Bike builder takes the high road

You never get a flat tire with these bikes, but falling off can get ugly.

“It’s rides like a unicycle with a training wheel in back,” cyclist Paul Rust said.

A big unicycle. The front wheel is 53-inches high followed by a tiny wheel in back, a style known as “ordinary” or “penny-farthing” bikes.

The gray-haired grandfather often rides around town on a hot-pink high-wheeler, turning heads as he casually cruises along Tejon Street downtown or through Garden of the Gods.

“It’s just an elegant ride and almost poetic,” he said. “It rides like a cloud.”

It should ­— it’s a $5,000 set of wheels.

Rust, a 58-year-old machinist from Security, started making the funky bikes 25 years ago with the help of his brothers, but he later quit for other pursuits. He recently got back in the groove in a shop, Rocky Mountain High Wheels, off Highway 24 in west Colorado Springs.

The 30-pound bikes are modern counterparts of the antique mode of early-cycling transit. The symbol of the late Victorian era still demands a certain etiquette from the rider.

“People do notice you,” Rust said. “You can’t be too free. Don’t scratch certain areas or pick your nose. It’s like being in a fishbowl the whole time.”

High visibility has its rewards.

“Everybody takes pictures with cell phones. Kids say, ‘That’s bad. Cool bike, dude.’ Older people say it in an English accent: ‘Penny-farthing, that’s nice. Yes, quite’,” Rust said adding British inflection.

Riders scramble to the seat using a peg in the back to give them a leg-up. “It’s a little harder to get on,” he said.

But easier than it looks.

The height is a mixed blessing.

“It’s about the same as a tractor-trailer driver or bus driver,” he said.

The downfalls are just that.

“I’ve taken five or six pretty good headers,” Rust said. “You go over the front when you go, so that can be a little dangerous.”

Still, it’s safer than a century ago. “A hundred years ago there were a lot of potholes to deal with.”
The speed is about the same as any bike. “It goes as fast as your legs will go,” Rust said. “There are no fast bicycles, there are only fast riders.”

Rust credits his family with fostering his free-spirit side.

His mom, Mary Jane Rust, a Pikes Peak Arts Council Lifetime Achievement Award recipient, was manager of Colorado Springs Symphony Orchestra and host of the “Emphasis on the Arts” weekly TV show.

Rust and his brood of five bike-loving brothers took six of the high wheelers to Ireland in 1990. “We got invited by Lord Mayor of Dublin to ride in the St. Patrick’s Day Parade,” he said.

Two of his brothers have since died, one from cancer and another from suicide.

Another brother, Michael Rust, 56, who was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and Museum in 1991, went missing five months ago under what authorities term suspicious circumstances. His blood was found near his home south of Salida in Saguache County.

The family has established a $25,000 reward for credible information.

“We work on the case every day,” Rust said.

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Call the writer at 636-0253.