Here's me on my first bike ever.
And this is my first mountain bike. In between these were a banana seat bike and a BMX. I don't think there are any pictures of those.I could get all nostalgic about bikes, I guess. I had a banana seat bike which was given to me by my wonderful parents. I still remember seeing it with a ribbon on it. I rode it until it wore out, and wanted a BMX even before then. I can remember all the details about BMX bikes that made me want one: Knobby tires, straight forks, a "racing" seat, pads, hand brakes, cool pedals (spikey), cool grips, freewheeling, BMX-style handlebars with the crossmember (with a pad on that too). I don't know why I wanted those things. Partly because my friends had them - and maybe because I recognized them as all more suitable for the kind of riding I was already doing: Dirt trails. I hardly rode a bike on pavement my entire childhood. I didn't grow up in a cul de sac like most of my friends did. I never had one of those 3-wheeled plastic Big Wheels or a Green Machine. There would have been no place to ride it. My childhood took place on dirt.
I was about 9 years old when mountain bikes hit the mass market in the US (1984 or so). But that doesn't mean I wasn't mountain biking before then. I was just doing it on the BMX I got for my birthday in fifth grade, and even the banana-seat bike I rode up until then. Right off our back yard was a winding network of dirt paths in the woods, not an inch of pavement.
My parents still live on the same property, about two miles south of Granite Falls. At the time, the house was surrounded by glorious nature. An overgrown field on the North side, the Pilchuck river on the East side, and a couple acres of mossy, ferny, Northwest woods on the South. From our property we had a couple trails that ventured into the woods to the south. As far as I know, those trails had been there since the beginning of time. It was when I was just old enough to sneak my dad's machete (probably not quite old enough, actually) that I started expanding the trail system. The whole place was on a hill side, so I had ample opportunity for elevation change. I can still remember every inch of those trails to this day, and one steep section in particular that was impossible to descend without skidding the whole way down.
Part of riding the circuit included rocketing out of the woods, into the yard, around the house, and back into the woods on a different trail. There were muddy spots at the corners of the house where I had destroyed the grass with repeated cornering. I could lap these trails over and over again until it was too dark to ride.
Back in the day there was no Northshore scene with skinnies and bridges to emulate. It hadn't been invented yet - not for another ten years or so. But there was still trail building in the form of bushwhacking: branch cutting, log sawing, root chopping - and a lot of just riding the same route until the ground became bare and hard-packed. That's my favorite trail building technique: just keep riding it!
Every time I'm riding a root-ridden singletrack, now 20 years later, I still have flashbacks to those trails. Any "modern" mountain bike trail looks exactly the same. It would be 10 years before I would hear the word "singletrack" but that's exactly what they were. I imagine that kids all over the country were doing the same thing at the same time, without any words to describe it. I think I called it "riding my bike in the woods" - maybe I'll go back to that. Actually it would have been just "riding my bike" since it was understood that it would always be in the woods, even on that banana-seat bike.
