SHOOTING THE MOON

Moon Rock Outfitters – Roswell, New Mexico

Megan Cederberg carefully adjusts the seat on a State bicycle. Local teenager, Kloee Clayton, gingerly climbs aboard as Cederberg holds the bike. Clayton stretches a foot to one of the pedals, then reaches for the other one. “Your knee should be almost fully extended,” Cederberg explains to her. “That’s when the fit is right.” Clayton smiles and nods, trying to balance the bike while inside Moon Rock Outfitters, a recreational outlet in Roswell.

The shop is located on Roswell’s main drag, right next to Stellar Coffee Company, and two doors down from where a green alien waves. Moon Rock is the heart of this southeastern New Mexico town’s cycling community. It offers bicycle and paddle board rentals, bicycle repairs, new and used inventory, custom bike orders, wheel truing, hub bearing servicing, drive-train cleaning and indexing, as well as bicycle assembly for online orders. The owners, Megan and Daniel Cederberg, also organize numerous community rides. These are frequently geared toward the city’s youth, particularly those who may have life disadvantages.

These rides are organized under a local non-profit, Casakids, in a program called, Adventure Time. Megan is the director of this program that runs in conjunction with Moon Rock. “It is for participants 12 to 26 at no cost to Casakids.” she says. Youth in Roswell can be referred to Casakids from the schools, the courts, and from the community. “For instance, if kids have any type of school violations, if they get in trouble, let’s say they beat up somebody at school or get caught with a vape or anything like that, any type of misdemeanor at school, they can get referred to our program. From there they can sign up and join Adventure Time. Adventure Time is paddle boarding, disc golfing, and biking in the summertime. But then throughout the school year, it goes beyond just physical activities. We’ll incorporate intellectual activities, creative, emotional and spiritual. So we like to do things like meditation, go to the zoo, go to the museums, we like to go to other local businesses and partake in their crafts or things that they do. A big goal in the program is to get them to have new experiences. Things that they would never have experienced before that could potentially help them cope in their life. So we have eight bikes, we have 11 paddle boards, five bags for disc golfing, and then we have all of the discs that we need for disc golfing.”

PUTTING THE PEDAL TO THE PAVEMENT

The Cederbergs didn’t really start out to be entrepreneurs. As a matter of fact, they kind of ended up in Roswell in 2015 via a roundabout route that started in their home state of Wisconsin. They followed Daniel Cederberg’s older brother, Joel, to the city. He was managing at Stellar Coffee when the couple visited him. They found the area to their liking and stayed on after Joel moved on.

The couple managed at Stellar Coffee Co. when they first moved to Roswell. Daniel, whose family owns a coffee place back in Wisconsin, fit right into that role, while Megan got to know the community as a barista and became a volunteer at the Chaves County CASA. She became a visitation monitor for CASA just six months after moving to Roswell. Over the years she took on other job titles there and settled into Youth Advocacy. The job was tough at times and she was feeling a bit overwhelmed in her role, as was Daniel sometimes. “Moon Rock started in January of 2019. I was working for CASA and I was kind of burnt out,” she says. “Daniel was a barista and manager at Stellar. He was the equipment fixer upper. He was the building guy. Daniel was really being utilized over there for everything he was worth, and we were both just like, ‘Dude, we need to live our dreams. We need to be doing something that we really love.’”

And there is nothing they love better than hopping on their bikes and cruising around Roswell. About six years ago, Megan was talking with the owner of Stellar Coffee Co., Anna Baker, who also happened to have a space available in the back of the coffee shop. She asked about opening a bike shop in the back room of Stellar. “I was like, ‘Hey, just a shot, dream in the dark. Let me and Daniel open a bike shop in your back room,’” Megan recalls. “And Anne was like, ‘Yeah, if you do one group ride a month, I will let you have the space for free.’”

