It was 40 years ago today…

….That we went to Crested Butte to play. My friends Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, Wende Cragg, Mike Castelli and I took our new off road bikes to the REAL mountains of Colorado. this led to a lifetime of mountain biking adventures.

Joe Breeze and I were the only relics from that 1978 ride to celebrate the 40th anniversary of it.  The story is too long to tell here, but I’m sure it will get published.  It would be hard to pack any more fun into two days than we did.

Okay, the photos didn’t show.  Here’s the link to the Flikr album.

Who’d have thought that a small idea for some fun would eventually become your life and eventually influence so many people all around the world.

👍

Wow, nice pics. That stem on that orange bike is pretty awesome.

Love it.

You guys rock 🤘

Riding bikes rocks 🤘🤘🤘

Can I go to Colororado?

Thanks for sharing.

Always worth seeing the pics.

40? You sure…

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/it-was-40-years-ago-last-month/

https://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/the-sport-is-now-40-years-old/

Nice pics though.

Read the post again Ads.

40? You sure…

Ahem…

… That we went to Crested Butte…

The ‘Klunkerz’ film is on Amazon prime now too if you want to watch it.

Oh sorry, he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet so I assumed it was the same old shit.

he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet

Unlike everyone else on here.

Without sounding harsh, that’s mighty impressive at your age 🙂

What’s this bike all about then?

P1040949 by Charles Kelly[/url], on Flickr

ads678

Oh sorry, he usually just pops to blow his own trumpet so I assumed it was the same old shit.

Well I’d say it’s a trumpet well worth listening to.

Thanks to him and his friends we have bikes suitable for mountains.

An opportunity the UK cycle industry was resolutely ignoring despite there being a long tradition here of riding in the mountains.

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here – just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes. 🙂 )

And where is that once mighty UK cycle industry now?

Thumbs up from me!

Can’t help but notice what looks to be a Charlie The Bikemonger long sleeved t-shirt in some of those pics!

As a child of the 70s we all had a racer or a tracker.

The tracker was a normal bike that we adapted by fitting knobblies,cow horns and a lower gear. No one ever ran a rear mech as we all knew it would break and certainly no toe clips. We were riding these long before The Grifter came out in 76.

My dad could weld so he was on call to weld a bar across our handlebars for that full motocross look.

Mostly we just bombed about the woods and did a few jumps. Graham Bull was a lunatic who also had a motocross bike and if enough people were around he would do one particular jump on his tracker that would certainly break the bike. Rich parents so a new bike was never far away.

Steve Douce was also on the scene but I don’t recall him having a tracker just being good on a racer. I think he even had a bunch of bananas crash helmet ,so was extra fast.

Me and Russel Clark were more into going places off road than doing jumps. One ride was to see how far we could go down the local stream in the village where I used to live. Riding for a whole day in wellington boots and jeans was not an issue back in those days.

As much as we enjoyed tracking it was just filling the time until we got our mopeds. If we had continued riding our trackers the birthplace of MTB would have been wherever boys,woods ,bikes intersected and got older.

This forum needs a like button…. 🙂

Seriously Ads? Wow.

Great photos repack rider, thanks for sharing.

My first two bikes were ” Gary Fisher’s ” ..

Respect repack ..thanks too !

LOL @ ads.

Props to the OP for developing the bikes, he does milk it tho!

As usual Repack love hearing from you on here.

@Ads – what was it you were doing 40 years ago this month, last month, next month, that spawned an industry/ethos/way of life? – take your attitude off to bikeradar.com it will be more welcome there.

Props to the OP for developing the bikes, he does milk it tho!

Often when there’s a book to sell! Still cool to see the photos though.

Loads of us rode ‘trackers’ round in the woods at that time, and we could all claim to have been at the forefront of MTBing and had the chance to ‘invent’ the genre.

But we didn’t.

Charlie and his mates did. And that’s why their names are in the MTB Hall of Fame and adorn the downtubes of some of our bikes today. If you have your name on your frame, it’s because you bought a sticker!

“An opportunity the UK cycle industry was resolutely ignoring despite there being a long tradition here of riding in the mountains.

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here – just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes.”
)

Takes me back to the mid 80’s

Some visiting yank professor turned up to the touring meet at our Cambridge cycling club with a Fisher MountainBike (made by ritchey I think). He was pretty much told by the club ‘elders’ that we didn’t want his type around these parts and that it was a damn cheek turning up to ride on a childrens toy…..

I was thinking – well I know what I’ll be doing for the rest of my life and bought a 1st generation Hoo Koo E Koo a year later.

Great pics. What a gorgeous place that looks.

(Then I saw eBike and shed a tear 😥 ) 😉

Found the archive photos on Charlie’s Flickr. Some marvellous stuff on there.I guess this is some of the stuff that was going to be in the archive he tried to get funding for?

