In August, 2006, I was faced with a decision. I was leaving my parents house north-east of Sacramento to drive up to Downieville where I had registered to race. It was about a week into two weeks of record high temperatures (13 days of 100+ degree highs). My wife and I had just returned from Lake Tahoe where we had ridden mountain bikes for a couple of days and had taken the scenic route through Downieville so I knew it was baking up there. I had just loaded up with groceries and was at the driveway of the grocery store where I was trying to make up my mind. “Do I turn left and race Downieville in this atrocious heat and dust or do I turn right and go visit friends in MarinCounty?”
Later in the day, I ended up at Steve Potts’ house in Inverness, CA where the weather was beautiful. After spending the night at Steve’s house, he promptly kidnapped me and from there I ended up at Tom Ritchey’s ranch about an hour and a half north. During my time there, Steve talked about how he’d like to see a bike shop reestablished in Point Reyes Station. My immediate thought was “I want to work in that shop.” That thought eventually, through the course of several months and several visits back to Point Reyes, became “I want to own a shop in Point Reyes.”
After many visits to Point Reyes to secure lodging and a retail space, we are making the plunge and moving away from the tile, stucco, strip mall hell that north San DiegoCounty has become. More fill in the blanks to follow. For now the photo below is the building that will house Black Mountain Cycles of Point Reyes Station, CA.
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