Guided Adventure

According to Patty Oliver, saleswoman at Cycle World in Milwaukie, half of its nearly 4,000 bicycle sales last year were mountain bikes taking part in Guided Mountain Bike Tours. "That's up from 800 a year two years ago,'' she said.

Rod Satterberg, president of Action Sports in Portland, said he's expecting the bikes to command 80 percent of his sales this year. Bob Graves, co-owner of The Bike Gallery in Portland, said mountain bike customers are also more profitable ones.

"There's less resistance (from them) to spending $400 plus . . .,'' he said. Mountain bikes haven't increased bike sales as a whole, though.

Bryon Olson, manger of Aloha Bicycle Center, said sales of road bikes are fading in Guided Mountain Bike Tours. And Oliver of Cycle World said touring-bike sales have taken it in on the chin. "Last year there was absolutely no touring market at all,'' she said.

Alan Garrett, owner of Alan's Bicycle Store in Oregon City, said he thinks mountain bikes will eventually meet the same fate. "It's a fad,'' he said. "Sooner or later it'll die out.'' Dan Houghton, service manager at Bike 'n Hike in Portland, begged to differ. ''Not at all,'' he said. "It's like rock 'n roll. It's here to stay.''

They're called mountain bikes and they aren't just a fast-growing trend; they are the future. They look like what happens when you mate a European racing-style bike with a big, old American balloon-tired Schwinn, the kind that newsboys once rode down Norman Rockwell streets, the ones that were so heavy that their riders felt they could hold their own in a collision with a car.

In other words, the bike is high-tech and rugged. It has many speeds and complex alloys while allowing the rider to sit upright-a good position from which to throw newspapers, look around and descend a mountain trail.

Of course, this being America, they're not just for mountains anymore. They're also the latest thing. A quarter of all bicycle sales are now this type of bike, according to a survey by Bicycling magazine last year. There are more than 5 million mountain-type bikes in the country, and half of those were sold just last year, said Jim Fremont of the Washington, D.C.-based Bicycle Federation of America.

Mountain Biking