By Kathleen Meyer, Chair, Stevensville Bicycle Camp Committee
The Stevensville Bicycle Camp Committee has accepted an offer it couldn’t refuse. The invitation came as a tentative idea three months ago, but has now solidified. The Bicycle Camp and the Stevensville Hotel, the latter owned by Mayor Gene Mim Mack and Robbie Springs, will merge in a manner that keeps both entities intact, while also preserving the exemplary notion of a donation-based facility for touring cyclists. Details will be forthcoming as they are sorted out and agreed upon.
For the past year, the all-volunteer Camp Committee has held aloft the vision of having an up and running bicycle camp in Stevensville in time for the celebrations and festivities accompanying next year’s opening of the Lolo to Missoula Trail and the fortieth anniversary of Missoula’s internationally-renown Adventure Cycling Association. Ours was a passionate attempt at fast-tracking a grassroots campaign, and within a surprisingly short period of time, a whole string of specialists – architects, builders, long distance cyclists, trail promoters, travel agents, Web masters, professionals in marketing and fund-raising, and scholars of bicycle tourism promotion – all stepped up and donated their expertise, enhancing and advancing our knowledge. We recently were pleased to gain the Town’s approval on our proposed location, and yet there were to be more tough meetings ahead, with many townsfolk unhappy about the location.
Camp Committee members now can look forward to enjoying some summer days—without additional intense and sweltering evenings spent in the Town Hall, without pounding the pavement for donated building materials, and without having to burn the midnight oil, filling out the application for the State Office of Tourism’s “brick & mortar” grant. The heavy lifting by our organization is over, and the Stevensville Hotel – which indeed just hosted eight cyclists – will be ready next spring with a new bathroom with shower, a safe room for bicycles, and a lawn for tents.
Should the hotel bicycle camp at some point become so successful it bursts the historic pink hospital’s seams, there will always be a two-inch thick binder residing at the Main Street Office with all the makings of “How to Build a Bicycle Camp.” Meanwhile, SBCC, as a part of the Main Street Association, will remain a nonprofit community arm, helping in areas that are beyond the Hotel’s budget.
The result? We all get a Stevensville Bicycle Camp. The town reaps the economic benefits of a wildly growing new tourism phenomenon. And visiting cyclists will never forget the lovely hotel setting, with its location only one hop from downtown’s amenities. Nor are they likely to forget the welcome they, as weary pedalers, receive at the hands of hosts Robbie and Gene—world travelers, historians, entrepreneurs.
Mayor Mim Mack’s heroic stamina, integrity, and generosity deserves long applause.