Kokopelli Bike & Board is celebrating its 30th birthday Saturday, Aug. 10 at WildEdge Brewing Collective, which has crafted a beer for the celebration.
It’s from 5 to 8 p.m., but if you’re itching to pedal, meet behind the Cortez shop at West Main and North Elm streets for a casual ride at 4 p.m.
“It’ll be fun and mellow, just kind of a gathering of everybody who wants to come. We’ll see who shows up,” said Pete Eschallier, a co-owner of the shop for 22 years, with a laugh.
To celebrate, WildEdge created a beer called Pedal Wrench.
It’s a play on their beer Monkeywrench, but with a lower alcohol percentage and added orange peel. The idea was to make a “post-ride beer,” said Tucker Robinson, an owner and brewer at WildEdge.
A portion of the party’s proceeds will benefit the High Desert DEVO youth cycling program, a nonprofit that mentors kids to foster confidence within them on and off a bike.
Kokopelli Bike & Board opened in 1994.
Jimbo Farley and Morgan Bell, the founders of the shop, were working at a bike shop in Alabama in the early ‘90s. They had thought about opening one in Colorado – one day, they agreed to make it happen.
“We just decided it was time to move west,” Farley said.
Their initial trip to Telluride proved fruitless- the friend they were supposed to see was out of town.
“He called us and said, ‘Sorry we missed you in Telluride. But, hey, you guys want to open a bike shop? There’s a little town called Cortez, it needs one’,” Farley said.
So they came back out a few weeks later and started what’s now Kokopelli Bike & Board.
Cortez felt like a good location for a bike shop, Farley said.
“We knew we were between Durango and Moab so, you know, things could grow here. There was just good opportunity.”
The duo had little money when they opened.
“We lived in the back of the shop for a year and just put all the money we made back into inventory to try and to grow it. It was an adventure for sure,” Farley said.
When Farley and Bell first got here, there wasn’t a whole lot of biking in the area.
Some folks were going out to Sand Canyon to bike. Boggy Draw wasn’t anything more than a few old cow trails strung together, Phil from Phil’s World was just starting to get some trails, Farley said.
“Phil’s World wouldn’t be called Phil’s World if it wasn’t for the bike shop. … He used to come in and tell us about these trails that he just kind of pieced together with deer trails out across from the fairgrounds,” said Scott Darling, a co-owner who got his start as a kid working at the shop.
“We just started kind of saying, ‘Well, you got your own little world out there Phil,’ so we started calling it Phil’s World.”
To be sure, Phil never really dug any of the trails out there – a lot of other folks did. But Phil would stack up bones, trees and rocks so people could find the trail.
“The trail we used to ride back in the day … used to be a 5-mile loop, and it used to go right behind the shooting range. Bullets were whizzing by you if someone was out there on the weekend,” said Darling. “It was totally unsafe.”
Nowadays, groups maintain and advocate for the bike trails.
What was once a social riding club called the Kokopelli Bike Club has grown into the Southwest Colorado Cycling Association, a nonprofit that does trail work on Tuesday nights and advocates for trail expansion and protection, Eschallier said.
“We’re just super-lucky to have a strong cycling community, a strong bike club here that does a lot of trail work. We owe all our success probably to those guys and how much trail they’ve built, especially in the past 10 years,” Eschallier said.
“They’re just a strong group of people who love working on trails and riding bikes. We’re super-lucky to have them.”
The Southwest Colorado Cycling Association does a lot of work in and around Montezuma County. There’s also a group in Mancos, called the Mancos Trails Group. and in Rico, the Rico Trails Alliance.
“There’s some core people who have built 90% of the trail around here,” Eschallier said.
They all agreed that the shop – and the sport – has grown a lot in the past 30 years. The second location of Kokopelli Board and Bike that opened in Dolores three years ago just celebrated its anniversary last weekend, which coincided with the Boggy Draw Beat Down race.
“As a business owner, you want it to expand and keep going … but living here you want to keep it small,” said Darling. “I think that’s the problem we’re going to have now, is keeping that small-town feel in Cortez, even in Dolores.”
Darling, Farley and Eschallier emphasized their gratitude for the community, and their help and support that has made the shop’s success possible.
“It’s awesome that Cortez has a shop like that. You know, and really, it’s the people, the town that made it grow to what it is today,” said Farley. “Just people being interested in the stuff we sold and being able to offer that – it’s pretty cool that it’s made it 30 years in a small town, and just to watch the whole community grow around as well.”
“Thanks to the community for making biking what it is. It’s been a fun 30 years,” Darling said.
