By Mike Anton
Denver Rocky Mountain News Staff Writer

CRESTED BUTTE -- Given all the booze they downed, it's astonishing that Jim Thomas and Al Maunz can even remember the day they and their pals helped give birth to the sport of mountain biking in Colorado.

It was 1976 and they were accidental athletes, a collection of itinerant construction workers, one-time draft evaders, young men without plans taking their time finding them.

They packed heavy: Three bottles of schnapps, two gallons of wine, three bottles of champagne, a keg of beer plus seven extra cases to ensure they wouldn't run short. All of it hauled up Pearl Pass outside Crested Butte in a couple of trucks only slightly less rickety than the bikes they followed -- 15 one-speed Schwinns that Maunz and a buddy had rescued from a Denver junkyard, fixed up and sold for twenty bucks a pop.

Klunkers, they called them. Tadpoles of today's high-tech machines.

"First we rode them. Then we pushed them," Thomas said. "Most of us ended up carrying our bikes up the pass."

Longtime Crested Butte resident Al Maunz sits on the old Schwinn "klunker" he rode over Pearl Pass with friends in 1976, helping launch mountain biking in Colorado.

"We had trucked these bikes up and ridden downhill, but never uphill," added Maunz. "Are you kidding me? Uphill? These things were heavy. We weren't into uphill."

That night on the Continental Divide, they lit a monster bonfire, fried a heap of steaks and partied until they passed out, exhausted and cold at 12,700 feet in mid-September, wishing they had brought tents.

Daylight brought bad news: During the night, someone had eaten all the doughnuts.

It was going to be a long, hard ride into Aspen.

"We didn't have a clue what we were getting into," Maunz said. "I had never even been over Pearl Pass. A guy who'd driven it warned us. He said, 'It's pretty gnarly, you know. Really steep with really big rocks. You sure you guys know what you're doing?"'

Maunz gave him the only answer he had.

"Of course we don't know what we're doing!"

Of course, what they were doing was making history -- helping to define a nascent sport whose steep and spectacular rise parallels the end-of-the-century outdoor recreation boom that has revolutionized Colorado.

It's hard to believe, but until that late summer day 23 years ago there was no notion that pedaling a bike up a mountain in Colorado was worth doing.

Outside San Francisco, a cadre of serious road cyclists-turned-engineers was literally inventing the mountain bike industry -- adding gears, designing new components and experimenting with lightweight materials that could withstand off-road pounding.

The first riders over Pearl Pass had no such vision.

"No one saw dollar signs in this," said Thomas, who's 49 and one of only three people left in Crested Butte who went on that first Pearl Pass ride. "I wasn't very smart, I guess. I could be a billionaire if I could only go back to those days and know what I know now."

The evolution of recreation has long driven change in Colorado, and the promotion of the state as a playground predates even the gold rush.

In 1854, Irish nobleman Sir George Gore led an entourage of hunters through the Rockies, killing enough buffalo, grizzlies, antelope and deer to fill a zoo. As news spread, Colorado soon became a stop for affluent sportsmen.

In the 1860s, travel writers dubbed the state the "Switzerland of America," and there was no looking back. New technology -- first the railroads, then the automobile, modern roads and tunnels -- unlocked Colorado's isolation, opening tourism to the masses. They flooded in -- for the hot springs and resorts, to fish and to hike, to camp and simply to gawk.

The establishment of national parks and forests around the turn of the century preserved huge swaths of the state for play. During the Depression, Civilian Conservation Corps workers built scores of campgrounds, cut hundreds of miles of trail.

When, in the late 1930s, the first ski runs were cut in Aspen, many in the sleepy, onetime boom town must have wondered: What are they thinking?

But just as the veterans of World War II transformed Colorado with skiing, a new generation of young people would sow the seeds of today's explosive growth in countless mountain towns beginning in the late 1960s.

Thomas, who also answers to the name Long Beach, came to Colorado from California in 1968 to attend Western State College in Gunnison. "I was avoiding the Vietnam War. I got a degree in math, which I don't use."

Eventually, he drifted up the valley to Crested Butte, a wrung-out coal town with outhouses and dirt streets, a struggling ski area and Victorian homes that sold for a song when they sold at all.

It was a strange and pivotal point in the town's history, a time when long-haired outsiders found themselves mixing at Friday night polka dances with a dwindling number of miners who were barely hanging on.

"I had never swung a hammer before, and suddenly I was enrolled in the free school of carpentry," Thomas said. "Some of us went the food-stamp route. We were all big hippies, and we were hiding out in the mountains. Some of the old-timers were hunting coyotes for the government, getting a hundred dollars a pop, trying to make it through the winter. They didn't know what to make of us."

June Krizmanich disagrees. She knew exactly what to make of the newcomers.

"I thought they were real dirty people -- physically and morally," said Krizmanich, whose grandparents came to Crested Butte from Europe in the 19th century, drawn by work in the mines that paid $6 a day.

Once, she was awakened at 2 a.m. by the sound of smashing next door.

"There were a whole bunch of them and they were chopping at a refrigerator with an ax," Krizmanich said, her eyes as wide at the age of 73 as they probably were then. "They were on dope, I think."

She has known Thomas for years. "He was wild." And his friend Maunz. "He was wild, too." When she heard that the two were part of a group that had ridden their bicycles over Pearl Pass to Aspen, Krizmanich was perplexed.

