In 2022, Trek is supporting three cyclists as they embark on the Life Time Grand Prix, a six-race off-road series that includes the Leadville Trail 100 MTB race and Unbound Gravel. While not an official team, Amity Rockwell, Ruth Winder, and Kiel Reijnen will all ride on Trek this season. Each of them worked with an artist at Trek to design a custom paint scheme for their Checkpoint gravel bikes. Here is a look at what Rockwell’s bike means to her.
Amity Rockwell was born and raised in San Francisco, and the city has always meant more to her than a place to call home.
The 28-year-old’s mother grew up in the northern California city in the late ’50s and early ’60s, and so, Rockwell says, “my whole life I’ve had these ties to San Francisco in that era.”
Whether listening to Jefferson Airplane and Janis Joplin, or hearing her mom’s stories about the concerts she saw in Golden Gate Park, the sounds and colors of San Francisco were suffused into Rockwell’s being. She wandered around the same trails and neighborhoods as her mom, later becoming a trail runner there, and now, a cyclist.
“Later on in college, I did a lot of printmaking, and there’s this common thread there where so much of the art and concert posters to come out of that period are these super colorful, bold relief prints,” Rockwell said. “It’s all part of this larger aesthetic that I’ve internalized over my lifetime.”
For her Checkpoint, Rockwell sent a lot of those visual cues to Trek, and she and the artist landed on a simplified scheme, mostly based in color and a little texture.
“On my top tube there’s a little icon of Sutro Tower, which is the tower on top of Sutro Forest in San Francisco. My mom grew up in a house right at the bottom of that, and I used to go there every single weekend to see my grandpa when I was a kid,” she said.
Now, the tower is something that Rockwell often spies from the saddle of her bike.
“Out training in the hills of Marin County, you can almost always look towards the city and that tower’s sticking up above the fog,” she said. “So it’s this really awesome beacon for me, like, ‘that’s exactly where home is.’