If you’ve been mountain biking long enough, it’s happened to you. Maybe it’s a trail section that you’ve been able to clear for awhile but anxiously await the challenge on your weekly ride. Maybe it’s a section that you have yet to clean, but you will not be beaten. Then, one day, you show up and the trail has been sanitized. Swept clean of any true difficulty in an effort to make the trail more “rideable.”
We hate it as much as the next rider, which is why these shirts from Lindarets give us a chuckle. If you haven’t heard, Lindarets is a new company that was started by a friend of ours that will focus on socks. Really nice socks that will keep your feet happy on long rides, but they’re also advocates for the environment, local manufacturing, and yes, trail building. The printed-in-New-Mexico tees are a bargain considering that at $22.50 they are only $.50 more than the American Apparel Tri-Blend blanks they’re printed on, plus it’s a good way to voice your opinion that mountain biking should be technical.
Tees are available in XS-XL.
From Lindarets:
While we are still working on our first ‘real’ products, the Lindarets team decided that we needed something for our friends during our annual pilgrimage to Interbike. Out riding some local trails, we noticed that the trail sanitizers had been back at work: digging up rocks, cutting out easy log-overs, and cutting ‘bro’ lines. Happily, our frustration found an outlet- and the “Rocks Belong” tee was born.
Now, we’re all for making mountain biking accessible- but believe that the sport’s physical and technical challenges are a big part of what has kept us riding for the past twenty-five years. Sure, there are trail sections and features that most of us will never ride cleanly (if at all), but we know that there is a rider out there who comes to these challenges month after month and year after year- and one day will. Removing these challenges not only unfairly deprives that rider, but prevents us from ever becoming that rider.
Without technical and physical challenges, trails can become too easy and, over time, lose our interest. Without challenges, we don’t have the opportunity for self-improvement, to cheer our friends up a hill, or even a good reason to get off and walk. Without challenges, we lose much of what mountain biking is all about.
Lindarets exists to make products that we’re excited about, in a way that we can stand behind. To that end, the Rocks Belong tee is printed in New Mexico on a Los Angeles-made American Apparel Tri-Blend Tee- the most comfortable shirt we’ve worn. They’re not cheap- but they’re worth it.
Yes, we made this shirt for ourselves. But given the response at Interbike, we’ve had more made for anyone who—as the small print says—wants to keep mountain biking technical.
