Tag: Adventure Cycling Association

Unreal estate

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 8 Comments
The Adventure Cycling Association HQ in Missoula.

Looks like the tussle between the Empire and the Rebellion is coming down to … a vote?

What, no starships, no light sabers, not even a Silca in the spokes?

Well, good on ’em, sez I. May the best argument win.

The Empire’s case for selling the Adventure Cycling Association’s HQ can be found on the ACA website.

The Rebellion’s case against the sale I have cut-and-pasted below, from email, because it’s the argument I support.

A quick disclaimer: I probably shouldn’t be weighing in here. I’ve let my ACA membership lapse, and most of the people I remember from the time I spent reviewing bicycles in my own peculiar way for Adventure Cyclist have left the organization.

But I remember fondly my years orbiting the periphery of the outfit as a sort of weirdo-at-large. I also remember a dark time when, if I found myself short of funds due to questionable financial practices and yet desirous of strong drink and/or powerful drugs in quantity, I would pawn one of my handguns to tide me over until payday.

That sort of behavior, like selling your home and then renting space in it, is not smart. But at least I could always get my handgun back without much fuss.

So, if I had a dog in this hunt, it would bark, “NO!”

With that said, up the rebels! Their argument follows:

Dear Members and Friends of Adventure Cycling,

If you are a current member of Adventure Cycling, you may have recently received a letter from the organization’s new executive director, Andy Williamson, urging members to vote for the sale of our Missoula headquarters at 150 E. Pine Street. The organization has received an offer of $2.55 million for the building and property. While we appreciate the financial challenges facing the organization, we believe selling this building—the debt-free, member-funded heart of Adventure Cycling—is the wrong solution at the wrong time.

Our goal is not confrontation but clarity. Below we address several points made in Andy Williamson’s message and explain why keeping the headquarters is central to Adventure Cycling’s recovery and long-term vitality.

1 · Financial Stability Requires Rebuilding, Not Liquidation
Andy Williamson states the $2.55 million sale would provide a financial“runway.” In truth, this is a one-time infusion that consumes a core endowment asset with limited long-term benefit. Independent analyses from former staff and Life Members demonstrate that Adventure Cycling can balance its budget without selling the building, through right-sizing the staff, leasing unused space, restoring donor confidence, and rebuilding programs. The building itself can generate revenue via tenants while continuing to serve as the organization’s public face. Once sold, that stream—and the underlying equity—are gone forever.

2 · An “Underutilized” Building Is a Symptom, Not the Cause
Andy’s letter cites an ‘underutilized, aging building’ that houses only seven staff. Yet that is a management choice, not an inherent flaw. Adventure Cycling’s earlier success stemmed from a dedicated staff working together under one roof, where spontaneous collaboration and shared purpose fueled innovation. Bringing staff back to Missoula—full- or part-time—would revive this culture and improve member service. National studies confirm that in-person collaboration increases creativity and performance, benefits that cannot be replicated through a fully remote structure.

3 · Deferred Maintenance Is Manageable
The building is fully paid for and exempt from property tax. Historical operating costs average roughly $25,000 per year for utilities, insurance, and routine upkeep. Moreover, the Life Member Fund and donor community stand ready to support maintenance when engaged transparently. Selling a building because of manageable upkeep costs is fiscally shortsighted.

4 · Membership Decline Reflects Lost Engagement, Not “Aging Out”
Leadership attributes falling membership to demographics. In fact, ACA’s own data show that the older cycling cohort is growing, not shrinking, nationwide. Membership losses track instead with reduced programs,rising dues, and the diminished services now offered through a remote staff . Restoring value—through vibrant tours, high-quality publications, and responsive outreach—will rebuild membership far more sustainably than selling headquarters property.

5 · Mission and Identity Depend on Place
For nearly 34 years, 150 E. Pine Street has welcomed cyclists from around the world. It is part museum, part visitor center, and wholly symbolic of Adventure Cycling’s mission to inspire, empower, and connect people to travel by bike. Relinquishing ownership of this “Mecca of bicycle travel” would fracture that identity. The building embodies continuity, credibility, and community trust—qualities no lease-back agreement can replace.

6 · Constructive Alternatives Exist
Rather than liquidating assets, ACA should implement the actionable recovery strategies already outlined by longtime members and advisors:

  • Re-establish balanced budgets where expenses match income;• Rebuild the interconnected ‘engagement funnel’ of routes, tours, membership, magazine, and advocacy;• Lease unused building space to compatible nonprofits or outdoor businesses;
  • If necessary, borrow short-term funds against the equity of the headquarters building;
  • Launch a donor appeal linked to the 50th Anniversary celebration;
  • Recruit new leadership and board members with proven nonprofit and financial expertise.

These measures strengthen the organization while preserving its heritage and its home.

