From An Idea......

Back in 2008 I was bouncing around this idea that someone should do a gravel road race/event calendar like the defunct endurance racing calendars that I had been aware of previously. Commenters thought it was an ace idea and that I should go ahead and do that. 

Gee....thanks, I guess! 

You see, I did take it upon myself to put up that blog site and grab all of what.......20 or so events?  I figured, you know, it would be easy to keep up with that. Then more folks found out I was doing this, added more events, I found out about more events, added those, and the next thing ya know.....

2014: Gravel Grinder News has become a review site for products, a place where over 200 events are listed, and has a Facebook page that is growing like a weed. Meanwhile, Ben Welnak, who started Mountain Bike Radio a few years prior, was also promoting gravel events, and had a site going for gravel stuff called Riding Gravel . He approached me and we started discussing a new direction and with his resources and what I have brought together with GGN we figured we could combine and have the premier gravel riding based site out there.

So we are combining the sites and today is the announcement day. Now you know.

The calendar will be migrated over to Riding Gravel and will be called the "Gravel Grinder News Calendar". For the meantime, Gravel Grinder News as a stand alone site will still be there, but all the calendar entries and pertinent reviews will be imported over to Riding Gravel. Once that process is completed, the Gravel Grinder News site will become dormant and you would be redirected to Riding Gravel.

We will still have reviews, opinions, and news on Riding Gravel.

So, what will be different? Some things will remain the same. There will still be reviews. There will still be a forum, and newsy stuff. In the area of new stuff, we will be doing a podcast. We're going to check out events in person and report on them. We will have racers and directors send in reports. Maybe more.....

Maybe we'll be wrong and we'll find out soon enough. Maybe we're not wrong, but that's the risk you take. Heck, I never figured that crazy calendar idea would ever get this far. One thing is for sure- this will precipitate another big change for me. I'll get around to announcing that later this month. But for now this will be an exciting new direction for both Ben and I. It makes sense to both of us to be joining forces instead of being parallel entities covering similar subject matter. In other words, two together are better than one, and I think the gravel and back road riders out there will see that to be true in the future. Besides, this is a passion of mine, as many of you readers here already know.

I won't be abandoning my dirt, woods, and bushwhacking side. Oh no! I like being off road too much to do that. I won't be selling off my fat bikes either! But gravel is a big part of my riding and I haven't been doing enough of that in the past year. I hope this new opportunity will help "fix" that issue and I think that it will do just that.