A Profile of Mountain Biking Visionary Ashley Korenblat

By Celia Storey
The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
January 2, 2005

Ashley Korenblat's journey of discovery has carried the mountain bike hall of famer from Wall Street's concrete canyons to cycling under the Western sky. She's blazing a trail to preserve America's public lands.

Six months ago, Ashley Korenblat parked her mountain bike.

No more white-knuckled, vaulting plummets for her, no rock-dodging tilts along red desert trails. No urgent, sweat-drenched miles that tax the agility and stamina of Western Spirit Cycling Adventures' visionary owner.

Less athletic moms-to-be will be rolling their eyes, but this is Ashley Korenblat we're talking about.

For the entrepreneurial Little Rock native, the sacrifice of not biking - and it is a sacrifice - goes hand in fingerless glove with a history of full-throttle devotion to causes that earn her care.

Along about the first week of March, the long-wanted little American growing inside her will find himself (or herself; Mom and Dad like surprises) the child of civic-minded explorers with a passion for preserving the nation's public lands.

Baby should brace for much camping and many stories about Theodore Roosevelt.

To protect this child of her dreams, careful eating, yoga and patient walks have replaced Korenblat's usual regimen of exciting rides in the high desert around Western Spirit's home base in Moab, Utah. "I am pretty much a fertility expert now," she jokes.

She will do everything right, down to and including reading some of the 10 or so guides to pregnancy that helpful friends have given her and her husband, Mark Sevenoff. Undertaking motherhood at age 43 means she has become a big target for the parenting advice of her already experienced peers. Her advisers include elite athletes who approve of her decision to ease back her exercise.

"But then there's Sacajawea," she notes.

The sturdy Shoshone was the only woman along for Lewis and Clark's Corps of Discovery trek across the West in the newborn 19 th century. She cheerfully faced physical perils and ate rotten food.

"Sacajawea had a baby on that trip. She had a baby, oh yeah," Korenblat says, chuckling and waggling her small hands. "She was pregnant at the beginning, and she had a baby and took that baby all the way to the mouth of the Columbia in Oregon.

"I think about Sacajawea a whole lot now. I'm trying to eat all this right food and so forth, and what about Sacajawea?" she asks. "Of course, she was about 18."

And "awesome."

But there are people who insist that Korenblat's also young for the distances she's already covered. And according to the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Crested Butte, Colo., which inducted her in 2003, she's a little bit awesome, too.

"She's a tremendous woman," says Alison Dunlap, a two-time Olympian, two-time World Cup champion who is the current national champion in crosscountry and short track cross-country mountain biking.

"She's very intelligent, insightful and very quick," says Rob Vandermark, president of Seven Cycles, an upscale, employee-owned manufacturer of custom bikes in Watertown, Mass.

"Most interesting about Ashley is the life that she's shaped," says Tim Blumenthal, who worked with her for 11 years when he was executive director of the International Mountain Bicycling Association.

Leveraging her prestige in 1990 while she was still president of one of bicycling's most innovative manufacturers, Merlin Metalworks, Korenblat helped get the nonprofit IMBA rolling when she joined its board in Boston.

"The budget of the first year was basically my salary plus some stamp money, $60,000 or $65,000," Blumenthal says, and Korenblat's volunteer fund-raising provided that salary. She raised tens of thousands more during her decade on the advocacy organization's board. As its president for four years, she personally pressed Congress and Bill Clinton's White House to invest in trails and to allow bicycle access to the national monuments.

"And now today, IMBA has 32,000 members, a $2.1 million budget, 25 employees, chapters in 30 countries - and a lot of that has to do with Ashley," Blumenthal says. "She's a very good fund-raiser, always has been for a variety of causes, for President Clinton, for her nonprofit work for Business for Social Responsibility, for a variety of things. She's persuasive, and she's not afraid to ask for money for something that she believes in.

"And she's usually successful." Blumenthal, now executive director of the industry nonprofit Bikes Belong Coalition in Boulder, Colo., admires the confidence that propels his old friend through "all the phases of her amazing life to date."

"It's really interesting what she's done for IMBA and for bicycle advocacy," he says. "But I think her life is also a testament to the United States as a place of opportunity with fewer barriers than other countries, a place where if you are smart enough and driven enough and creative enough, you can shape your own life."