Having gotten to know the Cederbergs since they both spent time working at the coffee house, Baker says it was an easy decision to give them the space. “Megan, and Daniel had proven their commitment to the community,” Baker says. “And the fact that they’re responsible individuals by working for me, both Megan and Daniel. After I’d been in business for about three years they stepped into a role that Daniel’s brother had been in, managing the shop and doing a lot of managing maintenance. This man had really relieved me of a lot of responsibilities. When they took over, they just slipped right into the same responsible, honest role. I’ve always been able to trust them. So I knew that Daniel had the inherent engineering skills to be able to pull something like this off, and I knew that Megan had the entrepreneurial skills to help them do it. So it just made perfect sense.”

SERVING THE COMMUNITY

What’s more, it filled a need in the community, Baker points out, because the only other bike shop was closing as the owner retired. With a direction and some goals in mind, Daniel and Megan got to work coordinating group rides and letting people know that they were open to service people’s bike needs. Group rides grew organically as Daniel and Megan invited people through word of mouth, Facebook, and other social medias. Group rides were connecting traveling nurses, college students, lawyers, and other community members together. Group rides had 10 or more participants on average. It was a great motivator to keep going. “Moon Rock’s first group ride was out to the Bitter Lakes Wildlife Refuge, then back into the sunset with Capitan Mountain, Sierra Blanca and Cloudcroft all appearing over the horizon,” she says.

And Daniel adds that “a favorite spot is the Spring River Recreation Trail, a paved eight-mile track across the city that joins five parks and lush gardens, connecting riders to nature and allowing users to slow down and literally smell the flowers.” The trail also connects many recreational amenities and attractions, including a disc golf course, a bird sanctuary, as well as basketball and tennis courts, the Roswell Museum and Arts Center, and the Spring River Zoo. “Outside of town, the scenic highways and county roads provide a healthy sense of connection to the land,” he writes. “Watching the desert change from yellow-brown to all the colors that wildflowers bring in the spring is a wonderful experience.”

Roswell has a nice selection of state parks and nature preserves that Moon Rock and locals utilize for adventure and recreation. Some favorites are the Salt Creek Wilderness, Bitter Lakes National Wildlife Refuge and Bottomless Lake State Park. They are all found outside of the city, around a 15-minute drive away — and close enough to bike to.

The dream was to open a bike shop where Daniel could maintain bikes while connecting people who had similar interests as they did. First step was to check out the local bike shop, Alien Outlaw. “At the same time, we got really lucky,” Megan says. When they arrived at the shop to talk with the owner in 2018, the timing was perfect. Steve Brooks, the owner of Alien Outlaw, was ready to retire and said he was closing soon. Daniel started buying equipment and inventory from Steve that day. Over the next few months, Daniel and Steve worked out some trade which provided Moon Rock an overnight, low-cost inventory, and tools of the trade. The bike shop opened its doors to the public on January 1st, 2019.

One year after opening the bike shop, Moon Rock had outgrown the space in the back of Stellar. They loved being downtown and the partnership with Anne. Daniel and Megan again asked Anne about renting another space from her. She had the other half of her building with a main street entrance and Anne said yes without hesitation. “The spot was sitting over here. I had people inquiring for it, but what I really wanted was something that would pretty much enhance the health and outdoor nature of Roswell,” she says. “Because it’s here and there just aren’t very many tools for people to be able to get out and do it. And we desperately needed a bike shop. So it was easy to say, ‘Hey, do it!’”

COLLABORATION

For Megan, riding is just a release, and she loves to share the feeling with the youth. In 2020, Megan was working as a youth advocate for Casakids, facilitating social emotional learning groups and teaching life skills. She put in a proposal to create an outdoor program that would provide social, physical, intellectual, creative, emotional, and spiritual experiences for the participants of Casakids. Carrie-Leigh Cloutier, CEO of Casakids, applied for a grant and was awarded funds to purchase eight State bicycles, 10 paddle boards, five disc golf kits with a basket, and all the supplies needed to achieve these outings.

The program was ready to start, but they needed a place to store all of the equipment and from which to function. When Moon Rock expanded into the current location, Megan made sure there was one room available for Adventure Time. This partnership would go on to create a space that youth enjoyed being in and would come to get their own bikes, repairs, and accessories.

