Welcome to Issue 17.3
This issue of Freehub explores cycles of change from multiple angles. Anne Keller documents the quirkier side of Moab’s riding scene. Caroline McCarley writes about a tight-knit group of Moroccan guides working hard to put their corner of Northern Africa firmly on the map as a point of interest for traveling mountain bikers. Matt Coté dons his business reporter hat to tell the definitive story of what happened, from an economic standpoint, during the boom of Covid and the bust of the ensuing years. And, in our cover story, Sakeus Bankson profiles the hard-to-pin-down Braydon Bringhurst—a rare rider who revels in both up and downhill feats of stupendous technicality.
The human brain is full of stories. Stories about who we are and how we fit into the world, but mostly stories about what will come. Our gray matter is, quite famously, an association machine—it largely links the future to the past. We’re always looking ahead, always running predictions. Predictions that can cement into beliefs.
And, if you’re a mountain biker, some of your strongest beliefs might in fact be about how fast you are, because the main virtue of our sport is speed. Truly, the pastime that rules our lives, whether you’re a recreational rider or a racer, is an endless game of relative positioning. Someone is always out in front, it’s an unavoidable quirk of singletrack.
Words by Matt Coté
There’s a rhododendron that grows on the side of my house. In spring its vibrant blooms stretch up toward the sun.
I’ve lived in this house for years, but it wasn’t until this past spring that I smelled the rhody’s blossoms for the first time. This occurred to me on a beautifully warm, sunny spring day in my quaint writer’s study. And by writer’s study, I mean my kitchen table with a stack of dirty dishes in sight. In years past, I likely would’ve been somewhere riding on the other side of the world—away from the bounty of my yard and day-to-day cleaning duties. It’s been quite a ride over the past year, to say the least, but here are some observations from “the other side.”
Words by Blake Hansen
Rob Stepnoski, the co-founder of Austin, Texas-based Freeride 512, can quickly pick a mountain biker from the city out of the pack by their low-slung, cat-pounce posture, a byproduct of squeezing under drooping juniper branches on the local trails.
You can even more quickly pick a member of Austin’s freeride scene out of the crowd because there are barely enough to make a crowd. But things in the rolling green ranchland of the Hill Country of central Texas have a way of growing quickly.
Words by Aaron Theisen
The three young women sat off to the side, shoulders hunched, heads lowered, working steadily through the task: cutting, gluing, folding with a kind of quiet urgency. When they were done, they placed their diorama at the far end of the table, joining a growing lineup of collages pieced together from magazine pages gathered at each checkpoint of the scavenger hunt.
The instructions for the night had been simple: Bring scissors and glue. Bike parts—old hubs, broken derailleurs, brake levers—began to accumulate around the entries as voting tokens, small metallic endorsements dropped one by one. By the time judging wrapped, theirs was the clear winner.
Words by Anne Keller
They say never meet your heroes, but it’s worth meeting Braydon Bringhurst.
No one else rides like him. The 37-year-old Idahoan has a style that looks so easy, developing it obviously took an insane amount of work. Bringhurst’s signature, explosive blend of BMX, freeriding, and trials-esque feats of climbing resonates with cross-country nerds and downhill junkies alike. Where most athletes stick to the climb or descent, Bringhurst does both as smoothly as water flowing uphill.
Words by Sakeus Bankson
On April 17, 2024, a ritual that had played out for 34 years was in full swing. The world’s biggest and brightest cycling brands were all setting up booths at the Sea Otter Classic bike festival near Monterey, California. As one of the busiest bike events on the globe, it’s also the most important industry mixer on the North American side of the Atlantic.
So, it was especially puzzling when the folks from Kona Bicycles began tearing their tents down just as quickly as they had put them up, only days after releasing a new bike, and fled the Laguna Seca Raceway in a head-down haze.
Words by Matt Coté
Abdellah Hida unwinds a woman’s coiled bike chain in the busy back hallway. The woman is not a local or a client of the Marrakech bike shop where Hida works, Atlas Sport, just a tourist building her bike in preparation for seven days of riding in the High Atlas mountain range.
Hida lines the derailleur up and screws it in. Without saying a word, he gives her a slight nod and picks up the two bikes he’d been moving to the back before she’d asked for help. Hida is a local bike mechanic who entered the 2025 BikingMan, a 500-kilometer off-road race in Morocco, competed against professional riders, and won. Afterward, he congratulated the French racer who finished behind him and told him he had to get back to the bike shop for work. Hida’s story offers a small snapshot of what has been happening in Morocco’s bike scene. The longer version, however, begins as most things worth knowing in the country do: by asking a local.
Words by Caroline McCarley
