Mt. Biking in SV back in the day. Spud, were you there?

[sunvalleylaw]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c67IAToSBXc&feature=player_embedded


Things sure have changed. I think this is New Bowl on Dollar if I am looking at it correctly. I was not yet in SV when I was still in Oregon in law school. Or I may have been in Gig Harbor by then since this is summer. I likely had just gotten, or was about to get, my first mountain bike. Spud may have been racing here. Doesn't seem that long ago that I took up mountain biking, but it sure has been!


PS. That old red aid car you see is now parked out at the BMX track and origin of a bunch of new trails west of Hailey. I don't think it has been moved in years. LOL!

[Eric]

Wow. No suspension, no clipless pedals, relatively skinny tires on all of those bikes. That looked painful. I suppose the saving grace was that they weren't going quite as fast as they do these days, so the crashes weren't quite as brutal as they would have been otherwise. Or so it appeared, anyway.

[sunvalleylaw]

Yeah, mountain biking was overall slower back then. The trails were often not as buffed and swoopy as they are these days. Now there is a lot more flow and momentum. Those guys were just out in the middle of a ski run. Having walked that dirt, I can say it is nothing like a trail you would experience today.

[Spudman]

I remember that course. I'm not sure if I was in any of that footage. I did see Ed Binnie near the beginning. It was a stupid rough course and I didn't do well on it. I don't think I crashed but I was really slow. They changed the course later and brought the two lines closer together. It really made for some hairy downhill. Good find SVL.

[Tig]

I think I spotted only one set of bull moose handlebars in the video! You had to be skilled to survive back in tha' day. I bought my first MTB in '85.

I didn't have any suspension until throwing a Rock Shox fork on a 1991 Serotta.

[NWBasser]

Wow. No suspension, no clipless pedals, relatively skinny tires on all of those bikes. That looked painful. I suppose the saving grace was that they weren't going quite as fast as they do these days, so the crashes weren't quite as brutal as they would have been otherwise. Or so it appeared, anyway.

About that time I was biking at the Snoqualmie Pass ski area with the rigid bike of the day. I hit a patch of boulders and my bike just bounced right out from beneath me and I went down hard. I remember there were some rich guys out there with Kleins which had the all-new Rockshox suspension forks. My how things have changed; with my current bike I would have blasted over those same boulders without even feeling much impact at all.

Man, I remember I had these Tioga Farmer John tires that had the worst traction you could imagine. Those things were so scary.

Tires, suspension, and disc brakes have made bikes sooo much better these days.