7 · A Vote NO Is a Vote for Adventure Cycling’s Future
Selling the headquarters might ease today’s cash flow but would undermine tomorrow’s foundation. Adventure Cycling has weathered crises before—each time by relying on the passion, generosity, and ingenuity of its staff and members, not by selling the assets acquired over decades.

We therefore urge every eligible member to vote NO on the proposed. Keep Adventure Cycling rooted in Missoula, where it began and where its mission still thrives.

The fact that ACA was cash positive at year-end 2023 makes this proposed building sale especially troubling. For that reason, the members of Save ACA will be voting NO on the sale of the building.

You have that same opportunity—but timing is critical.If you are not a current member, you must join or renew by 7:59 a.m. Monday, November 3 to be eligible to vote. Voting will take place between 8a.m. November 4 and November 24 through the official voting page.

With respect, determination, and gratitude, the members of Save ACA:

Dan Burden
Lys Burden
Greg Siple
June Siple
Jim Sayer
Sheila Snyder
Cyndi Steiner
Ginny Sullivan
Gary MacFadden

Burning down the house

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 39 Comments
These adventure-starved kids are burning down our house!

These kids today. Why aren’t they out there riding their damn’ bikes like we did when we were their age?

Why, when I was a pup. …

Sigh. It’s the same old song; music they’ve never danced to. “I said, ‘Ride, Sally, ride, now. …”

Writing at The Atlantic, freelancer Erin Sagen says today’s kids are very much not riding their bicycles, and for a variety of perfectly defensible reasons, too:

Since the 1990s, speed limits have ticked upward. Each year (minus a few temporary dips), drivers have progressively clocked more collective miles and driven ever larger cars. According to a 2023 report by the nonprofit Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, “Over the past 30 years, the average U.S. passenger vehicle has gotten about 4 inches wider, 10 inches longer, 8 inches taller and 1,000 pounds heavier.” These machines may be protecting drivers and passengers, but they can be much more intimidating to people on bikes. The annual number of children killed on bikes has actually fallen, a 2021 CDC report found, but the report acknowledges that this is likely in part because fewer kids are out riding.

Boy howdy. Citing stats from the National Sporting Goods Association, Sagen writes that during the 1990s, an average of 20.5 million children ages 7 to 17 rode a bike six or more times a year. By 2023, a few decades later, that number dropped to about 10.9 million. And of those kids, less than 5 percent rode their bikes “frequently.”

Six or more times a year? Sheeyit. We hopped on our bikes six or more times a week. Some of us still do. It’s fun, it’s exercise, it’s transportation … it’s liberation. Damn The Man! Let’s get big air at the gravel pit! Using one chain to break another, as it were.

No mas, no mas. !Que triste es la vida velo!

No wonder the Adventure Cycling Association has put its storied headquarters up for sale. Once a must-see for the membership, it’s only visited now by a handful of overripe saddle tramps in saggy wool shorts who just herded a 36-pound steel bike, hung about with tattered ripstop sacks stuffed with camping gear, canned beans, and one change of underwear, from Miami to Missoula without once stopping for a shower.

According to the ACA board of directors, the group’s membership has been dwindling for at least five years as its demographic “ages out” of bike travel. Tours and map sales are likewise struggling, and the association is failing to attract a younger crowd because ACA’s “brand” is seen as a raggedy-assed herd of sunburnt old roadies who just aren’t hep to the latest jive (gravel, bikepacking, insert your thrill of the minute here).

So, bam! The ACA HQ goes on the block, listed for $2.7 million, reports The Missoulian, its hometown newspaper.

I don’t know how this sale might save the ACA, because I haven’t seen any actual rescue proposals put forward. Just some MarketSpeak® in Bicycle Retailer about how ACA is “facing a crossroads,” “grappling with challenges,” and “addressing brutal truths while maintaining faith in the mission,” and how selling the HQ will “help us adapt to our reality, giving us the runway to reshape our programs and resources to continue inspiring transformative bike travel experiences.”

Friend of the Blog Diane “The Outspoken Cyclist” Lees is among those not convinced. She has viewed with alarm at her Substack, and former members of the organization — including its founders — are among the people who put together this petition urging that the sale be stopped.

Now, $2.7 mil’ may sound like a lot of money, especially if you don’t have it. But since Bikecentennial hit the road in 1976 I have, despite an appalling shortage of investment capital and absolutely no plan at all, pissed away at least that much on cigarettes, booze, drugs, guns, comic books, actual literature, albums, CDs, stereo gear, Toyota trucks and Subaru cars, road trips in three countries, moving violations in one of them, cheap motels, pet-friendly rentals, real estate, meals remarkable and questionable, vet bills, drawing paper, pencils, and pens, countless Apple products and peripherals, cable TV, streaming video, Internet hookups (no, not that kind of Internet hookup), blog/podcast hosting, and audio-visual gear.

And the only person who got any bicycling out of it all was me — in 1976, because I had been doing without a driver’s license for a few years thanks to a minor traffic accident (hit by a train), and afterward because I learned to love it (the cycling, not being hit by trains).

