Major dates of cycling history:

      1817

The sport of riding bicycles in the dirt officially began when Baron von Drais invented the Draisienne, a board between two wooden wheels for Germans to careen out of control through mud on the farm and in the city.

     1839

A Scottish blacksmith connected a crank mechanism to the rear wheel with two articulated rods, creating the first self-propelled bicycle.

     1870

 Englishman James Starley invented the high wheeler, or penny farthing, also known as the "ordinary" bicycle, that funny-looking contraption with the huge front wheel and dude with the mustache. This contraption introduced serious head and shoulder injury to a population with no concept of helmet use outside of warfare.

      1884

Englishman H.J. Larson created a bicycle with same-sized wheels, a chain and gears, workable brakes and handling characteristics, and called it the "Safety Bicycle" in obvious comparison to the penny farthing. Sadly for Larson, the bike never caught on.

     1885

The nephew of penny farthing inventor stole Larson's idea, called it the "Rover" Safety bike, and cashed in.

      1887

Former United States Army 25th Infantry Bicycle Corps, rode single speed Spalding safety bikes from Missoula, Montana to St. Louis.

     1940

 Japanese mountain bikers invade and conquer Burma, running out the English troops and command staff with bicycle-supported jungle warfare techniques.

      1945

The nuclear bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki kills more bicyclists than enemy troops.

There’s a lot of history and information floating around about the origins of mountain biking, some that’s recognized and some that depends on who has the best public relations firm. Mountain biking would have happened somewhere and it did.

Did it begin with the Buffalo Soldiers, a turn-of-the-century infantry who customized bicycles to carry gear over rough terrain? It was August 1896, the riders, black enlisted men and a white lieutenant, rode from Missoula, Montana, to Yellowstone and back, an arduous 800 miles. Their mission: to test the bicycle for military use in mountainous terrain.

The Velo Cross Club Parisien (VCCP) of France, Comprised of about 20 young bicyclists from the outskirts of Paris, who between 1951 and 1956 developed a sport that was remarkably akin to present-day mountain biking. These riders juiced up their French 650-B bikes with an extraordinary degree of technical sophistication.

Maybe it was John Finley Scott who was probably the first mountain bike enthusiast in the United States. In 1953 he built what he called a “ Woodsie Bike”, using a Schwinn World diamond frame, balloon tires, flat handlebars, derailleur gears, and cantilever brakes. John was more than twenty years ahead of his time, and while he remained an off-road cycling enthusiast, at the time there were not many others who shared his passion.

The Mountain Bike Hall of Fame believes that the inception of mountain biking needed to be a continuous series of events that connected with one another as opposed to an isolated incident. Another example, in the early 1970s there were a band of cyclists, The Cupertino Riders, aka. the Morrow Dirt Club, from Cupertino California, 75 miles south of Marin, who were modifying their bikes. They were grafting thumbshift-operated derailleurs and motorcycle lever-operated drum brakes to their klunkers to help them get up and down the south bay hills. They competed against some future hall-of-famers at a Marin County cylcecross race in late 1974, where their technology was noticed. Then they disappeared.

We believe that the continuous history of the mountain bike is most evident in Northern California. There are a few areas that will claim to be the first mountain bike community, but every history book will lead you to Marin County. The origins of mountain biking were totally innocent. It came into being not as some faddist vision of profit-oriented marketing types, but rather as the product of true cycling enthusiasts trying to find something new to do on two wheels. These cyclists found through fun and competition that the old one-speed klunkers they were using could be improved with modern cycling technology. One thing led to another and mountain biking “the sport” was born.