The team of Inside the Haanachack Concept Bike shop. 

 In 1986 a young man by the name of Bob Buckley was advised by his doctor to start riding a bike.  He noticed that there were mountain trails on the hilly public lands of Marin County, just north of the Golden Gate Bridge in Northern California, that would be great for biking, but locals struggled to ride regular street bikes on the trails.  So, he invented what we now call the “mountain bike”.  He and a team of local bike fans designed a lightweight, low cost, high quality bike perfect for rugged hill trails, and started a company they called Marin Bikes to build and sell them.  Along the way they created the sport of mountain biking.

Thirty-five years later, the same Marin Bikes that are renowned throughout the world have arrived in Lakeside at the newly opened Háanchak Bike Concept Store on the Libramiento in Centro de Lago.  Founded by three passionate riders –  Francisco Mociel, Moises Padilla, and Francisco González  – who saw Marin Bikes in a shop in Guadalajara, Háanchak Bike Concept became an immediate success.

Inside the Haanachack Concept Bike shop on the Libramiento.

“We opened about three months ago – it was the idea of owners – who saw that there were no similar bike stores in Chapala.  The other stores did not carry the kind of high-end bikes we specialize in and most importantly they did not have Marin Bikes,” bike specialist and endure rider Ciro Ladrón de Guevara told Laguna, adding that when the owners saw the Marin bikes in Guadalajara, they made a deal to bring in a container of them and open a store in Lakeside.

That decision paid off.  In only three months, Háanchak Bike Concept added 3 English-speaking employees to the three co-owners.  The shop sells at least three bikes a week and is expanding into a space next door.  The repair shop is busy seven days a week doing everything from gear adjustments to brake bleeding to mounting tubeless tires to special modifications for stock bikes.

“We sell three different kinds of bikes, including some road bikes,” Ladrón de Guevara told Laguna, “but I think the best bikes for the local cobblestone streets are the gravel bikes (known in the US as “trail bikes”) which don’t have suspension but come with mountain bike tires.” He added that, “riders can make their mountain bikes more comfortable with suspension forks and softer tires, but that adds weight.”  

Háanchak Bike Concept is open 7 days a week from 10 a to 8 pm at #132 Libramiento, next to Tio Sam’s.  

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