Blumenthal says he finds it "amazing" that a 5-foot-3-inch girl from Arkansas had the nerve to try out for the powerhouse snow-skiing team at Dartmouth College in Hanover, N.H., against elite New Englanders and Olympic hopefuls from whitecapped nations. "Pretty unusual for somebody from Arkansas, where the skiing isn't great," he notes.

There wasn't even any mountain biking in the 1970s for Little Rock girls.

"Growing up here, all a girl could do was be a cheerleader," her mother says. "She wasn't tall enough to be a basketball player, and we didn't know that much about bicycling when she was a girl."

But the ski-racing she did in college was a fall-back choice for Art and Betty Korenblat's daughter. When she graduated from Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, she fully intended to be a ballerina.

"My mother went to New York City and studied with the School of American Ballet when [George] Balanchine was at the New York Ballet," Ashley says. She felt her mom had been too "sweet" for the cutthroat world of dance, and she was sure she could make a career of it.

"She had such a bright, inquisitive mind, and I kept trying to steer her into other directions," Betty says, ruefully, still blaming herself just a bit for failing to dump cold realism on her daughter's dream. "I kept trying to push her toward academics more."

Only in college did Korenblat accept that she was too short for ballet.

So she attacked snow skiing with all the discipline she'd learned in dance. She picked up a bicycle as cross-training.

"I remember the first time I rode a mountain bike," she says. "I thought it was the most fun thing in the world. Just because you're in the trees, going through. Even now, if I were biking, for just an hour to get away from the pavement and get in a natural setting where you have to concentrate to not hit a tree and really be inthe present moment - that is such a great break."

After graduation, she worked in the congressional campaign of a Massachusetts state senator, Chester Atkins. "He won. That was my first opportunity to go to Washington, but I decided to go to business school instead," she says.

Returning to Dartmouth's Amos Tuck School of Business, Korenblat was labeled a "poet" because her foray into politics wasn't the usual banking internship. But she loved the group projects, and "when I graduated from the Tuck School in '86, it was express to New York City.

"This was during the height of investment banking, and they were recruiting MBAs to go to Wall Street by the hundreds," she says.

She joined the investment bank First Boston (which had not yet been purchased by Credit Suisse). The bank wanted to send her to Dallas to work in equities, but she talked her way onto the international bond desk. But although she liked explaining foreign markets to investors, "it was all about watching," she says. "You don't try to make anything happen, you just try to understand what is already happening in the market."

And she found herself spending all her free time trying to get out of New York. "I was dragging my bike or my skis in and out of the city every weekend."

Her family and friends couldn't understand why she was so sad. "Here I'd gone to all this school and gotten this great job," she reflects. "Everything was supposed to be great."

Finally, in 1987, she grabbed a chance to leap off Wall Street for a job managing a start-up beltmanufacturing company for a couple she'd met while working for Atkins. From a kitchen-table project, The Leather Shop grew to 350 employees and $25 million in sales.

In 1989, a DuPont heir, Gwyn Jones, traded her a titanium bike frame in exchange for a business plan for his new bicycle factory, Merlin Metalworks. Then he hired her as company president to "keep the trains running on time."

Vandermark, the Seven Cycles executive, then handled research and development for Merlin.

"We all rode mountain bikes every day, and she was interested to see what that was like," he remembers. "Within about a week, she was riding better than most of the people that worked there, partly because of her skiing background."

Soon she was racing at the expert level, "which essentially was just below professional, and she certainly raced against some professionals in her day," Vandermark says.

While she built the company and branched into road bikes, Merlin sponsored the Subaru Montgomery Team, which included young cyclists Ken Carpenter, Steve Hegg and Lance Armstrong.

Vandermark and Korenblat traveled to races around the country and even, in March 1991, to Little Rock for the Natural State Stage Race. This stellar event attracted all the top talent in women's road racing and many of the elite males, including Subaru Montgomery.

The course included a time trial up Overlook Road which, as a horrified Betty Korenblat (who with her husband still lives on the ridge above Overlook) warned Armstrong over dinner, runs "straight up!"

"And so whenever I saw those guys," Ashley Korenblat remembers, "say they'd been in Italy or wherever they'd been riding, they'd say, 'Oh, Ashley, we were in Italy and we rode this hill. It was straight up!'"

BREAKAWAY "The company grew really quickly, and Business Week listed us as one of the 10 best products made in the U.S.," she says. Merlin's mountain bikes were in such demand that when Armstrong asked for one, she made him buy it. "We'd already given him all these bikes, and they were so popular there were people waiting six months. I made Greg LeMond buy one, too," she says, laughing. "So I wasn't discriminating."

