A Brief History of Mountain Biking
Written by Quentin Septer
Note: This is a modified excerpt from my book, Where Land Becomes Sky: Life and Death Along the Colorado Trail, available now.
California’s Bay Area is often cited as the homeland of modern mountain biking. Back in the 1970s, Bay Area riders began renovating old road bikes from the 1930s and ‘40s. They added better brakes, bigger tires, and wider forks to the vintage bike frames. Then they raced their prototypes down the slopes of Mount Tamalpais in a blur of bell bottoms, jean jackets, and handlebar mustaches. The races became known as the “Repack Races,” aforenamed for the blown out coaster brake hubs frequented on the mountain’s steep descents—a mechanical inconvenience that requires the hub’s “repacking.” The riders of the Repack Races designed and built some of the world’s first mountain bikes (as we’d recognize them today). Some went on to establish the world’s first mountain bike companies. And a select few took the sport mainstream. Without them, mountain biking wouldn’t be what it is today.
But mountain biking, in the strictest sense of the term, was born nearly a century before their time.
The Swedish Bicycle Infantry started building off-road bikes designed for military transport back in the 1890s. These Swiss Army Bikes—Ordonnanzfahrrad Modell 05s built around rigid frames, 26” wheels, 20-tooth rear sprockets, and 50-tooth chainrings—enabled Swedish troops to cover more ground through the mountains. Swiss Army Bikes proved practical in the Alps, and soon, the U.S. Army began testing the efficacy of bicycle travel across the rugged terrain of the American West. The bicycle proved such a promising means of transportation, in fact, that for a brief time, the United States military considered the bicycle as an alternative to cavalry on horseback.
“There is no doubt in my mind that during the next great war,” Major General Nelson Miles wrote in 1894, “the bicycle, with such modifications and adaptations as experience may suggest, will become a most important machine for military purposes.”
Famously, the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps’ Buffalo Soldiers carried out many of these early modifications and adaptations. The group was one of four African American military regiments formed by the United States Congress in the wake of the Civil War. And the Bicycle Corps, as their designation implies, were tasked with exploring the landscapes of the West via bicycle. The Buffalo Soldiers rode single-speed, rigid-framed bicycles topping out at more than seventy pounds when fully loaded with gear—canvas tents, sleeping bags, blankets rolled up and strapped to their handlebars, along with rifles and other military equipment. In the Bicycle Corps’ formative days, the troops embarked on a four day, one hundred and twenty-six mile journey from Fort Missoula, Montana to McDonald Lake in the state’s Mission Mountains. In 1896, the Corps set out on a second trip, traveling from Fort Missoula to Yellowstone National Park and back—an 800 mile round-trip through wild and mountainous country. Headed by Lieutenant James A. Moss, the Corps completed this proto-bikepacking trip in just 23 days.
“Again and again would we stop along the road to look at paint pots, pools, springs, geysers,” Moss wrote of the expedition. “Riding through the Gibbon Meadows, we then turned off into Gibbon Canyon, deep, sinuous and picturesque. For miles we fared along the windings of the road, with the ever beautiful waters of Gibbon River at our side, now admiring this, then admiring that. Indeed, this was the very poetry of cycling.”
One year later, in the summer of 1897, the Bicycle Corps traversed the Rocky Mountains, en route to St. Louis. They covered more than 1,900 miles in a mere 34 days. But the bicycle ultimately proved impractical for military purposes, of course. In just a couple decades, there’d be tanks and explosives and machine guns, and an infantry on a fleet of bicycles would be little more than good target practice. The Bicycle Corps were disbanded shortly after the troop’s arrival in St. Louis on July 24, 1897.
But cyclists continued off-road riding into the early 20th century. Road cyclists took to cyclocross training during their off-seasons—a hybrid of road, gravel, and dirt trail riding that persists to this day. Cyclocross became an official sport in the 1940s, and in a sense, cyclocross became a kind of gateway drug to the adrenaline of mountain biking. Roadies were going off-roading in their training, and some folks kept going, further off the road, if you will, into the woods.
