Thanks to trails like Slickrock that course over the stone it’s built on, Moab is a spiritual home of mountain biking. Make a pilgrimage to the city and you’ll come across a shop called Bike Fiend and, nearby, the workshop of Pierre Chastain and Blaze Bicycles.
If Moab is the spiritual home, then Bike Fiend is a temple, supplying bikes, apparel, accessories, and coffee to the residents and visitors of the town that, while small in size, has such a huge cultural (and geological) significance.
You can also pick up a custom titanium frame with the neatest TIG-welded beads from Bike Fiend, via Pierre’s Blaze Bicycles workshop, whose specialty is his hardtail frames with elegantly curved tubes that serve both an aesthetic and functional purpose.
His frames, both skinny and fat-tired varieties, are designed to handle the punishment dished out by the harsh Utah terrain and the famous “Slickrock” sandstone trails. Pierre’s curved tubes bring a helpful amount of compliance to his frames.
This is one of Pierre’s Twin Turbo frames, built for Charlie, a Moab-local self-confessed nerd bike mechanic. Charlie tweaked a standard road bike geometry to suit his own style and ended up with more of a drop-bar mountain bike.
Charlie intended on making a statement with the Twin Turbo: It’s a call for less bravado and machismo within the bike industry, and a space for everyone. Be who you want to be. And we’re in total support of it.
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Massive thanks to Spencer Maughan for the photos and insights.
