Wheels of Fortune Part Two
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In 1990 I took a job teaching filmmaking at the University of Colorado just to be near the great riding above Boulder, moving away from the new wave of trail closures in Marin County that were the most depressing thing going in mountainbiking. In a couple of months I sold an expensive Italian road bike I had acquired in a trade for a guitar, and dropped the cool $800 for a customized Manitou front suspension fork with titanium stanchions, steerer, and bolts. I stuck this feathery, meticulous goodie on my Klein and headed for the mountains. It changed my life, and before long I was dreaming of what it might be like to put some suspension on the rear wheel as well.
I had become what the bike industry wanted me to be, a diehard consumer of high tech, high dollar, ultralight, titanium goodies, and boing-boing shit.
Years before, at the Interbike Show of 1986, Kestral introduced a nifty looking carbon fiber full suspension prototype. The bike, built with the assistance Keith Bontrager, a young fellow from Santa Cruz known for innovative steel cyclocross frames, and Paul Turner of Rock Shox, turned many a head. Slowly, with increasing momentum, small builders and former motorcycle-guys-turned-mountainbikers endeavored to create a workable full suspension design to put into production.
Manufacturers threw money to the wind. Gary Fisher's company crumbled under the weight of kicking the bugs out of a promising design created in association with motorcycle legend Mert Lawill. Trek created a white elephant pogo stick rear end that ejected riders over the handlebars like a catapult. Cannondale marketed the heaviest, ugliest bike of all time and people actually bought them. Bad designs, noble attempts, and boing-boing freaks ruled the day as I searched for the perfect full suspension bike.
Soon my desire was put to the test by the creation of well designed, fully suspended bikes like Richard Cunningham's Mantis Pro-Floater, Horst Leitner's AMP designs, and Mountain Cycles' and Brent Foes' rock-solid, long travel, space-cadet monocoques. After reading as much as I could about the various designs, and managing to ride a few, I decided to buy the Mantis. I ordered the bike and its components by mail from Cambria Bicycle Outfitters in California and sat back as UPS trickled the pieces into my sweaty little palms.
I spared no expense, building the bike up with the lightest American components and titanium goodies I could find. When at last the bike was together I took it out the door of my Pinewood Springs, Colorado home, pushed it up the steepest hill I could find, clicked in, pointed the pretty thing downward, and let it fly. The Avocet computer quickly shot to over 50 miles per hour.
I thought to myself, "This thing feels like a goddamn motorcycle!" But as the 120 degree turn to my house approached faster than I had ever imagined it would, I grabbed a handful of mushy, do-nothing brakes and realized it wasn't going to stop like a motorcycle. I shot by the turn, picked the front end up, banged over a deep drainage ditch, up a steep embankment, got airborn (brakes really don't work so hot when you are airborn), and landed hard in my neighbors yard, coming to a stop in a bush.
Whoops!
When I finally took the Mantis into the mountains on my favorite ride up 2200 feet past Big Elk Meadows to Meeker Park, it lead me into temptation on every technical trail section I had walked before. After I got used to the squishy, rubberband rear end, it climbed the steep and loose surfaces of the Front Range like it was glued to the ground. The Mantis changed directions almost intuitively and descended like a little buzz bomb, a tribute to Richard Cunningham's well thought out, balanced frame geometry. After I installed a brake booster and fine tuned cable lengths, pad, and brake arm angles, it stopped pretty good, too.
There were many downsides to the Pro-Floater, however. It creaked everywhere, and if I hit a diagonal rut the rear end twisted like it was made out of thin plywood. Within two weeks of hard riding the rear shock sounded like a .22 pistol shot every time I hit a bump. When I sent it back to the shock manufacturer, it took a month to fix, something they promised would only take a week. At one point the titanium bottom bracket spindle broke. I had to remove it and press in a new one with a special tool that cost a hundred bucks and required the brute upper body strength of Hulk Hogan. After installing the new spindle, it turned out that it was not long enough, so I had to wait for another spindle to be shipped to me and then repeat the stone age procedure. When the next spindle arrived too short, it pissed me off so bad that I began to hate the bike.
