Loud Performance
Loud Performance
Woven into the Fabric of the WNY MTB Scene
Loud Performance owner Dee Dippel stands with this year’s shiny, new fleet of fat bikes at his Bemus Point location. (Photo / Rich Rumfola)
Earlier this week, ellicottvilleNOW caught up with Dee Dippel, owner/operator of Loud Performance, to talk about all things outdoors. The mountain bike/snowboard shop offers two locations - Bemus Point and Ellicottville - and has become a staple in the local MTB scene.
eNOW: Loud Performance is one of the premier mountain bike and snowboard shops in all of Western New York. That’s not exactly how it all began for you in Bemus Point.
DEE: Snowmobiling is what first brought us up here from West Virginia. We opened up as a powersports/snowmobile shop and obviously, winters had been pretty decent, but the year we first opened in 2015-’16 the snowmobile trails were only open seven days. At that point, we just knew we had to do something else. That July, we got our first shipment of mountain bikes in and I had them all sold by September. I had mountain bike mechanic school in my background and I raced downhill mountain bikes for years, so I figured that would our niche up here - we would be a snowmobile/mountain bike shop - but the winters just didn’t support the snowmobiling anymore, and we kept moving more and more into the mountain bikes and fat bikes. As winters went on, we did less with snowmobiles and more with bikes and now it’s probably been five years since we actually wrenched on a snowmobile here - maybe 2017-18 - and since then we haven’t done any mechanical work for powersports and have been fully a bicycle shop. We added snowboards last year.
eNOW: You built your own mountain bike trails right outside your back door and in the woods surrounding Loud Performance.
DEE: We’re basically a mountain bike/fat bike/snowboard shop and as for having the trails out back, I just feel like we’re asking people to spend money on bikes. Well you can’t ride a bike around a parking lot and say, “Hey this bike is great.” Out back, we have plenty of riding for all levels of ability - especially beginners - and plenty of places to test bikes and ride them. You can ride anything in the store anytime. Having worked in bike shops before, that was how I wanted to be different. Take something out back and try it. We’ll set up the suspension for you. We want to make sure you leave here with a smile on your face and you’re happy and that you get exactly what you want.
eNOW: A mountain bike enthusiast walking through the front doors at Loud Performance will feel like a kid in a candy store.
DEE: We get it a lot that our store is not like a lot of other bike shops you see. Most stores have that corporate look but we wanted to be different and unique ourselves. We’re all diehard riders, so we wanted to sell the stuff we believe in - not just the stuff we had to carry. We offer eight lines of bikes. We have 4 to 5 lines of apparel. We try to carry all the cool stuff and not so much the bland and vanilla stuff. We do have brands we’re partial to like Rocky Mountain and Kona Bikes and Troylee Designs for apparel. I think what makes us unique is that we’re out in the middle of nowhere, so to speak, but that also allows us to have our own trail system right behind the shop. We’re not a big city kind of shop. We have bike customers from Pittsburgh into Ohio and in the Buffalo area and Rochester - so they travel to get here, which is cool.
eNOW: Tell us more about your trail system.
DEE: We call it “The Trails At Loud.” If you ride everything here it’s a little over seven miles of trails but we have wooden features and progressive features here, and stuff you can’t get on public land because it can’t be built like you can do it on private land. Another bonus is we’re just under nine-tenths of a mile from Long Point State Park and there’s another 12 miles of mountain bike trails over there. When you ride them both, you can get a heck of a ride just staying right here by the lake. We do a shop ride every Thursday night, year-round, that anyone can come to and we do fat bikes in the winter with groomed trails and then we do regular mountain bikes in the summertime. Of course, anyone can come here to ride our trails anytime they want. We just ask that they go online and sign a waiver on our website. Our trails are free to ride.
eNOW: For those who aren’t familiar, let’s talk about being able to ride your bike on snow.
