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Coconino Cycles
Steve Garro from Coconino Cycles here. So far in this series the lives seem to have traveled a theme, a common thread or vein. well, my life wasn't anything like those. I grew up in Tuba City AZ in the middle of the Navajo Indian reservation from 2nd grade on. it was at the end of the pavement in the middle on nowhere - just google earth it. it was all dirt, rock and sand for as far as you could see, and on a bluebird day that was the san francisco peaks 75mi. away. My dad was the maintenence man at the IHS hospital for 27yrs. I had a Navajo stepmom, and was raised in her family mostly. I rode my schwinn varsity all around in the sand and thorns after i bumped up from my garage sale stingray. I was largely shunned by allot of people as this was the hight of the AIM movement's "anti honkey" era. so, most of my time was spent in the desert riding my bike, fishing, rockhounding & canyoneering. good stuff. in my highschool of 2500 students there were 12 white kids. i'm still a little wierded out if i'm around nothing but white people. we hunted, fished, had a huge garden, trapped & had livestock. i knew of nothing else. we got two stations on the TV part of the time, and one was WGN {?} and one was 5 from phoenix, so i at least got wallace & ladmo {look it up.} ultimately, me & my dad didn't get along so he dropped me off on a corner in flagstaff, AZ with $20.00 and told me to get a job. i was 16 & i am still here. i have been a baker, a cook, a mason, a roofer, a greenhouse guy, a tree trimmer, anything that would pay. at 20 i got into being a mormon lake hotshot, an initial attack wilderness firefighter. my first summer was 100 days in yellowstone. awesome. the next year carrying chainsaws up mountains was blowing my knees out, and i had been mountain biking for about 12 years & i wanted to be a mechanic, so when a job opened up i got on that bandwagon of rotating bike shop jobs up until 2000, when i became 1/2 owner of a bikeshop. me & the other guy did not get along, so we split. along the way i had also been working winters building custom aluminum white water rafting gear, joining tubes, filing & polishing {sound familiar?} and i had $7000.00, a whole shop's worth of tools, metalworking experence and nothing to loose so i went to UBI and built a frame & then went to vulture cycles and built 4 more, one of which got cut up. it was great. i already knew about bikes, and i knew about joining tubes. i had all these great ideas about how i would spend my time afterwards, but Coconino Cycles just took off and i have been building bike after bike since Feb. 2003. Oh yeah - along the way, i rode the hell out of bikes. i never drove a car, ever. i raced my ass off for 20+ years. i could line up at the front of any given ultra endurance race and hold it until the end. I bike toured mexico four times, new zealand, chile/argentina, chile/bolivia, & throughout the southwest, trekked peru, spent every moment i could in the grand canyon, and for the last seven years, built allot of bike frames. poeple like my bike frames, and that makes me happy. I hope that gives you a sense of what i'm about. let the questions fly.
-Steve Garro.
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Originally Posted by edoz
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