Sharing stories about coffee, stories, and stoke
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Reflections
I love origin stories. In light of the superhero craze in Hollywood we love to learn about how each and every comic book hero came into being. For Spiderman it was a bite from a genetically modified spider, for Iron Man it began with attempting to stop shrapnel from reaching his heart, for Peter Quill we learned of his origins on Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 2, and the list goes on. We're intrigued and mesmerized by how they got their start.
I ride. You ride. I drink coffee. You drink coffee. But why? Setting aside the coffee part of this conversation we're left with a lone question ... why do you ride?
A few weekends ago I headed down to Mountain Bike Oregon (MBO) for the day. Up at 4 AM and on the road a half an hour later for a 2.5 drive from Portland to Oakridge. The main priority of the day was to hang out with Nate Miller from Tasco MTB and serve coffee in his booth. After a few hours of doing so the vendor area was a ghost town since the reason why people come to MBO is for successive days of shuttled runs through some of the most epic trails that Oregon has to offer. By mid-morning the shuttle buses had all gone and there was only one thing to do ... go ride ourselves.
Every organization lives by values or principles whether they are written down on a website or not. Most often they end up being the "unwritten rules" of the company. At Loam Coffee we're no different. We're guided by a set of principles and values (even "unwritten rules") that acts as a filter of sorts for how and where we get involved. Here's what we know (and what you know) ... we're into both coffee and mountain biking. Pretty basic and obvious.
To the outside world mountain bikers and are simply mountain bikers. We all look the same, act the same, ride the same bikes, dress the same, wear the same shoes, frequent the same websites, and even talk the same. You know and I know, and I know and you know ... that's utterly not true.
Mountain bikers are an interesting lot. We'll drive two vehicles for fours so three people can ride shuttled laps. We don't think much about loading our bikes up and hitting the road for the day. "Close" trips are anything within an hour and "reasonable" trips are anything under three hours one way. Driving and shuttling become almost as important as the ride itself and we have awesome set-ups to prove it ... Dakine truck pads, coolers full of ice for post-ride brews, and then there's the whole #vanlife crew out there with the amazing retrofits.
So when do local trails become local? What does local even mean?
