Recently, I have been approached by a lot of people that want to know how to get into writing within the mountain bike media. I’m always really happy to hear more people want to be creative and I try to be as honest and open about how they should approach it. However, I realized there…
Last week was the Charlie’s Angels race in Whistler. 250 women, two days of racing (DH first day then XC the next), a spa night, and a 70s disco. All the ingredients for a good time, but there always needs to be a little bit extra. The picture above is of two of the volunteer…
While at the Sea Otter Classic I decided to get to the bottom of a few things. Sure, there was racing to report, products to leer over, babies to shake and hands to kiss, but something deeper has been nagging at us. I want to be better. I want to do the best I can…
It happened at long last. I rode singletrack. Eleven weeks may not seem that long, but if you think that the whole of May, June and most of July was spent missing out on all the days riding and funning that could be had then it might start to feel longer. But trust me, it…
My left foot While out riding a trail freshly released from its snow-devil prison in Whistler, I sustained an injury that would throw my whole year into a flat spin. I was clearing a fallen tree off the trail when the tree fell onto my legs and folded my left foot underneath. I felt my…
World Affairs The singletrack riders guide to the galaxy…or maybe just some parts of New Zealand. I am besotted with New Zealand. I have been coming here for a whole bunch of years to escape from the perils of winter (it’s on the other half of the world innit) and each year I love this…
World Affairs: Map Over The Territory I am a sieve. Pour things into me and all those things just stream out like a crowd at a surprise Charlie Sheen appearance. As fast as I pour things in they just keep flowing away down the brain drain. Of course, I am talking about my mind and…
From Joseph Pulitzer’s credo in the first issue of the New World in 1983: “There is room in this great and growing city for a journal that is not only cheap but bright, not only bright but large, not only large but truly democratic – dedicated to the cause of the people rather than that…
Around the same time Grant Robinson and I traveled through the UK and visited Orange Bikes (story somewhere in this here webber), we also stopped off at Hope Technology to see what happens in a sleepy little village in the middle of nowhere. What we found was, frankly speaking, bloody extraordinary. High tech, forward thinking…
On Friday NSMB.com published Wheel Wars I, a brief overview of some of the new wheel size offerings, prototypes, products and perspectives on the practical implications of an ever-expanding wheel size catalogue. On Thursday we followed up with Cosmic Compromises: Is 650b Just Right or is it All Wrong? — Rumors and speculation have abound…
Bikes change colors and styles, go from no suspension to full suspension and everything in between; from single crown to triple clamp, from 1” of travel to 10”, from single-speed to 28 speed. What doesn’t change is the racer who gets on the bike and gives it 100 percent every single time whilst constantly dealing…
“…The menace is loose again, the Hell’s Angels, the hundred-carat headline, running fast and loud on the early morning freeway, low in the saddle, nobody smiles, jamming crazy through traffic and ninety miles an hour down the centre stripe, missing by inches…like Genghis Khan on an iron horse, a monster steed with fiery anus, flat…
“The difference is pace. You’ve got to move a newspaper story at a breakneck pace since the reader is only going to be with you for five minutes. A magazine story has to make the reader want to commit more time. If you get a magazine reader to commit to only five minutes you’ve failed.…
“Another metaphor for the problem of celebrity journalism is flash photography. All flash photographs are bad. The flash from the camera distorts the photo. And all flash photographs are the same: everybody’s skin looks the same. And everybody has those same little red dots in their eyes. Celebritydom distorts and obscures whatever might be interesting…
Warning: this isn’t my usual sexual innuendo laced, fart gag blithering tripe. I originally wrote it for NSMB.com and was received very poorly. I wanted to express the beautiful pain I experience when in the mountains and figured other people may feel the same. However, it was universally shot down as overly verbose and too…
World Affairs: The UK – You can never truly go home. I once had a friend called Rob Bartrip who was a legendary lady slayer. He may have exaggerated once or twice but he did pretty well and he racked up many more notches on his bedpost than his mother would care to know about.…
The Two Worlds Bikes have taught me a lot. Like a wizened old history teacher that I could sit and listen to forever or a bespectacled gym instructor who admonishes me for not doing enough laps, bikes have given me an education that can’t be learnt by book or exam. One of the most biggest…
This story came from issue 106 of Dirt Magazine. Photographer Grant Robinson (grantrobinson.com) and writer Seb Kemp visited the headquarters of Sombrio Clothing in North Vancouver to try and understand what makes Sombrio so different. Founder/owner/CEO/former-pro-hucker/mad-scientist Dave Watson sat down and we picked his brain on the why, where and how of Sombrio and the…
More often than not, the stories that can really fire up the creative juices of a writer are not the ones that will actually make it into print. A writer can have a great idea or story but for some reason or another it doesn’t end up going anywhere. Perhaps the writer is just a…
Last summer Grant Robinson and Seb Kemp toured the UK trying to track down the remnants of domestic mountain bike production. Along the way they stopped in at Orange Bikes to find out how a dirty little family run sheet metal business nearly once took over the world and what is the future in a…
