From a humble beginning: Spokane Bicycle Club marks 50 years

A group of about a dozen cyclists gathered near a cafe off Northwest Boulevard on a recent Monday. It was a little before 8 a.m., the sun just beginning to warm the city.

Don Barden watched as the attendees signed their names on a clipboard and prepared their bikes. Barden was the guy in charge, and the plan that morning was the same as it is just about every Monday – ride from the cafe to the Aubrey L. White Parkway and on to Long Lake. Then, turn around and come back.

“It’s fairly hilly, so it’s a good workout,” said Barden, who’s been leading the ride for the past few years.

The ride is one of many organized by the Spokane Bicycle Club, a group of some 250 cycling enthusiasts that can be found riding around the region most days of the week.

The club is celebrating its 50th anniversary with an event Saturday. The event will mark not only an achievement in longevity, but also a transformation.

Today, the club holds rides most days of the week, and a wide variety of them – casual trips on flat pavement, intense hill climbs, scenic jaunts on the trails of North Idaho. Its members keep tabs on the happenings of local government. It also works to encourage bicycle commuting and to spread the gospel of bicycle safety.

But it all began much more humbly, with one woman who just liked riding her bike.

A small beginning

Alice Hostetter wanted something active to do. It was the 1960s, and she and her husband were living in Sacramento, California. She was in her 30s, and most of the things she did were fairly sedentary – going to school, teaching piano lessons, playing the organ in church.

People she knew were into golf or bowling, neither of which appealed to her. Then some friends showed her and her husband a slideshow of recent bike trips they’d taken.

Hostetter doesn’t remember where her friends had ridden their bikes. She just remembers that it looked like fun.

They bought a pair of bikes – he wanted to ride, too – and she started pedaling her way around Sacramento.

She loved it. She was seeing new parts of the city, always trying to find out what was around the next bend.

“There was always that aspect,” she said. “The adventure of it.”

She joined a bicycle club there and started going on organized group rides. When those rides were over, she’d often go home and highlight the route on a map, paying close attention to how it was planned.

Eventually, she and her husband decided they wanted to move north. They ended up in Spokane Valley in 1972. Soon after they arrived, she got out on her bike.

She remembers the first ride she did on her own, taking Sullivan Road to Saltese Road. She climbed up a hill and as she came down, she realized she’d left the city behind.

“I thought, ‘Oh, this is gorgeous,’ ” she said. “To think that I’m out in the country just such a short distance from our home was just amazing.”

At first, that’s all she had: rides through the countryside, by herself. She felt like she was the only adult riding a bicycle in all of Spokane. People in cars sometimes gave her strange looks.

Three women in her neighborhood noticed what she was doing, though, and they reacted with curiosity.

They asked Hostetter if she could help them get started in cycling. She agreed.

Soon, they were riding together every week. Early on, the rides were short, and Hostetter had no inkling it would ever turn into something more than four women going for a ride.

“I wasn’t trying to start a bike club,” Hostetter said. “It was just a matter of going out and riding with friends.”

Becoming a club

It wasn’t long before riding with friends naturally turned into a full-fledged club. By 1976, the club had 25 members (including at least two octogenarians) and a name: Spokane Valley Bicycle Club.

A newsletter gave members a ride schedule. (For a time, former Spokesman-Review outdoors editor Rich Landers managed the newsletter.) For rides that weren’t on the schedule, the club used a phone chain – one person would call another to let them know about the ride, and then that person would call someone else and so on until the list of names had been exhausted.

More ambitious rides were planned. A copy of a newsletter from the spring of 1978 details a ride along the Oregon Coast, from Astoria to Coos Bay.

Hostetter’s involvement tapered off in the years after she founded the club. She started taking classes at Whitworth University and got busy. Meanwhile, the club became more organized. It dropped the “valley” from its name, and membership climbed into the hundreds.

Often, the new members were people like Margaret Watson, who joined in 1986. She was 50 and hadn’t spent much time on a bike since she was a child.

“I was very green, very new,” Watson said. “It took me a long time to get used to riding a bike for long distances.”

Over time, though, she got used to it, and she started going on longer and longer rides. She even served as club president for a couple of years. She said cycling taught her a lot about the region, and how to get around. She also credits it with keeping her healthy.

She kept riding until just recently, having told herself she’d stick with it until she turned 85.

“Bicycling for me was the best thing I’ve ever done,” Watson said.

Evolution

As the club grew, so did its influence on Spokane.

Its members started paying closer attention to government decisions that affect cyclists. Sally Phillips, who joined the club in 1989, is the club’s government affairs representative, which means she tracks actions by the city or state that affect cyclists and keeps the club informed.

Doing so has helped the club have a voice on issues that affect them, like improving bike infrastructure or mapping out a new trail. Phillips was reluctant to say any one thing got done because of the club, but she has noticed a shift.

She said concern about bicycle safety has increased over the past few decades, and that officials are more willing to accommodate cyclists when making decisions about road improvements.

The club has given back in other ways, too. Members have taught bicycle education in schools. For years, the club has run an attended bike parking area at the annual Bloomsday race.

Each May, it runs a number of events meant to encourage more people to use bikes as a primary mode of transportation.

Some things about the club have changed. The newsletter is digital. The phone chain is a thing of the past. People can find the week’s schedule online, and they sign up for rides there. Members can use an app called Ride with GPS to map rides.

The bikes have changed, too. On a typical club outing, it’s not uncommon to see someone on an e-bike.

But even with the changes, Phillips said, the club’s core purpose has stayed the same.

“The meat and potatoes for our club is a social group that gets together to ride bikes,” she said. “That’s the No. 1 thing that we do.”

From a small beginning

Hostetter is 87 now. She lives in a retirement community in Spokane. The Centennial Trail isn’t far from her front door, but she no longer owns a bike. She stopped riding shortly after her husband died, about six years ago.

She has the memories, though. Her first rides in Sacramento, the solo rides in Spokane. All the long trips she took with a friend – across the country, along the Mississippi River, around Washington’s San Juan Islands and many, many more.

Hostetter was never president of the club. After she finished studying at Whitworth, she worked as a teacher for a while. When she eventually had more time on her hands, she started riding more. For years, she led rides on Thursdays, a casual group she called the “Scenic Riders.”

That’s what she liked to do. She wanted to be the one leading a ride, not the one worrying about running a club.

That’s how it all got started anyway, even though she didn’t think she was founding a bike club.

“It gives me a lot of satisfaction to know that out of a small beginning, it developed to what it is today,” she said.