Turning Tragedy into an Electric Opportunity
One morning, my wife and I headed out for breakfast and noticed a worried ranger heading down the hill beside Pfeiffer Canyon Bridge, our only connection to civilization. Sure enough, the bridge was falling down.
We scrambled. My family moved to Carmel so that the kids could finish school, and we parked our cars north of where the bridge used to be. But I needed to stay on our new “island” to work. What could I do?
Living in a mountainous area, I knew that using a standard bike as my main mode of transportation would be difficult. I began looking into electric bikes to see how technology had advanced, thinking that they represented a possible solution. As I saw the power and range available, I got excited.
My father and I carried a pair of electric Rad Power bikes up the ½-mile bypass trail built by emergency crews. Our plan was to use these bikes as a utilitarian form of transportation. The next morning, we decided to test the bikes’ range and ended up making it all the way to McWay Falls and back. I was grinning so wide that my face almost split! An hour later, I drew up a business plan for Big Sur Adventures.
The chance to ride Highway 1 through Big Sur with no traffic was a unique opportunity. I heard so many people say that they wished Highway 1 could just shut down to cars. When it reopened, we needed to find another place where we could ride peacefully all day, another place that could give us that “perma-grin”. Point Lobos blew us away. The bike paths along the oceanfront in Pacific Grove and Pebble Beach also left us smiling all day.
At the end, we found a space in Pacific Grove, right where our favorite ride starts.
We hope that one day, it might become your favorite ride too!