Throughout the mid-1900s, “mountain biking,” as we’d recognize it today, emerged independently in distinct locations around the world. In the early 1950s, a group of two dozen Parisian cyclists known as the Velo Cross Club Parisien began customizing their French 650-B bicycles, riding with a style strikingly similar to that of modern-day mountain biking. In 1953, a California man named John Finley Scott took his Schwinn World Diamond bicycle frame and fit it with balloon tires, flat handlebars, derailleur gears, and cantilever brakes. He called his creation a “woodsie” bike. “John was more than 20 years ahead of his time and while he remained an off-road cycling enthusiast, there were not many others who shared his passion,” cycling journalist Charlie Kelly wrote of John Finley Scott in a piece for the Marin Museum of Bicycling. It must have been lonely, out there in the woods.
Mountain biking had yet to gain mainstream recognition. But soon, riders in Crested Butte, Colorado and Cupertino, California started adapting their road bikes for off-road use on local trails. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, cycling clubs like the Larkspur Canyon Gang, The Cupertino Riders, and Velo Club Tamalpais restored old balloon tire bikes produced by road and cyclocross brands in the early twentieth century. Fitting these old-school bikes with rear coaster brakes, Schwinn cantilever front brakes, chrome rims, and B.F. Goodrich knobby tires, Bay Area riders started racing their artisan mountain bikes down the slopes of Mount Tamalpais.
That’s when the Repack Races began. The Repack Races inspired the first major breakthroughs in modern mountain bike technology. Joe Breeze, Otis Guy, Keith Bontrager, and other competitors began designing and building bikes specifically for the sport of mountain biking. They welded new frames specialized for the sport—fit with slacker geometry, thicker tires, stronger forks, more powerful brakes. Then they formed legitimate companies. Mountain bike technology continued to evolve, and continues to do so to this day. Full-suspension bikes, “all-mountain” bikes, electric bikes, fat tire bikes, long-travel forks, 27.5 inch and 29 inch wheels, 700c rims, 1x drivetrains, Shimano’s new “gearbox.” (And it wouldn’t be an evolution if some of these attempts to innovate didn’t look like freakish genetic mutations. If you’ve ever seen a mountain bike with a single-sided fork, you know exactly what I’m talking about.) Today, mountain bike technology is so advanced and specialized that it tends to sound something like an alien language.
Take my own bike, for example, a 2020 Cannondale Habit 6. It’s not top of the line by any means—it’s straight from the factory, in fact—but it’s decked out with a Race Face Outboard BB bottom bracket, a KMC X11, 11-speed chain, and a Race Face Ride Cinch, 30T crankset. It’s got Sunrace, 11-46, 11-speed rear cogs, a Shimano SLX GS derailleur, and Shimano SLX 11-speed shifters, along with a RockShox Recon RL, 130mm, DebonAir, 51mm offset fork, a RockShox Deluxe Select, DebonAir rear shock, Shimano MT400 hubs, and 29 inch WTB STX i23 TCS, 32h rims, all on a 130mm travel, SmartForm C1 Alloy, Proportional Response Tuned, Ai offset drivetrain, ISCG05, BSA 83, post mount brake, tapered headtube frame.
I could go on, but I’m sure I’ve already lost you. I can’t make much sense of what I just wrote, myself. And all of these specs belong to just one run-of-the-mill mountain bike. Don’t even get me started on the many mountain biking disciplines in existence these days, each creating technological niches for an assortment of specialized gear. There’s cross country mountain biking, enduro, downhill, freeride, trials, trail riding, and, of course, bikepacking—the often miserable and sometimes blissful subdiscipline of the sport that I’ve taken up along the Colorado Trail.
And out here on the Trail, I can’t help but feel a kind of kinship with the pioneers of mountain biking, from the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps to the likes of Gary Fischer and John Finley Scott. Much like the evolution of the sport on Mount Tamalpais, and akin to the cross-country travels of the 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, mountain bike technology rides trails blazed by the human imagination. Innovations in mountain bike technology, audacious cycling trips across the American West; both have grown from visions in the minds of women and men as they pondered what the limits of man, woman, and bike might be. Mountain biking continues to ascend in popularity. New trails are built, new records are set, new technologies are fine-tuned to the subtleties of the sport’s sub-disciplines. But the ethos of mountain biking hasn’t changed all that much from the days of the Buffalo Soldiers, more than a century ago, when folks simply wondered how far a bicycle might take them.