About Hermosa Tours
Hermosa Tours was founded in 2007 in Durango, CO with the idea there was a market for “high end” mountain bike tours in comfortable lodges, with pillow-top beds and white glove amenities. Man was that a stupid idea….orit least it was in 2008 when the economy started to crumble and our founder Matt McFee stared at the ceiling wondering “Oh lord, what have I done?” Those first few years were challenging, but we filled in the gaps with bike shuttles around Durango, some day tours and other ways to make ends meet and keep moving forward. We soon explored other areas outside Durango like Gooseberry/SW Utah, The Kokopelli Trail and Moab to lengthen our season. In 2011, we started operating our first trip on the Arizona Trail: Oracle to Picketpost down in the Sonoran Desert. This really gave us a great tour we could run in the colder months.
2011/2012 brought two major events that changed the trajectory of the business dramatically. First was being awarded a permit from Coconino National Forest, Red Rock Ranger District…..aka the Sedona area. Sedona was bubbling with potential with miles and miles of amazing singletrack, although much of it was illegal at the time. Our original plan was to just offer multi-day, guided rides in Sedona, but that morphed into opening an office there and operating daily guided rides. It was immensely popular right away and now we had a second physical location from which to operate, and more importantly, operate when Durango was covered in snow.
The second major event was stumbling into a new business model: self-guided tours. There was never one lightning bolt moment when this idea came to fruition, it was more a case of small bits of information and observation coming together over time. We did away with the multi-day, guided, catered tours as we felt the market was already saturated with that product and instead offered a more do-it-yourself model where people could guide themselves at their own pace and arrive to a comfortable camp we had setup with all their personal gear waiting. Clients could buy and cook their own food using our kitchen and generally just have a personalized experience (at a lower price!) with some logistics plugged in along the way. It was a hit! Mountain bikers from everywhere really took to the concept and we quickly changed the entire multi-day catalog to self-guided. It is now our specialty and our brand.
In 2014 we entered into an agreement with the Arizona Trail Association to create a separate brand and operate self-guided tours (both MTB and trekking) along sections of the 800-mile Arizona National Scenic Trail. We called this venture AZT Expeditions and went about creating and permitting numerous trips along the trail. This partnership worked very well in the early going, but over time we learned what worked and didn’t work and eventually rolled the MTB trips back into the Hermosa Tours website/brand and eliminated the AZT Expeditions brand. We appreciated the time and opportunity with the ATA and continue to be a believer in their mission.