Repack, Pearl Pass, and the North Shore: A Geographic History of Mountain Biking
The riders sat thousands of feet above the San Francisco Bay on the slopes of Mount Tamalpais. The sport of “mountain biking” did not exist yet. Rather, this crew of riders from Northern California were out for the novel challenge of riding a bicycle far from smooth, predictable pavement.
The Larkspur Canyon Gang, made up of a large collection of loose knit friends, modified their town bikes to ride better off road, calling the bikes “clunkers.” As early as 1968, the Larkspur Canyon riders would push their bikes to the top of Eldridge Grade on Mount Tam and race back down.
Meanwhile, another group from Marin—including Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, Gary Fisher, and Otis Guy—belonged to a road cycling club called Velo Club Tamalpais. In 1973, Larkspur Canyon riders Marc Vendetti and Kenny Fuetsch became mechanics at a San Rafael bike shop, and both riders also joined Velo Club Tamalpais. Vendetti persuaded Breeze to buy a clunker for $5, which Breeze rode to a Velo Club Tamalpais meeting where the rest of the cyclists caught wind of the off road action.
If this sequence of events did not happen, perhaps Charlie Kelly’s only claim to fame would be working as a roadie for local rock band Sons of Champlin. Instead, more than 20 years before the first officially sanctioned Mountain Bike World Championship race, Kelly and his peers would contribute to the creation of mountain bike racing.
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History is not linear. Events don’t fit neatly into a single narrative. That’s one reason why the study of history is so compelling. The uncovering of differing perspectives can alter our understanding of the popular telling of history.
The popular understanding of the history of mountain biking in North America usually centers around the Repack downhill races in California, but that’s not the whole story. While this article will start with Repack, it will also examine events in Colorado and Canada. Each region put their own spin on the sport, which influences the ways we ride and compete on fat tires today.
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Back at the top of the hill, tension would naturally brew between the riders. Before long, competitive urges would take over, and the race would be on. Since many of the riders were road racers, they had experience racing time trials. They figured a time trial race would be the best format to test who was the fastest at riding clunkers down the mountain.
A view from the top of Mount Tam. Photo by Michael Pujals via Flickr Creative Commons.
On October 21, 1976, Kelly organized the first of the Repack races. The course was referred to as Repack, since the constant wear of the racer’s coaster brakes would require them to repack the bearings with grease after each run.
Held on Mount Tam’s Cascade Canyon Road outside of Fairfax, the course drops roughly 1,300 feet in under two miles.
“These young men belong to the same breed that skis down cliffs, jumps out of airplanes, or rides skateboards 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,’” Kelly wrote in an article for the January 1979 issue of Bicycling Magazine.
Accounts vary, but a dozen or so racers competed that October day, using an old Navy chronometer and an alarm clock to conduct the timing. The sheet of results disappeared after the race, but Alan Bonds finished in first place with a time of 5 minutes and 12 seconds.
Bonds won, as he later admitted, by taking a “short cut” under a closed access gate. The Repack course featured a gate which forced racers to dismount their bikes and run around to the side before continuing down the hill. However, Bonds previously saw another rider navigate a similar gate by sliding himself and his bike under a gap between the gate and the road surface. Bonds pulled the same maneuver on Repack and was victorious.
In total, 24 Repack races were held from 1976-79. Two more were held in 1983 and 1984 in conjunction with the National Off-Road Bicycling Association.
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There’s a saying that goes something like this: The first bicycle race was the day that the second bicycle was built. While it’s possible that there were other downhill style races around the same time as Repack, Repack can claim that the 1983 NORBA race was the first officially sanctioned downhill race.
The slopes of Mount Tam birthed a novel format of mountain bike racing. In the span of 50 years, downhill racing evolved from bombing fire roads on rigid clunkers, to the fighter-jet-like bikes that we see on the downhill World Cup circuit today.
Unbeknownst to the Repack racers, a group of mountain bikers in Colorado were making contributions to the sport at roughly the same time. This high altitude crew was not racing like the Repack crew, but they cemented their own contributions to the history and culture of mountain biking
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In the summer of 1976, a group of motorcyclists from Aspen, Colorado rolled into Crested Butte and lumbered up to the Grubstake Saloon. They bragged about their 40 mile journey over the rugged, 12,700 foot Pearl Pass. And—according to one account—-the Aspen men also came to eye-up the local women.
A few Crested Butte locals didn’t like that their town was invaded by the Aspen riders. They didn’t have motorcycles, but they had klunker bikes that were similar to the ones being ridden over in California. (In Colorado they spelled klunker with a “K”).
The high alpine Pear Pass in between Crested Butte and Aspen. Photo by trailsource.com via Flickr Creative Commons.
In September, one month before the first Repack race, a group of 15 riders set off from Crested Butte and headed over Pearl Pass. Only two riders, Bob Starr and Rick Verplank, successfully rode the entire distance without assistance from the follow car.
The tour took two days. The first day consisted of climbing the Crested Butte side of the pass, and after a campout near the top, the riders descended into Aspen the next day. Spending the night above 10,000 feet in September is cold, but it sounds like the group was prepared with a large amount of warmth-providing booze. They “consumed one keg of beer, three bottles of Schnapps, 2 gallons of wine, and 3 bottles of champagne.”
