Writer’s note: Not only does KLIM athlete, Brock Buttars, live in KLIM gear – long regarded as the industry’s snowbike leader who helped develop the world's first snowbike-specific kit – he’s also a Timbersled ambassador, KLIM Motorcycle test rider, photo shoot model and international hard enduro racer with a flourishing suspension shop and four racers under one roof, each with at least one of their own motorcycles. 

This 20-minute read shows how one Utah dad does it all – from coaching backyard motocross lessons to wrenching at all hours of the night with the family dog, Raze, while everyone else is sleeping and prepping four bikes for his moto dad duties for twins, Will and Chaz, and daughter, Tyla, plus weekly adventure bike ride date nights with his wife, Marcy. 

We stopped by the Brockstar Performance shop to get a glimpse of what it’s like at the Buttars compound before meeting up with the whole KLIM-covered family at a Southeast Idaho motocross race to see the +40 class moto dad in action. 

The adventures aren’t over yet.

The tl;dr version of this story’s tips on how Brock wears the all-new KLIM Technical Lifestyle collection:  

- Getting down and dirty in the shop? Grab the men’s Highline Jacket in asphalt and hi-vis: (“I like the asphalt and the darker colors because for me, I'm always fixing something or working on something, so I like the dark colorways for getting dusty and dirty, and you don't have to worry about getting it stained so much…It’s a good midweight material for once you're off the bike or getting ready to go somewhere or even just going to dinner. It's just a nice transitional piece…My family members are all into the fashion, and when I wear the red and blue one, they’re going, ‘That’s sweet.’ It’s not just a plain black tee shirt and cargo shorts.”)

- Going on an adventure date with your wife? Try the men’s Glacier Hoodie in fiery red and dress blues: (“The red and the blue one was my go-to if I was on Saturday going to the grocery store or dinner with my wife – cruising in the car, after you're done riding, sitting around camping. The styling for me, it was fancy clothes. I like the look of it - the colorway was my keep it clean, keep it nice…It’s just a good casual mid-layer casual piece but it’s actually got styling so you look good out on the town.”)

- To and from the grocery store or to and from the track? Sharpen up in the Glacier Hoodie in imperial blue and dress blues: (“I like the styling. It’s nice that it wasn't just plain colorways - it was nice to have different color options. My kids were actually trying to steal my red and blue one from me. When your kids actually like the colors then it's not just an old man sweatshirt.”)

***

Walking up to the starting line at the Cache Valley MX Park in Preston, Idaho, Brock Buttars is in Dad mode, chatting up his fellow moto dads in staging, sharing jokes and kid success stories before the gate drops. As one of four Buttars racing today – he might be the only dad with two sons and a daughter on the line – he has one of the best spots to watch: behind the gate for their motos.

As the only KLIM-sponsored athletes at the track, all four Buttars are all decked out in head-to-toe KLIM — a testament to the relationship their dad’s built over 10 years. Right now, on the gate with Tyla, one of three ponytails out of 33 bikes in the 250 D class, Brock whispers in her ear, repeating the same advice he’s told her for years, to which she nods, knowing already. 

“It’s all about the start. Keep your elbows up,” he says. “Just stay in the pack and don’t let them get in front of you. Always be looking ahead.”

The gate drops but the front tire of Tyla’s new-to-her KTM 125SX runs into the metal bar, so she’s dead last off the start. 

“That might be better for us,” Brock says, heading to the sidelines to cheer her on. “She can ride her own race and pick them off.” 

He walks a few feet before confessing, “When she gets back, she’s going to be pissed. She is going to be mad.” 

He admits he was nervous about getting her on a 125 before she turned 13, but after snow skiing all winter and gymnastics since she was 6, she has tremendous core strength, he says – she passes 10 people – up to 23rd – before the green flag. 

On the last lap, she makes a last-corner pass, running her competitor high in a corner until he stalls. Brock’s on the sidelines filming, cheering and whistling. 

“That’s a win right there,” he says after the finish. 

We intercept Tyla on the ride back to the pits. “What was that?” she asks, still frustrated about the start when everyone else was excited how she finished. 

Of the three kids, Brock says his daughter might be “most racer.” 

“She’s still ladylike – she taught herself how to play the guitar, she’s got her own sewing machine – but when the flag drops, she shows her teeth and turns into a racer, and I love that.” 

Back at their pits, “Crap, what moto am I?” Brock almost forgot he’s racing, too. 

“I gotta go. I think I’m on the line, honestly,” he says, flipping the switch from Dad to racer in seconds, his KLIM hat and glasses flying off. 

