On a mild evening last November, a mass of some 300 mountain bikers assembled for an outdoor dance party that promised to trigger yet another round of noise complaints from the residents of Sedona, Arizona. By day, these Roam Fest participants had raged on area trails. Now, beneath glowing string lights, the colorfully costumed crowd prepared to shake it hard and loud.

Uninhibited dance sessions are a signature feature of Roam Fest, a three-day celebration of women’s mountain biking held since 2017 in singletrack-heavy locations across the country. To preserve that raucous tradition while also placating the Sedonans who had called the police to Roam Fest in previous years, event organizer Ash Zolton addressed the tutu-wearing multitude with a compromise: Headphones would facilitate a silent disco. The change would bring a bonus benefit. “We’ve heard that our soundtrack is just too white,” says Zolton, a white, queer woman with a merry swagger. So while one channel on the headphones broadcast ’80s tunes by artists like Cyndi Lauper, the other aired Flo Rida and Spanish-language rap.

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The gathering included white, Black, brown, and Asian women; some identified as part of the LGBTQ+ community, others didn’t. There were women with silver hair, there were women using wheelchairs or wearing prosthetic limbs, and there were skinny women and chubby women and women in between. One woman donned an inflatable unicorn costume; another sported a Sasquatch getup lit with LED light bulbs. Everyone, however, was ready to throw their scabby, biking-bloodied arms in the air like they just didn’t care.

Mountain biking is Roam Fest’s raison d’être, but the collective energy here taps into something deeper than sport, something attendees seem desperate to connect with. Registration for Roam Fest fills within minutes, and participation and sponsorship dollars have been growing. It was formerly staged as smaller events in Sedona, Knoxville, Tennessee, and Fruita—not far from its headquarters in Grand Junction—but Roam Fest 2024 will welcome 1,000 femme-identifying cyclists to just one September gathering in Fruita. Smartwool, a Colorado-based outdoor lifestyle brand (rather than a cycling-specific manufacturer, as in the past), is the new presenting sponsor.

That change in benefactors is a bigger deal than one might think. While companies across the outdoor industry and businesses worldwide claim to want to exhibit the values of diversity, equity, and inclusion, perhaps no entity is doing inclusion programming better than Roam Fest. The festival’s appeal—and the reason this mountain biking extravaganza is gaining influence beyond cycling—is that few here feel left out.

Roam Fest has a come-one, come-all ethos. Photo by Re Wikstrom

Outdoor recreation—and the mountain sports that shape Colorado’s state identity—is notorious for lacking racial, ethnic, and cultural diversity. Major outdoor brands have tried to address the predominance of white privilege with programs such as the REI Cooperative Action Fund, which delivers donations to nonprofit organizations that promote inclusivity in the outdoors. “Today, many people and communities do not feel welcome or safe outside,” reads the fund’s November 2021 press release. Ski slopes, campgrounds, mountain bike trailheads, and fishing holes all attract a disproportionately white and affluent set of nature lovers. A 2022 report from the Outdoor Foundation, which tracks outdoor participation demographics, reported that 72 percent of outdoor recreationists are white—and the wealthiest households represent the largest share of participants, with 32 percent earning $100,000 or more annually.

Roam Fest also displayed that monoculture when it debuted in 2017 in Sedona. Co-founded by Zolton and her wife, Andi, a former racer and professional bike mechanic who coaches with USA Cycling’s Athlete Development Pathway, Roam Fest promoted stoke sans instruction. Zolton was dissatisfied with the trend among women’s events of targeting timid newbies, so she staged a party for what she calls skilled and confident “radasses” like herself. The inaugural Roam Fest included no skills clinics and no beginner options among its daily programs of social, locals-led rides. “But those experienced mountain bikers were all well-off and white,” Zolton says. “We attracted precisely one person of color.”

Afterward, that sole nonwhite person brought up the issue of underrepresentation. Straight mountain bikers also told Zolton that the event seemed like it was exclusively for the LGBTQ+ community. The feedback made her uncomfortable, she recalls. “But it took us getting uncomfortable,” Zolton says, “and having hard conversations and receiving hard feedback about our well-intentioned efforts to get us to embrace the challenge of trying things differently.”

That willingness to receive critique—“We love feedback!” is a Roam Fest tagline—allowed the Zoltons to consider and implement inclusivity strategies that were often proposed by people outside of their company leadership. “Roam Fest was willing to ask, ‘Who is not here, why are they not here, and how do we get them here if they want to come?’  ” says Brooke Goudy, a Black mountain biker who co-led Denver’s chapter of Black Girls Do Bike and now operates Rowdy Goudy, an organization promoting cycling and healthy lifestyles among women of color.

Money is one obvious participation barrier for women of color: The latest data from the Federal Reserve Board’s Survey of Consumer Finances indicates a $242,000 gap in median wealth between white and Black households. So Roam Fest developed its BIPOC Fellowship, which awards travel and participation stipends to qualifying applicants. Furthermore, Roam Fest reserves 20 percent of its event registrations for attendees who come from underrepresented communities.

But Roam didn’t stop at representation. Rachel Olzer, Roam Fest’s director of inclusion, a position born in response to the criticism Roam had received, encouraged Zolton to bolster support for attendees from marginalized groups during the event. For instance, Olzer recommended the creation of a separate retreat space where cyclists of color could withdraw for a social/emotional break. The notion ran counter to the Zoltons’ expectations of inclusivity. “Initially they were really skeptical because they were wanting integration and saw [a separate space] as exclusionary,” Olzer says.