"I thought they were crazy," she said. "Why would you want to do that?"

It started when a group of guys from Aspen rode their motocross bikes over Pearl Pass and parked them in front of the Grubstake, a bar that today exists only in memory.

Legend has it the dirt bikers rubbed the locals raw by trying to pick up their girlfriends with tales of their arduous ride. Maunz says he was offended by how straight and narrow the strangers parked their motorcycles out front.

Whatever. Something lit a fire under the Grubstake regulars. They decided to lash back, show who was tougher. That weekend, 15 of them took off from the bar with their entourage in tow -- witnesses, groupies, extra bikes, liquor. One guy road in a bathtub in the back of a pickup.

Workers build a luxury home with a stunning view of Mount Crested Butte. The town's image as a mountain biking mecca has contributed to growth in the old mining town.

The parade pedaled up Brush Creek Road, which is a good dirt road, well maintained, not too steep -- at first.

They huffed. They puffed. As the road turned to trail, one by one they got off and pushed.

"It was miserable," said Maunz.

Seven riders, including Thomas, made it to the campsite under Pearl Pass. The party was had, the doughnuts were stolen, and in the morning they awoke hung over to gray skies and drizzle.

"People were shocked by what was on the other side," Thomas said. "It was like stair steps, one huge boulder after another."

Whatever Ignaz Schwinn had in mind when he designed the first bikes with inner tubes in the 1930s, it wasn't this. The trail over Pearl Pass was built a century ago to transport ore by mule. As the riders descended, tires flattened. Seat posts snapped. Handle bars cracked. Coaster brakes began to smoke. Wheel hubs became red hot, then froze.

No one was hurt or killed either on the trail or that night in Aspen -- even though there were plenty of close calls in both places.

"We're trying to get a grant from the National Geographic Society to go over the Andes," one rider told the Crested Butte Pilot.

And that was it: The word mountain could now be added to biking in Colorado.

"It was just a joke," Maunz said. "No one ever intended to do that again until these guys from California called. They were serious."

Indeed they were. Two years after the first Pearl Pass ascent, riders from the Bay Area joined the locals. Among them were Gary Fisher and Joe Breeze, two road racers who had discovered dirt. They showed up in Crested Butte with prototypes of the bikes that would make both of them wealthy.

"These guys were shaving their legs and cutting little corners off their knobby tires to save weight," Maunz said. "I had a light with a horn on my bike. We weren't in their league."

Soon, mountain biking changed, became a big business. Today, from a cramped back room in Crested Butte's history museum, the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame & Museum celebrates the sport's development, including the first Pearl Pass ride.

There are old bikes on display and the story of the pioneers -- racers, businessmen, designers, promoters.

Don Cook and his wife, Kay Peterson, are in charge. Peterson ran Crested Butte's popular Fat Tire festival for years; Cook built his first klunker in 1980 with money from a tax refund check and became an early racer. Both are in the hall of fame.

Jim Thomas, Al Maunz and the rest of the first Pearl Pass riders are not.

"These guys," Cook said with a laugh, "were nothing more than serious barflies."

Today, Crested Butte sells itself as one of the world's premier mountain biking meccas. "Mountain biking did for this place what the ski area couldn't accomplish," said Cook, 40, who works nights as a liquor store clerk so he can spend his days riding. "Mountain biking turned this place from a podunk little sleepy town into what it is."

The streets are paved now. And town leaders confront issues that didn't exist in 1976: traffic, a backlash against unleashed dogs, the need for affordable housing. A beat-up Victorian in town can run upwards of $400,000.

"This place is going crazy," said Thomas, who works as a roofer. "I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. Seems like we're chasing Aspen and Telluride. A lot of rich people are coming to town. I realize that my livelihood -- my income -- depends on those people. But they've changed the whole flavor of the place."

Maunz owns Al's Backhoe Service. (Motto: God moves the heavens. We move the Earth.) When he isn't excavating the foundation for a new trophy home, he digs graves at the local cemetery.

"When I started in the dirt business, that's when I found out what I like to do," he said passionately, a 47-year-old boy with his trucks. "That's what I still do. I don't even check my hours at the end of the week, I love it so much."

Like Thomas, Maunz doesn't bike anymore, hasn't in years. "I work all the time. I don't have time to bike."

Yet Maunz still loves them.

Old klunkers -- they call them townies now -- are still popular in Crested Butte. Everyone rides them. They're a nice bit of nostalgia. And they don't get stolen.

Maunz collects them, pieces really, stuff he finds in the trash and along roads. Old frames and rusted rims. Chains and handle bars. Bald fat tires and big, cushy seats.

"I see them next to dumpsters and think, 'They're throwing away a perfectly good Schwinn frame!"' Maunz said. "You used to have to go all the way to Denver for these things! They're great bikes. They're cool looking. The frames are guaranteed for life! I've got piles of them in the basement."

He moves downstairs, to a dimly lit room strewn with tools and Christmas ornaments, paint cans and mattresses.

"This is my mountain bike hall of fame," Maunz said.

He studies a tangle of parts that have been tossed on the floor, a bunch of twisted metal wrapped in old memories.

"There," Maunz said, leaning forward and pointing. "That's the one."

And there at the bottom, nearly hidden from view, is the yellow klunker that carried him over Pearl Pass and Crested Butte into the future.

October 3, 1999

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