Kyle Thomas

The Website of Kyle Thomas (KyleWith)

I was big into the Biking Business

I may not be very entrepreneurial these days and I’m certainly not that much into biking as I use to be, but there was a time.

Back when I was 14 years old I was the bike guy. I started my 1st business called the YK Bike Corner. From 13 to 16 I was into biking, cross-country and downhill, I loved it, but I wasn’t very good at it. I still enjoyed it though, what I did start to get into was the mechanics. The 1st mountain bike I ever bought was a Kona Scrap. That is actually the only mountain bike I’ve actually bought, everything since then was built from the ground up. I then moved to a duel suspension bike, with a KHS frame. I rode that for about a year until settling in to a Giant AC 1 frame. I actually had two of those frames, one for back up parts. So in the time I spent building these bikes I acquired a set of skills, skills that I could use to help others.

My First Client

While looking through a local online classifieds site I found someone who needed help gearing their bike. I was 13 at the time I thought what the heck, I don’t know how much a person charges, but I can help. So I did just that, I rode my bike over to this persons place and I fixed the bike. I think I made $20 for about 15 min. of work, I was living large.

Business Began

After that first client I started to market myself. I built myself my 1st little website, albeit it was a free one, on a service that I don’t even think exist anymore. Anyone remember freewebs? I would put flyers up around town, I would put up classified ads, and I even went to the extent of advertising on the local classified site. Things actually started to pick up. At the same time as I was doing the bike stuff I was also flying into Treeline Lodge where I would work for a couple of weeks and then come back again.  Over the course of 2 summers I got myself established, people actually  started to know who I was. I made enough money to buy myself an outdoor tent garage, and convert it into a bike shop. I had a bike stand, and I had all the common tools, plus a lot of the specialized ones, for things like the crank and cassette. At 1st my whole shtick was that I could come to the client, and I wasn’t talking about big repairs here, but the little things that the average person can’t do. So I had my backpack full of tools and I would bike around town and fix people’s bikes.

Then I turned 16

When I 1st turned 16 and got my license it was a whole new world. Instead of going to people, I could go to them and get their bikes, bring them back to my shop and fix them there and return them the next day. It was awesome. There’s nothing like working in your own shop, in your own environment, with your own stuff. It was pretty cool, at one point I even had people coming to me and dropping off their bikes. In the summer of 2007 though, I spent most of July up at a place called Bathurst Inlet Lodge and when I came back I took off to British Columbia for most of August. I think this was the last summer that the bike business was still going. I had done a lot of work in May June, but when I started to go away things dwindled. I lost interest in the biking and really had no time to do the fixing anymore. Do I miss it? Absolutely! A year or so after I stopped fixing bikes I contemplated trying to get a job at the local sports shop, but it wasn’t for me. What I liked about my little business, was that I got to talk to the people, and I got to meet them. You will be hidden away and just fixing something and then sending it out again. I like the interaction.

In the past

The reason my memory got jogged about all of this, was because the bike forum, Pink Bikes sent me an e-mail the other day. I hadn’t signed into my account in probably 4 years, but it still worked. ykbiker!  Not only was able to sign in, but I was also able to find some old pictures. Here’s some pictures from my past… Which was actually not that long ago.

Pinkbike3

This is my complete bike to this day, with minor changes. I have a stronger rear rim now and a different rear shock, which has a blown seal.

Pinkbike1

Pinkbike

This was the parts frame. With all the moving parts on this frame I wanted to have extra bearings and bolts.

Pinkbike2

This is a Haro frame. I had bought this as a complete bike for my brother, but then he didn’t like it, so I stripped it and sold it.

Pinkbike4

Finally we have a .243 Frame I bought second-hand. This stuck around for a while although I don’t remember what I did with it.

Kylebike

I did just manage to find a picture of the KHS frame before I swapped everything onto the Giant frame. I of course am in the picture… back in 2005, while visiting Jasper.

Treeline Lodge the Lodge itself (Part 1)

This is another post on Treeline Lodge, the lodge I spent a few summers at as a teenager. You can read my introduction to the lodge here, but basically it is a Tourism/Outpost Camp 150 miles north of Yellowknife, NT in the Arctic Tundra.

I’m going to try to describe the actual lodge in this post. I attempted to get an image from Google Maps, but do to it location, in the middle of nowhere, the quality stinks. I’ll start with everything that was within the “bear fence”, which was basically an electric wired fence that was meant to slow a bear down enough it can be dealt with.

