We caught up with Dan Lenaghan, Tumbleweed builder and staff member, to ask him about his rider origin story, his bike, and more. If you've customized a build with us, chances are good you've interact with Dan—or Dan has interacted with your bike. 

Dan's Rig: Medium gen 1 Stargazer in Bone 

Rider Dimensions: Height: 5’6” / 168cm, PBH: 815, Stem length: 70mm

 

How did you get into cycling, and then into bikepacking? What’s your rider origin story?

I didn’t ride much growing up because our neighborhood had a creek on one side, a freeway on another side, and a 4-lane local highway on the last side. It was also incredibly hilly, so there wasn’t much in the way of possible destinations besides the card shop.

So I didn’t really get into biking until I went pretty much cold turkey on taxis and subways in Seoul, where I was teaching English. It turned out that I could spend 30 minutes boxed in with traffic and lurching in a taxi with three other coworkers, or I could spend 40-odd minutes on a 10 mile stretch of the Han River path and I was immediately hooked. One of my first commutes I recall a huge swarm of frogs in a culvert beside the path and every day there were just new details I’d forgotten about, being inside a taxi or the subway for so long.

Freak Alley, a sanctioned graffiti spot in Downtown Boise, 2018

I took my first real bike tour around 2012, but Korea is very dense and you don’t need to carry much with you - there’s always a convenience store nearby, somewhere, or a family style restaurant where you can absolutely stuff yourself for $10, and you can camp anywhere along waterways in addition to formal camping grounds. 

But the real lightbulb moment was running into two randonneurs who stopped at a pyeonijeom (the Korean word for literally ‘corner point,’ a convenience store/corner store). They had gorgeous steel touring bikes with leather saddles and had covered more than 80 miles that morning. They described their route and something about the idea of using nothing more than a bike and snacks along the way to go hundreds of miles over a weekend was intoxicating. I think I signed up the moment we pitched camp that night along a river south of Seoul, and did several brevets with the Korea Randonneurs, up to 400km.

Urban riding also shapes how you see infrastructure and shows you what access looks like without a car. People forget, for instance, that the Netherlands were extremely crowded with traffic and car pollution even through the 70s, but deaths related to traffic were upsetting enough to cause a change in social thought and now we see what the Netherlands have become for cycling. Some places still have a bad reputation, like Rotterdam, but it’s plain what’s possible when you build with people, not cars, in mind. 

 

How did those experiences shape what you look for in a bike?

It really taught me that with the right gear, you can just. keep. riding. And that was an amazing realization for me at the time. A bike needs to allow you to be self-sufficient. That means it’s made for packing gear onto. A little or a lot, you need supplies, you need snacks, you need a layer for when night falls.

First fixed gear long haul at the Sequoia 72 in 2016

Descending into Montour Campground with Bike Touring News, 2025

Some bikes might be thrilling but require a lot of maintenance, or can only really shine in very specific venues, like a track bike, or a full suspension mountain bike. Those experiences appeal to me less than something that’s able to happily do anything. And rather than finding quirky hacks for my Ibis, the Stargazer had everything on it, ready to go. No more P-clamps for my front rack, among many other things. 

 

What drew you to the Stargazer, aside from working at Tumbleweed? Did anything about it stand out compared to previous builds you’ve loved and ridden? 

I think the Stargazer broke me out of my vintage MTB obsession, as I’d been riding a dirt-drop converted 1992 Ibis SS for a few years before coming to Tumbleweed. There are a lot of exciting, sort of ‘collage’ possibilities when you’re working at a co-op and 80s and 90s era mountain bikes are well regarded for good reason, but they also show the limitations of their time, like wheel diameter or rim brakes. The culture around those types of bikes is very DIY and popular among people who are short on funds but high in demands they need their bike to meet, which is part and parcel with the meandering, self-lead dirtbag mentality that occupies a lot of bikepacking.

Even with big chainrings, I never felt like I was getting the speed or efficiency from a 26” wheel that I wanted, and I was running a 48/13 top gear. I was using weird adapters for racks and fenders. I had the worst axle-mounted supports for my fenders, but as a whole the Ibis felt like a missing link between the riding I had done and the riding I wanted to do. It’s still out there, being ridden as a bar bike by a local friend. 

But back to modern bikes - I was both tempted and confused when I rode my first gravel bike, a Norco Search XR, which was discontinued after only a few years back in 2018 or so. Modern gravel bikes are so racy - it makes no sense until you see how the bike industry grows cost and competition into new categories. Road racing is old, so now you have gravel racing. So a big tire road bike was a conflict for me before I got behind the ‘bigger tires are better’ school of thought - but experience is telling, and comfort and capability without a loss of speed (I feel like I work as hard on 2” tires as I do on 28mm tires) is a win-win. But no one was really making upright bikes, and I’m not racing, and comfort is important to me. Gravel bikes also, as a class, have very limited tire clearance, 2” max in many cases. Add in that I always have fenders (which aren’t at home on race bikes), and I was hacking together whatever I could find after I tried riding Shaw Mountain Road on my 3-speed with 28mm tires on it and just getting utterly bogged down in the dirt until I turned around. 

Exploring singletrack on my 1991ish Ibis SS, 2020

These bars are just inverted steel Schwinn cruiser bars from the 70s

I built up a steel frame from a defunct US brand in Portland and made a wonky drop bar super-gravel XC bike with a carbon fork and drop bars, and I wanted to love it but the ride was all over the place and the build had a lot of hacks. There wasn’t a Ratio kit yet and mixing MTB and drop bar parts was messy at best. Then the Ibis came along as a donation while I was working at the co-op, and I could at least put on 2.1” tires, which are probably about the minimum for Idaho gravel. But washboarded roads make short work of 26” wheels and you get tired of that jarring ride after 10 minutes, not to mention an hour or three. A 29er makes a huge difference in smoothing out the ruts.