He just made it to staging, corralled under the shade of an E-Z UP in the hot July sun. On the line for the second moto of +30 B – he finished fifth out of 10 in the first moto – it’s the kids’ turn to be there for their dad, even just in silence.  

From wrenching at the X Games to riding in a Red Bull film, a professional Timbersled ambassador, KLIM test model and the only snowbike on KLIM’s backcountry team, to starting his own business, Brockstar Performance, Brock says he’s enjoying this phase now, passing on what he’s learned and the passion for powersports to his family: wife, Marcy, twins Chaz and Will, age 11, and daughter, Tyla, who turned 13 by press time. 

Today, at the track a few miles away from their house, in between prepping three bikes plus his own, managing and coordinating with Marcy on the kids’ next moto, he’s showing up for himself, too. 

“That was so hard,” he says after the 10-minute moto, admitting his hands were going numb. “I can see how easy it is for dads to give it up.” 

After an early season shoulder injury – complete with surgery and a sling – Brock says he’s as fast as he’s ever been, or close to it, at 45. 

“It’s a weird age,” he said, listing off a string of seven knee surgeries, a recently-separated shoulder, eight screws in his ankle and a detached collarbone, along with dozens of first-place finishes. 

“I’ve spent thousands of hours just on a motorcycle – on a street bike, on a dirt bike, in the mountains, on a motocross track, in the desert,” Brock said. “You can't ride that many thousands of hours and not be pretty good.”

***

Growing up on a farm in southeast Idaho, Young Brock loved anything with a motor. 

“My dad had snowmobiles,” Brock said. “That was my favorite thing, just being able to drive it by myself at a young age. We had the big red three-wheeler, too, and a Honda XR 250. I remember hanging on to the gas cap and my dad going down the dirt road, probably doing 50 or 60 super fast.” 

From playing piano to joining drama club and eventually the high school football captain, a lot came easy – he could pick up wakeboarding or skateboarding and “get to where I was pretty good and then move on.”

 

“I never really liked to settle into anything,” he said. “I get bored really easily with things.”  

After school, he worked every day milking cows, saving up $100 to buy his first bike for getting to work. His school friends raced motocross on their “fancy race bikes” and he always wanted something to replace what he used to move sprinkler pipe.  

“The motorbikes were a tool to get around the farm,” he said. “I would ride wheelies on the three wheeler, side wheelies and jump it. I’d ride with my friends on their dirt bikes, and a lot of times I would go around the track faster on our three wheeler than my friends on their dirt bikes.”  

Soon, he saved another $600 for his next bike, thanks to his neighbor, who had a farm but didn’t like doing farm work, for paying him to drive tractors, cut hayfields and haul equipment. 

“That’s just what you did,” he said. “It’s old people talk now but there was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go, so I was actually making $11 an hour when I was 14 before I could even drive.” 

When he stumbled across the classified ad for a $400 1969 El Camino, with a blown motor, Brock begged his dad to tow it home. 

“It turned out that it just had the wrong oil filter on it,” he said. “So I started tuning and modifying the engine, putting performance parts on it before I even had a driver’s license.”

He remembers his insurance-agent dad’s reaction: “He was kind of funny. He was just like, ‘What did you do?’ He didn’t even know what I was doing. I’d be out in the yard changing the carburetor and all this stuff and he wouldn’t even look at it.” 

It wasn’t until he moved out in his early 20s and lived on his own, working at the Logan, Utah, dealership as a mechanic – after declining an offer to play football at Idaho State – that he bought his first dirt bike from a friend and started riding in the mountains five to six days a week. 

“That’s obviously what shaped me into who I am now,” he said. “Riding the thousands and thousands of hours that it takes to become really good at something.”  

He remembers being a 20-year-old kid “with all the desire and heart in the world” sitting on his bike one day in the gravel pit, where his shop is now, and looking out across the valley in the freezing cold. 

“I would go ride by myself in the rain, and it’s kind of snowing, and I would wear old snowmobile gear and just do laps to make myself as tired as I could get it, and ride for an hour or two straight,” he said. “It was so cold, but I was so pumped because no one else is doing this right now, or maybe I was one of three, but I just learned if you want to be better, if you want to be a good racer, you have to ride more than everyone else.”

When Marcy soon-to-be-Buttars heard Brock talking at the shop about wanting a motorcycle, she knew she had found her future husband, having grown up riding with her father and brother and loving motorcycles since she was a kid. 

