In the fall of 1979 my friend Gary Fisher and I rented a garage, where we assembled custom bikes of a sort not previously seen. The frames were built by a master framebuilder, 22-year old Tom Ritchey, to the high standards of an Italian road racing machine but not for that use. These bikes bristled with heavy duty tires and oversize brakes for our newly invented sport of downhill time-trial racing on a steep, rutted fire road called Repack that dropped 1300 feet in less than two miles. There was nothing on the market built for what we wanted to do on bikes, so we made our own.
Gary Fisher and I called our company "MountainBikes" and we changed the world Every off-road bike made before about 1984 was a knock off of our design. Our company name became generic also.
And then the business failed, but hey, what a ride.
Not many people have seen their goofy hobby take over the world like ours did, or get to influence the subject of their passion to this extent. Our crazy downhill idea is now a world championship discipline, with a rainbow jersey for the champion just like the world road or track champion's jersey.
I had one of the best bicycle adventures...ever. Ever.
Along the way I published the first mountain bike magazine, the Fat Tire Flyer, which created a written and graphic record of my adventures that I have drawn on heavily for my book, also called "Fat Tire Flyer." It is six months away from publication, but today Amazon listed it. Not something that happens to me every day, certainly worthy of an entry in my Diary.
Thanks for reading this far. Did you notice at the Amazon link that you can (ahem) pre-order right now?