With steel racks and 11 speed Shimano GRX

TRP Hylex brakes go well with a Microshift bar end and the current 10-45t XT cassette

The Stargazer feels like the fulfillment of things I was always looking for in a single bike but no one wanted to make. Drop bars, big tires (2.4” with fenders!), a high end steel frame.. It really had everything I wanted. We don’t talk about the appearance of our bikes much, but the decal design, the color choice, the bronze head badge - all of the things that charmed me about vintage bikes, I found in the aesthetic of the Stargazer. 

When I got to Tumbleweed, it was important to Daniel that Walt and I rode the bikes we sell so we could know them inside and out. My Stargazer is several years in the making because I’m like a little gnome waiting around for someone to get tired of a nice part I’m curious about and buy off them. 

I’m not an unbiased source, but the combination of comfort and fun in the Stargazer surprised me. It never feels slow, and though I’m running tires as narrow as we generally recommend (2” Schwalbe G-One Overland), right now it’s the perfect inbetweener for commuting and pavement, and the singletrack we have around here. It’s a great way of showcasing how a different tire makes the biggest difference once the rest has all been decided. If I left for a tour tomorrow I’d put on some 2.4’s and get rolling.

Is there anything people comment on about your build? The Campandgoslow tape seems pretty recognizable these days among a certain crowd. 

The tape is so recognizable - I have the brown trout fishscale pattern -  and it’s almost become a mark of being ‘in the know’ for bikepacking. Casey at Campandgoslow has done an awesome job of making a few very distinct patterns, and there’s a lot of bad looking bar tape out there. It’s about time someone did it right, and I hope to see a bluebelly lizard version someday. People are also still surprised to see a dropper post - my Stargazer is a clash of opposing standards between road touring and mountain biking.

Camping mode, no fenders and still running GRX

That, and my saddle, which is showing its mileage and is probably around 20k miles over the last 14 or so years when I bought it secondhand from a bike mechanic in Busan who didn’t want it on his all-carbon fixie. The Spurcycle bell is a nice replacement for the Crane copy I'd be using for many years prior. 

A spinning top from now-defunct Ocean Air Cycles

People also wonder why I have a blue string dangling from the bars, but it’s Pass and Stow's so called BART-brake (for Bay Area Rapid Transit). I’ve graduated from using elastic scrunchies for that. But the most pointless item of joy is probably the brass stem cap spinning top from the now-defunct Ocean Air Cycles. I’ve only used it a few times but it gives me joy to just look at. 

How have you dialed in your build to the kind of riding you’re doing now? Are there any unusual details or aspects of your build that you recommend to others?

To me, a bike without fenders is unfinished, but that’s a controversial view. Likewise, when I was first randonneuring, I wished more than anything for a dynamo so I wouldn’t ever have to stop riding. I’m terrible about charging my lights, and even then you’re still locked in to whatever the battery life is. So I have both of those, and another controversial part: a bar-end mirror so I can mind whoever’s behind me, a lovely little prototype from Spurcycle. It’s as much for minding other riders as it is for traffic - I hate getting left behind and I tend to stay toward the back in case I can help someone who runs into an issue on group rides. I’m happy to be the proverbial red lantern. 

Older riders always comment about my bar end shifter, which used to be the standard for touring since they’re so simple and robust. Thumb and bar-end shifters are still the gold standard for touring, really. Otherwise, I’m running 12-speed XT with an Onyx hub, though that's a bad description because the only Shimano parts are the chain, crank, and cassette until I'm finished experimenting with Ratio Technology's new modular derailleur.

Our standard DT Swiss 350 hubs have a very polite sound, provided you grease them occasionally, but I love the absolute silence of the Onyx sprag clutch. Hopefully it proves as durable as DT’s design. I have also contemplated thicker bar tape, like the kind Ergon offers, but for now the style of the Campandgoslow tape wins out as long as I have decent gloves to cushion my arthritic bike mechanic joints. 

Shimano's PRO dropper is a favorite for anything non-integrated

What’s an essential item for you on trips?

I don’t think many people would agree, but I like bringing a real paperback book. I always want to read or journal when I’m in nature. Another fun little thing I like to have along is a mini-frisbee called a gravity disc. It’s like skipping a stone and practically glows, so it’s hard to lose in the woods. I'm currently reading Miranda July's All Fours, and so far it's a joy. 

 

What’s the most memorable trip you’ve taken on your Stargazer so far?

My Stargazer still hasn’t seen as much dirt as I’d like it to. Balancing life with a dog can mean camping is better in a car since she’s too big for a trailer, but maybe a foothill overnighter would be a good introduction to biking for her. Otherwise, the short trip from Boise to the Montour campground is fun, though something a little more rustic would be great. I’m really hoping for 2026 to be the year of sub-24 hour campouts, and since we’re surrounded by national forest and BLM land, there’s no excuse to stay home. 

Baby's first Critical Mass, 2022

What do you mean you've never swapped outfits with your partner for your anniversary?

Nice foothills and nicer dogs, 2019

Do you have any tours planned for the coming year?

I’ve always wanted to bike as far north as I can without hitting pavement, and I’ve seen people riding along old railway grades along highway 55, so I’ll have to explore those routes a bit. But the thing I’m most excited to do is finding good camping spots within 20 or 30 miles of home, so you can make a 24-hour overnighter of it. Not every trip needs to be magazine cover material. 

Critical Mass during Covid, which totally ended

Helping folks out is really at the heart of everything. Community repair, 2020