Justin Short is a charismatic, humorous, activist in Spokane’s cycling community. As a kid, Justin started out as a BMX rider, which evolved into doing a 400-mile tour–on a BMX! In the late 1990s he started playing around with bike touring and off-road cycling, and got turned on to bikepacking as a participant in the 2019 Cross-Washington Mountain Bike event (aka XWA).
Outside of working 50-60 hour weeks as an 18-wheeler truck driver for a natural foods distributor, Justin has created Gravel Braintrust, is considered a fabulous rider, great illustrator, route developer, and event organizer.
For Justin, like many of us, cycling is an essential therapy for navigating the ups and downs of human life. Check out his heartfelt story:
Talk about how you got into cycling
I was the last kid in my neighborhood to get my training wheels off. That was 48 years ago so perhaps I’ve made up for lost time by now. I’ll be darned if it wasn’t the mere existence of bikes that got me into bikes. I was always just as excited to thrash about on a department store bmx with skidded-through hard rubber tires, and bashing my shins to a pulp with bare spindles after the pedal platforms had long since broken off as I am now to ride in the golden age of tubeless tires, disc brakes, and GPS navigation.
I was a BMX-er for a good 20 years, racing for 10. If I do the math–I was an English major, mind you–I’ve now NOT been a BMXer for as long as I was.
It was bikepacking that killed my competitive nature. I did my first trip–400 miles from my dad’s farm in Pennsyltucky to my mom’s farm in New York–on the BMX bike of course. I tied my Army sleeping bag with its own straps directly to the seat rails, and the enormous Army ruck sack I wore gave me saddle sores on my back. It was the same bike as my one and only magazine cover photo–Dig BMX Magazine–back in 1994. I knocked off 80 mile days on that rig, I was like death warmed over when I rolled into camp, which was a cornfield one night, behind a gas station another night, and the best Barney spot was a graveyard on Friday the 13th. I was freaking mystified by the idea of going somewhere far away on my bike, though I never did it again on the BMX.
I got my first road bike when I bike messengered in Pittsburgh for a year after college. It was a Cannondale crit bike, and I was amazed at how quickly I got around on that thing. But let’s be honest, there wasn’t much recreational riding going on during the messenger year. After messengering for a year, I thought I’d better go and see Colorado before the law of averages catches up with me. That crit bike saw plenty of Colorado gravel during the couple years I lived there, as well as plenty of redwoods singletrack after I moved to Santa Cruz.
I bought a 1981 Specialized Sequoia from a second hand shop in like ‘98, and that thing was the predecessor to the modern gravel/adventure bike. The only 2 real improvements the modern gravel bike has over Methuselah–that’s what I called that thing–are tubeless tires and disc brakes. I rode it all over California, Oregon, Colorado, and a little bit of BC. By that time I called what I was doing “bike touring,” and I tended to bring along the kitchen sink. “Bikepacking” wouldn’t happen to me until 2018 when I went on a little 3-day adventure around Vermont with a modern ultralight’ish setup. What struck me was how gently the 80 mile days rolled off.
2018 coincided with a life change in which I pivoted hard back into bikes after giving them the cold shoulder for about a dozen years. I bought my first modern gravel bike that year, and then a friend conned me into signing up for the 2019 Cross-Washington Mountain Bike event (aka XWA). It was like that episode with the BMX bike all over again, and I was completely mystified aaaand a little beat up. And the community of riders wasn’t the retired accountant types I typically ran into while touring the coast back in the 90’s. These goofballs were full-on Beyond Thunderdome. I had found my people. I’ve ridden XWA twice now, and while I’ll definitely do it again sometime, the late spring/early summer calendar is stacked with events, and I have a fascination with riding places I’ve never been before.
Talk about Gravel Braintrust
The Gravel Braintrust is a little online community I started after realizing that I was posting gravel rides and events on Spokane mountain bike pages. It’s mostly been on Facebook; a website has come and gone, soon to be resurrected. I’d like it to be a gravel/adventure/bikepacking resource with routes and intel, a calendar of events, and a bit ride journalism, plus a merch page with stickers, caps, bandanas and such. My current business model of printing up stickers and giving them away to every rider I meet hasn’t proven to be the most sustainable thing.
Talk about the Spokane cycling scene
The bike community here is super enthusiastic and supportive, and a there’s a strong multidisciplinarian population of riders here. You might run into one of your MTB friends on a road bike somewhere, or a friend you know from riding gravel might be ripping slabs fit for Redbull Rampage in the MTB park, and an awful lot of us ride fat bikes in the winter. Gravel has become the crossection where most of us meet.