DEE: Being in WNY, if a person wanted to ride a bike here all year long, and could only have one bicycle, it would be a hard argument not to own a fat bike. The fat bike is a bigger-tired bicycle that allows for lower ground pressure. If you think of yourself on a skinny-tired road bike and all your body weight is on top of X-amount of the tire on the ground at any one time, then compare that with a fat bike, where all your body weight is spread out across a tire that’s easily two or three times wider than the road bike, so it allows you to run really low air pressure and flatten the tire out a little bit more. Wintertime fat biking is not about how fast you can go down a trail. It’s about being able to maintain momentum and a smooth cadence and not be trenching or sinking into the snow, so it’s a lot different.
eNOW: You’ve got quite the involvement in the local mountain bike community.
DEE: I’m the vice president of the Western New York Mountain Biking Association (WNYMBA) and I’m on the board of the Chautauqua County Rails To Trails and the board of the Chautauqua County Friends Of Greenway group. In the WNYMBA, we really feel like we have a pretty good niche for wintertime single-track groomed fat bike riding. For example, we have our own fat bike groomer at Loud, Long Point State Park has their own fat bike groomer, so does Whalen State Forest in Panama and others going all the way to McCarty Hill by Holiday Valley/HoliMont. It’s all so new for us. Snowmobiling has been around seventy years but groomed fat biking has really just blown up in the last five or six years. We realize a lot of our members really love being on bicycles year-round. Being able to give them the avenue to do that is really awesome and so the members of the WNYMBA are all behind this and willing to put in the work and effort. It’s all volunteer basically.
eNOW: Any events coming up that you’re a part of?
DEE: This Sunday, February 19 there is a Fat Bike Downhill Mountain Bike Race at HoliMont, which will be the first time we’ve ever done anything like that in WNY. (UPDATE AS OF 2/17: THIS RACE HAS BEEN POSTPONED DUE TO TRAIL CONDITIONS; IT HAS BEEN RESCHEDULED FOR MARCH 12TH.) We also have Ditch Days coming up on March 25 - a big freestyle-jam kind of event for snowboarders. And then on April 8 we’re having a fat bike dual slalom race right on the ski slopes at HoliMont. And it’s funny, because if you would’ve told me five or ten years ago that we’d be doing this kind of stuff at HoliMont, I would’ve thought you were crazy. The same way as when we were sitting out under the stars with a campfire going this summer at the base of the hill at HoliMont for the WNYMBA campout weekend. I never would’ve thought we’d be doing something like that. Speaking of the WNYMBA campout, it will be back at HoliMont for its second year in August and the Roots, Rocks and Ridges festival will return with X-C and downhill races in the Fall. Loud Performance also hosts the Rooted women’s mountain bike festival in July right here at the store. It’s an all-women’s mountain biking weekend with instruction, demo bikes and vendors… it’s a really big event.
eNOW: Can you indulge on the emergence of the HoliMont Ski Club on the mountain bike scene?
DEE: It’s great for the folks at HoliMont to be so onboard with everything they’re doing with their bike park. We’ve been supporting them the whole way and will continue to do so. Personally, as an avid mountain biker, I love it! My wife and my son and I are over there every Sunday riding. They love it as much as I do. My son is seven-years-old and he and my wife both raced downhill races at HoliMont last summer. And my daughter, who is nine-years-old, goes up by the lake and paddleboards all day. They made a great move hiring Chris Perks. With his background in building snow parks and MTB trails, and with the creative freedom he has, the parks are just going to get better and better over the years.
Loud Performance specializes in mountain bikes, fat bikes and snowboards. They sell the ultimate variety of gear, accessories and apparel for those sports, as well as a great selection of items for anyone who leads an active, outdoor lifestyle. You can also rent and ride the best and brightest new technology on the market at Loud. Catch up with them at loudperformance.com and on Facebook and Instagram. Or better yet, drop into either of their locations: 4818 Route 430 in Bemus Point, and 16 Washington in Ellicottville in the basement of Ellicottville Coffee Company, aka Loud Underground.