I spent the last 4 days baking in the desert at Outerbike. Outerbike brought 20 bike companies and a few bike accessory companies to Moab, UT for an expo. It was so well organized I would have never guessed it was a first year event.
The Outerbike expo area was set up at the Bar M trailhead. There are a few trails there for riding with about 15 miles of riding. Each day they also shuttled people to another trail for longer rides. There wasn’t anything to keep people from going and riding somewhere else but they had guides out on the trails with tubes and tools in case riders needed help. The rides were
- Thursday – Sovereign Singletrack
- Friday – Porcupine Rim
- Saturday – Slickrock
- Sunday – Amasa Back
Except for the first day, they had lunch at the expo area so you could eat something other than Cliff Bars and gels. They had a big tent with tables and chairs so you could sit down out of the sun. At the end of the day, there was a beer garden under the big tent. The first 2 evenings they had a movie in town. Saturday night they had a party at Woody’s Tavern although not much was happening when I stopped by.
All of the people from the bike companies were really helpful. Two companies stood out though. Fox Shox had a couple guys there. They were great at fine tuning their shocks on the bikes I test rode. Osprey was there with their bike hydration packs. They had the packs stocked with a spare tube, mini-pump, multi-tool and Honey Stinger energy blocks. They used brand new bladders so their weren’t any issues with them being clean and then you could take the bladder with you.
There were a huge selection of different mountain bikes and a few road bikes to ride. I ended up not riding that many different bikes though. On Friday and Saturday I did the longer rides and was pretty cooked after riding in the mid 90 temps (that’s 10-15 degrees above normal). I rode the Cannondale one twenty, Yeti 575, Santa Cruz Blur, Santa Cruz Tallboy and Rocky Mountain Altitude 29.
Western Spirit Cycling, the organizer, plans on making Outerbike even bigger next year. I definitely recommend going whether or not you are planning on getting a new bike soon. It was $150 this year and that gave 4 days of hard riding without beating up your own bike plus plenty of extras.
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