Hey, that was a lot of fun. Thanks, Bellingham.
This weekend, in the small-ish city of Bellingham, Washington, the second edition of the Northwest Tune-Up occurred. It’s a homegrown festival featuring music, bikes, beer, and racing for three days centered in the Port of Bellingham. Overall, I love this festival. It’s great to see friends and good music while sharing the area with stoked individuals. But what I really love is the number of bike commuters the town hosts throughout. The location of the festival is quite poor for car parking and traffic, and that’s what makes it so great. People come knowing that they’re better off biking to the fest, so you’ll see thousands of fun and interesting bikes locked up around the festival grounds and throughout the entire city. It's a fun peek at what a less car-dependent society could be… but I'll get off my soapbox now.
I’ve also got a few opinions about the festival and its fest-goers, but I promise none are too negative. There are easy-fry things, like staging anti-fatigue mats as walkways on the chunky gravel. The gravel the festival grounds are covered in sucks to walk on, hard to bike on, and I saw multiple wheelchair users struggling to get around. Compared to the cost of hosting an entire music festival, a few hundred yards of anti-fatigue mats should be relatively cost-effective and make a huge impact.
Another opinion? Some of the people (A huge majority of everyone was fantastic). Look, I get it, mountain biking is an expensive sport. But this festival really, really shoves it in your face. Between the influencers waving around thousands of $$’s worth of cameras, $150k Sprinter vans, obnoxiously expensive bikes everywhere, bike companies that only specialize in $14,000 custom builds, and worst of all, a group of dudes who call themselves the “Expensive Hobbies Club”, they’re not making mountain biking look attractive. Mountain biking can be affordable, but the loudness of the mainstream gets in the way of the sport being “cool” and “accessible”, as many brands like to preach. I'm not claiming this is necessarily a problem, it's a general opinion of some of the sports partakers at large.
Last observation? This festival is an interesting marketing conundrum. It’s about as far from the mountain bike trails as you can get but advertises them as one of the biggest draws. People demoing a bike at the festival grounds must hop on a shuttle and go 15-20min away from the fest to get to the trails. This means that a huge number of fest goers aren’t even there to enjoy or partake in the festival for more than an hour or two a day. Most of us ride our bikes on the mountain all day, and by the evening, are too tired to go back to enjoy the music. I felt bad for the musicians, as I got within three rows of the stage no matter what act I was trying to see. Now, I’m making a generalization here, but in marketing speak, you want your consumers near the product as often as possible, and this festival incentivizes the opposite.
The only way I see them being able to partially fix this is by having demo sites at the two respective trailheads, Galbraith and Larrabee. You can still have shuttles running to/from the festival grounds, but this would keep more people in close proximity to your vendors throughout the day. The musicians and some vendors would still lose out, but this is a difficult event to pose logistics for, and I do not pretend to be an expert! I also don't envy the people trying to propose equal value to musicians, vendors, and festival-goers. Overall, even with the logistical challenges, I know myself and many others had a great time bopping between the areas of activity.
I’m sorry if it sounds like I’m whining. I swear I’m not, and to prove it I took a nap the following Monday afternoon to continue to recover from the festivities. On a personal note, I placed 5th in the Men’s 19-29 expert category race on Saturday! None of my individual stage times were that impressive, and I would have placed next-to-last in the pro category, but I did break my ankle five weeks ago (it’s still swollen) and was in no crash mode. Anyways, thanks again Northwest Tune-up. Can’t wait for next year.
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