Nuke Sunrise Bike Bags is a pack and bag brand headquartered in Moab, Utah. It was founded in El Paso, Texas, in 2013.
Moab got this bike bag maker through a summer road trip. Dave Wilson, a high school physics teacher in El Paso, Texas, was on vacation when he met a mountain biker in Moab. The company's About page covers the next part in six words: "Courtship intertwined with a trial co-habitation." After what the page calls a disappointing 2020-21 school year, he left the classroom and moved Nuke Sunrise Bike Bags to Moab full time.
The sewing started years earlier. In 2012 Wilson got serious about bikepacking and made bags on a clapped-out industrial sewing machine for the race bikes hanging in his garage. He rode the Arizona Trail 300 that year, then rode it again in 2013 on a singlespeed. Later in 2013 he launched Nuclear Sunrise Stitchworks as a part-time gig out of a bedroom.
Custom frame bags, cut to fit one bike, are still the bread and butter, at $125 to $135. The accessories get atomic age names, like the Silo, a 68 gram stem bag with a drain hole in the bottom. The warranty covers manufacturing defects for the life of the bag but not crashes, which on Moab slickrock is a meaningful exclusion.
The Nuke Sunrise name traces to a physics student whose grandmother, out walking the dog early one morning, saw the sun rise twice.
