--- title: Mountain Biking's Roots in 1970s California Counterculture description: Off-road biking began with the antics and inventiveness of a rag-tag set of adventurers in the 1970s, fans of the outdoors and The Dead. canonical: https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/ author: Randy Stearns article:opinion: false article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2014-05-20T22:26:42.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-10-01T08:53:00.790Z og:title: Mountain Biking's Roots in 1970s California Counterculture og:description: Off-road biking began with the antics and inventiveness of a rag-tag set of adventurers in the 1970s, fans of the outdoors and The Dead. og:url: https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 675 og:image:alt: TIME og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Mountain Biking's Roots in 1970s California Counterculture twitter:description: Off-road biking began with the antics and inventiveness of a rag-tag set of adventurers in the 1970s, fans of the outdoors and The Dead. twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/bltde093bcdab65f2d0/6988d9b9bc6cfc69913e2a3c/time-logo.jpg?branch=production --- # Mountain Biking's Beginnings: Fat Tires, Broken Hubs and the Grateful Dead > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=3eb43b0a-41bd-4bb8-b3ed-b51581af94f1&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: Renegades of Bike Culture [Watch (HLS stream): Renegades of Bike Culture](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/KBAbWMn9.m3u8) (4:03)  _Published 2014-05-20_ by [Randy Stearns](https://time.com/author/randy-w-stearns/) ## Randy Stearns May 20, 2014 10:26 PM UTC by [Randy Stearns](https://time.com/author/randy-w-stearns/) ## Randy Stearns May 20, 2014 10:26 PM UTC Long before there were [gutter bunnies](http://www.bikecommuters.com/2010/07/12/gutter-bunnies/), [baby heads](http://bit.ly/1o2VCy7) or [WOMBATS](http://www.wombats.org/), there were cyclists eager to push the limits of what their equipment and bodies could take. It began with a group of sporty iconoclasts, wheeling down the hills of northern California, creating a rough-and-tumble style of biking to match their unconventional personalities. They made it up as they went along, modifying their bikes to manage the terrain and enjoying themselves in all the ways that adventurous youth did in that era. Watch [UC Fig. 1](https://www.youtube.com/user/fig1)‘s video about the early days of mountain biking. Narrated by UC San Diego’s [Sarah McCullough](http://ridingresearch.com), who wrote her PhD thesis on the topic, it tells the history of the sport, the “renegades (including the women) who started it, remade the bikes and helped create a new leisure industry. And it wasn’t just about bikes and terrain in those days, ideas and music played an important part, including a benefit performance by the band that personified the counter-culture. “\[P\]eople were creating the kind of world they wanted to live in,” McCullough [says](//www.youtube.com/channel/UCT4hX0DRGkr2sz3XMaUeemQ). “A world with trails that created a flow through the mountains, paths they could follow fast, without braking.” If you want to learn more, check out work from off-road pioneers like William Savage ([_Klunkerz_](http://klunkerz.com/trailer-1.html)_)_, and Charlie Kelly ([_Fat Tire Flyer_](http://www.velopress.com/books/fat-tire-flyer/), due out later this year). ## Transcript The high wheelers are kind of fascinating. High wheelers were sort of like this thrill- seeking technology ridden primarily by sort of athletic young men. And the bigger the wheel, the faster you could go. And their stories of practices were when they started going downhill, and the pedals were directly connected to the front wheel. And so, you know, as fast as the wheel's spinning, so are the pedals. And if you're going downhill, and you get going too fast, it'll be hard to keep your feet on there. And so some of the young men would throw their legs over the handlebars, and they could sort of leap off of them, if the bicycles were crashing and kind of not get all tangled up. The types of bicycles that we ride today, I mean, something like this. When that was invented, that became known as the safety bicycle, because it was, considered much safer. [ MUSIC ]. Prior to the invention of mountain biking, there was a bike boom in the early 1970s. More people came to see bicycles as a potential viable mode of transportation, especially in the face of rising concerns about the environment. I interviewed a lot of the early mountain bikers. I also went riding with a lot of them, which was actually really crucial. I learned as much going riding with them as I did sitting down with talking with them. Mountain biking as we know it today really did start in Marin County, just north of San Francisco. It was begun by a group of people that were more into biking for adventures, and what they would do is they would take these old pre- World War II Schwinn cruiser bikes and get a ride in a pickup truck to the top of Mount Tamalpais. And then proceed to rocket down it, down this mountain on the dirt trails as fast as they could and race to the bottom. And parts often broke on them as they were riding. So, they would learn, okay, well, this type of hub tends to break sooner than this other type of hub, so we're all gonna try and have the good hub. You know essentially, it was an iterative process such that they found eventually the best parts to put on a bike. So as fascinating about this bike is like it's very well- traveled, you could say. I mean, it was in the frame built in Marin county, but then we have the brooks saddle from the UK. We have under railure from Sunture in Japan. We have the TA crank set from France, we have seat post from Italy, just to produce this one bike. Bikers started to have more attention with hikers and horseback rider in Marin. It did subsequently though lead to the shutting down of most single track or narrow trails to mountain bikes in Marin County. Other factions in the area built their own trails, and so people have actually built really fascinating trails that are built for riding in a pleasing fashion to create what they call flow experience. A trail becomes for a trained mountain biker a line, moving through that tells you where your bicycle is supposed to go. [ UNKNOWN ] and I know you'll all welcome the Grateful Dead. All these sort of like, experiences, were all intermeshed. I mean, Gary Fisher knew the Grateful Dead because he had encountered them when he raced in the Tour Del Mar bike race, which was both a road biking race and a folk rock festival. I mean today, I mean, how often would you expect a band like the Grateful Dead to play at a bike race. This, these, these aren't the sort of connections that we would draw today. But in that moment, in that place, that made sense. Because bikes and the music scene were seen as sort of like, a groovy not great thing that was gonna help make the world into the place we wanted it to be. [ MUSIC ]. There's all this cultural history and value locked in this collection. And what we try to do in access is try to help people unlock that. In a collection this large, you have, material on basically every major topic relevant to the history of the 20th century. We have over 300, 000 holdings, and the collection spans from the dawn of cinema to the present, so we have a lot of everything. ```json [{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"NewsArticle","@id":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/"},"headline":"Mountain Biking's Beginnings: Fat Tires, Broken Hubs and the Grateful Dead","datePublished":"2014-05-20T22:26:42.000Z","dateModified":"2026-10-01T08:53:00.790Z","description":"Mountain biking took root in the fertile counterculture of the 1970s","url":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/","keywords":["Living","California","San Francisco","Biking"],"thumbnailUrl":"","author":[{"@type":"Person","name":"Randy Stearns","jobTitle":null,"url":"https://time.com/author/randy-w-stearns/"}],"articleSection":"","image":[],"publisher":{"@type":"Organization","name":"Time","url":"https://time.com/","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://time.com/images/logo.png","width":528,"height":156},"foundingDate":"March 3, 1923","sameAs":["https://www.facebook.com/time","https://www.instagram.com/time/?hl=en","https://twitter.com/time","https://www.pinterest.com/timemagazine"]}},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"BreadcrumbList","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"item":{"@id":"/tag/time-section-living/","name":"Living"}},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"item":{"@id":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/","name":"Mountain Biking's Beginnings: Fat Tires, Broken Hubs and the Grateful Dead"}}]},{"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"Renegades of Bike Culture","description":"","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/KBAbWMn9/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2014-05-20T18:42:08.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/KBAbWMn9.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/","duration":"PT4M3S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/106364/mountain-biking-1970s/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}}] ```