Cycling Through Years of Community Service

Sometimes people walk in with questions about ski touring. Or where the best hamburger in town is. Sometimes they’ll call to question the shop about good places to camp in the area. Sometimes they’ll ask shop-specific questions about bikes, too, or Nordic skis. 

For the Glacier Cyclery and Nordic staff, nothing from the spectrum of inquiry is too far-fetched or off-topic to take a stab at answering.

Two years ago, Michael Meador, one of the downtown Whitefish shop’s co-owners who goes by Mike, received a call from a guy organizing a five-day group cycling trip later that spring. Mike and the caller discussed the group’s parameters, entailing a loop made of all dirt roads, views into Glacier National Park, less than 4,000 feet of elevation per day, and no more than 50 miles per day. 

“He asked me, ‘if you had five days off and were going to ride from your shop, where would you go?’” Meador recalled. “So, I got to go home and plan a whole route for him. It was the first time I had actually planned a route for somebody else, and then they actually went through with it.” 

The group returned from the trip with rave reviews; Meador said they’ve already visited again this year, and the group leader hinted that he and his friends might make a go for it again. 

That’s the brand of customer service animating the soul of Glacier Cyclery and Nordic, which is as much a repository of local bike-and-ski beta as it is a hub of commerce.

It’s a business model conceived of by bicycle tourists Jan and Ron Brunk, who opened the shop in 1982 for bike repairs-only, working out of a long, narrow building that stood where an open brick courtyard lies today. The shop has since moved to the left, in a wooded building with bright red doors that takes up a larger space to accommodate its expansion to bike retail, rentals and Nordic ski gear. 

In addition to Meador, co-owner Tyler Tourville and Raser Powell now oversee the shop’s day-to-day operations, with Powell in the process of buying out co-owner Vanessa Gailey, another member of the initial trio of longtime employees who in 2017 took the reins from Jan and Ron. They originally laid plans to switch leadership over the course of five years starting in 2017, allowing time for the Brunks to impart their expertise. But when the pandemic hit, Covid-19 mitigations threatened to upend the brick-and-mortar business model that had endured for decades, and Ron passed over the baton sooner than he’d anticipated. 

“The business is so different now than it was for the last 38 years,” Tourville recalled explaining to the couple at the time, prompting Ron and Jan to acknowledge that their years of expertise provided little guidance in a post-pandemic world. “You guys are in a whole new world,” Ron told them, according to Tourville. 

Even so, the shop still has the same sweet smell of chain-ring grease, and customers are still greeted by the same friendly smiles.

As an essential transportation business, Glacier Cyclery was able to keep its doors open during the outset of Covid-19 restrictions, with the new owners navigating stringent safety measures amid a bicycling boom as millions of people turned to outdoor recreation as a salve. At the same time, the Flathead Valley’s population began to spike, and the shop ramped up operations to keep pace.

“It was just kind of a trial by fire in the pandemic because the whole industry changed,” Meador recalled. 

In the beginning

Tourville, Powell and Meador have all spent most of their adult lives (other than the other occasional odd job) inside of a bike shop — since they were each 15, 16, and 17 years old, respectively. 

Meador knew Ron and Jan as a custom frame builder they serviced in Oregon. A bike ride through Montana in 1990 had convinced him that he would move here one day. So, when Ron and Jan called him in 1998 asking if he knew a bike mechanic that would be interested in moving to Whitefish and working full-time year-round, he didn’t need to look far. 

“I think I might,” Meador responded with a grin.

Tourville arrived in the Flathead primarily at the behest of his wife, who had grown up in the valley and always wanted to return, but also because of bikes. During a trip to Whitefish in 2001, Tourville went on a ride around Spencer Mountain with one of his wife’s local friends and discovered his own love for the place. Meador was the first one to greet him when he walked through Glacier Cyclery’s doors the same trip. 

“We moved here in a couple months,” Tourville said. 

Powell, the youngest of the three and the Martin City local of the group, started showing his face around the shop at a young age as a customer with an ever-breaking bike. Shortly after he got his driver’s license in 2014, Powell’s mom found an ad on Facebook calling for a store clerk to come sweep the shop in the mornings. 

“I was all over it, and I think the next day I applied,” Powell recalled. 

Back before the shop evolved to include Nordic skiing, the Brunks sold indoor workout equipment during the winter to keep staff employed year-round. It was a short-lived sales stint, in part because of the logistical challenges of delivery. Tourville remembered the pain of delivering a treadmill up a spiral staircase, remarking that the largest equipment always seemed to be for second-floor housing. 

“We all hated it,” Meador said. 

“But it did allow us to remain employed,” Tourville noted, with Meador and Powell nodding in agreement. 