Merlin built its popular frames using titanium tubing purchased in enormous and enormously expensive lots from aerospace suppliers. "And here we were this tiny company," she says. To raise money for buying the tubing, she recruited a board of investors. "Which was great because that [huge expense] was a big barrier to other companies trying to make this type of bicycle.

"But then one day the aerospace business got so bad that the aerospace companies decided they would sell to anyone, in tiny quantities. So we woke up one day to 30 competitors that we didn't have the day before."

As sales fell, Korenblat worried about her factory staff and looked around for new products that would help her avoid layoffs. She wanted to make wheelchairs, but her board refused.

"And then we got an offer [from Saucony] to buy the company. So we sold it," she says, and she left.

A group of displaced employees were able to form Seven Cycles, so the upheaval worked out in the end, she says. But the painful experience taught her she never again wanted to be forced to choose between the needs of her investors and the welfare of employees.

During a time spent "free floating in the universe," she turned down posts at companies like Tom's of Maine and Ben & Jerry's and at another bike maker she admires a lot, Specialized. Then in 1996, she met Lou Warner, who with his wife owned a small bike-tour business in Moab - Western Spirit Cycling. They wanted to sell.

She raised money for her buyout very carefully.

"I did this little bit tricky maneuver ... this sort of miniature junk bond deal where a group of loyal customers loaned me money. It was a bond, and I paid them interest. It's not equity; they aren't stockholders, but they get to go on two free trips a year," she says.

So she doesn't have to worry about being caught between a board of directors and her workers.

"And the investors love it. They don't want to get paid back [although she could pay them all back in a lump sum these days]. And they bring other people on the trips."

She and Sevenoff have expanded the tour business dramatically, offering multi-day road and mountain biking adventures in 16 states, Mexico and Central America. Routes range from mellow, family jaunts to hairgraying "extreme" treks.

Some trips involve overnight camping, with gourmet meals supplied by a big chuck-wagon truck with a silver water tank that holds 120 gallons. Others snuggle into hotels overnight.

She hopes to add a tour along Arkansas' scenic Womble Trail. In addition she works with Dunlap (who resides in Colorado Springs, Colo.), booking the Olympian's riding-lesson camps in Moab.

"She knows her stuff," Dunlap says. "She's really upfront, very straightforward, but she's also very fair, and she does a really good job of trying to make everybody happy instead of just being a typical 'boss' and saying, 'This is the way it is, do it or you're out the door.' "She'll say, 'OK what do you guys think? Do you not like this idea? Do you think it should be something different?' She really values feedback."

LAND AND PEOPLE At Seven Cycles, Vandermark remembers Korenblat's example: "Back when she and I worked together [at Merlin] I was very interested in product and equipment and assets and resources. She saw people as the resource, and I saw equipment as the resource.

"I've certainly learned that she was right. It is the people that are the resource, not the equipment or the capital."

"I think her employees enjoy working with her," Dunlap adds. And Blumenthal says, "When you ask her, 'How are things going at Western Spirit?' rather than talking so much about sales and the number of trips that they've booked, she usually talks about the team and morale and how the guides are feeling and what the customer feedback has been. The first thing is not 'well, we're going to hit our numbers' or 'we're going to miss our numbers.' "It's thinking about and recognizing the importance of good people."

While "it's interesting to start a business and run a business," Korenblat says, she feels the volunteer work she's doing in Utah as a tourist industry representative to federal and state landmanagement agencies is vastly more important for the people who live there and those who will come after them.

She serves on a Bureau of Land Management Resource Advisory Committee ("a very important position," Blumenthal says) working with Utah's state BLM director to make rules for who is allowed to use public lands and how. The group is drafting plans to resolve conflicts between bikers, hikers and allterrain vehicle drivers.

And as an outspoken member of Utah's Outdoor Recreation Economic Ecosystem Task Force, she's working to persuade regulatory officials, land owners and other business leaders that undeveloped public land has real economic value in its natural state.

"Without public land," she says, "you don't need a $400 raincoat ... and you don't need a canoe and you don't need a bike and you don't need outfitters.

"The task force has helped county officials see their public land less as a block to broadening the tax base and more as the foundation of local industry. The progress that we make could affect everything."

The fate of the land she rides is crucial to the health of the nation, and she plans to teach her baby to cherish both.