Hybrid Biking At Its Best

Handlebars are up and straight, and -- here's the luxurious part -- the gear shifters are thumb levers mounted on the handlebars. One can flick easily through 15 gears; no more taking one hand away from the bars and leaning forward to shift a gear lever on the frame.

Suddenly just going fast on a lightweight bike isn't enough anymore -- what counts is going any place you want. "Skinny-tire chauvinists figure they're not supposed to like these things," says Schubert, "but they ride them and love them." On the West Coast, particularly around Marin County, cradle of the fattire movement, Hybrid Mountain Bike are swarming into the hills. In southern Utah's Canyonlands National Park, a band of riders touring last year on conventional 10-speeds parked their bikes alongside the highway and walked up a treacherous, narrow hiking path, in some spots skirting patches of loose shale.

They emerged on top of a high mesa overlooking the park. There sat Eric Miller, 22, of Salt Lake City and a gang of his pals -- all of whom had ridden their klunkers up. Miller knows how the bikes are meant to be used, and he constantly takes his to the limit: He rides it both ways on staircases, across rocky streambeds and over small walls. He may also have the only klunker around with fenders -- a defensive measure. "They make my bike look particularly stupid," he says. "But I've discovered that people don't steal Hybrid Mountain Bike that have fenders; they glance at them and think they're cheap and go for the 10-speeds instead."

Miller's pal, John O'Brien of Fisher's Cyclery in Salt Lake, put together a klunker as a gift for his girl friend, Stephanie Gerbasi -- and so many customers leap on it when it's parked inside the shop that he figures he could probably make a living custom-building the things. "It's great fun to actually look for bumps and dips in the streets," says Gerbasi, "or to peel off the road and follow a narrow trail through the woods." Says O'Brien, "The idea is that you can take a highquality Hybrid Mountain Bike like this and actually abuse it and not hurt it."

In the East, Tom Franges, a management consultant for Fuji America in New Jersey, says forget off-road terrain, "we see klunkers as the perfect city bike. Klunkers can handle any hazard on city streets, and they're light enough to be picked up and carried up to your apartment.

Mountain Biking