As a child of the 70s we all had a racer or a tracker.

Exactly.  We used the frames that were available in the UK whereas the US guys used the cruiser frames available there.  An small race frame with some cycle speedway knobbly tyres and wide bars was just a skinnier version of the clunker bikes more suited to UK woods and forests.  Of course we didn’t call it mountain biking because it didn’t involve mountains…

just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes

I think you mean “go back a few days”.

The industry was full of the types who turn their lips up in a superior sneer at anything new or different. (We have them here – just go back a few years on the forum and read comments about 29ers, fatbikes, 650b, or more recently gravel bikes.”

[Holds up hand] Guilty…

But in fairness the introduction of 650b to MTB’s a couple of years ago was purely a cynical exercise in “Standards Adjustment” to bump sales figures, not a true “Innovation”…

Most of the rest of it I’m into and I see 29ers, 1x drives, Gravel bikes, plus tyres, etc, etc as incremental little bit of functional development to make a bike better…

One of those bikes belonged to my late friend Larry – also a friend to Repack Rider and it was ridden over the Pearl Pass as a tribute.  Means a lot to me.

Love the photos, and the reminder of where it all started!

cool photos, I’m sitting at my desk but  transported back to my childhood and riding jumps in the woods on my Raleigh arena racer!

Looks like you will be able to read the story in Singletrack World.  Chipps bought it for the next issue.

That is a Charlie Hobbs shirt.  I try to get him a photo of me in it everywhere I go.

What’s this bike all about then?

P1040949 by Charles Kelly, on Flickr

That is a 1935 Schwinn, which is I believe the first year that company offered a balloon tyre.  It was ridden by Tommy Breeze, son of Joe.  Probably the most dangerous bike on the trail, not even remotely suited for the terrain.

The kid’s father is a renowned bicycle designer, and this is what he rode.

One of the riders celebrated with a little LSD. He sat near the fire at the camp, shirtless and barefoot, wearing a towel over his head and grooving to whoever was playing the guitar at the moment. He was friendly, but conversations with him were not always…linear. The dude didn’t have a tent or a sleeping bag, all he had was a blanket. He heated a big rock in the fire, wrapped his blanket around it and curled up around his rock for the night.

It rained that night.

The next time I saw him, it was at the top of Pearl pass.  He had put on shoes and a shirt… and a full face helmet, and he was riding the most expensive carbon FS bike in the entire collection.

Looks like you will be able to read the story in Singletrack World.  Chipps bought it for the next issue

Cool. Be good to have a paper version. On nice, thick, sweet smelling, printer paper. 🙂

Does anyone have pictures of their tracker?

Thanks Repack Rider, and all your mates as well 😀 There was a poster given away with either Dirt or MBUK or something in the 90s, it might have been this one-

which I took from house to house with me as I moved around when I was younger. Awesome stuff, ta.

The sad thing about the UK bike industry missing out on the birth of mtb was that they were already making suitable bikes (by the standards of the time, obviously) and had been since at least the 1930s.

Take this 1960 Rudge for the export market. It had 2″ tyres and was built for rough usage.

I have a similar but local model which has the 26×1⅜” tyres, and have ridden it extensively offroad. Its handling is quite competent for everything short of technical singletrack, ie good gravel bike. It even has a reinforced steerer.

Humber, Elswick, Raleigh were among the other companies that made similar bikes for the colonies.

Just imagine if they had sold them in the UK.

Young lads would have stripped off all the extraneous stuff like mudguards and chainguards and been out bombing around the hills. We even had decent canti brakes back then – Resilions.

The mtb could have been born here in the 1930s.

But it wasn’t.

Let’s face it, the UK blew it, and our industry got decimated as a result.

So let’s be grateful for what happened 40 years ago.

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BTW if anyone has a colonial model Rudge etc, I’d love to have a close look at it.

Amazing to think Wende Cragg was part of the group that invented mountain biking. Such a wonderfully talented person, really at the height of their talents back then too. Gives you butterflies just thinking about it

The mtb could have been born here in the 1930s.

But it wasn’t.

British people in the 30s were far too reserved to do stuff like that.  Imagine the tutting you’d have received chucking yourself down forest roads at that speed.

The Californians made it cool and exciting.. downhill races VS bimbling about with a pipe and tweed.

They made the bikes, then made the races and brought the cool.  Then the industry cashed in.   All we were missing was the cool.

molgrips

British people in the 30s were far too reserved to do stuff like that.  Imagine the tutting you’d have received chucking yourself down forest roads at that speed…

🙂

Oh they were doing it alright, it’s just that the short sighted tutters were in charge of the industry and the cycling bodies.