CHARLIE KELLY

Foreword by Joe Breeze

REPACK AND THE BIRTH

OF MOUNTAIN BIKING

Copyright © 2014 by Charlie Kelly

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Cover design by Voltage, Ltd.Cover and author photos by Wende Cragg/Rolling Dinosaur ArchiveBack cover photo by Jerry RiboliInterior photograph credits on page 252 Photo retouching by Andy CastellanoInterior design by Vicki Hopewell

Text set in Titillium and Warnock

14 15 16 / 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

contentsEpiphany

ch1

6

Foreword

3

ch21

168

ch22

172

ch23

178

The Dirt Bicycle

Comes of Age

ch9

66

ch24

182

189

193

252

253

ch2

14

Spidey

ch10

74

Crested Butte

ch3

20

21 Humbolt

ch11

80

Getting Organized

ch12

88

The Word Gets Out

ch4

26

Singlespeeds

ch14

110

The First Mountain-

Bike

ch13

96

The Ritchey Mountain-

Bike

ch5

32

Marin County

Klunkers

ch15

118

Widening the View

ch6

40

Repack

ch16

129

Mountain-Bikes

ch7

48

A Passion for Racing

ch17

134

Fat Tire Flyer

ch8

56

The Most Important

Bicycle of the 20th

Century

ch18

144

NORBA

ch19

152

The 1982 Coors

Classic

ch20

160

The Image

The Ride of a

Lifetime

Mammoth Kamikaze

Giro d’Italia

After the Flyer

Postscript: Some

Conclusions

251

Acknowledg-ments

247

Coda Appendix Credits Index

THE RITCHEY MOUNTAINBIKE

chapter

13

In September 1979 I went back to Crested Butte with Joe Breeze, Wende Cragg, Gary Fisher, new Ritchey owner James MacWay, and Chris McManus, a friend of Joe’s who was mounted

on a one-speed, coaster brake dinosaur. We trav-eled in two vehicles, a rented station wagon with four people inside and the bikes on top and James’s classic old Porsche with one passenger. Unfortu-nately, within shouting distance of Crested Butte the Porsche blew an oil plug, quickly followed by the engine. James had to leave it in a service station that had never seen a Porsche, and we all crowded into the wagon to finish the drive.

In addition to our six riders, another two loads of Marin clunker riders made the trek, including a couple of the Koski brothers with their new bikes made in Mert Lawwill’s shop, for a total of 18 from Marin. When we got to Crested Butte, the change that had taken place in a single year was more than amazing.

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While the crew that had originated the ride into Aspen had been blue-collar, hard-drinking firefight-ers, the town had another faction, the telemark ski-ers. Telemark skiing is a Nordic technique for skiing downhill that uses only the toe binding from skinny cross-country skis. A cross-country lift ticket was cheaper than a downhill ticket at the Crested Butte ski area; the assumption was that a cross-country skier would not be making a dozen runs in a day. By telemarking, locals saved money with a skinny- ski ticket while getting in just as many runs as the downhillers. In the process, they pioneered that style of telemark skiing in the United States.

Mountain biking was a perfect summer sport for the same crowd. After we had introduced it to the town a year earlier, the locals had caught up with us very quickly. The Clunker Tour sponsors at the Grubstake Saloon were ready for us this time, and the crew had more than doubled, although once again half the total riders were from Marin.

Right: The Marin County crew stretches after the long drive to Crested Butte, Colorado, for the

Fourth Annual Crested Butte to Aspen Pearl Pass Tour, September 1979. Left to right: Gary Fisher,

James MacWay, me, Joe Breeze, Wende Cragg.

Bottom: Heading up Paradise Divide out of Crested Butte, September 1979. Left to right: Joe, me, Gary,

and James. Wende’s Breezer is over to the right.

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Richard Nilsen, who had inspired us to come out a year earlier, was back, and this time he was on real fat-tire equipment to replace his touring bike. Alan Bonds flew into Aspen with his bike and rode it over the Maroon Bells into Crested Butte. It was a much more demanding ride to make in one day than he had expected, and he rolled into Crested Butte late in the afternoon exhausted and shattered.

The Koskis had brought with them a crowd of Cove Bike Shop regulars equipped with the latest advance in clunker technology since the arrival of aluminum rims. They had gumwall, 26 × 2.125–inch, Mitsuboshi Cruiser Mitt tires that were half the weight of the old Uniroyal Nobby tires we were still using. These gumwall tires were made for street riding and had minimal knobs, so they didn’t look suitable for rugged, off-road use. The Cove riders used the new tires to ride the relatively good road to the overnight campsite and then, before the climb to the summit, swapped them for Uniroyal tires like ours, which they had stashed in the gear trucked up to the camp.

