Northwest Vegas bike shop is home to a hidden gem

E.T. has phoned home.

But first, a pit stop in Centennial Hills.

There, the most famous space alien in the history of American cinema sits in a milk crate affixed to the handlebars of an exceedingly hard-to-find 1981 Kuwahara-KZ bicycle hanging from the rafters — or at least a 3D, foam-injected mold of the extraterrestrial’s head finished off with a custom makeup job.

“This is one of my prized possessions,” notes Mike Skoy, neck craned upward, gazing at the bike he meticulously restored from a rusty frame he found on eBay after years of searching.

“It was all primered gray,” he recalls. “I hand-painted that to match the movie poster that came out in 1982.”

It’s a recent Thursday just before opening at The Vault Bicycle Shop (7575 Norman Rockwell Lane, Suite 120), and while the walls that surround us can’t talk — as thickly layered in rubber and banana seats as they are — they still have plenty to say.

“Every one of these bikes, they tell a story,” Skoy says, leading us on a tour of his place, which has twice been recognized by the National Bicycle Dealers Association as one of the top 10 bike shops in America.

‘I gotta preserve this’

“These are all originals,” he continues, pointing to a red, white and blue bike manufactured by Redline in 1976. “That was one of 150 ever made. I did a full bicentennial build on it.”

We pass by a clutch of superhero bikes from the ’70s (Batman, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk), a sweet “Charlie’s Angels”-themed ride and the first Hello Kitty bike imported to the United States by the Sanrio company in 1976.

“It’s an original one that I found back East,” Skoy says of the latter. “And I just was like, ‘Oh, I gotta preserve this.’ ”

Preservation is the be-all and end-all here: Everything is vintage, from the 1982 Schwinn Sidewinder, the company’s first mountain bike, to the sleek black-and-yellow 1979 Colnago Super racing bike to the myriad framed cycling publications on display here.

“Every single magazine that’s hanging up is a No. 1 issue,” Skoy says. “I hunted these all over the world.”

The fruits of Skoy’s labors have gradually evolved over the past 10 years into a hidden gem for cycling enthusiasts — or anyone who ever steered their Huffy over a homemade wooden ramp when they were a kid: a sort of mini-Smithsonian to the pastime tucked into a full-service bike shop in the far north valley.

It was never intended to be a museum, but that’s exactly what it’s become.

“I wanted it to be a walk down memory lane,” Skoy says of his vast collection of all things cycling. “But after I hung my 75th bike, I was like, ‘We’re more like a museum.’ ”

A museum sans stuffiness.

“Wherever I travel, I like to go in the local bike shops and just check them out,” Skoy says, “and what I’ve discovered — and nothing against anybody else’s business model and all that — but I just saw a lot of shops being cookie cutter, the same neat rows.

“There’s no personality,” he continues. “You guys might as well wear shirts and ties in there. I did want a different shop than anything you see out there. But I don’t remember if I ever thought it would turn into this.”

Feeling of independence

It was his first taste of his freedom as a child, one that lingers decades later. The son of a military father, Skoy was living in England when his dad and sister taught him how to ride a bike.

“I remember looking back and seeing everyone’s like, ‘Yeah, you’re doing it! You’re doing it!’ ” he recalls. “I went around the corner, and I couldn’t see them anymore. That was my first feeling of independence. Like, ‘Wow, I’m doing this. There’s no parents here guiding me. I’m doing this on my own.’

“I still carry that feeling,” Skoy adds. “And part of me having all this is that I want to reconnect people with their first feeling of that same independence when they were kids.”

It can be addictive, this initial burst of autonomy from behind the handlebars.

He’s been hooked ever since.

Skoy’s family later relocated to Las Vegas, where he started racing bikes when he was 12, becoming the top rider in Nevada in 1990.

He thought about turning pro, but life took him elsewhere. A few decades ago, Skoy was working in finance in the medical industry in Portland, Oregon, a mecca for cycling.

“I’m sitting up there all day, doing my work in a shirt and tie, looking out the window, just seeing bicycles all day,” he remembers, “like, ‘What I wouldn’t give to be in the industry.’ ”

‘This is on me now’

He’d get his chance when his office closed and his boss offered to relocate Skoy and his family to another city or pay for training in another field instead.

Skoy took the opportunity to become a certified bike mechanic, returning to Vegas, where he worked at a local shop, saving money to start his own business.

Right when he was about to do so, tragedy struck: His son got into a terrible accident, resulting in numerous trips to a pediatric hospital in California and stays at the Ronald McDonald House for surgeries on the boy’s arm.

The dream had to be put on hold.

“One day, I woke up and I go, ‘I won’t be able to do this for at least for another five years,’ ” Skoy recalls. “So let me just hunker down, learn everything I need to do, so I can be the best at it.”

Finally, 10 years ago, he opened his own place.

“I was like, ‘This is on me now, and I can’t fail,’ ” Skoy says. “ ‘Let me just do something so unique, so unlike what anybody else in town is doing, and we’ll stand out.”

Restoring glory

“Can you imagine if Paul McCartney’s or John Lennon’s butt sat on that seat?”

Speaking of unique, Skoy is looking up at an antique ski bike that the Beatles used to race down a mountain in the Austrian countryside in 1965’s “Help!” — he just doesn’t know which one rode it, exactly.

Skoy’s shop is filled with artifacts that you probably won’t encounter anywhere else, from a silver all-metal 1955 Anthony Brothers Tricycle that looks like it weighs 40 pounds to a high-wheel penny-farthing bike made of wood — complete with oak handlebars — that he scored from a shop teacher in Phoenix.

But what The Vault is even more chock-full of is memories, some of Skoy’s own making: Mounted on a far wall is his 1990 Robinson Team Pro racing bike complete with a No. 1 plate that he earned by being the state’s top rider. After selling the bike to a friend when he was a kid, he later tracked it all the way to an Illinois farmhouse, where it was just an oxidized frame that Skoy rebuilt to its original, gleaming glory.

He digs doing the same for others, reuniting customers with their teenage rides or making old bikes new again.

Skoy talks of surprising a client who’s a member of the North Las Vegas City Council with a Mongoose Motomag bike that he rode back in the day, and of refurbishing a grandmother’s childhood tricycle shortly before she entered the hospital near the end of her life.

“This woman carried this tricycle around with her her whole life,” he says. “We ended up finding the same tricycle with the parts we needed and took the ones off just to complete that. We got that to her within two days of her passing, and she was able to give it to her grandkids.”

‘They find that spark’

Skoy’s shop isn’t wholly rooted in the past — there are new bikes for sale here, too, and they service even the most up-to-date, electronically enhanced mountain bikes.

But what excites him the most, what really makes his eyes gleam, is the way a bike can make you feel like a kid again.

It’s a fleeting thing, and therein lies its power: Sometimes you take a ride, and sometimes it takes you.

“I find sometimes that grown-ups get that (feeling) lost inside of them,” Skoy says. “So, it’s so cool when someone comes in, ‘Oh, I used to ride a bike 40 years ago, but I haven’t been on anything since,’ and you spark that passion in them. ‘Test-ride this.’ They go down the street, they come back, and that smile just says everything.

“You found that again, that first feeling of independence, going out on a Saturday and being gone all day,” he continues. “They find that spark, and you’re like, ‘You’re back.’”

Contact Jason Bracelin at jbracelin@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0476. Follow @jasonbracelin76 on Instagram.