History of Mountain Bike Development

"Hi, this is Aaron Phillips for Expert Village. Let's talk a little bit about the revolution of the mountain bike as you get prepared to choose the right bike for you. I'm looking here at a beach cruiser, basically that is what you call it. It is a bike that is equipped with fenders, a little basket for going grocery shopping, nice wide comfortable seat, biggo balloon tires. Alright. Even chain guards, you can wear regular pants and not get all dirty. This one has got a few gears, a lot of them don't have gears. But this kind of shows you what mountain bikes started from, right here. Back in the seventies a bunch of guys from California lived in Marin County, California, guys like Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher, there is a bunch of other ones I am not naming, they got together and they started taking Schwinn Excelsior and other bikes that kind of resemble a bike like this and they took them up this hill in Marin County, they called it repack hill. They called it repack hill because once you went down you had to repack all the barrings and hubs and the coaster brake because you just ruin all the brakes. But they had tires like this, they thought that these bikes, these old Schwinn's were perfect for going on the dirt because they have these big balloon tires and believe it or not I think those tires were pretty bald, kind of like this back then. And you will see, that is kind of where mountain biking started and then the bike builders got more and more innervated, they started taking existing bikes and cutting off the forks and welding on new ones and just kind of doing more machining and just more and more kind of evolving that kind of sport that it is today. If you look at what it is today, you go from this to something more like this. Alright. So that you still have that idea of big knobby tires, give you that nematic cushion against the ground but you got you know much more aggressive thread pattern. You've got frame designs that have gotten just positively alien looking."