Yucca Dune blog

My name is Tim Ryschon. Yucca Dune was the brainchild of my sisters and I back in 1995.  We dreamt of bringing something unique to our hometown of Valentine, Nebraska.  Huddled around my dining table, we contemplated how the Cowboy Trail, a new rail-to-trail bike path that bisects Valentine might interact with established tourist attraction of the Niobrara National Scenic River.  Certainly, this would be a historic opportunity to rent bikes, perhaps sell coffee, and launch a high-end outdoor retail store there.  We were all under the spell (and coop members) of REI and imagined how such a product line might fair in our small town.

We wouldn’t be stopped by the usual and prudent questions about business operations (of which we had none), or of market size (we grew up there), or of vendor accounts, bookkeeping, inventory management, customer relations, and cash flow.  Onward we charged!

We did it though.  We created a spectacular micro-version of our beloved REI in our beloved hometown, serving truly non-Nebraskan inventory, video, and mystic to our Sandhills neighbors and guests.