Emporia adjusts to growing pains of Unbound Gravel's 12,000 visitors

Emporia, Kansas could be called a boom town, but instead of gold or silver, it is the flint rocks on country roads that attract thousands and thousands of cyclists to the area for the Unbound Gravel event. 

This midwestern community has less than 25,000 residents during the year. Unbound Gravel is responsible for adding 50% more people in Emporia once a year and making it the gravel riding capital of the world. 

More than 12,000 people flock to the little town for Unbound Gravel, and this year sees the biggest field of athletes, with 5,000 competing and riding across five distances and routes from 25 miles to 350 miles.

A population explosion is a good thing for the local economy, as Lelan Dains, director of Visit Emporia confirmed. Dains used to be one of the owners of Merchant Cycles, the official bike shop of 2024 Unbound Gravel.  

Of course, there are headaches and problems with all those cyclists, support staff, industry professionals and fans trying to find places to stay within close proximity. 

“We do have a community that helps out, and it's still an issue. It would literally take nearly every homeowner in this community opening up their homes in order to facilitate that. That's an unfortunate logistic hurdle,” Dains told Cyclingnews about the  Unbound Gravel housing crunch. 

“It does lead to an increase of traffic in our small little town, which might anger some folks who aren't accustomed to that, but on the whole, the vast majority of residents understand the positive impact.”

Emporia not only serves as the front porch to the Flint Hills for cycling, it was also the birthplace of disc golf and hosts tournaments throughout the year. 

In early May, an estimated 800 competitors and 3,000 spectators were in town for the Dynamic Discs Open. In late June, Emporia will see another influx of disc golfers and spectators for the 2024 PDGA Masters Disc Golf World Championships.

“Emporia is also the founding city of Veterans Day, the home of the National Nurses, Hall of Fame. It's a pretty eclectic little town,” Dains explained.

Hotel rooms book quickly for Unbound each year and people are left looking for traditional accommodations 60 miles away in Topeka or 80 miles away in Wichita. People can put their names on a wait list for the handful of hotels in Emporia, but convenience is not cheap - the going rate for brand-name properties like the Hampton Inn and Holiday Inn Express were $392 to $643 per night.

The short-term, private rental market, like Airbnb, is also tight, with homes sold out months in advance. Many riders opted for the do-it-yourself camping option at the fairgrounds for a reasonable cost, low-cost dorm rooms at Emporia State University dorms for those who don’t mind sharing space with new friends, and the occasional $40 per night for a spare bedroom offered by local residents. 

The dorm rooms are very popular, and some riders prefer that option to renting a private home. 

Just ask Virginia’s Blue Ridge TWENTY24, who had Melisa Rollins finish fifth in the elite women’s Unbound 200 and Alexis Jaramillo won the overall in the junior women’s division. The team brought a large contingency of riders in 2022 and they rented an unfurnished home, so had to buy air mattresses, sheets and linens to make it work.

Emporia then and now

So where in the Unbound Gravel and Emporia timeline that things start to change? When did the event become big?

Multi-time MTB national champion Rebecca Rusch competed in 2012 and won (she was third overall among men and women). Then she came back and won twice more. Heads began to turn in the cycling world about this special off-road endurance event.

“A mass of people riding together, that did not appeal to me as an explorer and a mountain biker,” Rusch told Cyclingnews last year about her resistance to try the Kansas gravel race.

“The terrain was exciting and it was kind of fun. I found it was a lot like mountain biking. I took it seriously, went back to defend and it became part of my race schedule for a number of years.”

Lelain Dains said that it was Rusch’s presence that was a significant factor for people pay attention to the event, but it was still modest. Then he said the ‘mythology’ about the tyre-slicing flint rocks and the menacing mud put the event on the world map.

“I think a big launch point was the infamous 2015 year of the mud, when Yuri Hauswald won in a sprint finish. And I just remember there being a lot of mythology that was born out of that event that year, and it kind of took on a life of its own. And then from 2015 on, you can see some pretty clear accelerated growth, namely in the attention around it. The media attention started to take off, and with that came increased participation.”

Dains started the Visit Emporia pledge last year for visitors, to demonstrate being good stewards of the community and environment during time in the area. 

The three components include: treat others as you want them to treat you, leave no trace (don't litter) and respect our culture. But the pledge is not just for visitors, and he says they “walk the walk”.

“We initiate clean-up efforts, notably the day after the race on Sunday. In collaboration with Life Time, we bring in volunteers from all over the area and we do the best we can to canvas almost every inch of these courses,” Dains said.

“I'll tell you, the vast majority of the trash that we pick up certainly isn't coming from those cyclists. We could pick up everything, not just [food] wrappers and bottles to get left behind. We're picking up televisions, beer cans, whatever we can put in the vehicles and haul it back out of there. It's our part of our obligation, responsibility to being a good host.

“You don't host World Championships or the ‘Super Bowl of gravel by accident. We're not the only town in the Flint Hills. We're not the only town with disc golf courses. That takes a desire, a go-get-em attitude that we have right here in Emporia.”