Meet Me in the Hills
It was the evening. My phone rang.
It was 2019, mid-September, the last steam bath days of St. Louis heat stretched on like slobber strands dangling from a hound’s jowls.
One night I was admiring the Moonish street lamp outside my window when the phone rang. It was Jackson. He pitched a rendezvous. In ten days meet FBM, Profile, and some of the extended ménage in Colorado to hitch along for a leg of the 6th Maiden America tour for roughly 48 hours of riding in the Rockies. It was short notice and a short trip—a blink.
Street Lamp, surrogate for the Moon.
I extended my right arm and my elbow creaked like a door in an abandoned Victorian, as it had for months. The tendonitis reduced gripping my bars to a symbolic gesture, but it wasn’t a deal breaker. I might get in a few airs before the rusty hinge pulled off the door like viscera velcro. And prospecting for transition gold in the mountains with friends was worth it even if I couldn’t ride. I decided to cut work and booked the flight to Denver.
Other than the brushes on Bohren’s Midnight Radio summer boiled off without a hiss, but Jackson’s call promised fall wouldn’t evaporate the same way. So, before dawn on the equinox I slipped on my backpack and tugged my bike bag 6 blocks to catch the 5am Red Line to Lambert.
A few hours later Jackson grabbed me from the Denver airport and we were off to meet the others west of the city. When we pulled into the motel parking lot the renegade BMX nobility we were joining were starting to gather around the vans. It was mostly familiars.
Jackson and I were close friends from when I lived in Santa Cruz. I watched Garrett grow up ripping Ramp Riders in Saint Louis with his brothers, Zach and Adam. Steve Crandall became a friend after years of crossing paths on the road. Others: Stew, Dolecki, Seamus, Holladay I knew from prior FBM meet-ups and the typical currents of BMX life. The Leeper Bros, Jay from QBP, Vic from Circuit, Matt from Profile, and the bizarrely skilled Declan Murray were new to me and—
”I’m so horny!”
Eric Holladay knew what he started and grinned behind black sunglasses as he strolled up to the van, un-buttoned short sleeve billowing, khaki shorts, slides, banana in hand.
”I’m horrnyyy,” replied a voice from the shadows of the van interior, Seamus I think.
”Man, I’m so horny. Is anybody else horny?” asked Garrett.
Pockets of voices around the asphalt returned,
“I’m horny,”
“Whooo’s horny?”
“Sooo horny.”
Then nothing.
This was a pack of coyotes.
The trip was two days, and that’s being generous, but it felt like a week in the best way.
On the first day, I did manage a few carves at The Hook and a few airs at the Milliken park on the qwedge. That earned me six more months of frayed cable friction in my arms. So, I was sidelined right away but happy and shot tons of photos.
Me at Milliken, by Jackson Allen
Garrett Guilliams at Frisco.
None of us had a clue leading up to it, but this trip marked the conclusion of FBM operating as a handmade in the USA BMX bike company. Steve made the announcement while everyone was taking a break at Frisco. But, he also made clear this wasn’t the end of the road for friendships or road trips.
FBM was always more people than product anyway.
The road—we met there, we meet there, and if we see each other again, that’s where it’ll be.
(Edit:July 18, 2026)
Check out Steve’s new ventures:
Radshare - A not-for-profit getting kids on bikes and in helmets.
Drop In Coffee - Coffee that supports the Radshare cause.
Steve’s Youtube - Where he’s sharing footage old and new.
Joy Machines
The good’s waiting, it doesn't care how you get there.
J O Y M A C H I N E S
Various vessels to find the good out there.
“There is always so much good out there for us, waiting.” my friend Joe wrote in response to some travel photos I shared in our intermittent, but years long email thread. I agree, but I would, and he helped shape my opinion nearly two decades earlier.
In 2004, Terrible One, the BMX company he co-founded, put out their one DVD. It was unlike anything I’d seen in BMX.
The riding in the video was powerful, and nice to look at, but the context of the riding was the belle of the ball.
It was a world tour seeking out ruined ramps in vast, desolate landscapes, immaculate architecture calling for a carve among esoteric sculptures in ancient cities, improbable skateparks lacquered in vibrant graffiti embedded in equally vivid cultures that were in stark contrast to our own. The video was a beacon and the places they traveled became pilgrimage sites for generations of riders afterward, acting as corridors to an way of life that is greater than the sum of its parts.
It was obvious that the bike was just a vessel, ferrying them, all of us through our experience.
How rad we get, or how much fun we have along the way is up to us. If we make the experience entirely about the bike, or how we're riding it, we risk making our vessel into a cardboard boat, permeable, soggy with time, and easily sunk by the waves and rain rolling in with the inevitable storm of entropy.
26 years into my own riding, I still wake up with this electrostatic feeling in my skin, excitement, a hunger for a carve on the edge of traction, the cresting arc of a good air, wall rides, and the buzz of discovering new shapes to ride.
But, I know the bike is just a vessel, an avatar, and it could easily look like a skateboard, a pair of shoes, a guitar, a pen, a camera, anything, any activity. It can take any form because the power isn't in the vessel, it's in the understanding that the good is out there waiting, and it doesn’t care how you get there.
When you know that, the vessel appears in a form just for you.
Smoke in the Wenatchee
When the forest fire’s haze crests the mountains and you can stare at the sun.
Edifice Complex
New temples and new gods root in the mortar and bones of old temples and old gods. One night at Sk8 Liborious in photos.
New temples and new gods root in the mortar and bones of old temples and old gods.
These photos are from one on of many night sessions on the Sk8 Liborious vert ramp in 2019.
Update: Sk8 Liborious burned to the ground overnight on June 29th, 2023.
No one was injured.
