A 1970s Race In Marin Launched A National Mountain Biking Trend

MARIN COUNTY, CA — On Oct. 21, 1976, a small group of cyclists and a canine named Junior gathered on Carson Ridge, which rises simply west of Fairfax. It was midmorning and the sky was vibrant blue, a gorgeous day for racing 50-pound classic Schwinn Excelsior clunkers down Cascade Canyon Highway, whose winding grime floor plunges 1,300 ft in lower than two miles, previous serpentine outcrops, low-lying chaparral, and scattered oaks on its solution to the confluence of San Anselmo and Cascade creeks.

Among the many bike riders assembled that Thursday morning, at an hour when most folk had been dutifully toiling at their boring 9-to-5s, was Fred Wolf, an early off-road bike owner; Charlie Kelly, a roadie for a beloved native rock band known as the Sons of Champlin; Larry and Wende Cragg, who carried her trusty Nikkormat 35mm digicam virtually all over the place; and an airbrush artist and vintage-bicycle customizer named Alan Bonds, whose recorded time of 5 minutes and 12 seconds that day (common pace, about 23 mph) was adequate to take first place in a race that rapidly grew to become identified all over the world as Repack.

“It was form of a fluke,” mentioned Bonds right now of his historic victory. “Not one of the actually quick guys like Gary Fisher, Joe Breeze, and Otis Man had been there. I used to be principally racing towards Fred, Charlie, and some others, though they had been the quickest guys I knew.”

For the document, Fisher would put up the quickest time on Repack (4:22 on Dec. 5, 1976), Joe Breeze would wind up second (4:24 on Dec. 19, 1976), and Otis Man would place third (4:25 on Dec. 12, 1976).

Repack was held 22 instances between 1976 and 1979, plus two extra instances within the early Nineteen Eighties. In lots of respects, Repack launched mountain biking, though, strictly talking, it’s not the place the then-nascent sport and leisure pastime was born. Nonetheless, the primary Repack race was early sufficient that riders didn’t seek advice from the bikes they pointed down Cascade Canyon Highway as “mountain bikes,” because the phrase had not but been coined.

UC Davis professor John Finley Scott created a forerunner of the trendy mountain bike in 1953 when he constructed his first “woodsie,” as he known as it.

In England, starting in 1955, members of the Tough-Stuff Fellowship rode bicycles outfitted with fats balloon tires by means of locations just like the Chiltern Hills. And all through the Seventies, folks in the US rode bicycles off street for enjoyable in Santa Barbara and Cupertino, in addition to in Crested Butte, Colorado, the place the Pearl Go Tour endurance experience by means of 40 miles of rocky, high-altitude terrain was launched a month earlier than the primary Repack race.

These Repack riders on that first October morning weren’t overly targeted on their place on this mountain biking historical past, however by 1976, all of them had been intimately aware of the dusty hearth roads that snaked across the flanks of close by Mount Tamalpais, the place handfuls of cyclists had been driving off-pavement because the mid-Sixties.

For Fisher — whose identify has change into synonymous with the game because of the mountain bikes he and Kelly inbuilt 1979 — the hills of Marin County had been an unsupervised playground, which he explored with a gaggle of biking buddies from Redwood Excessive Faculty in Larkspur known as the Larkspur Canyon Gang, who rode outdated Schwinns and different modified clunkers.

“The scene was like, you already know, exit into the mountains, drink some beer,” Fisher mentioned.

Wende Cragg, one of many few feminine cyclists within the early days of mountain biking, undoubtedly didn’t get into off-road for the pace.

“On my first experience out, I used to be terrified — my bike weighed about 55 kilos, so it was arduous to deal with,” mentioned Cragg, who was a neighbor and buddy of Wolf. “I assumed, ‘God, I am by no means going to get again on this bike once more.’ Little by little, I acclimated to it. Earlier than I knew it, I used to be hooked.”

Partially, Cragg was drawn to the liberty she felt driving a bicycle within the hills. “I lived proper subsequent to an open-space space, so I had instant entry,” she mentioned. “There was no cause to not make the most of it. None of us actually labored, and for a few years, that is all I did, actually, simply experience, experience, experience. We would pack a lunch and a Frisbee, carry the canine and a few bud, and go.”

For folks like Cragg, mountain biking was a portal to communing with Mom Nature. For others, not a lot. “The explanation mountain biking is so common,” says Kelly, “is that it is one of many solely methods in trendy life that you may flip in your adrenaline pump, and depart it on for a very long time.”

In Marin County, probably the greatest locations to get within the adrenaline zone was Cascade Canyon Highway, which had been a favourite of the toughest of the hardcores because the early Seventies. The truth is, even its nickname, Repack, which individuals like Kelly and Wolf began utilizing a while after 1974, was hardcore.

Coaster brakes acquired a severe exercise on the best way down Cascade Canyon Highway. By the point riders arrived on the backside, their bikes’ rear hubs would truly be smoking from the pressures they had been subjected to, as scorching as a frying pan to the contact. The smoke, after all, was proof of the lubricants contained in the hub vaporizing. Thus, when you did not need your rear hub to grab up on you with out warning, you wanted to repack it with recent, cool grease.

