I was born in 1973 and raised in Larkspur, Marin County, California. I started riding mountain bikes after BMX bikes in middle school, about 1984, when I got a Schwinn High Sierra that soon got stolen and I replaced it with a green Specialized Hard Rock. It was then that I started exploring Mt. Tam with my skateboarding buddy TK. I didn’t know it then, but my influences were all around me at that time. We’d ride up Eldridge Grade to East Peak, have a safety break, then bomb down various routes back home. There was a definite feel to Tam, where you’d see the old wily’s on locally made Breeze’s, Fisher’s, Cunningham’s, and Ritchey’s and the kids following suit learning from the old hippies. I remember going to look for a new bike at a local shop and them recommending I get a handmade frame/fork from a local dude named Tom (Ritchey) but the cost was more than my saved-up allowance piggy bank could handle. So I ‘settled’ for an unfinished aluminum Klein Pinnacle with Suntour XCD pro from the Village Peddler in 1987. This is the bike I took to Colorado with me to College in 1991 and started racing on in 1993. I never had heard of mountain bike racing until I got to the University of Colorado at Boulder where a friend said he had started racing beginner and that I should give it a go. I didn’t even know what lycra was at that time, I always had ridden in tighty-whiteys, board-shorts, and a t-shirt. So, that’s where the baggy shorts thing started, not because any other reason than it’s what I grew up doing and prefer. I won my first two beginner races and moved up through the ranks eventually to turn Pro in 1995 while riding for Moots Cycles. In 1999-2000 I was part of a pretty sweet Boulder-based team called Ionic-Nema with Peter Swenson, Nathan Schultz, and the current many-time over National Champ JHK. We all raced in Nema baggy shorts and jerseys and had a blast in what we all considered one of our last racing seasons. I quit full-time racing a year later, went to grad school in Ecology at CU, and did some fun endurance or “adventure” races such as Montezuma’s Revenge (RIP), but I never stopped riding and exploring the Colorado backcountry. I was part of a rogue group of singlespeeders called the Intergalactic Pilots that made it their mission to have fun when all else were taking racing and themselves too seriously. The blue pilot suits can still be seen around the world today, so keep an eye out and hand them up a cocktail if you see a Pilot in a race!
Today, I’ve become more of a slow-rider – a mountain tourer – where I ride for the experience of getting out and looking around to see new places. That is what drives me – the sense that there’s always something out there that no human will ever see or experience – that there still is true wildness out there and that I may be able to get a glimpse of it each time I’m on a ride. And if not, at least I’ll keep searching…
A link below goes to some picture albums that show a few recent tours…nothing huge like the Great Divide Route but that is on the list of to dos.
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