For those of you who don’t support the local fish rubber and missed the breaking news, Mooseknuckler Ally ProZac was in town (or is, he wasn’t specific on the exact time he was leaving today). As is now tradition, he wondered over to the shop on the dingled commuter he keeps at the parents’ house and made plans for a ride.
The ride took place yesterday afternoon as the clouds cleared and the wind died down a little bit. We rode my favoritest of trails. You guessed it, Paradise. The reasons, though completely unimportant, were two fold. First, we had little time, about an hour to get a ride in. And B, because I needed a GPS track and despite my best efforts at bribing someone else to get it for me, I had to do it myself.
As always, Paradise kind of sucked, but the ride was good as it was spent with one of the original Mooseknucklers along with a newer addition to the tribe.
Jumping to what right now will seem like a completely unrelated topic, the Mooseknuckler Cup happened this past weekend.
For those of you with short memories or complete lack of planning skills, the Mooseknuckler Cup happens the last Friday of every month. Seeing that the month ends today, that makes last Friday the Mooseknuckler Cup. This also means the next alley cat styled social event will occur on March 30th. I will wait while you mark your calendar.
February’s event was planned out by Fixie Dave who did a nice job of making us all ride a lot. We started at the Brook’s Nature Park and spent the next hour and a half searching out parks, a coin marked with the year 1980, a green dinosaur, a .01 stamp and our favorite snack.
You would be surprised at how many parks are within the SG city limits. It was like a trip down memory lane for myself as I grew up just off of Bluff Street and spent many summer days perusing different parks on my kick ass Murray bmx bike. Most of those parks are still there. KB and I made our way around the city snapping photos of each park and brainstorming on the route to be most efficient and hit the most playgrounds. Luckily it was night and the parks weren’t occupied by copious amounts of children or we may have been arrested for taking pictures of strangers’ children.
Anyway, we met back at the nature center and enjoyed story telling, shared our photos and snack food.
As we chatted, shivering in our boots and discreetly enjoying our adult beverages, I said, “At least there are five of us who enjoy bicycle culture.” This made perfect sense because there were five of us in attendance.
The Alliance was born in the winter of 2005 as a grass roots advocacy group. The name came from a group of us who all worked together and have become known as the original four and our scheme to find a way to get media passes to Interbike. Anyway, the Alliance had big goals; create a cycling friendly infrastructure and foment a cycling community (this can be found here).
Since that time the Alliance has taken on many different forms and has existed on two opposite ends of the state. I have written a dozen or so mission statements that have been wide ranging in orientation and objective. The only thing that has been constant has been the name and the idea of fomenting a cycling community. The current mission statement deals entirely with that idea.
Alley Cats, No Dabs Contests, Social Lounges, yea they all kind of fit nicely into that idea that I would like to live in a place that there are people who are excited about bikes and that ride them all the time. I can’t help but look to Portland or Minneapolis and wish that I resided there. Unfortunately both places lack the very things that keep me planted here in Southern Utah. So the other option is to create what we are lacking here because I have not yet figured out how to get the red rocks transplanted to Portland…
A lot has changed in SG in the past 7 years. Cyclists are everywhere. Some are locals, others come from far away places to ride that event commonly known as Torture (less commonly known as the Ironman).
That’s what it is all about. From the beginning when there were four (Sir Gurr, Prattipus, ProZac and myself) to now when there are five that show up for an Alley Cat. The Alliance is still there pushing, prodding and hoping that some day we might be the next best cycling friendly community, but with red rocks.
Ride more.