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I have always loved the concept of a Flèche, which is the French word for “arrow”. It’s a 24 hour straight rando ending in a city, which in this case, happens to be SF.
For more information on the 2014 Flèche put on by the SF Randonneurs, head over to Boyz on the Hoods.
Related note: I really want to ride Indians Road after watching this!
This Friday, May 2nd, Aaron from Stinner Frameworks will be at Mission Workshop from 7-10pm for a Q&A on frame building. Of course, there will be beer and bourbon.
Head over to Mission Workshop for details. If you do go to this event – you’d be crazy not to – do me a favor and give Stinner a high five. That dude is killing it.
Freight’s got their double leather straps in stock, along with single leather straps. These made in SF toe straps come in brown and black. Head over to Freight for more.
Photo by John Daniel Reiss
I love JDR’s portraits and this one of Jake is so good! Head over to John’s Tumblr for more.
The homies at Full Frame Collective visited SF’s Falconer Cycles, a ‘locals secret’… Check out more at FFC!
State Bicycle Co, Jason Clary and Macaframa, doing what they do best in SF.
The AWOL blog has so much good content in it these days. Like these photos of Dylan and Erik’s Swift Ozette randonneur bag!
Photo by Walton Brush
I’ve done this before. Your front tire gets shredded and all you have laying around is a red-backed Vittoria Randonneur. The difference is, I never took a second to document it. Nice one Walton! See more of the Walt’s world at his Tumblr.
TCB and Clementine Courier ripping through SF for Roulant.
I love seeing local companies working together. Great job Mash!
“A few weeks ago Dylan, Cubby, Gabe and myself helped Eleven Inc move their website. Here is the finished piece!”
Photos by Ian Sutherland
It’s been a while since I’ve seen Andrew Low and these photos that Ian Sutherland shot made me feel like I was there. Seriously some of the best from this man’s shop and he’s had a lot of photographers visit him over the years.
See more at LOW Bicycles!
Ever since Erik showed me the first sneak peek at his Specialized AWOL, I knew I’d have a blast photographing it one day. Little did I know, however, it’d be in San Francisco. By now, you’ve seen photos and video of this bike here on the site. How could you miss it? With the special Nickel PVD – Physical Vapor Desposition – coating, it pops!
Erik even referred to this bike as a “peacock” in the Transcontinental video. It’s almost so distracting that you fail to notice the Shimano Dura Ace Di2 Alfine 11 speed Gates carbon belt drive set up with hydraulic disc brakes. Or the wicked fat tire clearances.
Other nifty details are the Plug by Supernova, which charges electronic devices but one of my favorite frame details is the special bracket for mounting the rear Supernova light onto the non-drive rocker dropout. And of course, the Fällkniven F1 Swedish special forces-issued knife with its (purple) zip-tied sheath.
Trust me, during our ride in the Diablo Range, I was geeking out so hard on this bike.
Yeah, it’s pretty jamming and what better place to shoot it than Bernal Heights in SF, at sundown, as the sky itself put on a color-assault of its own. Countdown to full nuke… 3… 2… 1…
When Erik and I met at Eurobike last year, we talked about doing a ride to celebrate the Specialized AWOL release. Originally, we talked about Oregon, then LA, but after some research, we realized there were plenty of roads, tracks and trails literally in SF’s backyard.
With the help of Jared from Riv Bike, Erik began to think about a three day route from SF to the Diablo Range, Morgan Territory, Henry Coe and finally, into Morgan Hill where we’d share our story and watch the premier of the Transcontinental film. It seemed like an achievable goal. We’d pack for camping, which included cold nights and mornings and most importantly, we’d take our time.
Rather than actually planning our route, we decided to take trail maps and meander a bit off the beaten path. Digital maps don’t have all the trails marked and some of the current maps of the Diablo range revealed a path none of us had taken. We were set.
Unfortunately, as it tends to go, unexpected elements came into the equation and our plans changed. At first, I was pretty upset about it, seeing as how I was planning on pulling a few stories out of our ride, but after reviewing my photos, I decided it made for a good story…
Part of what the Specialized AWOL project represents is an escape, a desire to get out of your normal ride routine and try something new. Taking a chance if you will. While we didn’t complete our ride, we had fun and saw some incredible displays of color as Mother Nature impressed us all.
Seriously, the sunrise the second day rivals all in my past experiences…
Read on in the Gallery!
There’s more to come, including my review of the AWOL Transcontinental Limited Edition and a Beautiful Bicycle post on Erik’s own bike.
This might just be the best Mash video yet. The Wolvh is in SF.
It’s been fun, but too chaotic and short. Hopefully I’ll be back for more riding and photos! Sorry if I didn’t get to hang out this trip but I’ll be back!
Apologies for the lack of updates today, I was unable to spend any time online and spent the afternoon working on the story and photos from the weekend. All I’ll say right now is that I had a blast, even though our original plans got shortened a bit.
More to come, including a bunch of rad photos, a review of the AWOL and photos of Erik’s mad-peacock AWOL.
Leave it to Mash to put out a minute-long video that packs the stoke. Rainier is an exceptionally-strong rider and seeing him climb Fillmore Street like that is impressive!
This morning, the AWOL team and myself left San Francisco for a three day ride through Henry W. Coe state park down to Morgan Hill. While we have a general idea of how we’ll get down there (i.e. excessive speculation), we’re leaving a lot of room for error. Because, let’s face it, no big ride can go down without something going wrong. At least that’s my track record as of late.
I’ll be riding one of the new hydraulic disc, belt drive AWOL Transcontinental limited edition bikes and shooting photos of the ride for a few features on PiNP.
Come Monday, we’ll be showing my photos from the ride at the premier of the Transcontinental AWOL video at Specialized HQ.
Follow Hellhommus and me on Instagram this weekend for updates!