I called Cambria and begged them to take the Mantis back. To my surprise, they told me that somebody would probably pay full pop for the used Pro Floater because they were the hot thing on the market at the time. Cambria gave me full credit in exchange for an upgrade to a bike that I really couldn't afford. What the hell, you only live once.
What are credit cards for, anyway?
They're for buying a Rock Shox amended Titanium Fat Chance, that's what.
Compared to the Mantis full suspension, the Massachusetts built, Chris Chance designed bike, with its stable, forgiving ride and completely perfect fit, was a total monster. The ultra-light parts I purchased for the Mantis turned the Chance into a 21 pound ride. Now I could blast downhill at will and charge over obstacles I had balked at before, but without the flex, creaks, and maintenance headaches of the Mantis. My spirit soared to 11,000 feet every other day.
I sat back on my Fat Chance and watched bike companies duke it out to create a reliable and worthy full suspension rig. With the influx of disgusting big business enveloping the mountainbike industry, the new bouncing stallions were being kissed by innovation fed by real money. I knew eventually I would have the perfect full suspension bike, and even if it took ten years, at least I had the Fat Chance to keep me company.
Rear suspension bugaboos were slowly worked out. First it was special brake boosters and braces, then side pull brake designs, discs, and Shimano V-brakes. Problems with travel, rear end flex, and suspension bob were alleviated by multiple pivots, CNC machined links, interrupted seat tubes, experiments with pivot points, and unified rear triangles. Problems with sloppy, creaking pivots were solved by close tolerance machining, grease fittings, tempered metals, delrin, teflon, and ball bearings. All of this research and development meant that production costs soared. Small frame builders either folded, shamelessly copied like Xerox, or were absorbed into larger corporations.
It got weird too. Off shoots to the industry emerged and flourished as mountainbiking grew bigger than John Holmes.
Baggy pants for the insecure, anti-chain suck devices for the shifty, funky disc wheels for the overly endowed wallets, weird handlebars, space age helmets, and a neverending variety of shoes, pedals, CNC machined hubs, headsets, and cranks were manufactured to satisfy the feeding frenzy of people like myself. Even mountainbike food became a marketable commodity.
Energy bars that tasted like flavored cardboard and turned into tooth-busting bricks in cold weather replaced bananas and the wife's chocolate chip cookies. Energy drinks that gave you gas so fast they made your eyes pop out, replaced spring water mixed with flat soda pop. Energy goo in a tube that tasted just like the lard and sugar icing on the cake your mom got from the local bakery on your 9th birthday replaced cheap and nasty Snickers and Three Musketeers bars. Energy snacks of all kinds, runny goos and crunchy turd bars, neatly packaged in foil, are now competing for your cavities with the rock hard cardboard energy bars. With the advent of bready cookie-like bars you can now make that birthday cake on the trail. Just squirt a bunch of chocolate energy snot out of a toothpaste tube onto your energy cookie clump out of that silver wrapper, and voila, instant chocolate cake, lightheaded bellyache just like the one you got on your 9th birthday.
What happened to bananas? Well, smart people still eat them, but for the less-than-smart, need-to-spend-more-money-to-feel-cool crowd, they've got banana flavored cardboard energy bars for two bucks a piece. Go for it.
And who eats this crap? Mountainbikers like me and you, that's who. And we eat a lot more than this energy bar shit. We eat up the media hype fed to us by the marketing folks like its barbecued potato chips after a big joint. Bet you can't eat just one lie, either. Just how to you spell, "sellout?"
Mountainbiking has become so hip and lucrative that manufacturers of earthly abominations are using the sport to advertise their useless shit, snaring people who want to be hip and can afford to pay for the privilege. You can bet that as long as there are people who will buy one speed, titanium replica cruiser bikes for the price of a small car, there will be a market for Mercedes, BMW's and Volvo's.
Mountainbike racing is no longer a communal celebration of love for two-wheeled, human powered, environment-saving machines. It's a marketing ploy to get you to buy a car.
The purely American mountainbike racing scene and subculture where nobody gave a shit who won, has been slowly adopted by sleazy, European, image-driven, never-even-seen wilderness, idiots that spawned the subhuman worship of road racing and its sorry commercialization. Now it's image, glitz and glamour, sound and fury, extreme sport signifying airheadedness in the extreme, sick and twisted, sponsored by evil corporations, but still cool as hell, because it's titties on a mountainbike.
