If you come through SF then you need to hit Fairfax, 20 miles north. Tamarancho is ten miles of private singletrack with a flow trail and a downhill only section. After that you hoist a pint at one of two bike-specific pubs, then admire the public monument to downhill racing. Stop in at the Marin Museum of Bicycling/Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and check out machinery from the last 150 years.

Charlie Kelly, but probably not since the 70’s

Turns out the equivalent is made by bicycle companies now.

In the ’80s Gary Fisher and I (i.e. “MountainBikes”) were the US importers for Magura motorcycle products, mostly for the brake and clutch levers, but we sold a few of the MX bars. The cross-piece was removable so you could thread it into a stem. It was a little higher rise than what is popular noew.

My Transition “Klunker” model bike came with a pretty good approximation of those ’70s motorcycle bars.

I was doing a publicity event for my book Fat Tire Flyer close enough to the start of the second stage of the Amgen Tour of California that a few of us drove down to catch the start in Nevada City.

When I got there I ran into my brother from another mother, frame builder Chris Kelly. He gave me the keys to the kingdom, a laminate that got me inside the barriers. The leader jerseys were introduced, Mark Cavendish wearing yellow and Peter Sagan wearing polka dots. I took a lot of snaps of them as they stood next to each other, but this one seems to have caught a moment.

If you are a couple this is a great place just north of golden gate bridge.

http://www.homeaway.co.uk/p271873vb

If you’re going to be riding its easy to get to Mt Tam, Camp Tamarancho and Repack Road. The owners are really nice and live above the property and are also cyclists.

I know exactly where this is, and you couldn’t ask for better location, location and location. Ride in any direction from here!

I was a rock band roadie for a long time. I’ve smoked a joint with Jerry Garcia, been bike riding with Bob Weir, the other Grateful Dead guitar player. I’ve known Huey Lewis since long before he got paid to play music. Van Morrison used to live in my town, and I was living in the building where his band practiced so i saw him a lot then. Toured one summer with the Average White Band, got to know them pretty well.

George Lucas lives in my town. Years ago he hired me and my truck and we drove around to all his business locations to deliver Christmas presents to all his employees. George didn’t ride with me, he drove his own car. For years he ate breakfast most mornings in a small local restaurant, sat at the counter like everybody else.

Met Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf when I moved their piano. Very friendly guy, not very big, didn’t look at all like an athlete. He was really interested in how a couple of guys were going to handle something as big as his piano. Meanwhile, Steffi was sitting near the front door, scrubbing the grout between the floor tiles with a toothbrush. Her “whale tail” was on display six inches above the top of her jeans. I tried not to look, but then I lied about not looking.

Thanks for the Fat Tire Flyer love.

I supplied the words and images, but my publisher took it to the next level with an amazing job of artwork, layout, and expensive printing. I could not believe the sheer quality when I first saw the actual product.

Then they sell it for about half of what it appears to be worth.

My words don’t do those amazing times justice, but it’s all there is.

Be sure to lets us know when you will arrive. Fairfax is about 15 miles from the north end of the Golden Gate Bridge. Might as well ride Tamarancho and Repack.

Repack_Rider (Charlie Kelly) to the forum please

Hullo.

There is some great singletrack in Fairfax at the Tamarancho private MTB reserve. $5 gets you a day pass, well worth it. (I have the $50 annual, a permanent tag on my bike.) A nine mile loop has been augmented by the addition of “Endor,” the Flow Trail.

If nine miles isn’t enough, turn around and do the loop in the other direction. It’s totally different!

If you’re up for the climb, you can hit Repack from Tamarancho, about three miles of climbing from the trail called “B-17 Extension.” The B-17 trail is named for the wreckage of a WW II bomber.

By modern DH standards Repack is not technically challenging, but as my mate Mr. Fisher pointed out, it’s not the terrain, it’s the competition to get down it faster than anyone else.

I have hosted a dozen or so UK riders over the past few years, including a few from this site. Say hello, Leon.

Got the new Breezer “Repack” 650B.

Got a new Transition Klunker, one-speed, coaster brake.

Got my book on mountain biking published.

Your dad is the same age as I am. He would surely enjoy my book about the Northern California hippies who came up with mountain biking.

Every year on the Thanksgiving holiday in the US, a thousand mountain bikers descend on Fairfax, Caliornia for the annual Appetite Seminar. This year riders who turned out early saw a spectacular inversion layer. I must have seen a dozen photos on FB, all taken from the same spot.

Here are people taking photos of the same thing.

Fat Tire Flyer is very good If you don’t want to immediately go out and throw yourself down a hill on a SS clunker after reading it I’ll eat my hat

Thanks for the compliment. Wall Street Journal liked it also. I had the good fortune of having my work reviewed in the WSJ by a friend, Rob Penn, who wrote “It’s All About the Bike,” and produced the BBC programme, “The Ride of My Life,” in which I get about ten minutes out of the hour show.

