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Saskatoon Cycles September 2026 Newsletter

Bike Valet Update

We’re down to our final two venues for the 2026 Bike Valet. That’s right: it’s been an amazing season, and we’re still not done!

The current tallies for this year’s Bike Valet:
15 Venues
Over 500 AMAZING volunteer hours
Over 3500 bikes parked!

The Bike Valet owes its ongoing success to a culmination of cooperation from key players, year after year. First, there are the volunteers. So far this year, they’ve donated over 500 combined hours of their time to make this program the success it is. They show up in high heat, wind, and rain and always have a friendly face waiting to greet you and your wheels. We are eternally grateful.

Second, we’re also highly appreciative of the thousands of people who use and donate to the valet all season! Any program is only successful if it is utilized by the public, and boy, we’ve been so happy to see the Bike Valet get utilized so much this year!

Third, but certainly not least, we are thankful to the venue operators who contract the Bike Valet services and provide them as a free option to their patrons! They create the amazing events that draw people together in the first place, and without their hard work and support, the valet would not have a reason to exist.

We’re thrilled to be a part of this great cycling and event community. We are excited to wrap up 2026 with a run and cycling event, and pumped to get ready for 2027!

Help us make our last two venues fun and well-staffed:

Critical Mass Ride – Sept 25

The next Critical Mass in Saskatoon is this Friday, September 25, 2026.

Riders and other participants will muster at the A.L. Cole Pumphouse and depart at 6:30PM.

If you’re unfamiliar with the concept, we’ve found the Wikipedia entry has an excellent overview and important information:

Critical Mass is a form of direct action in which people travel as a group on bicycles at a set location and time. The idea is for people to group together to make it safe for each other to ride bicycles through their streets, based on the old adage: there’s safety in numbers.

Critical Mass has a decentralized (rather than hierarchical) structure. Critical Mass is sometimes called an “organized coincidence”, with no leadership or membership.

The Critical Mass YXE Instagram page states:

13km route. Expect to ride in the dark. Make yourself visible. Bring lights and reflectors. A small number of lights will be distributed before the ride.

Saskatoon Cycles supports getting people on their bikes and riding safely in their cities. We are not organizers of the Critical Mass, but feel the event may be of interest to our membership.

Ride For Refuge – Oct 3

Saskatoon Cycles is holding in 4th place for fundraising in the Ride for Refuge 2026!

In case you need a refresher, Ride for Refuge is a family-friendly, in-person fundraising ride/walk held this year on Saturday, October 3 in support of charities that help people seeking hope, safety, and freedom.

In Saskatoon, funds raised go to Global Gathering Place, a drop-in non-profit centre that provides personalized, heartfelt settlement assistance to refugees and immigrants. They’re one of our Keep Rolling partners, and we also support the ride with a Bike Valet!

We’re proud of our placement so far on this year’s fundraising leaderboard. You can still get involved by donating to our team or JOINING the team and becoming your own fundraising hero! Join the fun!

Cycling Guide Navigation App

This is your regular reminder that there’s a new, easy way to navigate the streets of Saskatoon.

Welcome to Cycling Guide!

It’s a FREE, made-in-Canada app that finds the lowest stress routes for any bicycle trip in the city; instead of taking a Google route that might not distinguish you from a car, Cycling Guide is designed for cyclists who want to feel safe on their journey.

The app will constantly be evolving with updated data, and users are encouraged to help develop even better routes by providing feedback and suggestions.

You can DOWNLOAD THE APP FOR FREE HERE.

Check it out today!

Nuit Blanche 2026

We lit up Nuit Blanche last weekend with dozens of riders joining us to tour all of the different exhibits the festival had to offer. Bikes were dressed up with LED lights, glow sticks, and some riders even wore special light-up jackets for the Glow Roll!

Our route passed by multiple performances before stopping briefly at River Landing to give everyone a chance to see the nearby shows. We ended the ride on a high note; right in the heart of downtown as a hip hop performance was scheduled to start, and our Glow Roll dispersed throughout the city enjoying all the sights and sounds in store for us.

A huge thank you to the organizers of Nuit Blanche for putting this event together and including us in the fun.

Cathy Watts Memorial Ride 2026

We think it went how Cathy would have wanted: starting at the parklet across from D’Lish that she helped champion, a diverse group went on a quiet bike ride punctuated by homemade cookies and soup. The weather was as delightful as the company.

We learned at the start of the ride, from Cathy’s husband Trent, that the Cathy Watts Memorial Scholarship remained healthy and sustainable and had recently been awarded to another U of S student working in the area of active transportation. It seemed a fitting theme for the ride: lasting social legacy for cycling, a better future, and education.

Trent and Cathy

We continue to miss Cathy, but her indomitable spirit rides with us every day.

Darin Kinniewess Memorial Walk/Ride 2026

Wednesday, September 16, 2026, was a day of good reflection.

People touched by Darin Kinniewess’ life showed up to share stories, connect with others, and pay respects during the 3rd Annual Memorial Walk/Ride. Family members and community workers from FASD Network, Bridge on 20th, and the Salvation Army all talked warmly of Darin’s sense of humour, friendliness, and loyalty. They expressed a universal admiration for his appetite to always do better. Even those who had never met Darin personally could see the love and loss that filled in the spaces around his death in September 2023.

Traffic deaths make the headlines and a thought is spared for the lives lost. Unless the victim is someone we’ve known personally, though, we can’t begin to know much about them or the people they’ve left behind. Their disappearance becomes a statistic. We pay even less attention to the thousands of life-altering injuries that occur each year in Saskatchewan.

We owe it to our communities to remember all the people we lose, and recognize all the impacts of injury that stem every year from car collisions. Regardless of blame or fault, or mode of transportation, at the root of each incident a human life is affected, with ripples that impact many more lives outward.

With remembrance comes the possibility and hope of doing better. We can demand improved infrastructure and rules that reduce the probabilities of harm. We can ensure that safety is prioritized for everyone, regardless of how they get around. We can manifest the normalization of ZERO road deaths.

Darin wasn’t a statistic to the people around him. Natasha Fox (killed on her bike earlier in 2023) wasn’t either. They were people with rich lives that interconnected with other lives. And the best way for us to honour these real lives lost to traffic tragedies is to work toward making sure the needless deaths stop happening at all.

Donate

Your donations give us the resources to press toward a Saskatoon where cycling is a viable, year-round mode of transportation that is safe, convenient, and comfortable for all ages.

We want families to be able to simply hop on their bikes to go grab an ice cream and enjoy the beauty of Saskatoon. For you or your partner to pick up groceries or a library book. And we really want you to be able to commute to work and back safely and conveniently.

Your donation helps us work on these three ‘pillars’ of cycling development for Saskatoon:

  • Infrastructure – A safe, convenient, comfortable, and well-maintained cycling network throughout the city that allows cyclists to go from every neighbourhood to key destinations.
  • Ridership – Educate, encourage, and promote cycling so more people choose bicycles as a convenient and safe transportation option year round.
  • Culture – Educate, encourage, and promote diversity in ridership with respectful inclusion of all modes of transportation.

Please Donate Today