“By 1976,” Kelly says, “an entire bunch of us had upgraded our clunkers to 10-speeds, with drum brakes within the entrance and rear. That is what I used to be driving on the day of the primary Repack. In these days, a motorbike didn’t final lengthy sufficient below me to get too sentimental about it. I simply destroyed frames, repeatedly.”

Repack, then, didn’t mark the primary time cyclists in Marin County began driving their bikes into the hills, nor was it the primary time cyclists in California had tricked out fat-tire bikes with higher {hardware}. However the aggressive nature of Repack drew consideration to mountain biking in a means that driving round within the hills consuming beer together with your buddies didn’t. And as soon as folks in Marin like Bonds, Breeze, Kelly and Fisher started to customise, after which construct from scratch, bikes designed to beat Repack, the entire thing jelled.

To satisfy Breeze right now, you would not peg him because the man who received extra Repacks than anybody else, and whose personal-best time down Cascade Canyon Highway (4:24) is simply two seconds behind the course document set by Fisher (4:22).

Reality instructed, Breeze appears extra just like the curator of a bicycling museum in Marin County, which is what he occurs to be, than a calculating pace demon, which is what he as soon as was. Within the early Seventies, inspired by his buddy Marc Vendetti, Breeze began driving a 1941, balloon-tire Schwinn on Mount Tam, too.

“When fat-tire racing got here alongside,” Breeze says of Repack, “I used to be the No. 1 draft decide. I took it actually critically. I’d stroll up and down the course to map it out, to memorize it. I made a science out of it.”

Breeze seems to have been the primary particular person to construct a body designed for mountain biking, though even he did not name it that within the fall of 1977 when he started work on his first Breezer. With its distinctive twin-lateral tubes, the primary nickel-plated Breezer was commissioned by
Kelly.

In all, Breeze made 10 Breezers between the autumn of 1977 and the spring of 1978. Breezer No. 1, the prototype, which Breeze rode in Repack No. 15 within the fall of 1977 for a profitable time of 4:25, is now within the Smithsonian.

Breezer No. 2 stays within the assortment of Kelly.

Breeze’s bikes had been unarguably superior, however Breeze was a perfectionist, which meant he did not precisely work rapidly.

“Gary was in search of somebody to construct him a customized bike, however Joe was going to take some time,” Kelly mentioned. “So Gary farmed the job out to a few completely different builders, together with Tom Ritchey, to see who may do it first. Tom Ritchey acquired Gary his bike first.”

Ritchey was a whiz-kid, lightning-fast body builder from Palo Alto.

“Tom thought, ‘Nicely, these guys need frames, so I will make some extra,'” remembers Kelly, “however he did not actually need to construct out all the bikes, as a result of that is an actual ache. So, in desperation, Tom mentioned, ‘Hey Gary, are you able to assist me do away with these frames?’ And Gary mentioned, ‘Hey Charlie, are you able to assist me do away with these frames?’ And from that minute on, I assume we had been in enterprise.

The entire thing was form of flawed and doomed from the beginning, nevertheless it did change the world, and who will get to do this? So, I am not sad about it.”

What Kelly is referring to is co-founding with Fisher an organization known as MountainBikes, which lastly gave a reputation to what he, Wolf, Bonds, Fisher, Breeze, Cragg, and plenty of others had been driving up the hills of Marin.

“In 1979, Charlie Kelly and I began an organization known as MountainBikes,” mentioned Fisher. “That was an unique identify on the time. Earlier than that, folks known as all of them sorts of silly issues.

“What we did principally,” Fisher continues, “was make a number of bikes. The primary 12 months we made 160 bikes, the second 12 months we made 1,000. A thousand bikes! All these different guys had been dickin’ round, you already know, making 10 bikes a 12 months. However I used to be like, ‘Man, you gotta make it occur!'”

The Kelly/Fisher partnership resulted in 1983, and a decade later, Fisher ended up promoting MountainBikes to Trek, which now has a model known as the Gary Fisher Assortment.

“Folks name me the ‘father of the mountain bike’ and all these items, and so they say to me, ‘Gary, thanks, thanks for making a mountain bike. You’ve got modified my life.’ And I say to them, ‘Hey, man, if it weren’t for you desirous to experience my bikes, I might be nothing, you already know?'”

*To learn the total, unique September 2014 story in regards to the historical past of mountain biking, go to Collectors Weekly. To be taught extra in regards to the early days of mountain biking, decide up Charlie Kelly’s 2014 e book, “Fats Tire Flyer: Repack and the Delivery of Mountain Biking” and take a look at Billy Savage’s
documentary, “Klunkerz.” Additionally, assist the Marin Museum of Bicycling and Mountain Bike Corridor of Fame, which opened in Fairfax in 2015, when the Mountain Bike Corridor of Fame relocated from Crested Butte, Colorado, the place it was based in 1988.

By Ben Marks / Collectors Weekly

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