Yesterday I joined a birthday ride to celebrate a good friend's 45th. He rallied six of us into an epic day that went off perfectly. The local dropped expert trail knowledge. Every rider stepped up to new and intimidating challenges, and the guy who always crashes had a spectacular OTB right in front of me!
Back at the trailhead beers and hotdogs galore were waiting for us. For the next several hours the hotdogs glistened and biking stories were told. Everyone crushed the techy ten mile ride so I was surprised to learn that most of the crew had started mountain biking during or just before Covid. Me and the other Gen Xer were the only lifetime riders.
A few hotdogs in, one mustached millennial posed the question, "So when did mountain biking get good?" It's a great question. Especially if your first bike is a carbon 29er with a dropper and a 1x drivetrain.
The other old guy started describing a specific point in full suspension development but I disagreed. I declared that V brakes were the advancement that made mountain biking great. V brakes allowed us to leave behind the mournful wail of the dreaded cantilever brakes. I remember a moment in the mid 90's when I knew a guy who raced for the Pearl Izumi team. He had fitted his bike with this new style of brakes and he rightly predicted V brakes would change everything.
One of the brilliant things about V brakes was that you could pull off your cantilevers and mount the new brakes onto the existing mounts. You could drastically upgrade your brakes and not change anything else about the bike.
But I didn't do that, I rode the canti's until that first bike was utterly destroyed, and then I got a new bike. This started to make me doubt my answer to the question.
My first bike was a low-end fully rigid Trek, after a few months I upgrade it with a Rock Shox Quadra 10 elastomer fork. (was this the moment riding became great?) That bike also had toe clips, a grip shifter and a seat post clamp without a quick release. Toe clips were hard to get your foot back into once you were moving and sometimes they would hang up while trying to get your foot out when stopped, (ask Joe Biden). The Sram grip shifter seemed cool until you hammered a rocky descent and got to the bottom only to realize you had shifted four gears while just holding onto the bars. No quick release meant digging through a pocket for an Allen key to lower your seat for the descent. (Remember this was also before Camelbacks)
Despite all these limitations I loved that bike, especially after I painted it red, green and gold to reflect my Rastafarian beliefs.
My next bike, had lever shifters, clipless pedals and a quick release seatpost clamp. The steel hardtail HookooEkoo was as good as it gets. With my hands in the bullhorn bar extenders that bike could climb the highest mountain and then descend like it was on rails shredding the tightest singletrack.
After pondering the question overnight I would change my answer. Mountain biking has always been great, we always ride the best technology available to us, and single track was always fun even when the top speed was half what it is today. The key to a great ride is who you're with. If everyone is on bikes of the same generation then it's gonna be a good time.
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