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Salsa Cycles has just introduced their updated bike line at Saddle Drive, QBP’s trailside dealer open house in California. New to Salsa’s already plump lineup is the Woodsmoke. A rowdy, slack n low hardtail designed to fit either 27.5+, 29+ or 29″ wheels. Head on over to Salsa’s blog to see more details and the complete lineup!
Jay and Tracey Petervary are complete animals when it comes to bikepacking ultra races…
Words by Morgan Taylor, photos by Scott Haraldson.
No matter how you slice it, our little corner of the world is out of the way to get to. We are surrounded by wilderness in all directions, which presents both opportunities and challenges. The two major east-west highways in BC diverge around us in order to traverse the four chains of glacially carved mountains toward the continental divide, and relatively few people find reason to come through this neck of the woods.
Words by Morgan Taylor, photo by Scott Haraldson.
Last summer we hosted the guys from Salsa Cycles for a few days as they came through our neck of the woods in the BC mountains collecting images and stories for the launch of their new 27.5″ wheeled, 150mm trail bike, Redpoint. Over the past week, Salsa has slow-released a storysite – Have Dirt, Will Travel – a series of essays on mountain bike road trips with photos from that trip. I’ve got a gallery coming from that visit next week, but for now, check out the storysite and all the details on Redpoint here.
Four Seasons with the Salsa Blackborow
Photos and words by Jarrod Bunk
It started over a 2 years ago, when I was riding my current fatbike – a Surly Moonlander – for much more than just winter riding. It was slowly becoming my everything bike, and eventually that Moonlander replaced my carbon Cannondale Scalpel. Looking back, that piqued my interest in a more aggressive geometry bike, that could handle some sort of suspension fork.
There were a handful of manufacturers with tapered head tubes to allow for a Rock Shox Bluto or other fork. Simply put my next bike had to have the ability to run suspension, fat 5” tires, and through axles. Of the handful of bikes out at the time this wasn’t possible. Along comes a Blackborow. It has checked all of my boxes, and even some that I didn’t know I needed checking. THAT FOREST SERVICE GREEN, I had to have it. Things fell into place and a few months after waiting my dinglespeed build showed up. I have a tendency to build my bikes custom, so I stripped the bike down and rebuilt it with some stuff that I prefer to use. Industry 9 Hubs, dropper post, RaceFace NEXT SL cranks and the cockpit from Chromag.
The Dirty Kanza is a race where personal discoveries are made… In this video Salsa explores some of those.
The Whisky Six Select Frames
Photos by Jarrod Bunk, words by John Watson
Photo via Whisky
Each year at Frostbike, Whisky builds bikes, both custom from frame builders and production from one of the QBP brands. This year Whisky had six builders and brands at the Frostbike booth to show off their new rims, bars and seatposts. Dubbed the Six Select, the collection debuted a variety of veritable dream bikes, including: Rock Lobster, 44 Bikes, Retrotec, Moth Attack, Salsa and Engin.
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Follow Jarrod on Instagram.
Photos by Scott Haraldson
Multi-day bikepacking trips through the Montana backcountry should be on everyone’s cycling bucket list. For these women, the Kootenai National Forest would be their home for four days as they covered 170 miles, with three fire lookouts as their destination each day. Travel to each of the lookouts was via Forest Service roads and singletrack, with some intermediary roads sprinkled in throughout. Each of these lookouts, for obvious reasons, were on the very tops of the peaks within the Purcell and Salish mountain ranges: Garver Mountain at 5,784 feet, Big Creek Baldy at 5,768, and McGuire Mountain at 6,970 feet.
Head over to Salsa to check out this awesome story and see more great photos below!
This is the eleventh layout of the Radavist 2015 Calendar, entitled “Tandemonium”. The camera and location are noted on the bottom left of the document.
3…2…1… take-off! Too bad this ship didn’t land as smoothly as it was jettisoned. Tandems are fun, both to ride and to photograph with this photo in particular getting a lot of requests for the calendar. Ask and you shall receive.
Miss this story? Check it out at Tandemonium on Lukens.
For a high-res JPG, suitable for print and desktop wallpaper*, right click and save link as – The Radavist 2015 Calendar – November. Please, this photo is for personal use only!
(*set background to white and center for optimal coverage)
Newton’s law of universal gravitation states that any two bodies on a tandem must be extra careful while embracing Rubber Side Up! Kyle and Robert sent the Salsa Powderkeg off a rock lip during a Ringtail photoshoot this morning and things didn’t go so well. Ok, the air photo is rad but they landed a bit off-axis and took a mean spill.
