Built to Ride
Bend Magazine writer Daniel O’Neil features the AdvenChair wheelchair that thinks its a mountain bike in his Sept/Oct 2025 article “Built to Ride—Custom bikes are a growing industry.” Downhill, cross-country, touring, road, gravel—the high desert offers every option a cyclist could ask for. It follows, then, that the area is also home to a core group of custom bike builders who are pushing bicycle engineering and production past any preconceived boundaries, while also maintaining the spirit of elation and freedom that cycling can provide.
The AdvenChair is designed to go out of bounds.
The AdvenChair, created by Geoff Babb and Dale Neubaurer, is an all-terrain wheelchair designed to go off-road. In September 2016, almost eleven years after suffering a near-fatal brain-stem stroke, Geoff Babb sat in his modified wheelchair at the Bright Angel trailhead with his family and a group of friends. Given the path that he had traveled to reach that point, a wheelchair journey into the belly of the Grand Canyon didn’t seem far-fetched.