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Don't try this at home

Hello! When Nzo got started we had a shop of our own. It was a long shot, there were nowhere enough mountain bikers to support that idea at the time, but we learned a lot. One of the very good things about that proto-shop was the opportunity it provided for yakking with mountain bikers about mountain biking. These days Nzo occupies the front corner of a shop here in Rotorua. The other day I happened to be visiting and a couple wandered in to browse. Soon enough we were yakking about mountain biking. The visitor had come for a conference, and brought his bike. The weather was really bad, but like anybody on a tight schedule, he went riding anyway....

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The Photographer's Day Off

The man behind most of the decent photos in the Nzo story is Graeme Murray. We met on a mountain bike ride, shortly after we moved to Rotorua, the town we chose as a base to start Nzo. Graeme is a local, and was barely out of his teens. He had already decided his goal was to become a professional photographer. He told me that on our first meeting, after I told him what we planned to do. He became a professional photographer a long time ago, and we count ourselves very lucky to have firstly, done most of the stuff we set out to do, and secondly, managed to retain G as our main photographer.  We have also continued...

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Outrunning a deluge

It’s Thursday, which on my planet means the day after Wednesday. Hump day. It’s the day we generally do a trip to the coast for various reasons, and usually run out of time for bike rides. So Thursday is a pretty key day to get out for a spin, can’t go cold turkey for longer than 24 hours without getting an itchy sensation under my skin. For other and equally various reasons I decided to make this outing an almost gravel ride to the top of a long, mellow trail back down. Nice and cruisy, nothing even slightly risky. Unless you count that big black thunderstorm which only became visible after I popped out of the trees near the top...

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Thoughts on trail muntage

Here is a snapshot of the way my brain operates. Well, not the whole thing, a blogpost isn’t long enough. Just the bit that is in charge of my emotional response to the comings and goings of mountain bike trails. Around here, the trails are in what is officially a ‘production’ forest, where trees grow until they are big enough to sell to somebody. Depending how you look at it, you could argue about that definition all day, and we frequently do. Pine trees on the volcanic plateau grow pretty fast. A plot that gets mowed down can be a sort of forest within half a decade. It is a constant source of amazement how soon a cut-over bomb site can...

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Test flying a drop bar Krampus

Many moons ago, when giant lizards walked the land, I thought I would like to ride Tour Aotearoa. We had done some long bike packing missions before, camping our way around the South Island, and another time in Hawaii (highly recommended, will repeat if we are ever allowed to go there again). I got myself equipped with a bike I thought would be ideal, entered the first edition, and then reality stepped in and I couldn’t take the month off that would be required to complete it at the pace I intended to go. Life has continued to stymie any further attempts to be away from the ranch for that long, and now I am not at all sure I...

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