Robert suffered minor dirt rash but Kyle’s pretty banged up. Needless to say it was a long pedal back down the trail…
Ben Weaver‘s a unique individual and a perfect fit for Salsa Cycles…
This looks like a great way to spend a Wednesday night in SF, brought to you by Swift Industries and Huckleberry Bicycles:
“Salsa Cycles takes you around the world with the launch of their new word touring bike, we’re excited to be one of the first to carry it but it’s a secret! You will just have to join us to see what all the fuss is about.
And Swift Industries cooks up amazing camp food to fuel the ride with taste testing, cooking demonstrations and different stove and food options. Moroccan food and drinks will be provided along with great music.”
Salsa Cycles’ Grateful Deadwood
Photos by Kyle Kelley and words by John Watson
Leave it to Kyle to bring some hippy shit into the mix for Salsa’s newest drop bar mountain bike, the Deadwood. Sorry, the “Grateful Deadwood.” Personally, I would have gone with some sort of fellen tree or Nature is Metal reference.
Kyle recently went to Saddle Drive, QBP’s open house demo in Ogden, Utah for his bike shop Golden Saddle Cyclery after having spent a great deal of time this year on the Niner Ros9+. Needless to say, Kyle came into Saddledrive with a pretty open mind about the 3″ tire platform. Over the years, he’s also sold a number of Fargos to customers who were planning on tackling the TDR either in the near or far future. How could you make the Fargo better? Throw some bigger tires on it, right?
In the forest, dying trees bring about new growth. Bigger is better, when it comes to ride cushioning and traction. The drop bar MTB world is growing, thanks to Salsa.
This week is SaddleDrive, the QBP open house that goes down each year in Ogden, Utah. That means a whole lotta new stuff rolling through the Q brand’s lineups, including Salsa. With the success of the Cutthroat launch, I wouldn’t have expected a bike to immediately speak to me from Salsa for a while yet here we are, staring down a even gnarlier drop-bar dirt tourer / MTB: the Deadwood.
Granted, it ain’t carbon and it ain’t designed with racing in mind but that wouldn’t keep this 29+ from getting plenty rowdy on the trails. Check out more info on the Deadwood at Salsa, see the full 2016 lineup while you’re at it and see these bikes in person at dealers in October.
This is the seventh layout of the Radavist 2015 Calendar, entitled “Glacier”. The camera and location are noted on the bottom left of the document.
These mountains are unmistakable. They’re icons, sculpted by ice. Spanning from Canada and into Montana, Glacier National Park is one of the iconic national parks that borders the Tour Divide. Before dropping down into Polebridge for pastries and coffee, I had to stop to soak in this view as my fellow cyclists zoomed past, surfing ribbons of dust and gravel.
For a high-res JPG, suitable for print and desktop wallpaper*, right click and save link as – The Radavist 2015 Calendar – July. Please, this photo is for personal use only!
(*set background to white and center for optimal coverage)
There’s nothing like taking a brand new bike and throwing it into the proverbial fire.
Bikes like this are not meant to be babied, nurtured, wiped down with a micro-fiber cloth and sprayed with chemicals to make them look shiny. They’re meant to be abused, smashed, shredded and put to the test, straight out of the gate. Especially bikes specifically designed for arguably one of the most intense endurance races in the Continental United States.
The Salsa Cutthroat is what I would call a first for the company. In the sense that it’s a bike designed for a specific event: the Tour Divide Race.
Stories. We all have to have stories to coincide with photos right? Nowadays, someone has to get lost, or their life threatened, or lose a battle to nature’s mood swings. Catastrophe, calamity and someone’s a casualty of what everyone seems to be dubbing “adventure.”
Truth is, a bike ride is hardly ever an “adventure.” Much less a bike launch. I don’t like that word: “adventure.” It tends to envelop so much of our day-to-day lives, especially those of us who spend a great deal of time outdoors. Was it an adventure? No, it was a hike. Or we went swimming. Or we got lost for an hour. “Adventure.” It’s been watered down, branded, packaged and delivered to us in a freeze-dried, waterproof pouch. We share our curated lives exposed through meticulously VSCO’d / Photoshopped vignettes on Instagram.
While this may seem cynical, I can assure you it’s far from that. It’s more of an explanation, or a primer if you will and here comes to the top coat: while the word adventure’s definition is subjective, the spirit of conquest is the thing that ties all facets of that word together. For some people, conquest lies in what others might deem an obtainable task. For others, it’s something so far-fetched that it’s more of an impossibility than a probability… Whatever it is, “adventure” means different things to different people, but we should all be more creative in how we define it. According to my opinion anyway.
From washed out roads to ripping descents, the past three days have been an incredible journey. The stories will unfold this week, but for now, head over to @TheRadavist on Instagram for a few sneak peeks.