Rick Verplank, whose spontaneous adventure three years earlier had led to this point, fired a shotgun to send us off. At the top of Pearl Pass, we posed once again for the obligatory group photo.

A few months later the photo appeared on the cover of the April 1980 issue of Bicycling magazine.

Since the Porsche was not ready to return to California, the six of us jammed ourselves and our bikes into and around the station wagon for the trip home. Camping in Austin, Nevada, we were caught in a rainstorm that forced four big men to sleep in a two-man tent along with 3 or 4 inches of water. The situation was so ridiculously uncom-fortable that we couldn’t help laughing hysterically about it all night.

A few weeks after we returned from Crested Butte, Gary called me up and asked me to come over to his cottage in Fairfax. He told me that Tom Ritchey had made some more frames like the one he was riding, and he wanted to show them to me. When I got there, Gary opened the trunk of his battered BMW and showed me the frames. There were nine of them nestled in there, and they were as beautifully made as my Colnago. Gary explained that Tom had become very interested in this new kind of bike and had made a few more.

Although there was an avid crew of off-road rid-ers down in Tom’s area near Palo Alto, led by legend-ary local Jobst Brandt, they hit their trails either on road bikes or similarly set up rugged bikes equipped with 650B tires and drop handlebars. Tom hadn’t

The start line and banner of the Fourth Annual (but third actual) Pearl Pass Tour, outside the Grubstake Saloon on Elk Avenue in Crested Butte, September 1979.

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Fat Tire Flyer • The Ritchey MountainBike

in quality to our road bikes. They could hardly be called “clunkers,” but they didn’t yet have a general name. When I took up cycling, the road bike had been just “the bike” because there was only one kind. Then I had owned a “clunker” as well. Now, when we had to differentiate in conversations as to which we were riding of the two beautiful bikes we owned, we spoke of our “road bikes” or our “moun-tain bikes.” “Mountain Bikes” seemed like a great name for our company. Just to make it clear that it was a brand name and not just a general term, we soon made it one word and used a cute spelling, MountainBikes.

Gary and I went to Palo Alto so I could meet Tom. He had been at my January race and appears in photos standing behind me while I was inter-viewed by the TV crew, but if we had had a con-versation back then, I didn’t remember it. He was working in the machine shop in his garage when Gary introduced me, and the three of us talked in the most general terms about what would need to happen to get rid of those nine frames and more. Tom made frames and forks. He would deliver them to us already painted, with the new “Bullmoose” one-piece bar and stem. Gary and I would get the parts, assemble the bikes, find the customers, and pay Tom for the framesets. What could be simpler?

been able to sell any of the new style of flat-han-dlebar, big-tire bikes to anyone in his area. Since he knew Gary had access to riders who wanted bikes like Gary’s, he had offered them to Gary on spec to see whether Gary could help get rid of them.

Nine bikes were a lot of bikes, and Tom wanted about $400 apiece for the frames if Gary was able to sell them. These frames were not at all cheap, and they only represented a starting point to a bike. As we looked at the booty, Gary asked a sim-ple question with lifelong consequences. “Do you want to help me sell these frames?”

It was too easy to say yes, and I did. We did the minimum amount of company organization that was possible and then we were in business. We counted the cash that the two of us had on our persons at that moment, about $200. We took that money to the nearest bank, and we opened a joint business account.

We had a company name that we wanted to use. The term mountain bike had recently entered our personal lexicon. The bikes had been clunk-ers until Joe had taken them out of that category with his beautiful nickel-plated frames. Now there were several versions of custom off-road bikes: Joe’s, Tom’s, the Lawwill-Knight ProCruiser (from a Koski design), and Jeffrey Richman’s, all similar

My first business card, designed by Pete Barrett.

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Ritchey number 1, from Tom Ritchey’s collection. Tom’s beautiful fillet brazing and no-frills design are on full display.

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Fat Tire Flyer • The Ritchey MountainBike

While the discussion was going on, Tom turned out a couple of small bike parts on his lathe without appearing to measure anything, then fitted them right into place.

Pete Barrett designed a business card for us, depicting the rear wheel of a fat-tire bike on top of a snow-capped peak. We needed to be able to get mail, so we rented a post office box. A business card, a checking account, and a post office box address do not add up to a company, and $200 wasn’t enough to equip even one of the bikes. Yet we were indis-putably in the mountain bike business.

