A bike town's Halloween
Davis is the bicycle capital of America, and once a year it fills up with the undead. A FREE, all-ages Halloween festival and costumed bike parade, run by volunteers, paid for by sponsors, and it builds trikes for children who have never been able to ride one.
Several thousand zombies, in a town built for bicycles
Throughout October, Davis fills up with Halloween, and it all builds to one Saturday. On Halloween itself, Saturday 31 October, Community Park becomes a Halloween theme park and several thousand costumed people ride bicycles through a town built for bicycles.
Expect 25+ entertainment stations, carnival-style food, music, arts, crafts, live bats and a great deal more. Encounter epic spectacles: zombies on stilts, the dancing dead, an entire Halloween marching band that walks straight through the crowd, mad scientists, rotting robots, swords, lasers, a fencing academy, a robotics team, and pop-up brain juice handed out by neighborhood children along the route.
The parade rolls out at 11am, five miles at a gentle pace, and at the halfway point professional BMX riders throw themselves into the air off a ramp as your reward for pedalling out there. Then the whole afternoon builds to 2:30pm, when zombies fall out of an aeroplane and land in the park in front of you.
At 3pm the whole thing moves downtown for two hours of trick-or-treating through dozens of businesses. It is FREE. All of it is FREE.
The origin story, as a comic
Davis illustrator and graphic designer Elijah Adorno drew the whole thing as a two-page comic: two children wheeling their bikes past the cemetery on Halloween night, and what comes out of the ground when it hears the word bicycle.
Look at the zombie on page two. Green face, blue cycle helmet, coming up out of the grave shouting for a bicycle. That is the same zombie at the top of every page of this website. The festival has been wearing Elijah’s drawing ever since.
Why it exists
This festival exists to put custom adaptive tricycles under children with disabilities. NorCal Trykers builds them, and they are our beneficiary every year. Each trike costs about $1,200. Since 2019 the parade has funded 42 of them, roughly $50,000, while never charging a penny at the gate.
Those children get to feel what everybody else in this town takes for granted: riding, moving under your own power, the wind in your hair. That is the whole point, and the zombies are how we pay for it.
Who makes it
The Davis Odd Fellows Lodge #169 and The Bike Campaign produce the festival with the Davis Bike Club. Aaron Wedra chairs the volunteer committee. More than 130 local and regional organizations bring something to the day, and about a hundred volunteers put it up and take it down. Everyone is on the team page.
Why Davis
Because no other town in America could do this. Davis was the first city in the country to stripe a bike lane, the first ever awarded Platinum by the League of American Bicyclists, and is home to the US Bicycling Hall of Fame. There are 108 miles of bike lanes and 63 miles of paths here, and more people cycle to work per head than anywhere else in the United States.
Which is why Halloween here arrives on two wheels, and why you can step off a train, borrow a bike and never touch a car all weekend.
How to help
Sponsor it, volunteer, bring a booth, or simply turn up in costume and bring your neighbours. All four are genuinely useful.
