Greg Matyas riding on the Knik Glacier on the Corvus FLT, named Fat Bike of the Year from three different industry publications, photo by Cheryl Matyas. 
Greg Matyas before the 2011 Iditarod Trail Invitational with a limited edition USA-made steel frame Fatback, photo courtesy Greg Matyas. 
2009 Fatback, USA-made titanium frame, photo courtesy Greg Matyas.
Biking in the snow in Alaska has a history dating back to at least the Klondike Gold Rush. It was the beginning of the Victorian bicycle boom and some gold prospectors coming to Alaska and Canada went with bikes for transportation instead of investing in a much more expensive dog team. One route, the 400-mile trail from Dawson to Whitehorse, well-maintained by dog-sled travel, saw at least 250 cyclists in a single season during the gold rush. Bikes were a single fixed gear with skinny tires. While road bikes changed over the decades, the first new type of bike didn’t evolve until the mountain bike hit the trails in the late 1970s. Within ten years of their introduction, Alaskans were tinkering with the mountain bike design to allow better travel over snowy surfaces. Our guest for this show, Greg Matyas, followed this evolution of the bike from the road to the trails to the snow. He is the owner of Speedway Cycles and the changes he made while developing his fat bike, called the Fatback, earned him the moniker “father of the modern fat bike.”
GUEST:
Greg Matyas, father of the modern fat bike and owner of Speedway Cycles
LINKS:
- “Crossing frozen Alaska by bike – a hundred years ago,”
- “Alaska’s Gold Rush cyclists: Some things don’t change,”
- Anchorage Museum Exhibit, Snow Flyers, through April 5, 2020
- Speedway Cycles, home of the Fatback
BROADCAST: Thursday, January 16th, 2020. 2:00 pm – 3:00 p.m. AKT
REPEAT BROADCAST: Thursday, January 16th, 2020. 8:00 – 9:00 p.m. AKT
SUBSCRIBE: Receive Outdoor Explorer automatically every week via:
Eric Bork, or you can just call him “Bork” because everybody else does, is the FM Operations Manager for KSKA-FM. He oversees the day-to-day operations of the FM broadcast. He produces and edits episodes of Outdoor Explorer, the Alaska-focused outdoors program. He also maintains the web posts for that show. You may have heard him filling in for Morning Edition or hosting All Things Considered and can still find him operating the soundboard for any of the live broadcast programs.
After escaping the Detroit area when he was 18, Bork made it up to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he earned a degree in Communications/Radio Broadcasting from Northern Michigan University. He spent time managing the college radio station, working for the local NPR affiliate, and then in top 40 radio in Michigan before coming to Alaska to work his first few summers. After then moving to Chicago, it only took five years to convince him to move back to Alaska in 2010. When not involved in great radio programming he’s probably riding a bicycle, thinking about riding bicycles, dreaming about bikes, reading a book, or planning the next place he’ll travel to. Only two continents left to conquer!