The thing that struck me when I moved here in 2012 is how much urban single track there is. No matter where you are in town, there’s a trailhead somewhere close by. I began exploring those things on the MTB, and at the time a 25-mile ride was a big day, because I mostly hung out in the jump park or joined in the occasional Tuesday night shop ride. That was a fun group, and through them I heard the local lore from rider who grew up here. One of them mentioned the Midnight Century (MC), and 2 weeks later I was initiated into the mysteries of Spokane’s underground gravel scene. There’s no organization to this thing, no support, it just happens. It’s been going on for 20 years as of last year, and almost no one remembers who started that ball rolling. It became a gravel ride in 2008. When I showed up for my first MC in 2017 (on a road bike, of course) there had to be 60+ riders, and one hell of a party atmosphere. In 2018 I had a proper gravel bike, and I did some major exploration of the urban single track in preparation for that year’s MC. As autumn was creeping in that year, I organized a spoof of a gravel race up Mt Spokane and called it Dirty Spokanza. A dozen riders showed up the first year, then 2 dozen in 2019, and 75 riders in 2020, even though we were in COVID lockdown. I got a cease and desist letter from Lifetime Fitness over the name, and if those miserable scumbags wouldn’t have dragged their feet coming up with the dumb corporate focus group’esque name “Unbound Gravel,” then I totally would have called my event “Unground Bavel,” and maybe collected another cease and desist letter. I’ve kind’a lost my ambition to create a proper race/event with permits, insurance, feed stations, and crews of volunteers. I’ve been slowly walking back the level of organization back towards the Midnight Century level of organization, so almost none. I still get 50-75 riders showing up, even though I’ve been reluctant to let folks know it’s even happening until it’s less than a week out.
The gravel boom was really starting to go mainstream as I was getting into it, and it seemed like almost every rider of every kind in town was either getting a gravel bike or running whatever bike they had. Gravel quickly became the center of the biker Venn diagram, and cross sections of bike communities that didn’t ordinarily hang out together–roadies and mountain bikers for example–would spend absurdly long days and/or nights riding together, getting to know one another in the way you only can when you’re lost in the woods on a bike in the middle of nowhere. I think a lot of us have lived through some stuff, so the longform conversations that unfold tend to be pretty therapeutic, and at the same time we’re busy creating new trauma bonds.
My pandemic project was the creation of the Circum-Spokane-Cision Adventure Route, a 100+ mile/11,000 foot loop that hits almost every major mountain and trail network surrounding Spokane. I’ve only pulled it off once in its entirety, it’s one hell of a day with a lot of full-on mountain biking. I think it was here that I began to recognize that I’m better off as community builder than a route builder, or at least that’s the impression I get from some of the folks I con into riding with me. Having said that, I do have a solid crew of nut jobs here who are down for my nonsense, and have plenty of their own to dish out. But you really don’t grow a community with the kind of absurdist distance and terrain that is somewhat expected in the gravel world. I like to enlist the help of more sensible riders to create routes for the general public, like the Pre-Midnight 50. It’s a 50 mile loop for the “midnight curious” that finishes just as the Midnight Century is getting ready to roll out. Riders arrive back at the start as a palpable wave of excitement is rippling through the mob of riders showing up for century. My friend Patty Jo created the first iteration of the Pre Midnight 50, and a bunch of new riders showed up, almost all of them rode the century the next year. I created a janky-ass route the next year, with plenty of messed up single track, drainage tunnels, bombing down stairs, bushwhacking, dodging sprinklers and whatnot. I was sweating bullets waiting to see who would show up for this thing, fortunately the entire group was a bunch of my mountain bike friends, and we had a blast, but that could have been a bad experience for a new rider. As it is, I got a friend in over his head on the Patty Jo version last year, but I paced with him back to the start where he was immediately infected by the fervor of the century, and he’s totally down for that next time around.
Talk about your inspirations and motivations for route and event creation
The 2019 Cross-Washington Bike Race (XWA) was my gateway drug into multi-day ultra distance stuff. If I knew what’s good for me, I should just stay the hell out of bikepacking route creation. But I don’t, so of course I’m going to show up at a dam I can’t cross with no food or water and the nearest re-supply on the other side. Stumbling upon private land is a common issue, too. I still get my hands dirty creating routes, I just have to be careful who I bring along, because flexibility is key. I don’t ever do proper route recon, I just go ride the thing, and then find out the bad new when I get there, the we re-route, or ask neighbors for local intel. A couple times I’ve been able to track down a property owner to get permission or have it denied. That sort of thing has helped me to to really appreciate the hard work that goes into creating a solid route.
I have a hard time finding time for that level of route investigation when I’m working 50-60 hours per week and trying to get ready for some big dumb ride or another. So I do what I can to promote routes that are solid and well developed, like Idaho Panhandle Ramble (aka PanRam). Bikepacking routes are an excellent way to get cross-pollination between different cycling communities. We have a lot of different routes with grand depart events around the Pacific Northwest in the 300-400’ish mile range. Some of these things I’m able to knock off over my 3 day weekend, and it’s as much about meeting riders for me as it is seeing places I’ve never been before, of seeing places I have been, but from and entirely different perspective and frame of reference. I never knew Mt Spokane was visible 100 miles from the finish of XWA until 2021 when I realized that’s what I was seeing in the distance. Mt Spokane isn’t a towering snow capped menace, by any means. My wife calls it a green bump with trees, but has been a refuge for me. I kind’a feel like Mt Spokane is my mountain and my heart belongs to it; and to see it out there in the distance, guiding me to the finish was an emotionally impactful experience. I cried about as hard as I’ve ever cried on a bike that day, tears of joy of course. I get into some interesting inner states on the bike in which I can access emotions that are hard to approach. It’s not always rainbows and puppies. It was an existential crisis that pushed me back into bikes at this point of my life, and I am by no means finished processing that and other crap.