I have some favourite bike books, not all of them recent. However I concur that Tyler Hamilton’s “Secret Race” is pretty good. If you want to go all the way back to last year, Andy Homan did a biography of a top six-day racer at the turn of the 19th Century, “Life in the Slipstream: the Bobby Walthour Jr. Story.”

I had an offer of a signed one, but still waiting for someone to message me back with a postage quote

I’ll look into it. Damn thing weighs more than a couple of my bikes.

Hit me with a PM.

Some years back I took a road ride, just myself and a man named John Allis. He was in town and looking for a local riding guide. He was at the time the defending US road champion. Just me and the national champ, out for a ride. I took it easy on him.

Ridden with Ned Overend who has held numerous championships.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

When is your visit?

The trick is to glare at someone else. A bit dodgier in a lift shared by only one other person.

One brand, Levis. One style, 501, button fly. One size 34 x 34.

Same same for 50 years or so. Don’t care what people think of a guy my age wearing jeans. I’m a workin’ man and I don’t own a necktie.

I buy them online for about 25% less than in the store.

It’s been pretty @#$%^& good to me.

Hey, thanks for your support!

Here’s a really good review!

The original WTB was three guys, Charlie Cunningham, Steve Potts and Mark Slate. No Lance. Unlikely story probably made up after WTB was a “thing.”

This thread is depressing to me. It kind of sums up the ‘trolliverse’ the internet has become today.

When the review copy of Fat Tire Flyer[/url] arrives at STW, I’m confident the editors will love it.

It does not affect my life if an internet troll does not respect me. I get respect from people whose opinions matter to me. A few days ago my best mates Tom Ritchey, Joe Breeze, and Gary Fisher joined me in signing the first copies of my book. Maybe you have heard of them?

The 175 first editions with these four signatures will be treasured forever by their owners, who stood in a long queue to get them, no matter what the trolls think.

The bike industry noticed.

I don’t buy they were first to ever conduct a downhill race (which Charlie has said on this thread several times) purely on the strength that they have results,

Just out of curiosity, what would it take to convince you? Obviously SOMEBODY did it first, and I have the photos and the results of my efforts. It’s only been 38 years since I put on my first race, and I would think any competing claims would have surfaced by now.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Changed the avatar to a race photo from 1978, before helmets were required and before the term “mountain bike” had ever been coined. Better?

If someone feels the need to tell people about their accomplishments then it sort of ruins the image of it for me a bit.

Several of my friends and I took part in something amazing, and it led to everything this website is about. I was taking extensive notes while it happened. I was offered a lot of money for my story.

What would you do? Turn down the money?

Of course you would.

Here’s the Amazon link.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

If you’d “invented mountain biking” but all your other friends had come out of it as millionaires with their own bike companies, you’d probably be on here throwing roses at yourself, promoting your book about how you “invented mountain biking”

Before you speculate on my motives, you might want to ask me, because I’m listening.

I shared an adventure with Gary, Joe and Tom that changed the world. I don’t begrudge any of them their success because I watched them all earn it. These guys are about the dearest friends I have.

I was the only one in that group taking notes, and I am by far the best writer, so it is up to me to tell our story.

Other than making enough to get by, money has never driven me. The reason my book will sell is not because I argue with people I don’t know on a website forum. It will sell because it is the sh!t.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

My grandad said he invented mountainbiking.

About a million people seem to be making that claim. There are more people making that claim than there are bicyclists. All of them are lying, except the people who aren’t, and there are IMNSHO four in the latter category.

It’s one thing to build a bike for yourself. It’s quite another to decide to MANUFACTURE bicycles of a sort that had never appeared on the market. Please show me someone, ANYONE, who put a bicycle built to Tour de France quality, but with derailleur gears and big tyres for rough ground, on the market before we did. Please show me the results of a downhill race held before I put one on in 1976.

Talk is cheap, but I have the pix.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I rode trails on my balloon tire bike when I was a kid, but so did every other kid, and that wasn’t mountain biking. As an adult in 1973 I took one out on a trail with my friend Gary Fisher, and started a process that six years later led to Gary and me building custom bikes for anyone with money. We were not the only business in Marin County doing that, but we were the best known. There were three other versions of an off road bike being made in Marin by 1979. Sure, other people had come up with the idea of an off-road bike, and built them, but nowhere else IN THE WORLD could you find bikes like these for sale.

When mountain bikes went mainstream around 1983 and every bicycle company started selling a version, it was clear that the Ritchey/MountainBike that Gary and I assembled on Tom Ritchey’s frames was the starting point for every single mountain bike design on the market. That was 30 years ago, and a lot has happened to the bikes since, but they started from that design. It worked, it had created a popular image, and no one else wanted to waste time doing years of R&D when the market was moving so quickly.

The complicated and lengthy process that led to all this can’t be boiled down to a single phrase, “invented the mountain bike.” It took me 280 pages to explain it.

Let me add that I do not care to be lectured to about events I took part in, by someone whose knowledge of these events comes from a wikipedia article.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

The Rough Stuff Fellowship was established in 1955 by off-road cyclists in the United Kingdom.

