About

There are no derailleurs here. Just bikes, rides, people, and places that prove one gear is enough.

At its core, this is a mountain bike publication. But it’s also a reaction to where I think the internet has gone.

Everything today seems optimized for 15-second videos, endless scrolling, and an algorithm deciding what you’re allowed to see next. As much as I hate to admit it, that’s where most of the attention has moved.

I miss the internet that made me want to read.

Long-form stories.

Editorials.

Ride reports.

Photography that wasn’t immediately swiped past.

The kind of articles where someone clearly cared enough to spend a few hours writing something worth your time.

So I built one.

The Name Was Supposed to Be a Joke

The name was supposed to be a joke. I registered for Single Speed Worlds 2026, the form asked for a team name, and because I am a software engineer, I pulled 404 Gears Not Found out of my ass. It’s a play on the HTTP 404 Page Not Found error. I thought it was funny, typed it into the box, and moved on with my day.

A couple of days later I started wondering whether it should be a real thing. Maybe a simple page with a few bike stories, nothing elaborate. Then I started planning, which is usually where my simple ideas go to die. The weather in Golden was miserable that weekend, so I got in one short ride around South Table Mountain and spent roughly twenty hours building what became this site instead. It isn’t WordPress, Squarespace, or some out-of-the-box content management system. I built it from scratch.

It has already turned into more than the personal page I first pictured. Rides come with maps, elevation profiles, and downloadable GPX files. Anyone can send in their own stories, and people have. I’m working on stickers, and maybe even water bottles, which is apparently the moment a website quietly becomes an actual organization.

The archive is organized the way it’s actually used: Stories for the culture and the manifesto-level stuff, bikes for individual builds, rides for real routes with GPX files attached, people for the riders behind the bikes, places for towns and trail systems, and tech for the gearing math and build guides single-speed riding actually requires. Collections pull related pieces together when a theme is worth grouping. It isn’t a product review site or a race results database. There are plenty of those already.

This started as one person’s bikes and rides, but it isn’t meant to stay that way. One feature I’m particularly proud of is that anyone can contribute.

If you’ve got a ride report, bike build, trail guide, race recap, editorial, or photo story you’d like to share, you submit it through the website. Behind the scenes, that becomes something that can be reviewed, edited, discussed, converted into web format, and ultimately published.

I wanted contributing to feel as lightweight as reading. A real bike, a real ride, and a couple of decent photos go a long way, and polished writing isn’t required. If that sounds like you, the submit page is open.

The content itself is exactly what I enjoy: mountain bike builds, single-speed culture, mechanical disasters, editorials, ride reports, photography, and occasionally proving that one gear is enough. Or at least enough to get yourself into trouble. Home base is Golden, Colorado, and a lot of the riding starts here, but the site travels: it follows one-geared people and single-speed events all over the country, and riders scattered well beyond Colorado.

Will long-form writing ever beat short-form social media again?

Probably not.

But I don’t think that means we should stop making things worth reading.

This is my small attempt to remind people what they’re missing.

If you’re into single-speed riding, good stories, photography, or just appreciate thoughtfully built projects, I’d love for you to take a look.

The long-form stuff lives here. New pieces get announced on Instagram if you’d rather follow along there first.