I started riding at nine years old in the hay fields of Custer, Washington, where we’d drag hay bales into shape and race around whatever track we’d built that day. Japanese sport bikes came in my twenties. Then, for about fifteen years, it was big Harley touring bikes and long-distance trips — multi-week rides, a lot of pavement. What finally got me was everything I kept driving past. Every trip had a dozen gravel roads peeling off into somewhere I’d never been, and I never took one. So I sold the Harley and bought a DesertX Rally, and now I find out where they go.

I found Mosko the way a lot of people probably do — shopping. The DesertX needed luggage, and I needed gear, because it turns out a leather vest and chaps are not exactly technical off-road apparel. Somewhere in that process I noticed the company was in White Salmon, and that changed the errand into something else. I’ve spent my career in IT, building and running engineering teams and untangling systems that don’t talk to each other. That’s what I do here: keep the tools and the data working so everyone else can focus on building gear. I wanted to be part of this team long before there was a job for me to apply to.