“The descent was nothing but horrifying, rough and rocky,” Starr told the Crested Butte Pilot. “The original drop-outs jumped out of support vehicles at the tip and all 15 rode their klunkers down the pass until just before the pavement at Ashcroft where the brakes were smoking and rear ends were seizing up.” The conservative tortoise types cruised past the burning up hares, as it were, and we trickled in one by one, met at the Jerome Hotel and had a party all over Aspen.”
There was no Pearl Pass Tour in 1977, as many from the group worked as firefighters and were busy fighting wildfires throughout the country. In 1978, the Marin racers drove out to Colorado to join after reading about the tour in CoEvolution Quarterly.
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In terms of bike technology, the rugged terrain of Pearl Pass demonstrated the need for sturdier components. The rough Rocky Mountains demanded more from bikes than the fire roads of California, and progressing bike technology meant that riders could more efficiently enjoy the expansive network of singletrack trails that would sprout up in the Crested Butte region as the popularity of mountain biking increased.
The Pearl Pass Tour also contributed to mountain bike culture. As written above, the tour was as much of a bike ride as it was a party. That idea of enjoying oneself during and after a ride still exists today. Breweries are strewn around mountain towns, allowing mountain bikers to borrow from the apres ski tradition.
Finally, Pearl Pass proved that mountain bikes can, and will go, pretty much anywhere. Mountain bike trails wind their way through the world’s mountains, and there will only be more of them. Some riders don’t even necessarily need a trail. They call themselves freeriders, and their discipline of the sport was born in British Columbia.
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North of the border in British Columbia, a similar movement was taking place that would diverge into a much more extreme aspect of the sport.
In the laid-back community of Deep Cove, Charles “Chaz” Romalis and friends were modifying bicycles using similar techniques to what was being done in Marin and Crested Butte. In fact, it could be said that Deep Cove—located in North Vancouver below Mount Seymour—had a similar seaside town feel to parts of Marin, while also featuring close access to big mountain winter recreation like Crested Butte.
Romalis made frequent trips to California to ride in the hills above Santa Barbara. While he was there, he collected parts for his bikes. In 1981, he co founded Deep Cove Bike Shop along with Doug “Dewey” Lafavor and Ashley “Nummers” Walker. The shop was an importer, builder, and seller of high end mountain bikes.
In the ‘80’s, mountain bikers from Deep Cove began exploring the access roads and hiking trails on Mount Seymour. Because of the isolated nature of Deep Cove, riders didn’t know that around the same time another group of mountain bikers a few miles to the west were taking up the same sport near Mount Fromme.
One of the riders from the Fromme area was Todd “Digger” Fiander. Digger got his nickname from the amount of trail building, or “digging” that he did. While working on a trail, Digger pioneered a small, yet revolutionary technique. He took a length of Cedar plank and laid it down, spanning a three-foot-deep divot in the ground. Riders would use the plank as a bridge, avoiding the divot.
Using deadfall found in the forest, trail builders could now build bridges for mountain bikers to more easily navigate parts of the forest floor that were not otherwise passable, like divots or marshland. The riders referred to these kinds of manmade trail features as “stunts.”
Planks of wood were also used to build aerial bridges. The builder would attach smaller planks at a 90-degree intersection, creating something that resembles a ladder. Riders would balance on these bridges and also use them to launch themselves into the air to perform tricks.
An aerial ladder bridge like those found on the North Shore. Photo by bookwus via Flickr Creative Commons.
Digger built a trail called Ladies Only on Mount Fromme, which was the epitome of this new style of trail building and riding. A collection of “freeriders” emerged, melding mountain biking with the adrenaline fueled tricks and stunts found in freestyle BMX and skiing. Wade Simmons came to the North Shore from Kamloops, and immediately started throwing down. He would go on to win the first edition of Red Bull Rampage, one of the most publicized and famous mountain bike competitions, in 2001.
“It was like that game Mousetrap,” Simmons told Privateer of the early North Shore days. “You would go for a ride for 3-4 hours and ride maybe only 2km because all you do is session. It was like skateboarding where kids try and rail slide for hours.”
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Freeriding has contributed a wide array of advancements to the sport of mountain biking today. In the early 2000’s, ski lift served mountain biking blossomed in Whistler. Located about an hour north of Vancouver, Whistler Blackcomb is still considered to be the gold standard bike park, thanks in part to trail building techniques inspired by the North Shore. There are now lift-served bike parks at ski resorts around the world, including in Crested Butte.
A more mainstream version of freeride culture, which may be compared to skate culture, can be seen in the popularity of municipal bikeparks.. Bike parks featuring dirt jumps, freeride features, and pump tracks are essentially skateparks for bikes, and are popping up in more and more cities around the world.
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Spurred by a number of factors, mountain biking has been evolving from a fringe, niche sport, into a more mainstream activity. Part of the appeal of mountain biking is the number of different disciplines the sport has to offer. From cross country to freeride, there is a version of off road biking for anybody.
These different disciplines were born out of movements in different parts of North America. Downhill racing has its roots in the Repack races, high country cross country riding is associated with the Pearl Pass Tour, and freeriding calls British Columbia home. In ten years, who knows what trends will be popular in the mountain bike community, but it’s inevitable that there will be something worth talking about.