Connecting with the great outdoors is essential to our humanity. We are cyclists who love the outdoors and are building a business to support others to do the same.
We provide the specialty gear, knowledge and inspiration to thrive on your next adventure. There are so many ways to get your bikepacking groove on these days. We’re here to help you make choices amongst all the options.
We believe in the power of our collective bikepacking community. We see a common kinship among all bicycle travelers. Whether you are traveling on pavement, gravel roads or trails, traveling by bike is an experience with common threads. We seek to provide a venue to share these experiences and collectively improve our capabilities as bicycle travelers.
Shop Team Manager – Toby Smith
Toby is an alchemist of bike love, a wizard of cycling culture and a prophet of adventuring by bicycle. We’re so stoked to have him plying his trade managing our bike shop, building up new bicycles, servicing old ones and fine tuning our showroom in anticipation of the return of cool weather and a functional Toole street in front of our building.
Toby has been living the bike shop life since 2004, getting started at the Sports Basement in San Fransisco before relocating to Ventura. In 2010, Toby co-founded the Ventura Bike Hub an amazing community bike shop. Toby helped build this organization into a thriving and integral part of Ventura’s cycling community and it was a tough and sad parting of ways for him and his partner Benicia to move on to Tucson. But it is also a testament of what they built that they can move along and pass their leadership on to the next generation of HUB leaders.
Beyond bicycle wrenching and riding, Toby’s interests include surfing, restoring old cars and traveling with his family.
See Toby’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Bike Mechanic & Photographer – Jacob Wilkinson
Wearing many hats here at Campfire, Jake has found great alignment for his many skills and interests working with us. Jake grew up in the Tucson area enjoying many of the outdoor adventuring opportunities from running to climbing. But more recently Jake has gone all in into the world of cycling and bikepacking.
We gladly yanked Jake away from REI where he had gotten himself established as a bicycle mechanic. Now he is wrenching for us and along with taking care of our event and product photography.
Another great bikepacking business skill that Jake brings to the table is bike bag sewing. Jake builds great bags under his brand Good Dog Packs.
See Jake’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Bike Mechanic – Ellie Kaszniak
Ellie has recently joined our team as our part-time bike mechanic, to help us with our extra repairs and bike builds, especially during the busy season. Ellie grew up in Tucson where she began working with community bike projects in the early 2000’s. After spending many formative years in the Pacific Northwest working as a mechanic and in bicycle youth programming, she returned full time to Tucson in 2017. Since returning, Ellie has been an instrumental part of teaching and co-managing the amazing organization that is BICAS. Ellie remains involved at BICAS as well as working with after school youth bike clubs.
Ellie loves to get out on bikepacking and climbing trips with her buds all over the Southwest and beyond. We’re so excited to have Ellie sharing her depth of bicycle mechanic prowess and Tucson bike community knowledge here at Campfire Cycling.
See Ellie’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Showroom Sales & Ecommerce Support – Burger
Burger joined Campfire Cycling in the summer of 2024, bringing a wealth of bikepacking experience and a deep passion for making cycling more accessible. As a devoted bike commuter, they’ve navigated the intense streets of New York City, the rural landscapes of Montana, and now the choppy, flavorful roads of Tucson. Burger spends many weekends bikepacking through Patagonia and other surrounding Tucson regions and several times a year, they venture out on bigger adventures like the Monumental Loop and Pinyons and Pines. Eventually they aspire to ride the Oregon Trail route, the Highland Trail in Scotland, the Baja Divide, and eventually the Tour Divide.
With a decade of experience in outdoor guiding and education, Burger has honed their skills in logistics, operations, and wilderness education. They’ve guided 30-day self-supported wilderness trips, developed environmental education curricula, and provided diversity and inclusion training focused on trans competency and racial justice. Their background also includes extensive volunteer work with bike co-ops in Tucson and New York, where they’ve gained deep knowledge of bicycle components, gear, and mechanics. At Campfire Cycling, Burger supports both our shop and e-commerce operations, assisting customers in finding the perfect gear and handling order fulfillment with efficiency and care. Committed to fostering an inclusive cycling community, especially for marginalized individuals, Burger’s blend of technical expertise, community involvement, and a deep love for cycling makes them a perfect fit for the Campfire Cycling family.
See Burger’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Ecommerce Operations Manager – David Tang
David Tang has deep roots in the Tucson cycling scene having grown up in Tucson and cut his cycling industry teeth working in many Tucson shops before becoming the owner of Ordinary Bike Shop. Most recently, before joining Campfire Cycling, David managed the cycling department at REI. Beyond a deep and broad focus on all things bicycle retail, David ran a production company for many years and is a lover of House music and all things audio/visual. David also is an avid traveller and recently took an amazing sounding trip to France and Spain.
As our Ecommerce Operations Manger, David stays busy fine tuning our fulfillment, purchasing, inventory management, customer service, catalog management, systems integration and so much more. David is a craftsmen of the cardboard, a tetris player of the storage shelf and a maestro of the inventory software. David does all of these things with a keen interest and love for all of you adventure minded cyclists out there. Order delivery turnaround time and super helpful customer service have taken a major leap forward here at Campfire under David’s watch.
See David’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Catalog Content Writer – Kipkirui Ng’etich
Kipkirui is our first remote employee, based out of Kenya. Kip (as we call him) does copywriting for our products, product categories and bikepacking guides. He also uploads and organizes new products into our system. Kip has been getting increasingly into more epic cycling over the last five years, enjoying long road and gravel cycling near his home in the outskirts of Nairobi. We’ve been excited to work with Kip as he prepares to give bikepacking a try soon.
Beyond cycling, Kip is a lawyer who enjoys doing pro bono work in his community. Kip is a gamer, a chess player and practices Jui-Jitsu. We’re grateful to have Kip around sharing his perspective, charm, good humor and dedication to success.
See Kip’s contributions to our weekly Team Tidbits.
Ecommerce Team Manager & Founder – Josh Lipton
In 2001, Josh begin his career as an entrepreneur focused on the bicycle industry with the development of the CELLO bicycle case, a system for converting a BOB Trailer into a bicycle shipping case. This project evolved into BikeTrailerShop.com which launched in 2006 and was an instant success leading to BikeBagShop.com and BikeKidShop.com, all of which eventually consolidated into BikeShopHub.com. In 2013 Josh moved BikeShopHub.com from Flagstaff to Tucson.
In 2017 a by then outdated ecommerce platform had lead to an inability to adapt to the rapidly evolving challenges of competing at ecommerce in the cycling industry. Over the course of 2018 and 2019, Josh worked to correct this by rebranding the business into Campfire Cycling. These days, Josh leads Campfire’s Ecommerce team, focusing on the marketing and website maintenance side of things as well as working on keeping the overall business moving in a positive direction.
Josh grew up in Flagstaff, AZ getting into cycling at an early age, and getting into racing mountain bikes during the mid-90s MTB boom. Cycling has been a big part of his life ever since, for fun, for adventure and for driving ideas for business and bicycle advocacy. With two kids, Josh doesn’t get out on as many big bikepacking trips as he’d like. That said, Josh does get the family out occasionally, including this trip. And Josh does manage to join in the fun of quite a few of Campfire Cycling’s bikepacking trips.