The Age of the Guidebook

Part of mountain biking's evolution can be seen in how riding venues are found and promoted.

The 1990s was the Age of the Guidebook. Local riders with the ambition and the resources would produce a guide to the trails they knew, to help visiting riders find them. We discovered the trails and explored them the way explorers have always done, and produced various artifacts on paper to pass the information along.

Guidebook writers face numerous challenges, especially when a route sprawls across miles and spans more than one USGS map. In the forests of New England, landmarks may be scarce. Not every rider used a cycle computer, so mileage increments might not help. Access to the land wasn't always guaranteed. Some rides were open to locals and riders in the company of locals, but the landowner wouldn't appreciate seeing the trail featured in a public ride guide.

At the point in the early 21st Century when mountain biking died back considerably around here, the internet was still a limited resource. By the time we started to notice much demand -- or even just curiosity -- about mountain bikes again, paper maps had all but disappeared, and the internet was bulging with sites devoted to every aspect of cycling.

Cycling has developed a serious web dependency. More on that later.

For practical reasons, I gave up mountain biking around the turn of the century. The Surly Cross Check I built seemed like the perfect bike to explore public rights of way, whether paved or unpaved, without having to worry about landowner permission or trail conditions. I was inventing "gravel riding" without realizing it. It was just "riding" in the peculiar conditions of this area. Lines on the map might not still be maintained roads, but if they were on the map there had been a road at one time. In most cases, enough was left of it to let me get through. Only rarely would a road be so deteriorated that I would hesitate to use it again if I wanted to go that way.

With the resurgence of mountain bike interest, we've seen not only how the mechanical technology has changed, but how trail information has also changed. Because mountain biking has been domesticated fully or partly depending on your region, trail systems are largely purpose-built on preserved land. They're easy to map and easy to promote. Since mountain bikers are largely a drive-to-the-ride crowd, the only difference between them and any other bike path user is the type of terrain they want to encounter on the trails. The all-terrain bicycle is really a limited terrain bicycle, unless you want to expend a lot of personal miles per calorie to chug along on smooth roads on one of those beasts.

Applying the destination resort concept to mountain biking makes it easier to exploit as a purely consumer activity. Some people go to golf resorts. Some people go to lakes or seaside resorts. The mountain biking consumer goes to areas with a known and well documented concentration of riding.

When mountain biking first seized the public fancy in the latter half of the 1980s, it represented freedom and mobility. Rightly or wrongly, the public viewed the mountain bike as the perfect vehicle to ride anywhere, the pedaled equivalent of the SUV. This point of view survived into the 1990s, until the bike designers took it away by focusing on rough terrain capability at the expense of everything else. Given that focus, you no longer have a bike that anyone wants to spend much time pedaling around in search of their favorite terrain. You want to go straight to the good stuff. Choose your favorite search engine, find a venue, load the bikes on your car or truck, and go.