First was the kitchen building, which was a long rectangle building. One entrance at the front of the building and another at the back for the cook and staff. As you walked in there were 4 large picnic styled tables with benches around them for camp residents to eat meals. About mid way down the building you would approach a built-in serving countertop, where residents would get their meals. As you went into the kitchen you would find an industrial sized grill and oven – I mean some means eggs on that grill. On the other side was an industrial sized sink, with countertop scattered throughout. There was also a large island table in the middle of the kitchen. As you passed through the kitchen you would walk into the pantry, with a big built-in, walk-in fridge on you right and freezers on the left.

Running parallel off the right side of the kitchen building were two building for sleeping quarters. Each building had 12 rooms with two beds in each room and a hallway running down the middle. They were very basic rooms, each bed with closet and bedside table.

Attached to the lodging building closest to the bear fence was a hallway that lead to a few different places. The first was the fully functioning bathrooms and laundry room. Each bathroom (Men/Women) was fitted with actual toilets, sinks with running water and showers. If you made a left turn while going down the hallway you would pass a very small room which housed two very large water tanks. These tanks – which I had to fill from the lake on a daily basis – were for drinking and washing water. Water was pumped from a clean lake and then filtered to the max and then pumped into the hot water tank or throughout the buildings. Continuing down the hallway would get you to the final room. This room was the rec room. There was a small library, a few table games and SATELLITE TV. The TV was a big deal, guys would come in from the field and this is where they would ended up after supper. The other reason that made this room unique was it 25ft (I don’t actually know) ceiling. I never did know why it was so high. At one point I thought it was because someone might have wanted to build a second floor, but I never found out.

As I have become long winded about the Lodge, I’ll break this into two posts.

Treeline Lodge, NWT

Treeline Lodge’s Peggy’s Pit

I introduced Treeline Lodge last week, a place that now lives in my memories. I will now share specific parts of the Treeline Lodge I remember, this time Peggy’s Pit.

As I mentioned Treeline Lodge was built close to two old mines and because of that there was a fairly large road system in the area. The roads weren’t elaborate and was just made of gravel. Because of the relatively flat tundra building the roads would have been easy but the gravel would have had to been created from something.

So to make the gravel, a large rock area was, I’m assuming, blasted out to make said gravel. Gravel was continued to be blasted out of the large rock until a pit was formed.

The name comes from an owner of mines in the North at that time, although her reputation is not in good terms in the north. Supposedly Petty Witte, aka Margret Kent, cheated many people and fled the north.

Peggy’s Pit was one of the first things I remember about Treeline because the pit is far from any lake but is full of water and has cliffs that reach out of the ground.  If memory serves right, the water gradually goes down 30 or so feet. It was a cool place to head in the evening and hang out.

Treeline

Treeline6

Treeline5

Introducing Treeline Lodge

I haven’t been as active in sharing my memories as I wanted to when I started the category months ago. So today I want to introduce some of my fondest memories. Memories from a place in the middle of the tundra in the Northwest Territories called Treeline Lodge on Mathews Lake. Matthews Lake is about 150 miles northeast of Yellowknife, towards the Nunavut border.

View Larger Map

A quick history of the area would include the operation of two gold mines, Salmita Mine and Tundra Mine, between the years of 1945 and 1987. After the Tundra Mine was shut down and disassembled and Salmita Mine was shut down, part of the land was sold to an outfitter out of Yellowknife. The same outfitter my father worked for for almost 10 years. The camp that was on the land was used as an exploration camp in the 90’s until being sold. The camp was cleaned up and reno’d into a tourism/exploration lodge.

I spent the summer of 2003,2004,2005 and maybe a week in 2006, I can’t completely remember. I feel disappointed I didn’t take any photos, but digital cameras were quiet expensive back then and not on the top of my list. Luckily while crawling Facebook the other week I came across a old school mate’s photos of the lodge from 2009 after the lodge was shut down and only used as a small exploration camp.

Treeline Lodge NWT

I have 4 or 5 pre-thought of posts on the lodge that I want to share. This place is one of my favourite places in the world.

Remembering those Childhood TV Shows

For some reason this afternoon the Skinnamarink song came into my head. You know the one song by Sharon, Lois and Bram from back in the day. For some reason that I’m not going to understand it did, I was sing along in my head, Skinnamarinky dinky dink, shinnamarinky doo, and so on. So what did I do next, well I went to Twitter to ask if anyone else remembered them. The response was intense. I was recieving replies every 5 seconds, I couldn’t keep up.

Friends were singing along, reliving old memories. Then Brent broke out the Youtube videos of some of the old shows we all use to watch. Then the memories really started to come back. Sharon, Lois and Bram, The Polka Dotted Door, Today’s Special. Here are some of the videos.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu8wuyvl9Vc

It was nice to escape reality for a moment and relive some memories. I miss them. I also don’t think children’s shows today are anything like those ones.

What are some memories you have of tv shows from your childhood?