There was already a bike waiting on the front stoop when Dustin Craney got to work. He glanced at the note taped to the seat and rolled it inside.

“It’s here for service,” he said, as he opened up the door.

Craney is usually onboarding tour guides this time of year, but instead he and his staff are doing a lot of bicycle tune ups this spring.

Sockeye Cycle is known for bike tours and rentals in Haines and Skagway. They fix and sell bikes, too, but until recently, that’s been only a small fraction of their business model. Then coronavirus hit. The summer cruise ship season vaporized. Thousands of summer tours turned into a big question mark on the calendar. But something else happened. People started buying bikes. Lots of them.

“This year has definitely been one of the biggest that we’ve seen. And I would say normally in a spring, you know, 20, 30, 40 bikes would be normal. And we’ve probably sold about double that this year,” said Craney.

Bike sales have doubled all over the country, according to reporting by the New York Times. In major cities, bike shops attribute the uptick to fears of public transportation, but in the remote southeast, that’s more than unlikely. Many seasonal workers are without jobs, however, and may simply be spending more time outside.

Major manufacturers can’t keep up with the sudden demand. Craney said most models are backordered until this fall. But he was planning for a record-breaking tourist season, so he’s got a solid inventory. That, and he started to sell off his fleet of a couple hundred rental and tour bikes, which, with no cruise ships on the horizon, are just sitting in the shop anyway.

“Some of those new bikes that we thought we would be using for rentals or for tours have been a good fit for retail sales here as well. So we’ve been able to repurpose those and we’re actually pretty comfortable with our inventory that we’ve been selling a lot of bikes and we realized that we’re not going to be able to restock anytime soon,” he said.

He wasn’t able to hire the dozen or so seasonal tour guides that run bike tours for visitors each year, but he has been able to retain his seven Alaska employees, thanks in part to federal relief programs like the Payroll Protection Program, but also because of those sales and an uptick in demand for maintenance.

Haines mechanic Ted Kelly puts a bike up on the repair stand and spins a wheel.

“The rotor is bent and maybe a little bit loose,” he said.

“You can kind of hear it when it slows down because it’s rubbing.”

This is one of the back-logged tune ups on his list. Kelly usually maintains the tour and rental fleet, but this year he said he’s even busier doing maintenance, repairs, and bike builds for customers.

“Had some 16-hour days recently, just trying to get through bikes and bike builds.”

Most of the bikes stay in Haines and Skagway, but they’ve been shipping all over the region.

“This is the first one to Klawock this year, but we’ve sent a few all over Southeast and a lot over to Skagway,” Craney said, as he wheeled the bike outside.

“Just load this in my van, get it over to the airport!”

The record sales don’t make up for the two to three thousand tour and rental customers per month that Sockeye won’t see this year. But Craney said he sees the value in coasting for a while and he’s glad he’s glad that more people are getting out on their bikes.