When the SimWorks USA crew found themselves down in the Bay Area in California in mid April for the Chris King Guest House event in Santa Cruz, a day at Sea Otter, and then participating in a pop-up sale at Box Dog Bikes in SF- we didn’t fully foresee that some pieces would fall in to place that week that would wind up scripting a necessary return to the region a few weeks later.

We do a strong business in California, probably like a lot of businesses in the industry operating in that “alt-cycling” space. We’ve got a ton of great customers, dealers, business partners, collaborators and friends strewn about the state; thus spending some time down there a few times a year ends up feeling justified. It just so happened that a couple of those opportunities got stacked this year, so we piled back in the SimWorks van and took that familiar ride down I-5 in a solid 10 hour push and based ourselves out of Santa Rosa at the Sycip family compound for a handful of days.

The King Guest House event in Santa Cruz a few weeks prior wound up feeling like a prelude for the Meet your Maker builder showcase that accompanied the storied Skyline XC race in Napa this year. Perhaps a more intimate affair than Guest House, a lot of the same familiar faces made the trip to Napa to hang out and show off the fruits of their labors. Jeremy Sycip had helped to organize this event originally over 10 years ago and he wasn’t going to miss it this year, especially living just a stone’s throw from Napa. The event had fallen out of organization and attendance for some years, but in the cathartic sigh of relief that has been trying to put COVID behind us, and 3+ challenging and troublesome years of trying to organize races and events, all in attendance were clearly in high spirits and thankful to have an opportunity to get back to Skyline- once the site of some historic Grundig World Cup races back in the hay day of XC MTB racing.

In attendance for MYM this year was an all-star roster of some of NorCal’s and beyond’s finest handbuilt bike builders. Jeremy Sycip, as well as Curtis from Retrotec made it out, in addition to Rick Hunter making the trip upstate from Three Rivers, Black Cat Todd was up from Aptos, and Cameron from Falconer came out from Quincy as well. Tony Pereira from Breadwinner had made the same long slog down from Portland that we had. So much experience and talent coming together to celebrate the return of some normalcy and an excuse to casually hang out, reconnect and celebrate handbuilt bikes and the world surrounding them. It’s always a treat to set up the SimWorks booth and show-off our own wares alongside the eye candy that these builders show up with at these kinds of events. It’s humbling, but there’s a respect that we feel reciprocated from them as well. Some of that is rooted in the deep history of SimWorks via Circles bringing their frames in to the Japan market, but an element of it also is based in our business’s own emphasis on craft and methods of manufacturing that have stood the test of time. And some of it is just that we love to hang out and talk about beautiful bikes and ride them and party.

A huge community of riders, builders, brand people, and event organizers made it out on Friday evening on the course before the race field went out and abused it on Saturday morning en masse. Probably one of the largest off-road group rides that I can remember going on in as long I can remember, the course was challenging but fun, with steep hairpin climbs and descents, some slab navigation, technical features and little in the way of mild flatter terrain. I could clearly see how this had become a zone that had played host to spicy circuit races and even the Single Speed World Championships back in 2008 – although sections of the course had me shaking my head in disbelief that an entire field of riders had undertaken the challenge on Single Speeds.

The uncharacteristically wet winter weather in Northern California this year had lent itself to a Super Bloom event- demonstrated by beautiful vast fields of wildflower blooms on display, and my allergies kicked in to haywire overdrive. Nevertheless, ’twas certainly encouraging to see that terrain in such floral splendor, particularly for a region that any more finds itself gripped in wary expectation of an ever-increasingly long and threatening “fire season.”

Skyline Park checks a lot of boxes for a full-featured regional park, with wilderness access for cyclists, equestrians and hikers alike. There’s an archery field and disc-golf course, along with picnicking, garden and gazebo space. The trail network feels expansive, beyond the extend of what we rode that was designated for the race course. A cook shack provided a suitable space for meal prep for the Friday evening communal dinner that Curtis had helped to organize, as well as race day Saturday’s sausage cookout pulled together by the race organizers.

The MYM event and Skyline serve as reminders that the work that we do is community driven and dependent largely on the relationships and bonds that we form. SimWorks as a business and brand has made a focused effort to foster and maintain the relationships that we have with the bicycle framebuilding community, because of the passion that exists amongst that community for their craft. Constructing unique, beautiful, custom bicycles is a humble undertaking for all of these people, and while we tend to glamorize the line of work a bit, it can be a really challenging way to make a living. For many of these people, the business side of it can be extremely daunting- particularly for creatives, fabricators and makers that are less inclined to want to focus on the administrative, accounting, branding, marketing and sales side of the business. It’s endlessly challenging to create a business rooted in art and craft that is highly competitive, flooded with options for customers, trying to tap in to a market trend or the ever evolving “standards” that frankly are plaguing the industry lately.

And so we stand by these folks and tip our cap to them, and hopefully do our part to highlight that what they do is special and necessary and that we can draw parallels in the success of our own business alongside theirs. Economies swing, preferences in markets change, material and labor costs fluctuate, torches get hung up, new builders join the fray- it’s an ever evolving scene, but it feels true and never watered down- and that in part is what’s exciting about it, and a reason SimWorks will continue to work to highlight and support it.