Bicycling Posts

Video: Pinkbike in Duluth and Lebanon Hills

The cycling website Pinkbike recently visited Duluth (first half of the video) and Lebanon Falls (about 170 miles south of Duluth; second half of video).

Cycle lanes aren’t enough in snowy climes

Check this out. I came across this article in The Guardian written by a cycling advocate from Winnipeg. It’s a few years old now and you’re probably done with any mention of winter but it seems timely what with it being just a few days after National Bike to Work Day. 

Ice cycles: the northerly world cities leading the winter bicycle revolution

I don’t know how many of you read this Op/Ed piece in the Duluth News Tribune:

Local View: Balance needed to meet needs of bicyclists, pedestrians – AND motorists

The BBC Interviews Duluth Cyclist Leah Gruhn

Photo by Jeremy Kershaw

Leah Gruhn, geologist at Barr Engineering and avid Duluth cyclist, was the first woman to complete Northern Minnesota’s Arrowhead 135 mile race in record-breaking low temps on Tuesday, Jan. 29.

The BBC asked her how she did it.

If you’re a grandma in Duluth …

We missed it in 2015, but here’s a belated clip of Lance Armstrong on The Joe Rogan Experience podcast dropping a reference to Duluth.

Seth’s Bike Hacks in Duluth

YouTube star Seth Alvo of Seth’s Bike Hacks was recently in Duluth in search of good mountain biking. He was not disappointed.

Ride Duluth

Minneapolis-based director Brendan Lauer put together this video featuring fat-tire cyclists Alex Rohde, Andy Kienitz and Evan Simula, with narrator Hansi Johnson.

Schwinning and Losing

When I was a kid I had a blue Schwinn Sting-Ray Fastback 5-speed banana-seat bicycle with ape-hanger handlebars. It was classic and beautiful. I hated it.

That bike was a relic handed down from my significantly older brother, Scott, who bought it in the late 1960s with his paper route money and used it to expedite his collections process. I took it over just as the 1970s turned into the 1980s, and by then banana bikes weren’t cool. Freestyle bikes were the new rage.

In West Duluth at the time we called freestyle bikes “dirt bikes,” a term that would get them confused with motorized dirt bikes in other neighborhoods or other periods in history, but there was no confusion among us. The Huffy BMX is a popular dirt bike I remember, along with Diamondbacks. I wasn’t really tuned into what all the hot brands were, nor was I much of an enthusiast for stunt biking, I just knew I wanted one of those bikes so I could blend in and not look ridiculous when it was time to jump over stuff and race through mud or whatever. But I didn’t want one bad enough to get a paper route and pay for it, I just wanted fate to hand me one. Because if fate hands you anything in this life, it immediately entitles you to think it will hand you things over and over again.

Fat-tire Bike Iceberg Jumping

Video by Richard Hoeg of 365 Days of Birds.

The Duluth Hard Enduro

The Duluth Hard Enduro is coming up on Oct. 28. It is a big-mountain style all-day epic enduro race across the city of Duluth hitting all of the raddest trails from fast and flowing to rocky techy gnar!

Trail City: The Bikers, Builders and Believers of Duluth, MN

Filmed and edited by Kyle Ilenda and Spencer Johnson for Freehub Magazine.

Hansi Johnson’s “Photo that Won’t Die”

It was shot just a few hundred feet from Duluth’s Aerial Lift Bridge, but it evokes the spirit of being in a far more remote part of the planet. Hansi Johnson’s “photo that won’t die” is so-named because in recent years it’s been in Outside magazine, the Red Bulletin, the Italian news magazine Panorama, a few calendars and as Johnson notes, it’s “been ripped off and passed around more times than I care to admit.”

Add two more to the list: Men’s Journal recently included the image among its “25 Best Adventure Photos of the Past 25 Years.” The back cover of a new book from Outside magazine, “The Edge of the World,” also features the image.

Piedmont Plunge

Often helmet-cam videos of mountain bike runs have a music soundtrack. This one by Baylor Litsey, shot on the Piedmont Mountain Bike Trails in Duluth, sticks with the natural sounds for a more realistic glimpse of the trail-riding experience.

Duluth portion of Munger Trail to close for construction

Munger TrailA 5-mile stretch of the Willard Munger State Trail between Grand Avenue and Becks Road in western Duluth will be closed for an extensive construction project from mid-April through August, according to the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources.

The project will stabilize parts of the treadway damaged during the Historic Solstice Flood Disaster of 2012 and bring that section of the trail up to current standards that call for a wider surface and shoulders. Because heavy equipment will be operating in the area, the section of the trail will be closed to all traffic throughout the project.

The Munger Trail is a collection of three trail segments accommodating multiple uses, including bicycling, walking, horseback riding and snowmobiling. The 70-mile Hinckley–Duluth segment is completely paved — other than the damaged areas — and passes through three state forests and Jay Cooke State Park.

Below are images from spring 2017 showing damaged sections of the trail in Duluth.

Munger Trail 2017

Willard Munger State Trail 2017

Sonic Divide: States

Great Divide Mountain Bike RouteThis short art video by Payton MacDonald features paintings by Duluth’s Kenneth D. Johnson. Sonic Divide documents a performance-art piece in which MacDonald mountain biked more than 2,500 miles — from Mexico to Canada — while periodically stopping to perform music.

Public input sought on Duluth Traverse mini-master plan

Duluth-Traverse-Trail

The city of Duluth is compiling comments for the draft Duluth Traverse Trail Management and Mini-Master Plan and is seeking input on expanded mountain bike trail offerings with a goal of 100 miles of trails, bike skills park construction sites and improved/expanded neighborhood trail access and facilities such as expanded parking, showers and signage.

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