Gary Fisher and I were RSF members. The RSF was not interested in competition, mad downhills or technical innovation. They did nothing to advance the sport.

In Oregon, one Chemeketan club member, D. Gwynn, built a rough terrain trail bicycle in 1966. He named it a “mountain bicycle” for its intended place of use. This may be the first use of that name.

Allow me to point out that building a bicycle for oneself does not put other people on them. Apparently he stopped with one. We didn’t.

My late friend John Finley Scott (PhD) built what would have passed for a mountain bike, and he did it in 1953. He called it a “Woodsie Bike.” He was an initial investor in Gary Fisher and myself, and even though he beat us to the idea by 20 years, once again, there was only one bike, and he did not claim to have invented the sport.

Racing is what moved our sport forward, and one bike is not going to start a race. Two bikes will.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

So down hill racing was invented a repack , Maybe.
What I do can only be called mountainbiking because I do it on a mountain bike.

Of course. And the name of your bike comes from the name of the company that Gary Fisher and I started in a rented garage in 1979. We called the company “MountainBikes,” and I challenge you to find a prior reference to any bicycle that uses that term.

I don’t think anyone can claim to have invented mountainbiking or the mountainbike as I am sure people have rode bikes on mountains or even modified or built a bike for specific off road environments long before the phrase mountainbike was even coined.

You may be “sure of” something you didn’t see, but that doesn’t make it real. I took part in the activities I talk about, which is a huge difference from what you conjecture.

Talk is cheap. Pix or it didn’t happen.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Photo from the signing event. The bike is mine, built for me in 1978 by the gentleman second from left, Joe Breeze. This was the first bike built specifically for this new sport, not cobbled together from something else. The two other gentlemen are Tom Ritchey and Gary Fisher.

Since all of you beat me to this idea, please show me the hand-made off-road bikes built for downhill racing before this one was.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I never claim to have invented the machinery, which as everyone feels they need to point out to me for the last 30 years, is obvious and has been done many times. I never claimed to be the first to ride on a trail.

We invented a SPORT, not a bike. Form follows function. Once we invented the sport of DOWNHILL RACING AGAINST THE CLOCK, the bikes “invented” themselves. The bikes you ride today can trace their ancestry directly to the bikes we built for our racing

So, please tell me about all your downhill events that took place before October 21st, 1976 and show me the photos and the results with the dates, because I certainly can do so.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Also: this. I don’t see Mr. Garner’s name here.

The Hippie Daredevils Who Were Just Crazy Enough to Invent Mountain Biking

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Get talking the chap who turns out to be Rik Garner, one of the first guys to build mountain bikes back in the late 70s. He even shows me the original bike he built that Mike Sinyard of specialised “borrowed” for the design of the stump jumper, the first ever production mountain bike.

Beg to differ. In 1981 Specialized purchased four bikes from Gary Fisher and me, the basis for the Stumpjumper.

Talk is cheap. Show me the photos from 1976. If he “invented the mountain bike,” why doesn’t he get any credit for it?

Read my book, “Fat Tire Flyer[/url],” out in a few weeks in the US, a little later in the UK.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I would have picked up on this sooner, but I just got back from the big bicycle trade show, where I saw the first copies of my book.

It is more beautiful than I could have hoped. My publishers really delivered.

We had about 200 copies at the trade show. We had to give away some to luminaries, but we sold about 160 to lucky people who queued up around the block as I signed copies along with the guys I shared this incredible adventure with: Gary Fisher, Tom Ritchey and Joe Breeze. These will be collector’s items. It is extremely unlikely that this crew will be assembled again for such a task. Tom Ritchey especially hates public appearances, but he came through for me with two hours of his time.

Some walked up with armloads of books. The people at the end of the line who didn’t get one were beyond disappointed, but what can you do?

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

So repack any progress with selling signed copies direct, I’m holding off pre-ordering from Amazon

I should be able to take care of you. I will be selling signed copies online as soon as I get some.

I heard from the editor that the books arrived from the printer today. I haven’t even seen it, but he says it looks great. I’ll see it tomorrow, and I’ll be signing copies along with Joe Breeze and Gary Fisher on Thursday.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Repack_rider, hopefully you will pop on here again and read this, and see there would be the interest

What do they say about the Devil, whisper his name and he shows up?

I have a collection of books about mountain biking, mostly signed first editions. Nothing in my collection touches mine, because my personal mountain bike history starts before there were mountain bikes, and includes the time when I was one of about a dozen such cyclists in the world.

I wrote my own press release. Here it is.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

I ran into McMoonter on the trail in California.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Sunset last night. Ran a quick errand on my bike, thought, I should take my camera in case I see something interesting.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

The quarry where the final scene takes place is now condo housing. The trestle Harry jumped from went a few years ago also. The railroad route that used the trestle now leads to a tunnel converted for bicyclists through a hill.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Hard to imagine a rim that wouldn’t work as long as it is protected by some sort of flexible pneumatic cushion.

2retro4u
Marin County, Cali

Glad to hear it. In the US they give the driver a medal.