“I always said I wouldn't marry somebody unless they could ride,” Marcy said. “So I bought his first motorcycle.”

“That was our love story,” Brock said. “She bought us a street bike.” 

Little did anyone know how that would change the trajectory of their future family. Before kids, they took trips almost every weekend to Moab, Jackson Hole or Stanley, Idaho, “basically in any direction” getting lost on dirt roads. Since then, they’ve owned about 20 different adventure bikes. 

“That’s been our thing,” Brock said. “The motorcycle kind of built our bond. When life gets hectic and stressful, which it does, and everything’s just gnarly, we can reset every Saturday night, jump on the bike, go get dinner and then do a big loop and take a 15-, 20-mile dirt road – that's our weekly adventure date.”

Soon, they were jumping 20 feet in the air, going 40 miles an hour, catching air standing two-up. 

“We can do some pretty gnarly stuff on the adventure bike,” he said. “She loves it. She likes to go fast.” 

Once married, the couple moved to Kaysville, Utah, where he worked at ATK Motorcycles. “A couple guys who were these desert racer dudes and were like, ‘Why don’t you come to a desert race?’ and I was like, ‘Where do I sign up?’”

His first season, with the only instructions to “follow the pink ribbon,” he started in the novice class, winning the first round in Delta, Utah, a $100 tire and a big trophy. He won again at the second round in Knolls after a dead-last start, and crashed back to fifth overall at the third. By the fourth race, an AMA National Hare and Hound, he won the amateur overall. 

“That was huge,” he said. “The guys keep saying I was a sandbag or sandbagger when I'd literally never raced before.”

Working at the dealership, washing and assembling snowmobiles, he worked his way into changing oil and doing other things. Then he started doing suspension and changing fork seals. 

With racing, he could not afford to send out his suspension, so he started reading service manuals and learning how to take forks apart by himself. 

“Then I started doing it for my buddies and getting this customer base on the side,” he said. 

By the last race of the year, he’d moved up to the expert class and finished sixth overall out of over 300. 

Fast forward through an A class championship, multiple Idaho City 100 rides – “I’ve done that one probably like 10 or 12 times” – Best in the Desert, Vegas to Reno, Arenacross, Endurocross and hare scramble wins, with trophies in almost every category of dirt bike racing, he turned his side hustle into a full-time job and Brockstar LLC was born. 

“I’d come home at night and would have three sets of fork seals to do,” he said. “And it just got to the point where I was making more money working for a few hours after I got home from being gone all day, and I was working for someone else.”

The name Brockstar, a nickname from a high school grocery store checkout lady, became the business name and now his fork stickers are all over the West, which was built from taking hand-me-downs – “If somebody's like, ‘Hey, I'm gonna throw away this jack or this grinder.’”

“I’ve never really had a handout,” Brock said. “Everything I have, I just kind of built it into what it is now. My shop is still nothing pretty to look at inside other than 20 years of history and parts that I don't think should be thrown away.” 

Inside the shop, along with his KTM race bike was always a snowmobile: “I was really into snowmobiling.”

Working at the dealership led to some snow-side connections, and he started doing dirt bike suspension for professional snowmobile athletes like Keith Curtis and Dave McClure. 

“I was like this dirt bike guy but they also knew I was a snowmobiler,” he said. 

Eventually, Ryan Harris of SnoWest Snowmobile Magazine invited Brock help on its snow bike project build, which led to his first time ever riding a snowbike.

“For the first 30 minutes, it was just sketchy,” he said, “because the track kit was kind of primitive and then it was like an icy road that was rutted out.”

But after an hour, he started figuring out how to jump it and ride up steep canyons and saw its potential. A couple rides later, he was selling his snowmobile. “And, wow, I never looked back,” he said. 

Showing what he could do on a snowbike – posting video of jumping hundreds of feet and riding in places that no snowmobile could go – led to X Games invites and spots in Red Bull feature films like the Powder Hounds, a Ronnie Renner snowbiking video series. 

“They were like, we should bring Brock,” he said. “He’s a damn good rider and he can fix our stuff if it breaks.” 

All of a sudden, Brock went from having 500 Instagram followers to over 10,000 in two months. Along the way, as a KLIM-sponsored motorcycle athlete, Brock helped push for KLIM’s snowbike-specific gear, helping with feedback and product development. 

“I kind of had to fight for showing that snowbikes weren’t just a fad,” he said. “I had to break down the walls and be like, ‘This is legit. This is just as cool as snowmobiling and hill climbing,’ so it’s kind of been fun to be a part of that.”

