Vacation Holidays With Your Mountain Bike

From California, the land that tolerates pain as gladly as W.C. Fields suffered children, came the Mountain Bi king Holidays.

With a cushy seat, an upright position and obnoxiously large tires, the mountain bike has wrested Oregon cyclists from the masochists' grip, as it has everywhere else in the country, and managed to garner a huge chunk of bicycle sales.

Joe Breeze, a machinist and cyclist in Mill Valley, Calif., helped assist in the birth of the mountain bike the day he picked up a 1941 Schwinn Excelsior with the intention of restoring it. In its heyday, the Excelsior was a favorite of paperboys during Mountain Bi king Holidays. Some friends talked him into taking the bike into the hills of nearby Mount Tamalpais.

He found the bike's long frame of heavy steel was well suited to surviving brutal, rocky descents. So, with increasing frequency, he and other cyclists, such as Tom Ritchey and Gary Fisher, started riding their paperboy bikes on the trails and fire roads of Mount Tamalpais, in between 10-speed bike races.

"This kind of became our off-season sport,'' said Breeze. Since the old bikes had just one speed, they didn't lend themselves to riding back up the hill very well. "At first we hitchhiked to the top of Mount Tam,'' said Breeze. "Eventually, we got tired of hitchhiking and we started riding up the hill.'' This led to the first modification of the Excelsior. ''People started putting gears on the bike,'' said Breeze.

Soon Breeze and his friends made other changes. They put brakes on both wheels for quicker stopping. They put huge tires on the wheels for better traction. They replaced the curved forks with straight ones to increase the bike's stability. They put the gear levers on the handlebars so the rider could change gears without compromising the ability to steer.

Then they began persuading skeptical road cyclists to take the bikes for a spin. "They'd come back,'' said Breeze, "with smiles on their faces'' and a burning desire in their hearts to have their own mountain bike. So, Breeze and his friends "would go to Oregon and Northern California and find these old Schwinns in dumps,'' take them home, modify them and sell them.

"Soon we had all these fine aluminum parts on the bikes and the frames would break,'' said Breeze. Since he had built 10-speed frames before, his friends approached him to build the first frame expressly designed for the rigors of mountain biking. The rest is history. Today, Breeze, 34, makes a living building mountain bikes and road bikes, as 10-speeds are now known.

Mountain Biking