Growing up in New Salem, Ryan Conley and his friends built their own bikes with parts from the junkyard.

“As a kid, I remember building jumps on the side of the road …. We used to build little mountain-bike trails,” he said.

Now grown, Conley just hosted the first Helderberg Cliffhanger, a mountain-bike race that drew over 350 participants to Thacher Park on Father’s Day.

Conley came up with the name for the competition, a nod to the escarpment’s limestone cliffs as well as a reference to the suspense of racing. He also designed the race logo, which features mountains with a silhouetted cyclist hanging from a steep slope.

“I’m a builder,” said Conley, “so I like to build and design and create things.”

“The coolest part to me,” Conley says in this week’s Enterprise podcast, “is that 160 of those registered were kids from 3 years old on a strider bike to 8 years old in a mountain-bike group through high school.”

Conley himself has a 7-year-old son, Pierce, who raced and he also has a 5-year-old daughter, Charlize.

He promoted the race with Andy Ruiz, whom he called “a local cyclist legend.”

Read the full story at https://altamontenterprise.com/07122022/passion-cycling-led-conley-organize-first-helderberg-cliffhanger

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.