Gary and I stashed the frames at his house and went about the business of getting rid of them. On the plus side, we had nine frames and $200. On the minus side, we had nothing except those things, including a business location. We didn’t have any place for a phone to ring except our houses, and any of three people answered at mine, so we used Gary’s phone number.

We needed customers who would pay us in advance for the bike, which we determined would cost about $1,200. We would take that money to the bike shop and buy the parts we needed over the counter. We assembled the first few bikes at the house I shared with Kent Bostick and Pete on San Anselmo Avenue, and Gary took photos of one of

our first completed bikes in the room where most families ate dinner but where we assembled bikes.

At the time, you could buy a Tour de France racing bike for less money than we wanted for a bike with $3 tires. We really needed to charge even more, but we had already pushed the ceiling as hard as possible. It took a lot of faith to hand over that kind of money to two guys with a zero track record. Besides, look at them. Because his hippie appearance was a hindrance for working in Europe with the bike team coached by Mike Neel, Gary had recently chopped off the 2 feet of hair he sported when I met him. I had no need for that kind of grooming, and I left mine long. I adopted the Fu Manchu mustache look, along with Gary, Joe, and Tom (who to this day has sported the same hirsute look). Few who looked at Gary and me would have mistaken us for solid citizens.

Nevertheless, we managed to find a few cus-tomers. My uncle, an engineer who worked on oil-drilling sites all over the world, ponied up for a bike and waited a few weeks for it, as did a local firefighter who worked with Otis Guy. We weren’t making any money, but we were putting bikes under people and starting to find ways of drawing attention to the bikes and ourselves. I didn’t even have a Ritchey myself when I started selling them,

Me hefting Ritchey number 2 up a steep trail for a MountainBikes promotion shot.

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and it would be well into the next year before I had one of my own.

We took photos of Gary’s bike with Gary’s camera, a medium-format Hasselblad left over from the days in the ’60s when he shot images of rock stars. We had one bike to use for the photos, Gary’s, and one camera, also Gary’s. I could ride a bike, but I had never used that kind of camera, so I served as the model on Gary’s bike while he took the photos. One action shot had me toting the bike up a hill on my shoulder; another had me holding it at arm’s length to show how light I could make it look. For my star turn, I wore ordi-nary Levis and a yellow T-shirt that Bob Burrowes had printed up. On the front was a photograph of Bob in action on Repack and the logo “Marin County Klunkers.” On the back it read, “I’d rather be klunking.”

When Thanksgiving rolled around, I had Pete draw up another poster for the Appetite Seminar, and the turnout was a couple dozen riders, includ-ing a San Francisco bicyclist named Darryl Skrabak riding a Jack Taylor cyclocross bike.

Darryl now and then contributed to a local free tabloid called City Sports. If Darryl hadn’t been there and written about it, I might have forgot-ten that ride by now. It started raining during the

Head-on toward the camera aboard Ritchey number 2.

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Fat Tire Flyer • The Ritchey MountainBike

shops based on the expectation that it would run. It appeared in the December 1979/January 1980 issue of City Sports. It starts with this:

There are events that become adventures, and adventures that become ordeals, and ordeals in which things go from bad to worse, and the worse things become, the better they are.

It was that way at the Appetite Seminar held Thanksgiving Day in the Marin hills. This unheralded event was plain awful. It was the worst Seminar ever, and it was the Fifth Annual. It will fuel Marin bench rac-

ride, the mud peeling up off the road in sheets on our tires. The inclement conditions and the mud-clogged machinery turned the ride into a desperate forced march by hypothermic riders. As the leader, I was responsible, so I herded the miserable crew around the loop and then went home, warmed up, and tried to forget the day.

Darryl found the adventure charming in retro-spect and wrote a paean to the ride that he titled “Working Up an Appetite.” The City Sports editor at first derided Darryl’s story and planned to spike it until members of the advertising department mentioned that they had already sold ads to bike

Mert Lawwill’s ProCruiser, based on a design by the Koski brothers, came out in 1979.

ing for months. The miseries visited upon the participants will be dwelt upon at length, and recounted repeatedly, and expanded into tales, and thence into legend. It will be recalled as one of the great ones.

Because it was the worst.

Darryl took a photograph of Gary on his Ritchey bike and captioned it “Gary Fisher on his super-low-geared klunker.” This was the first pho-tograph of the Ritchey bike to hit print. Farther down in the piece, Darryl used our company name in print for the first time. “Ritchey is now party to a fledgling Kelly and Fisher concern known as MountainBikes, which markets Ritchey’s frames and other klunker equipment.”