By the time Bikecentennial blossomed into the Adventure Cycling Association in 1993 I had settled down a great deal. It helped that after 15 years of newspapering I was officially and permanently unemployed, building a second career of sorts as a freelancer peddling vicious libels, ugly scribbles, and outright lies to niche magazines with the circulation of a week-old murder victim. I had also begun racing bicycles, and acquiring them, the latter a jones which haunts me to this day.

And after a decade and a half of that, thanks to the risk-taking spirit of the late, great Mike Deme, and his successors, Alex Strickland and Dan Meyer, I even sold some word count to Adventure Cyclist, at a time when the decline and fall of the for-profit bicycle magazine had left me short on runway and having trouble adapting to my reality.

Those dudes, and the other great advocates for and facilitators of bicycle travel I met while scribbling bike reviews for Adventure Cyclist, have all left the building that ACA plans to sell for … whatever. I’m sorry that I never visited them there, because now I never will. The building will become a bespoke hotel, law office, or assisted-living residence, whose half-daffy inmates will swear to their keepers that in the wee hours of the darkening night they hear the clicking of wide-range cassettes and catch a whiff of overworked chamois cream.

Sell the real estate? That’s what vulture capitalists do when they add another newspaper to their portfolio. I’ve seen it with my own eyes. A storied newspaper building becomes office space, condos, or a parking lot, the printing gets outsourced, and the few remaining journos who produce the paper are exiled to some soulless strip-mail shithole with all the joie de vivre of a happy-ending massage parlor — chances are the space used to be a happy-ending massage parlor — because the vulture capitalists don’t have any souls of their own and can’t imagine why anyone would want one. Bad for the bottom line.

Sell the real estate? Would the pope sell the Sistine Chapel? Puh-leeze. Dude won’t even Airbnb his summer place at Castel Gandolfo. Even a fucking Realtor will tell you it’s all about location, location, location.

Sell the real estate? It’s like eating your seed corn. Nothing down that long and winding road except for maybe one big dump and then death. Remember the wisdom of another intrepid traveler, Buckaroo Banzai, who has taught us: “No matter where you go, there you are.”

Is it too late for all these weak-in-the-knees whippersnappers askeered of the big, bad cars to revisit their cushy lifestyles, take a big ol’ bite out of life, savor the flavor of adventure cycling? And save the Adventure Cycling Association’s venerable headquarters, the hub around which America’s bicycle-travel universe revolves?

For the love of Deme, put that smartphone down, Rain, Drain or Spokane, whatever the hell your helicopter parents named your sorry ass, unless you’re calling Soma Fabrications to order up a damn’ Pescadero. Listen to the Voices. Here’s your panniers, there’s the door, what’s your hurry?

Don’t make me stop this blog and come back there.

Feel the (Bourbon) burn

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 7 Comments

Oh, indeed, that’s the question right there.

Bicycle Week continues at El Rancho Pendejo with a long-distance peek at the National Bicycle Tourism Conference in my old hometown of San Antonio, Texas.

BRAIN’s Steve Frothingham, a very busy fellow indeed, is down on the scene and learning all about the bicycle tourism, including the Bourbon Country Burn, an event I might’ve leapt at a few years back when I was still a drinking man, assuming that any reputable publication’s editor would have been loopy enough to send a copper-bottomed tosspot to it in the vain hope of getting anything in return for the investment in time and treasure beyond a phone call from jail and a plea for lawyers, guns and money.

The BCB went from 200 participants to more than a thousand in three years, sez Steve to me, he sez. So they must be doing something right. (See “Which distilleries will I see,” above.)

The Adventure Cycling Association has boots on the ground, too, so look for a report in an upcoming edition of Adventure Cyclist.

Ch-ch-ch-changes

~ Patrick O'Grady ~ 2 Comments

Scott Pankratz will lead the Adventure Cycling Association, succeeding outgoing executive director Jim Sayer.

The Adventure Cycling Association has hired itself a new executive director.

My attention was elsewhere when the deal went down, and I don’t know what it means for The Organization. I may have met Scott Pankratz in the course of my wanderings, though I don’t recall doing so. I have met many people, many, many of them, and they have met some version of me.

In any case, he seems to have been involved in good works, co-founding (with wife Julie Osborn) the nonprofit Ecology Project International; serving on the boards of the Montana Community Foundation and the Montana Nonprofit Association; and riding the ol’ bikey-bikey from Hither to Yon and back again.

“My passion and enthusiasm as the incoming executive director at Adventure Cycling come directly from transformative moments in the saddle from Alaska to Mexico,” Pankratz said via press release. “I look forward to expanding our community to give everyone with a bike the confidence, community, and gratitude that is at the heart of the Adventure Cycling experience.”

Scott takes over from the departing Jim Sayer early next year. Best wishes to both.