Ultimately, Roam Fest’s leadership greenlit the Chill Zone, and the refuge has since prompted enthusiastic feedback from race participants. “It’s like an affinity space within the affinity space,” Goudy says. “When we women get together, we can really be ourselves. But Black and brown women still experience microaggressions. We can’t stop it, but we can give them a respite.”

Then, Roam went even further. The race expanded its scope by welcoming all self-identifying femmes and developing outreach and programming to support adaptive cyclists. On top of that, Roam Fest organized rides that gather individuals with similar lived experiences, including moms, queer people and their allies, and people ages 50 and older. Plus, the Shredtalks Panel, a topic-driven discussion led by a changing cast of trailblazers working at the intersection of cycling and representation, has become a Roam Fest hallmark.

Such initiatives demanded financial investment, of course, and the Zoltons have spent more than $250,000 on staffing and scholarships to fund Roam Fest’s inclusion programming efforts. But demand for inclusivity initiatives was surging across the outdoor rec industry, and other cycling events and races, such as Washington state’s Sturdy Dirty Enduro, were increasingly asking Roam’s gurus for guidance on how to diversify their attendees. “We realized that as a for-profit company,” Zolton says, “we didn’t have the capacity to bring inclusion to events beyond Roam Fest.”

Enter the Roam Collective, a three-year-old nonprofit led by Zoe Richards, who is also the partnerships manager at Sierra Nevada Brewing Co., a sponsor of Roam Fest. Now, the BIPOC Fellowship, the Shredtalks Panel, and the para/adaptive programs live under the collective’s umbrella. That parasol has been making room under its canopy for new programs and new partnerships, too.

In 2023, for example, Roam Rowdies was born. The project allows Goudy to recruit Black, femme-identifying mountain bikers and not only give them a stipend to attend Roam Fest but also fund their participation in another bike industry gathering. Additionally, Roam Rowdies helps create cycling events within mountain bikers’ home communities. Thus, the invitation to attend Roam Fest is bundled with aftereffects that reinforce the individual’s engagement with the cycling community. In March 2024, Roam Fest joined Boot Tan Fest and its femme-centric ski party at Sunlight Mountain Resort in Glenwood Springs, where Roam reps contributed logistical know-how and their famously warm welcome. Then, in April 2024, Roam Collective took its Shredtalks Panel to world cycling’s biggest festival and expo, the Sea Otter Classic, in California.

Companies beyond the cycling sector, such as Smartwool, have noticed Roam’s DEI successes, and many now support the event as sponsors. But Zolton and Sam Ryan, Roam Fest’s director of partnerships and operations, scrutinize organizations that are interested in aligning themselves with Roam Fest to make sure the brands’ commitments to inclusivity run deeper than their desire to sell products to women. “Some companies are just trying to get access to our demographic on a silver platter, and that’s not what we’re about,” says Ryan, who evaluates prospective sponsors by the diversity she sees among employees and sponsored athletes. Arizona-based Pivot Cycles, for instance, sends its demo bike fleet along with an inclusive cohort of company representatives to the event, and women make up 50 percent of Smartwool’s leadership. “We see our partnership with Roam as an extension of our inclusivity goals as a brand,” says Kelly Muededonck, Smartwool’s brand marketing manager for North America. “Roam’s unwavering commitment to diversity and inclusion is a huge reason why we are so excited to support their mission. They create a space that celebrates every single individual and makes them feel comfortable even when they are doing something brand new.”

Fruita’s trails will host Roam Fest this year. Photo by Re Wikstrom

Until this year, “hugs, not handshakes” had been Roam Fest’s motto. Zolton greeted every individual at event check-in with a physical embrace intended to emphasize the authenticity of her welcome. But Zolton was forced to acknowledge the impracticality of hugging all 1,000 participants at this month’s largest-ever event. Besides, some past attendees had registered their preference for a touchless greeting, so Zolton decided to honor the feedback. After all, she says, if it’s not a “F***, yeah!” then it’s a “F***, no,” a guiding principle Zolton applies equally to launching a mountain bike off a rock ledge and to hugging.

The demotion of the hug is just one of the many elements that have changed since the first Roam Fest, when two event staffers and seven volunteers hosted 100 attendees. This month’s gathering involves 37 staffers (not including employees of the Roam Collective) and more than 100 volunteers. Although Roam Fest now lacks the geographic reach of multiple locations nationwide, its concentrated form facilitates expanded programming: For the first time, the festival will support hearing-impaired participants with sign language translation and a closed-captioned Adventure Film Tour. The BIPOC Fellowship has also evolved to allow returning awardees to serve as mentors for new participants. Zolton has even walked back her prohibition on instruction. As an add-on to the standard event ticket (starting at $275 for early-bird pricing), this year’s attendees can elect to join a prefestival skills party that combines on-bike technique practice with lessons on bike maintenance.

Attendees may love the larger version of Roam Fest. Inclusivity initiatives strive to enlarge the “we” by welcoming more perspectives. Doing so, Olzer says, “makes our ability to connect—and for me, that’s the point of life—a lot more rich.” Not yet known is whether people can make the intimate connections they seek within a gathering of 1,000.

Not surprisingly, Zolton is eager for feedback: “We want to hear about it if it’s too big.” Missteps happen and accepting them is a critical part of attempting progress in inclusion programming, she says. The new Deaf Shredders initiative, for example, could reveal itself to have significant shortcomings, as Roam’s other first attempts sometimes have. That would be merely one step in the journey. “It’s been a process,” Zolton says, “of failing up.”

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