By Justin Short
Cover photo courtesy of Tomas Kelley Lynch
The print edition of the September magazine incorrectly captioned the photos for this article. Photos are courtesy of Tomas Kelley Lynch.
The trails where my friends and I rode bikes during my college years had a three-story treehouse that looked like someone threw a dump truck load of scrap wood at a tree and it stuck. That image etched into my memory from more than 30 years ago is an apt metaphor for the way I construct my ride calendar every year. The spring and early summer are packed with multiple events every weekend. I throw everything at the wall, then at some point my wife and I will sit down to nail in place the rides and races that may or may not happen.
I didn’t get to attend Climb for the Cure, a high-profile gravel race up Mount Spokane organized by Duane Ramsey, but I’m always amazed at what sticks. There’s always a brief lull in bike events during the dog days of summer, and maybe I’ll get a house project completed. Things start ramping up once again with the Midnight Century in August, and oh what a doozy that was this year. There were 60 finishers, which can only mean there were 120 lunatics at the start if the average 50% attrition rate held true. And none of us were expecting all-night rain. Look for a full report on midnightcentury.com sometime in the near future.
That was my last big ride before Big Sky Spectaculaire, a 900-mile bikepacking race out of Bozeman, Montana, later in the month. There’s always a little time travel involved in print media event coverage. I’m a little bit nervous about an event that will have already happened by the time you read this. So if you wouldn’t mind traveling back in time to tell me, “cheer up, little buddy. It’s just a bike ride,” that would be greatly appreciated.
Anyway, as the searing summer temperatures—and hopefully the smoke, if there is smoke, because right now there’s not a lot of smoke—begin to recede in September, it seems like riders and event organizers alike are scrambling to get in their last hoorah for the season before the whipping winds and sideways slush storms send us reaching for our woolies and Gore-Tex. There’s an overwhelming number of one day and multi-day events to choose from. I mean, I’m still not sure if the Walla Walla Grit gravel grinder and the Cino Heroica, an overnight ride out of Kalispell, are on the same weekend, but I’d really like to attend both. I can look that up, so don’t bother time traveling to inform me with that little tidbit of information.
And while you have your time machine all greased up and ready to go, you definitely don’t want to will have missed [time travel verb tenses can get a little strange, so bear with me] the Spokane Bike Party. Organizer Erin Mensing has a fun event planned to bring the community together on bikes:
“I wanted to create a night where the mountain bikers and roadies and people who need to pull the cobwebs off their bikes can all ride together to celebrate bike joy en masse. Group rides are super fun, but they also help people become more comfortable riding on the roads, which can lead to more people using their bikes as transportation. We will be partly on roads and also using some of our amazing paved trails. We’ve rigged up a trailer with large speakers for music and are expecting a couple of other bikes with sounds systems to be joining the ride to help us out with the music as well. The route is flat and easy, and we begin and end in the same location (Olmsted Brothers Green). Oh, and the ride is open to skaters as well. We are going to make this an annual event (possibly semi annual) with hopes that it just keeps growing each year.”
Spokane bike party is a week away as I write this and perhaps a month or two back as you read it, so I hope to will have seen you there! You can check Erin’s socials @Spokane_rides on instagram and the Spokane Rides facebook group to see what she and her husband, Kyle, have cooking for 2025.
One of the final events of the season is the Gravel Flamdangle. It rolls out from the Big Barn Brewery on Sunday, Oct. 6, so at least I don’t have to cause a rift in the time-grammar continuum to tell you about it. You can find more information at GravelBraintrust.com. Whatever you end up doing, though, make sure you get out to turn some pedals during these gloriously comfortable days of Inland Northwest autumn, and perhaps see some larches as the colors change. If you don’t mind reminding me next year when the EDC article is due for the fall issue of OTO, I’ll write about great places to see the larches on bikes. You can borrow my time machine if you need to. It’s a beat up old Timex that only transports you forward in realtime. It won’t be able to transport you back to now, but maybe that feature will come with a firmware update in the not-too-distant future.
Justin Short is going to will have been writing the Everyday Cyclist column for the as yet unforeseeable past, present, and future. And he’ll definitely be goofing off on bikes for the same duration.
