Proto Gravel

 In celebration of the twentieth year of this blog, I have a few tales to tell. This post is one of them. This series will occur off and on throughout this anniversary year, I hope to illuminate some behind-the-scenes stories and highlights from the blog during this time. Enjoy!

Back in 2009 I was riding the wave of everything I had found myself involved with which was a crazy time in my life. This all spilled out on the blog in an almost dizzying stream of posts with varying subjects ranging from event productions, gravel riding and racing, 29"er news and development, and my shop job. Honestly, looking back on this time, I have no idea how I managed to fit it all together. 

To think this all happened because I started this blog is incredible. In four short years I was on a crazy train of bicycle related things which, somehow, did not derail into a mass of smoking carnage. It came really close to it, but thankfully it did not happen. 

I'll spend a lot of time breaking down 2009 and this blog in future 20th anniversary posts, but for today's entry I wanted to focus in on something that was a time-stamp in the nascent gravel racing scene. That being the appearance of a dedicated gravel racing bike. 

Not many people ever saw this bike, or knew of its existence.

In early May of 2009, (the only Trans Iowa not held during the last full weekend of April) a grey framed, metal bicycle with traditional cantilever brakes appeared at the start line of an ultra-distance gravel event. You may think that this is "no big deal", but you don't know the context of what this bike meant for a certain, very small subset of cyclists and why this was a cog that helped propel gravel cycling into the heights which we now know in 2024. 

Previously to this, all bicycles that were ridden at gravel events were intended for other disciplines. Imagine this world if you can! Predominantly gravel events were ridden using cyclo cross bicycles or mountain bikes. Yes, there was the odd road bike, touring bike, and maybe someone used a recumbent in there at some point. However; the point is that a "gravel specific bike", while being thought of by many at the time, just was not a reality. 

Joe Meiser, an engineer at Quality Bicycle Products and often allocated to working on designs for Salsa Cycles, a QBP owned brand, was at Trans Iowa v3 in 2007. Apparently this and a few other gravel events sparked an interest in gravel cycling within the walls at Quality Bicycle Products and specifically at Salsa Cycles. Work began on a design focused on the needs of racers at these events. 

Many gravel events weren't very big back then. This is the results from the GLGA in 2008.

Which, if you consider how many folks were actually gravel racing then, is amazing. Rosters for these early gravel events were tiny in comparison to what we see today. That did not seem to matter to Salsa and its designers who came to Trans Iowa and the DK200 in 2009 with the bicycle shown above.

 The bike was a titanium prototype which kind of walked the line between cyclo cross and gravel. This made sense in 2007/2008 because a business had to hedge their bets on gravel which wasn't big enough then to support a bicycle specifically dedicated for gravel only. The time period this bike came from also shows up in the quick release axle standard, the cantilever brakes, and the straight steer tube. Note the two bottle mounts with no other accessory mounting points. 

I snagged the image above during Joe Meiser's stop at a convenience store during Trans Iowa v5 in North English, Iowa. Joe would go on to win the event overall. At the time I had squirreled away this image as Salsa hadn't been offering anything other than Scandium aluminum and steel frames up to that point. But toward the end of the year Salsa introduced titanium frames so I posted the image on the blog then. 

It didn't catch on with many folks that a gravel specific bicycle was on the way, but of course, we all know now that happened in 2012. In the meantime I actually got to see other Salsa prototype gravel bikes at Trans Iowa, but those were never discussed on this blog out of respect for Salsa and the people I knew there at the time. 

And a note on that Good Life Gravel Adventure results image: David Pals was so impressed with that event in 2008 that he insisted I go do it in 2009. Which I did and was a part of a crazy, insane weekend which I will document in a future 20th Anniversary post coming soon. 

Stay tuned for that...