“We love biking. I’m not the extravagant biker where I get all the gear and know everything about the bikes, but I do love the meditation of biking and I like biking long distance,” she says.

COVID

When the pandemic set in, public transportation and meeting together in public indoor spaces wasn’t really an option. The community took to the outdoors, and Moon Rock was there to provide bikes, skateboards, skates, and bike repairs to help people stay healthy during that hard time. Bike shops all over the nation were seeing growth, and Moon Rock was too. “I mean, biking was exponential. It was like everybody wanted to bike,” she says. “We grew so fast.”

Megan takes a break from talking about the business to grab a tire pump and works on bringing a tire up to proper inflation. Then she goes back into a storeroom and brings out a bunch of helmets, passing them around to everybody in the shop. Then she delivers a quick primer on some riding etiquette and rules of the road.

“Okay,” she says. “There are a few things everybody needs to know. We’re going to ride together in single file. When we cross a road, everybody needs to yell, ‘Clear,’ so those following know no cars are coming. When we’re making a turn, hold your left out for making a left and hold your left hand pointed up for a right.”

Then she takes everyone out into the back parking lot for a quick spin to make sure everybody was comfortable, understood how to work the gears and the brakes, and was confident about taking to the streets.

“The mission of Moon Rock,” Daniel says, “is being an outlet for moving health,” Megan explains. “That is the mission statement, if that makes sense. And I do think the mission is creating the ability to build community and have a space where people can come and have something in common that is better for them.”

That’s important in a place like Roswell, which has a checkered reputation for having enough recreational opportunities for people. But, Megan says, people need to take responsibility for creating their own way of nourishing and refreshing their mind and body. To go out and make it their own. And that’s where cycling can be such an uplifting and emotionally freeing experience.

“We’re in a space where a lot of people in Roswell have this idea that this place is terrible. They hate it here. There’s nothing to do here. And, truthfully, we feel that sometimes, too,” she says. “I think we feel the burden of that, too. But then we remind ourselves we can go on bike rides. We can gather people and go on bike rides, and that is so beautiful. And Roswell actually has a very beautiful trail system.”

SERVING THE COMMUNITY

Megan heads off down a bike path, five teens and a couple of adults in her wake. The going is slow as everybody gets used to riding unfamiliar bikes. The route takes a turn down an embankment and winds along a concreted arroyo for a bit, before rising up and passing through a small park with an empty basketball court. The route continues along some seldom-used streets and through another park. While taking a break, a young woman bounces out of a nearby house with a puppy in tow and gives Megan a big hug. After returning it, Megan scoops up the pup for some doggy kisses. And this, she says later, is really what Moon Rock is trying to accomplish.

“So running these programs, we’re building a team,” she says. “We’re definitely getting more people involved. But if I could do it the way I dream for it, it would be that we go on long rides with kids. Like we’re hitting 30 miles, and if they want to go beyond, then we’re grabbing those kids that want to go beyond. But I would love to see us do a 30-mile ride and just see what we see. It’s not like California, or waterfalls, or beautiful mountain areas, but it is beautiful in its own sense. It’s desert, where you can see far away and see it smaller and up close, but still far away. It’s so different, and I want us to be able to do that so they can get a slowed-down version of life. And I’d like to take them to new destinations.”

The bottom line, Megan says back at Moon Rock after the ride, is that communities need to bolster youth to prosper, and the Cederbergs are trying their best to help that along in Roswell.

“I think the benefit of these programs is even though we’re working — I was thinking about that this morning — how do we politely say that these children are abused, abandoned, or neglected, but still give them empowerment? How do we give empowerment to them without simply saying, we’re just helping the needy and the poor and the broken? But I think you see with them that they are that, but they’re so much more,” she says. “It’s weird; we’ll figure it out. Recognize that you’re giving an experience to a child, and everybody becomes a mentor in my programs, and it has been super lovely.”

Photos by Roberto E. Rosales Photography Editorial by Glen Rosales

Moon Rock Outfitters – Roswell, NM