Titties are good.
Mountainbiking are good.
Therefore, buy our evil shit because it's good by association.
If I believed the media hype I'd think that mountainbikes go downhill in snow in a spit shined flash, guided by pot smoking, coffee drinking, XTC popping, babbling misfits with no point, in spandex, lycra, kevlar, and cordura armor, somewhat distracted by hair, tattoos, cars, shiny gold biking shorts and shoes, and the caliber of their guns, duking it out on high tech machines weighing 50 pounds, costing more than a new car, for huge amounts of money and maybe a few seconds of fleeting exposure on the boob tube where they can say really dumb shit that has no bearing on anything at all.
If I believed the media hype I'd think that cross country biking is the Oympics in stagnant slo-mo, creeping up the hill in a sweat through a crowd of adoring fans.
If I believed the media hype I'd think that mountainbikes are for cops to jump over cars, hang over the handlebars like postmodern Lone Rangers, and blast the bad guys with carbon fiber Glock service revolvers.
I'm writing this to remind a new generation of two-wheeled enthusiasts that the sport of mountainbiking was born in America, the child of a downhill race called Repack that emerged in a time of growing spiritual awareness, when those who rode into the mountains and raced a mountainbike on weekends didn't give a damn if it was "cool." Pot smoking peacenik misfits in flannel and denim, somewhat distracted by the destruction of the rainforests and the assassinations of George Moscone and Harvey Milk, duked it out for nothing more than bragging rights, on rattling, cobbled-together contraptions weighing 40 pounds with ever-fading and smoking brakes, and they actually had more fun doing it this way. And yes, they were really stoned. And yes, while they were the first to market the phenom, they were not the first to ride a bike off-road. Me and my buddies were doing it in the first grade in 1955.
Whenever something becomes hip you can bet that every asshole that wants or needs to be hip will show up sooner or later. It happened to Northern California. The rents in San Francisco are now the highest in the United States. You can't even ride singletrack in Marin anymore, and on the trails they let you ride, there's cops in the bushes with radar guns making sure you don't have too much fun.
There is some good news, however, and, as usual, it is about the bike itself: Full suspension has finally become worthy! A couple of years ago I bought an Answer Manitou full suspension frame, decked it out with sane, worthy components, and discovered the joy of riding all over again. The Manitou sent my Fat Chance Titanium into retirement like a rocket, joining the Ritchey and Klein on the wall of my office. I liked the bike so much that I became an Answer Manitou dealer. In 1998 I hooked up with Ellsworth and now I sell what I consider to be the state of the art in full suspension mountain bikes.
I have retreated to gnarly and surreal Moab, Utah, the best mountainbiking destination on planet earth, a place where the act of mountainbiking is an important contributor to the economy, and almost untouchable. Trails here will not remain open, though. Slowly, irresponsible trail users are making our sport look like an environmental disaster in the eyes of Sierra Club suits. The used-to-be-hip mountain bike subculture is now crowded with every kind of human and a great deal of them are really stupid and proud of it. Recently, after being passed by a couple of out-of-control testosteron bozos on singletrack with Tony Ellsworth, he said in horror, "Are those guys one of US? If so, we are in trouble."
So, for better or for worse, I ride, build and take pictures of mountain bikes for a living. Every time I go for a ride I deduct it from my taxes, and despite the fact that I charge for sex, I insist that clients leave the real world behind. I try to recall a time for everyone, a time when we had a chance, a time when doors and minds were left open. Every day I turn a very small group of people on to nearly pristine wilderness and incredible, awesome technical riding, and if the sorry state of humanity is on their nerves, I help them get away from it all on a mountainbike. In my own way, I am trying to maintain, share, and expand upon that deja vu rush I got the first time I rode a bicycle off road in Golden Gate Park, at least up until the point where I smashed my nuts.
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To speak to Lee Bridgers or to book a tour call (435) 259-6419 or write Dreamride Mountainbike Tours, P.O. Box 1137, Moab, UT 84532.
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