It’s as dark as a night can get and we’ve been swallowed by the forest. Riding shotgun in Jeff’s Prius as we bump along a gravel road feels like being an extra in a low-budget Star Trek fan film about crash landing a shuttlecraft through an asteroid field. The huge console display certainly wouldn’t be out of place.
I could swear we’ve emerged from the darkest-dark and gone past the same group of campsites three times but Jeff just keeps on trucking along without a care in the world until suddenly he throws the vessel into a sudden right-hand dive and we’re there. ‘There’ being the campsite of Grant and Christine, two awesome folks who met working in bike shops on the North Shore. We’ve been invited for a bite to eat and a visit or our drive home after a very long day walking around Whistler and it’s lovely to just relax for a bit before going full road-warrior. It’s actually my favourite Crankworx memory – thanks, G & C!
I’m not a fan of Crankworx – I know, I know, I hate everything fun – and my goal since I started doing projects for NSMB has been to show up for a single day, see everything I need to see, and write about it. I actually don’t remember the exact circumstances but in, I think, 2016 I told Jeff I was driving up to Crankworx for a single day and he decided to come along and that was that.
The first year, Jeff had made a bunch of commitments to do some wrenching for friends while we were up in Whistler, so when I picked him up we stuff my car with a work stand and tools, and away we went. The first year, and all the years following, we’d leave very early, stop for coffee at Galileo in Britannia Beach, and be walking around the pits before a single tech had shown up, getting the lay of the land. It often felt like we were the first in and the last out on our marathon day.
I would make appointments to check out some new tech stuff and other than the few places we had to be during the day we’d wander about looking for interesting things to report on – particularly stuff we thought other media would gloss over or miss entirely. I feel we had a very good track record for having a good time, exercising our inner bike nerds, and coming up with interesting content.
I was surprised by how much I missed our annual day in Whistler for 2020 and looking forward to sweating the small stuff in the future.
A look back on Crankworx:
- Sweating The Small Stuff, 2016
- Sweating The Small Stuff, 2017
- Sweating The Small Stuff Part 3, 2019
- Sweating The Small Stuff Part 2, 2019
- Sweating The Small Stuff Part 1, 2019