Bike World News

While the mountain bike had several “birthplaces”, none contributed more to the sport than Marin Country, California. In the early 1970’s, a group of serious athletes, tinkerers and pot smoking hippies came together to drive the evolution of paperboy bikes to dedicated mountain bikes and to create a global renaissance in bicycling. Tom Ritchey, Gary Fisher, Otis Guy, Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly and many many others were the original free riders.

“Klunkerz” takes a fond look back at these early days, when members of the Larkspur Canyon Gang and the Morrow Dirt Club first started riding on the fire roads on Mount Tamalpais. Breeze, Fisher and Ritchey were all serious road racers that would switch over to the bikes that they called bombers, balooners or klunkers when the road season drew to a close. Not all of these pioneers were road riders. Some just liked to go fast downhill.

Fisher was one of the riders than began modifying old bikes for others. The first step was to take an old paperboy bike and remove the fenders, chainguards, tank and any other unnecessary items. As speeds increased, the Marin County riders began to recognize that the bicycle technologies of the 1940s and 1950s were limiting them. They began to graft cantilever brakes, tandem drum brakes, triple cranksets, derailleurs and more onto the bikes.

The first races on Mt. Tam took place as early as 1971, but it was the formation of the now legendary Repack Run in October of 1976 that began to raise the awareness of mountain biking outside of Marin. Shortly thereafter, Tom Ritchey and Joe Breeze, both of who had been building road bikes for some time, began to weld the first dedicated mountain bike frames. Breeze’s first bike spent 3 months on the drawing board before he put torch to metal, but that first bike (and the next ten) was sold before it was completed. Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher formed a company to build bikes as well, with Ritchey as their primary supplier. Kelly and Fisher ended up selling 160 bikes in their first year and over 1000 the next year. The revolution was well underway.

By 1983, mass production of mountain bikes was coming in. Every major manufacturer either had a mountain bike or plans to make one, but it was Specialized, and their Stumpjumper line of bikes that really took mountain bikes into the American consciousness.

The film also pays tributes to Wendee Craig and Jacquie Phelan, the first women to ride mountain bikes, and to John Finley Scott, a San Francisco area cyclist who arguably built the first mountain bike in the fifties and used it to travel around the West.

Even if you don’t ride or race mountain bikes, “Klunkerz” offers insight to the birth of a type of bike and a style of racing that was born within most of our lifetimes.

$27.99 at www.klunkerz.com

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