A few years later, the Brunks purchased a seasonal ski shack out on the golf course, running the two business separately for five years before combining them into what is today Glacier Cyclery and Nordic. 

“We at least have enthusiasm for cross country skiing,” Tourville said. “We all want to exercise outside, right?”

“We’re not indoors people at all,” Meador said. “That’s why we’re going to make a retractable roof soon where we can have our workstations outside, as soon as the funding comes in.” 

A community staple

The variety of offerings in the bike shop reflects the range of bike trails around the valley, which, as Meador and the others note, is broad. Santa Cruz mountain bikes, Kona gravel bikes, fat bikes, e-bikes, kids’ bikes — you name it, it’s likely that Glacier Cyclery and Nordic has it in stock, or knows where to find it. The only wheels they don’t really keep in stock are road bikes, sales of which Tourville said have significantly dropped locally, due in part to the increase in traffic and street lanes featuring narrow or non-existent shoulders to ride on. 

On the Nordic front, the shop offers a variety of cross-country ski packages, including half-day, full-day or overnight rentals. For those with their own skinny skis, the shop services skis for repairs, waxing, binding mounts and pole shortening. 

“The variety of people and bikes here is amazing for a small town in northwest Montana,” Tourville said, describing part of what attracted him to the area.

Beyond the formal ownership titles that designate a point-person for high level problem solving, the owners run a team-oriented workplace, which was another prominent prong of the founders’ business model. 

“Ron and Jan didn’t really like having titles, per se,” Tourville said. “They just liked people that took initiative, and it’s always been a very big team effort.”  

Meador emphasized the lack of hierarchy. “We still all shovel snow and clean toilets,” he said. 

The shop is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on weekdays in the winter, closing an hour earlier on Saturdays and closed on Sundays. In the summer, they’ll open an hour earlier. 

The team also provides mobile support for local bike races. Meador stands by with watermelons and moral support for contestants struggling through the Joe Cosley Pancake Ride, a brutal 100- to 200-mile annual race that brags of impossible elevation gains. The team staffs an aid station for the Last Best Ride, a local gravel bike race, and was instrumental in organizing the Cino Heroica ride from Kila to Hot Springs, an ode to a bygone era of bicycle racing that included a mid-point potluck and mobile bar.

Powell spotlights the mobile mechanic van the cyclery drove around last summer, with stints at the Columbia Falls farmers market and a day in the canyon fixing kid’s bikes for free. 

“We’d love to do more of that kind of stuff,” Meador said. “Just community, just getting people on bikes, it’s never a bad thing.”

The shop works with nonprofit and local trail organizations like Whitefish Legacy Partners to host trail rides, a project that snowballed out of some local trail advocacy groups like Friends of Spencer that Tourville served in as a member. Last year, the shop ran a weekly women’s gravel ride, taking turns hosting alongside neighboring local bike shop Great Northern Cycle & Ski. 

Service with a smile

The co-owners sit on black-wired chairs in the shop’s courtyard, soaking up some of spring’s first sunbeams as they swap stories about their favorite nearby trails. A customer drops a box of pastries from Fleur Bake Shop on the table in gratitude for the ongoing mechanical work on his bike. 

“That guy goes overboard,” Meador said, noting the customer’s regular habit of generosity as he reaches for an almond tart. 

“We’ve done a lot of work for him, and he really loves riding bikes,” Tourville added. 

It brings up memories of Gabe, a customer-turned-summer-staffer known on long bike rides for his “random pastry bag,” a bike bag full of exposed pastries for fellow riders to grab. 

“You’re never allowed to look in,” Powell said, all three laughing. 

Though the customer base has grown exponentially over the years with the increase in population and tourism during the busy summer months, the crew still recognizes the community of regulars around the area, calling out bikes by the last time they received a tune-up or when they were sold. 

An essential element of this familiarity is rooted in the reputation the shop has earned in its friendliness and accessibility, including answering strangers’ wide-ranging questions about the area. Despite the high volume of non-bike and non-Nordic related phone calls the owners of Glacier Cyclery and Nordic field on a regular basis, the shop services don’t technically include a valley concierge service, and never will, Tourville said. 

“If we hired for it then there’d be expectations that we know everything,” he said.

Meador called the service a “byproduct,” which, “when it happens, is unscripted and passion oriented.”

“I just think a lot of bike shops in general are places to go where people are very, very familiar with their surroundings and the lay of the land,” Meador said. 

Tourville agreed, commenting on the fact that they’ve all been in bike shops their whole lives. 

“We all know we’re not going to make a bunch of money being bike shop owners,” Tourville said. “We do it because we love coming to work and working with people that like to ride bikes.”