COLORADO SPRINGS
It’s a decades-old debate: Did mountain biking begin in Colorado’s Crested Butte or the California hills of Marin County?
The West Coast pioneers might be able to toot their own horns a little more these days.
After 25 years in Crested Butte, the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame and Museum will move this fall to Fairfax, Calif.
Museum co-director Don Cook, who was among those in Crested Butte riding terrain never thought possible on their “klunkers” in the late 1970s, said it was riders in the San Francisco Bay Area who built the predecessors of the modern mountain bike.
“The mountain bike – was it invented in Fairfax? Yeah,” Cook said. “Was the ‘klunker’ simultaneously being used for recreation and transportation here? Yeah.
“But the sport of mountain biking took hold in Fairfax and the Bay Area in general, and from there grew,” he said.
The history of this uniquely American sport always has been a tale of two communities. In Crested Butte, raucous party-on-wheel rides over Pearl Pass on one-speed “klunkers” began in 1976 and spawned Fat Tire Bike Week in 1980, the nation’s oldest mountain-bike festival.
But when the West Coast riders, including innovators Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly and Gary Fisher, heard about the Pearl Pass rides, they came and wowed the locals with their sophisticated bikes. They could pedal to the top of Pearl Pass while the Colorado riders pushed their bikes.
Crested Butte retained its reputation as one of the nation’s premier mountain-biking destinations, and the museum long has emphasized that town’s role in the sport’s origins. But the mountain terrain that gives the area such great riding also makes the town isolated, and visitation to the museum hardly has paid the bills, forcing organizers to rely on donations and their own money to keep it going.
Cook said the younger people who shuffle in and out of the ski town show little interest in the museum. So when Breeze and other California riders offered to build a 3,000-square-foot museum – compared with the small space it now occupies in a corner of the Crested Butte Mountain Heritage Museum – Cook and the museum’s board acquiesced.
“It’s going to have a draw like we could never have approached. That’s just realistic. We’re a difficult place to get to,” Cook said. “Could we even try and compete with that? We would be standing in the way of progress and more people finding out about the history of this American-born sport.”
Durango’s Ed Zink, a 1992 inductee to the Hall of Fame, said there’s no one place necessarily better suited to play host to the hall.
“I think there is no magic place that it belongs,” he said. “There are several magic places. So Crested Butte is one of those magic places, but there’s magic places in California. Maybe it’s their turn to have it for a while.”
Heritage Museum director Glo Cunningham, who first rode Pearl Pass in 1980, said the move does not diminish Crested Butte’s role in developing the sport.
“I have no admissions that Marin County is the home of mountain biking. And I absolutely do not believe that,” she said. “I believe that together we both started mountain biking at the same time. Together, Crested Butte and Marin County are the reasons mountain biking has become the fabulous sport it has.”
The mountain-biking museum will remain open through September, after which the exhibits will be loaded onto trucks and shipped west to Fairfax.
Zink said the more expansive facility should provide much more room to house a large amount of mountain-biking artifacts that don’t fit in the current space in Crested Butte. That means there will be more room for more history, a history that has deep roots in Durango, too. Zink estimated that about 10 percent of the Hall’s members have ties to Durango, including names such as Travis Brown, Ruthie Matthes, Ned Overend and John Tomac, just to name a few.
Overend agreed that the new space should be a positive when it comes to displaying more of the bikes and other pieces that tell the sport’s history.
“It’s good, you know, because it was so cramped there in Crested Butte,” Overend, a 1990 inductee, said. “They didn’t really have enough room to display very much stuff or even tell much of a story about mountain biking.”
Matthes, a 2012 inductee, had some mixed feelings about the move. She said she thinks moving it closer to a bigger metropolitan center – San Francisco is 20 miles away – and proximity to the U.S. Bicycling Hall of Fame in Davis, Calif., is a positive, but she’s a bit sad to see it leave its original home.
“On one hand, I think that because it’s going to a place where there’s a greater amount of people in close proximity, I think that’s a positive because it (will) perhaps expose the sport to more people,” she said. “On the other hand, it was started in Crested Butte ... and I feel kind of bad to see it leave there.”
When the move happens, it will be a bittersweet occasion for Cook, co-director since 1996.
“It’s like watching your child grow up in a small town and watching them go off and be successful in the city. Can I stand in the way of it? No,” he said. “Do you wish they would have just found a job locally and married locally and had your grandkids close to you? Yeah.”
Herald Sports Writer Ryan Owens contributed to this report.