That fall we received a visit from Bob Hadley, editor of Bicycle Motocross Action. We had noth-ing remotely to do with BMX and did not count it among our influences. It was most likely Mert’s involvement in framebuilding for the Koskis that got Hadley’s attention, since even in retirement Mert was a national hero and icon for motorcy-clists. Mert had been a national champion motor-cycle racer and had a starring role in a documen-tary film with Steve McQueen, On Any Sunday. By this time, Mert and the Koskis had separated,

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and each was working on bikes independently of the other. The Koskis would call their next design Trailmaster, and Mert continued producing the original Koski design as the ProCruiser.

The BMX magazine sent a photographer to take action shots, and Joe gave them the action they needed for a motor-drive photo sequence of a side-ways pitch. The price of the bikes stunned Hadley; his eventual article was titled “Loaded for Bear and Ungodly Expensive: Full Bore Cruisers.”

Despite his thin credentials in mountain biking, Mert got most of Hadley’s attention for his Koski-designed ProCruiser. Mert claimed sales of his first 75 bikes for about $500 apiece, with the next 100 on their way. After that Hadley mentioned us: “The only other people who are producing pure klunkers are Joe Breeze and Tom Ritchey. Each has built around ten bikes. The Breezer and the Ritchey sell for an incredible $1,200 . . . which gives you an idea of the quality of the workmanship and components that are put into these bikes.”

What to call them?

We asked Mert, Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, Charles Kelly, and the owners of the Cove Bike Shop in Tiburon—the people at the heart of this brand-

new pastime—what they thought these bikes should be called.

Of all the names that have been applied at various times for these bikes—Klunkers, Ballooners, Bombers, Downhillers, Mountain Bikes, Trail Bikes, Tankers, Cruisers, Cow Trail-ers, the consensus of opinion is that they should be called Mountain Bikes. And when you think about it, that name fits like a glove.

BMX was being marketed to parents as a “safe” sport for kids, and those kids were the target audi-ence for the magazine. Our lack of helmets called

Gary putting his second Ritchey MountainBike through its paces.

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Fat Tire Flyer • The Ritchey MountainBike

for a scolding in the article. A photograph of Mert sliding a ProCruiser sideways is captioned “Mert Lawwill, still hookin’ it on, even without his Harley. But no helmet. Tsk, tsk, tsk, Mert.”

A writer named Dean Bradley, who worked for the other major BMX publication, BMX Plus!, was the next to notice us, and in the February 1980 issue he reviewed what he called the “Richey [sic] Mountain Bike.” Bradley led off the article with a remarkable prediction. “This month’s 26-inch test bike is called a Mountain Bike. Chances are that you’ve never heard of it before, but believe me, you will be hearing a lot about this revolutionary bike in the future.” The rest of the article went on in the same vein. Dean loved the bikes and gushed over them in the article.

In keeping with magazine tradition, the BMX Plus! advertising department leaned on us to take out an ad since Dean was giving us a lot of posi-tive publicity in the article. This was our first print advertising, and we didn’t have anything prepared. We didn’t have Pete’s graphics as a separate piece of art, so we sent the magazine’s art department a business card and told them what we wanted the ad to say:

MOUNTAIN BIKESThe Trail Blazers26 × 2.125 18 Speeds 28 lb.Advanced Off-RoadBicycle TechnologyCustom Framesets—BikesConversion Kits for BeachBike to Mountain Cruiser

Write or CallFor FREE Catalog:Mountain BikesP.O. Box 405Fairfax, CA 94930(415) 456-1898

Really? A free catalog?

Our MountainBikes ad from 1980.

THE TRUE, COMPLETE, AND EXTRAORDINARY TALE OF THE INVENTION OF REPACK AND THE RISE OF MOUNTAIN BIKING

SPORTS • CYCLING

”It’s a cool, clear morning in Northern California, but the five young men are sweating profusely as they push strangely modified bicycles up the steep hill. They are discussing the dirt road surface, which re-sembles a moonscape more than it does a road.

”These young men belong to the same breed that skis down cliffs, jumps out of airplanes, or rides skate-

boards down Everest. They have developed their own unique athletic challenge, a race which is known only to a few dozen locals and is referred to as ‘Repack.’ The road they are on is the racecourse.

”The sport that is going on here may never catch on with the American public, and its originators couldn’t care less. They are here to get off.”

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