Mountain Bikes

Two wheels gliding through the trees. Mental condition is of hyper-focus. Not a sound but the thumping of blood in your ears. Eyes glazed from a staring at the trail before you. Legs forever circling. Hands gripping the bar. Chest heaves in a new fill of fresh O2. We are 'everything' and 'nothing' at same moment.

Background || Kestrel || Cannondale || Schwinn || Photos || External

Background Info

Well, I might as well admit it. I used to work in a couple of bike shops before and during college. I turned wrenches and build Web sites to feed my need for speed. I was lousy at selling them, fixing them was a different matter.

In '01, I moved to the Portland, OR metro. Since moving here, I have not had much time to ride, but I am working on a few changes to make that a more common event in my life. A note for all of you pre-working stiffs:

Go to college so you can use your brain to make money.
Make room in your life for your passions and you will never feel trapped by the superstructure of real life that will arise around you.
Enjoy what you have right now. Tomorrow may never come.

Where was I?

There are a couple of places near by where I like to ride: Brown's Camp and Haag Lake. Both are legal and provide entertaining rides within 30 minutes of my place. Brown's Camp is an off-road vehicle area, but there are miles and miles of trails where access is restricted to human power. Hikers, dog walkers, mountain bikes and joggers coexist reasonably well in these spaces. You can always hear the motocross riders in the distance but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In case of an emergency, you know someone is close by and not 5 miles away. Haag Lake is a county park. Not many people ever walk the trail, usually you will see people using the trail access ports to reach the water's edge. Good climbs to get your heart pumping and fast descents.

Kestrel

My bike of choice. When I was doing Web work for Wheelers Cycle and Fitness in Kansas City, MO, I picked up 2 black Kestrel Rubicon Comp framesets. In the present, I am pushing the two bikes into different directions. One I am building to be a downhill bike, where weight is not the main concern. The other bike I am going supper light for cross-country riding. [more]

Original Parts Spec.
Performance Review
Things to be aware of...
Upgrade path.

Cannondale

I still have an old M1000 frame hanging on my garage wall. Blue to black fade. It is a really pretty frame. Light, stiff, nimble... Originally came with Sun Tour micro drive, thumb shifters, etc. I put a Manitou fork on it when I lived in Alaska. While in college this was my main bike. For some reason I caught the purple anodized bug. I have purple skewers, bar ends, etc. Truly ugly by today's standards, but back then... Sold the fork to a friend when I traded for a F1000 frameset. That was an intense bike.

Cannondale used to have a policy for trading up your bikes. While in college a few of us cornered the factory rep at a Trials demonstration and talked the poor guy into trading up 3 rigid frames to one Super V full-suspension, one F1000 front suspension and one Delta V one suspension. In the end, I had an F1000. The original arrangement was for all of us to turn in our frames at the local dealership when we picked up the new ones. Well, the dealer didn't care what we did with our old frames. :) That's why I still have my M1000 frame hanging on the wall.

Schwinn

My first real mountain bike was a Schwinn Cimarron, black (of course), rigid at both ends as it was the pre-suspension days, Sun Tour thumb shifters, 6 speed, triple crank, toe clips. What a tank! I never had any problems with that bike. I don't remember what ever happened to it. I think I sold it to a friend, but that was a very long time ago...

Photos

A few images from the archives: promo shots, trail shots, happy dogs, etc. [more]

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