The podcast series: Bicycling in the San Luis Valley

We released four full episodes of a podcast series that set us forward into a new form of audio storytelling. Within the episodes, we featured in-studio guests who spoke with Marty Jones. A few of those guests appeared virtually, but they were recorded in our studio. Most of the other audio pieces were conducted outside with people on the streets with their bikes. 

This series was unlike anything we’d ever done before. It incorporated in-studio narration with out-in-the-field interviews to tell a story that was both entertaining and informative. The medium of storytelling that podcasts provide is an important way to not only tell compelling stories, but listen to the voices of the people whose stories we are telling. 

The title of our first episode was a quote by Judy Egbert, who told us that after falling in love with bike riding and owning different bikes throughout the years, she rides because “it saves my sanity.” 

We didn’t just hear from bike riders. We interviewed Tony Cady and Annalies Van Vonno from the Colorado Department of Transportation. They told The Citizen that the state agency is in the midst of a culture shift that will look at Colorado’s motorways as more than just motorways but travel corridors that accommodate different forms of transportation.

Cady told us, “As an agency we are trying to encourage the use of our roadways by bicyclists and pedestrian traffic. We’re also really trying to encourage more transit oriented services in our rural areas to get less cars on the road themselves, right?

“We’re getting faced with much more mobility issues, congestion, motor vehicle conflicts, and we know we’re not going to be able to build our way out of those issues and we need to find other ways of solving those problems. And one of the best ways we’ve found to do that is to just try to take the sheer volume of cars off our roadways. And the only way to do that is to really enhance the ability for people to safely use our roads by walking, by cycling and by using transit services. That is a struggle in rural Colorado and one that we’re trying to tackle.”

CDOT is also looking at how, through that culture change, it can accommodate those who can neither drive a car or ride a bike. 

“A long time ago and to some extent still now, I mean CDOT, our main goal is really to take care of the highways, the state highways, the interstates,” said Van Vonno, “but there’s also so much more than just highways and interstates and vehicular traffic. We’re really focusing on how we can have a multimodal transportation system that works for everyone because there are a lot of folks who either don’t drive or can’t drive when you add up all of the people who are too young to drive or too old and don’t feel comfortable driving anymore.

“Over a third of our population either does not drive, cannot drive or doesn’t want to drive. And we need a transportation system that serves everyone, and not just the people who have the ability and the means to own and operate a car.”

The audio series wasn’t just purely data and advocacy-driven. In Part III, we talked with SLV Rattlers Mountain Bike team coach Gregg Goodland and captain Summit Mashburn. The Rattlers are a Valley-wide high school mountain bike team. They are organized and practice like any other organized sport. Except, their practice fields aren’t turf. They work out between Penitente Canyon’s volcanic tuff walls, or through Stone Quarry dust and Limekiln sand. 

“When I started the team,” said Mashburn, “I had little to no experience on a mountain bike. Eventually after doing the team for a while I got the experience of being on a mountain bike and I got to learn how to be on a mountain bike and it was a lot of fun.”

Ride With a Rattler day is kind of like a try out, but Mashbrun said, “It’s not exactly, if you do it you can fail or if you do it you’ll pass. We just want the team to have fun. And we want to kind of add more rattlers to the team and have more team members.”

Mountain recreation, as the data suggests, takes up a large portion of the average Valley cyclist’s time. In our other podcast series, The Valley Pod, we talked with Sean Noonan. Noonan is the Bureau of Land Management’s Recreation Planner for the SLV. He told us that the Valley’s BLM open, public space is a little over 500,000 acres. 

Which translates to a lot of places to ride a bike.