Our story begins.
In the fall of 2009 John Williams and Jeremy Smith started the Spearfish Bicycle Cooperative based out of a shop on Ames St. The initial impulse for this project came from a grant we received from a group called Focus the Nation that was working to promote youth-led initiatives to transition away from fossil fuels.
As a part of this grant, we installed the first grid-tied solar array in the Northern Hills on the roof of our shop space. During the time we were at the shop on Ames St. we had regular open shop hours, weekly community rides, women’s workshops, potlucks, hosted book tours and music/theater performances and began organizing community bicycle events that are still ongoing – Spearfish Bike Week in late August and an expanded National Bike to Work Week celebration in May. If you are curious for more about the early years of the co-op, here’s a link to our first website http://spearfishbikecoop.blogspot.com/.
At the end of 2015 we needed to move out of our original space. We kept organizing community rides and pop-up workshops while trying to find a new shop, and in the spring of 2019, we reopened as a part of makeSPACE, a collaborative workspace bridging the arts, equity education, and cycling communities. As makeSPACE we took on organizing the Bike Train and the Girls on Bikes program. Due to several factors, Covid included, in the fall of 2021 the cycling aspect of makeSPACE transitioned into its own 501 c(3) and the Spearfish Bicycle Collective was formed. We are excited to be moving into a new workspace in the summer of 2022 and will still be organizing bike events all year long. Let us know how you’d like to be involved.
We are so grateful for all of the support this community has shown as we have gone through these transitions and look forward to many more years of celebrating bicycles in the Spearfish and the Northern Hills.