season, nearly. That means it’s time to roll out the reminders of how to keep it classy and rubber side down. In 2012, fourth year medical student, Zachery Ashwell published his study of the injuries suffered in the Whistler Bike Park. He analyzed 898 Whistler Health Care Centre case reports from between…
This is the best video I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not mountain biking but it’s still cycling and the story and the metaphors in this universal. A powerful half-hour film documenting one man’s experience of his body at war with itself. Founded in Australia by cyclist and former cancer patient Justin McLean, thrivor…
I’ve asked a lot of people a lot of questions in the course of my ‘career’ as a writer. I’ve always been fascinated by what makes people tick, what motivates them, what is the process of their critical thinking and what defining moments forged them into the people they are and the path that they…
The most essential thing to learn to do in mountain biking is…anyone? Well, I believe the answer is how to corner. Every trail has corners, it’s the only thing that every trail will have. Corners might be the only feature that singletrack in a Welsh trail center and an ancient packhorse track in the Upper…
[In another article about Dan Raymond I talked about Dan’s background in trailbuilding but here I want to uncover some of the truths and observations Dan has gathered through trailbuilding. Here’s five things to consider before building your own trail.] A few summers ago rumors of a new line secreted away high up on the…
[This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 issue of Mountain Life magazine.] “I feel that you can experience something in your head and get the same physical reaction, the adrenalin rush, as you do when you do it for real,” Dan Raymond chews this thought over some, takes a swig from his beer (craft…
“When I was a kid I would make my own skateboards in my dads’ shop. I had a very deliberate intent to make them a certain way,” Ian Ritz matter-of-factly reveals as he wanders about the Function Junction headquarters of Chromag in Whistler, the bike brand he founded out of necessity and inclination. Ian’s father…
So it’s that time of the year when Pinkbike holds it’s POTY (Photo Of The Year) competition. 32 of the top photos (I’m assuming that means most viewed) from 2014 go into the octagon and battle it out in a round robin style death match that will see just one image crowned the very, absolute,…
A few years back, when the world was on the cusp of a (less than) revolutionary change in wheels, “Mad” Mike Gamble and I created a masterpiece of scientific mystery and quantitative mythology. I’m not sure we can top this…although there are ideas brewing.
In November 2012, Jordan Manley, a very well respected action sport photographer and filmmaker, suffered a concussion that severely changed his life. The concussion was such that Jordan was unable to perform even quite simple tasks without triggering his symptoms. Recovery for this kind of injury, which is effectively brain damage, means resting the brain…
I recently returned from the Andes Pacifico race in Chile. I don’t know where to start to describe such an incredible experience, all I know for certain is that my ribs are sore from laughing so much, my pride is bruised from crashing more in one week than I have in the last 20 years…
*EDIT: Thanks to Neil Barstow for finding the link to this piece ‘How to live like a king for very little‘ by Thor Harris. Link in article below now. I didn’t write this. I came across this a while ago and it made me laugh, cringe and think. —
There are tits everywhere. Absolutely every direction I look there are boobs staring at me. I glance left or right and what catches my gaze every time is the twinkle of lusty eyes and a pair of perky nipples. Yellowed page three beauties pinned to walls encase me in a wanker’s wet dream. Like trying…
Crankworx is coming. It might only be February but plans are already afoot for Whistler’s biggest festival. This year I’ve taken over the running of Deep Summer and Dirt Diaries, as well as devising the most efficient way of destroying the spirits’ of riders at the Enduro World Series race that takes place during Crankworx.…
Recently I came across an interesting think piece on climbing website Evening Sends which raised the question of whether one particular female climber was in fact a climber or a model. The climber-model in question is Sierra Blair-Coyle, who has 30,500 followers on Instagram, 202,000+ people who like her Facebook page and which the article…
IKAM is a small run, low budget magazine that myself, Grant Robinson, Jon Matlock and a host of inspired, passionate and exceptionally talented contributors collaborated on this summer. It wasn’t a business model or a moneymaking scheme just a creative outlet for people who are fed up with the lack of creativity and stifling templates…
Here’s a GoPro video of me winning the TiS Dual Slalom World Championship at Peaty’s house in 2011. Well, the ghetto equivalent. Thanks to WideOpenMag for the video. I just realized that the ‘ghetto’ in the above paragraph might be a little misleading. I’m not saying Steve Peat lives in a ghetto or that the…
I just unearthed this old video I made of an interview with Marc Beaumont after news broke that he was to be the fourth Atherton. Wow, that was fun to make but it’s no surprise that I didn’t make it past the first set of interviews to be a Newsnight presenter. Warning: this video may…
This was the last thing I wrote for BIKE Magazine during my short spell working there. It happens to be my favorite thing I wrote while at BIKE. I wonder why that was? Maybe I knew what was coming and I was relaxed enough to write as I wanted. Or perhaps it’s because the Bike…
This article originally appeared in Spoke Magazine. It was penned around the same time as the previous article I posted ‘The Globalization Of Contentment’, and you’ll see why. One hundred years ago the idea of traveling around the world was something only attainable by the uber elite – or sailors or soldiers sent overseas to…
This story originally appeared in Spoke Magazine. Another, fuller version also ran in Privateer Magazine. Before you read this, let me give you some background to the story: I’d just spent the previous ten months traveling almost non-stop (in fact, I’d been traveling for a lot longer than this but 2011 had been a particularly…
Each summer Chromag Bikes hold a Show ‘n’ Shine event where owners attempt to win the coveted Best In Show award. Well, not every owner goes for the win. While some people spend months putting together a fresh, beautiful bike or coming up with an equally impressive way of displaying their bike (think peepshow, full…
The weather changed this weekend. Summer, the longest and most violently summery one I can remember, finally loosened it’s grasp and slipped below the Earth’s waistline to shine and heat another world for the next half year or so. I was thankful to see the rain return after such a dry year and having the…
I was asked to scribble a prayer for the start of the Chromag Bikes 10th anniversary (actually, the 11th) ride, Exile On Steel Street. The loose topic I was given was ‘why’. Here it is. WHY? It’s stiff and it’s harsh, It’s brutal and jarring. Every bump is a thump, and each root is a brut. It’s antiquated and…
Twenty years of biking has taught me this: Keep your house in order. Learn how to maintain the trails you have. Sure, build new trail if you really need it but don’t forget to keep what you have tidy. Learn to corner, it will make your life better. Always reserve the right to maintain a…
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