NY Times Article.

Just over 10 years ago, Fruita was a depressed agricultural town with an oil refinery being shut down by the Environmental Protection Agency. Then, Troy Rarick, a 44-year-old cyclist from nearby Grand Junction, conceived a plan to transform Fruita by giving it a new identity: ecotourism hub.

“So many people were driving from Denver to Moab,” Mr. Rarick said. “Fruita is surrounded by two million acres of public land. Why was there nothing here?”

In 1994, Mr. Rarick bought a downtown storefront for $26,000 and recruited a band of residents to build trails in an area on the north end of town called 18 Road, where broad, high mesas erode in 3,000-foot plumes that slope down to the verdant valley floor. Official trails would have taken years to permit and then would have been built as “multiuse,” which for mountain bikers translates to “awfully boring.”

So Mr. Rarick’s crew surreptitiously tromped through the vast United States Bureau of Land Management territory with shovels, meticulously designing what many mountain bikers would describe as their dream terrain, trails replete with steep banks and mad twists and turns.

While the trails were being carved, Mr. Rarick opened a bike shop, Over the Edge Sports; organized an annual festival; and lobbied the town council to recast amenities for visiting cyclists. Today the joke is that in Fruita, bikes outnumber people.

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