Tunbridge
Gravel bike riding — also known as back-road riding, dirt-road riding or gravel grinding — is exploding in popularity, appealing to cyclists seeking to escape auto traffic and connect with the area’s natural landscape.
Personnel from bike shops throughout the region say road bicycles with gravel-specific gear — wider tires, lower gears and enhanced braking systems with curved, road-style handlebars — are among their top sellers, and annual rides featuring dirt roads are burgeoning.
Aside from converting traditional road cyclists, gravel riding is appealing to longtime mountain bikers who enjoy covering more ground on dirt roads than they’re able to on trails.
The aesthetics are possibly the biggest draw. What’s better than a country back road along pastoral hillsides, where cars are few and views are plenty? Many back-road hillcrests offer stunning vistas, and lovers of rural history revel in passing by ancient stone walls and cemeteries. Farms, wildlife and old-growth forests can all be part of the package for those who venture onto the area’s lesser-traveled byways.
Zac Freeman, director of the Braintree 357 autumn gravel race near Randolph, enjoys myriad aspects of gravel riding.
“The biggest thing, I think, is the peacefulness,” said Freeman, who is vice president of the Rochester Area Sports Trails Alliance (RASTA).
“Paved roads, of course, have a more developed feel, but you get on a dirt road and it’s a whole new world. Braintree Hill, where the Braintree 357 is held, is a quintessential maple-lined dirt road with beautiful old-growth maple trees. Part of the route, Thresher Road, has a small creek beside it and all kinds of mossy rocks. When you get to the top of the hill, you can see for probably 100 miles. The views are spectacular.”
While downhill sections require some skill as cyclists negotiate loose material and sometimes encounter ruts and erosion, pedaling through a rural landscape has a way of relaxing the experience.
“It’s more about keeping your cadence than going for a faster pace,” Freeman said. “Gravel slows you down a little bit. In a fast-paced world, it’s a welcome change of pace.”
Alex Buskey, an avid mountain biker who also rides gravel, enjoys the connectivity of dirt roads between rural villages, sometimes offering more direct pathways than the fastest routes in a car.
“A lot of small towns are connected by dirt roads, so you can kind of cruise to different places and get different vibes,” Buskey said.
When back roads become destinations, they also become economic drivers, Freeman noted.
“When people come to ride dirt roads, a lot of them get gas and food,” he said. “And it’s really low-impact (environmentally). There’s almost no impact, other than the drive to get somewhere.”
Not everyone even needs to drive in order to utilize gravel bikes. Jonathan Wilmot, co-owner of Omer & Bob’s sports shop in Lebanon, said many of his customers enjoy having more terrain options when they depart from their front doors.
“Gravel bikes allow you to get out of traffic and have more scenic rides, but they’re not just for gravel,” Wilmot said. “You can link up paved roads and dirt roads, which I know a lot of people do. A lot of people set out right from their house.”
Wilmot said gravel cycles have been the store’s top-selling road bikes for several years, while Alden Suokko, a mechanic at Paradise Sports in Windsor, said gravel bikes were the only new road models the store began carrying this year. Similar sales increases were reported by personnel from Woodstock Sports and Mason Racing in Lebanon.
It’s been showing at gravel-specific events such as Pedal Power to the People, a fundraiser for Royalton Radio, with 10- and 25-mile course routes through the back roads of Tunbridge. Despite wet conditions on Saturday morning, the low-key event attracted nearly 50 cyclists, a high in its fifth year.
Freeman’s Braintree 357, held in October, and the Vermont Overland, a 43-mile dirt road race in the Woodstock area featuring 5,700 feet of elevation gain, have also seen participation upticks.
Vermont Overland, in its fourth year, sold out all 500 original spots on the day registration opened last winter, according to founder Peter Vollers. He subsequently made space for additional riders and expects 650 of them for this year’s event, to be held next Sunday in Reading, Vt.
Vollers also leads weekly gravel rides in the Woodstock area, attracting between 15 and 30 cyclists at once.
“People just love riding on Class IV roads, but they used to be miserable trying to do it on road bikes,” said Vollers in a phone interview. “There are some steep hills and the (road material) can be very rough and loose. Once we started getting bigger tires and lower gears on road bikes, it was a game-changer.”
Some gravel riders have yet to invest in gravel-specific bikes, using mountain bikes to navigate both trails and back roads. Many mountain bikers have been utilizing dirt roads as alternative training routes since long before gravel bikes hit the market.
Robbie Booty, of Sharon, has been enjoying gravel riding for many years.
“It’s not that gravel riding is new; it’s just that the equipment to make it easier is new,” said Booty, a bike mechanic at Drummond Custom Cycles in Enfield. “The industry is finally catching up with us.”
Jared Pendak can be reached at jpendak@vnews.com or 603-727-3225.