The Birthplace of Mountain Biking

Crested Butte likes to call itself the birthplace of the mountain bike, and it has a real claim to the title. In the early nineteen seventies, this was a rough little ex mining town full of young people looking for cheap fun. In the mid nineteen seventies, locals like Al Maunz and Steve Baker began cobbling together heavy, fat tired bicycles they called klunkers, built from old cruiser frames for their crew of friends known as the Grubstake Gang.

The klunkers were far too heavy to pedal up the steep old mining roads, so the riders would haul them uphill in trucks and then bomb straight back down toward the Grubstake bar, and the story goes that the last rider bought the first round of beer. Out of that rowdy scene came a legend. In nineteen seventy six, a group of Crested Butte riders pedaled and pushed their one speed klunkers all the way over Pearl Pass, at twelve thousand seven hundred five feet, and down into Aspen.

That ride became the Pearl Pass Tour, now one of the longest running organized mountain bike rides in the world. Over the years it drew tinkerers from as far away as Marin County, California, and the ideas that flowed between them helped turn the crude klunker into the modern mountain bike.