He thanks KLIM for listening – it’s his favorite thing about working with the Idaho-based company. 

“They’re the leader now for having snowmobile specific one-pieces, and it really comes through in the products. They actually listen to riders and make changes. It’s truly why KLIM has become the brand that it is.” 

With the newly-released KLIM Technical Lifestyle collection, Brock said he likes having clothes to wear with similar styling as KLIM’s world-renowned gear that he and his family have come to love.  

“We wear the best gear for off-road when we're riding a motorcycle, and it's nice to be able to dress nice but still be branded in KLIM to go to dinner,” he said. “My family members are all into fashion, and when I wear the red and blue Glacier Hoodie, they’re going, ‘That’s sweet.’ It’s not just a plain black tee shirt and cargo shorts."

***

Back at the track on the gate, the twins line up for their second moto in the 65CC BEGINNER (10-11) class. 

Brock walks back and forth between the two, while Tyla bounces between her brothers and Marcy looks on. The mother of three dirt bike racers said she always knew the boys would race, but she never thought her daughter would. 

“Tyla wasn't interested there for a little bit, but then the boys could out ride her for a little bit, and that kind of bugged her, so that kind of lit a fire in her,” Marcy said. “It's actually really fun and it's something that brings them all together. It's like they can fight over petty little things but then they always have riding to talk about.”

For Tyla, who started riding a PW50 around age 3, her first motorcycle memory was pinning it down a soccer field “just full throttle like every day.” 

Since then, her first race at age 7, she’s had her dad in her ear coaching her on the starting line.

“He just says, ‘Don’t look down. Look forward. Steer into the ruts and just stay calm. Have fun.’ His favorite thing to say is, ‘Have fun, beat boys.’”

At 13, Tyla says she already knows she never wants to stop riding. 

“I think just being a girl you want to win. You want to beat boys. And so it's just so fun. I love the sport. It's just all I want to do.”

Her mom, Tyla says, has always been supportive. 

“She just wants us to be careful,” Tyla said. “She thinks it’s cool.”

For Will, his dad’s advice is similar: “Lean forward and get on the gas,” Will says, leading most of the first 65CC BEGINNER (10-11) moto, coming off with the win and making it look easy. 

“It feels good (to win),” Will said, adding that he foresees riding will be a part of his whole life. “I guess you could say it’s a lot cooler than football or soccer.”

As a twin, Will says it’s “crazy” competitive between the three siblings.

“If Chaz beats me in a race or I beat him, we’ll rub it in each other’s face until the next race." 

Chaz agreed, saying they’re always trying to push each other to be better and “keep progressing.”

“If they get better, then you want to be better, so it helps you, too,” he said. “We’re always trying to be the better one.” 

For his first motorcycle memory, around age 3 on a PW 50, Chaz says he was too scared to ride without training wheels. 

“I kept looking around in our shop for a piece that I could hook on to the bike,” he said. “So we could hold on to it. I finally found this little wagon paddle or something like that. And so I just somehow hooked it onto the back of it, and my dad kind of held me up. I was able to kind of just let go, and I looked back and he's not there. And I'm cruising.” 

Since then, it’s been “pretty good,” for Will, with “quite a bit of racing.” He also enjoys riding snowbikes.

“I love snow bikes, because I can ride my dad's 450 with NOS and just be in third gear tapped, but if you crash, it doesn't hurt.”

***

For Marcy, the awesome thing about Brock is his adventurous spirit. 

“He can turn anything into an adventure,” she said. “So whether it's an everyday thing like grocery shopping, it doesn't matter. Going out to dinner or going up in the mountains, it’s just always an adventure.”

Brock feels lucky to share what he’s built into his lifestyle and have it be their family time. It’s the highlight of his life, he says. 

“You can also have an amazing family life and have kids and not slow down,” he said. "You can still live your life and chase your dreams and bring the kids along and teach them to keep up, or they’re getting left at home.” 

“As a dad, I’m not just sitting in the stands drinking soda and talking to the neighbors,” he added. “I’m actually racing too, and I think that’s a big thing. Motorcycles keep families together, you know. The family that plays together stays together.’”

There’s one word – balance – that’s always been his motivation. 

“To balance life,” Brock said. “For me, it’s like, make your life the best and then have motorcycles and snowmobiles or whatever be a part of it. If you live your life so you don’t feel like you need to escape reality, that’s my words to live by. Create your world so that you don’t feel like you have to go on a cruise ship or whatever. I am honored that my lifestyle is the KLIM lifestyle.”

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