Destination: Crested Butte, Colorado

If Crested Butte didn’t invent mountain biking, mountain biking would have had to invent Crested Butte.

There’s a tableau familiar to anyone who’s driven north along Colorado Highway 135, where the Gunnison Valley unfolds like a pop-up book of the parting of the seas to reveal the majestic West Elk Mountains. Trace a trail through it and it looks like the postcard image of the sport. Fertile ground, then, for its genesis.

“I saw Crested Butte for the first time and had no doubt it was a place I never wanted to leave,” says Crested Butte Museum board member and mountain bike historian Mike Horn of his arrival to the valley two decades ago. Horn’s Born from Junk film chronicles the outlaw origin story of the sport that, aside from the particulars, sounds like one from a century prior. And it was, like most inventions, done out of necessity.

In the '60s and '70s, a countercultural movement drew a new wave of pioneers to the mountains of Colorado. Suddenly, joining the miners and hardscrabble farmers of the Gunnison Valley were ski bums, draft dodgers, scofflaws, the down-on-their-luck, and the back-to-the-land hippies. Many had more free time than money. In addition, the unpaved streets of Crested Butte grew Pontiac-swallowing potholes; riding a bike was more convenient and less expensive than driving. And bikes, that counterculture staple, were more fun, too. Around 1974, Al Maunz and his friend Steve Baker began cobbling together “klunker” bikes for their close friends, the “Grubstake Gang” (so named for their go-to watering hole in town). Like the countercultural brew of Crested Butte, the klunkers comprised a hodgepodge of parts—Maunz and crew favored wartime-era Schwinn cruisers—and more than a few beers, that age-old lubricant of bicycle-borne hijinks.

The klunkers were too heavy to pedal up the old mining roads around town, so the Grubstake Gang would load them up in trucks (naturally, mountain bikers invented shuttling the day after they invented mountain biking) and, wearing denim and work boots, bomb them down the roads back to the Grubstake, with the loser buying the first round of beers.

It was at the Grubstake in autumn of 1976 that a group of Aspen locals pulled up on their motorcycles with intentions of chatting up the ladies of Crested Butte. Vowing not to let the provocation go unchecked, the Grubstake Gang decided to ride their klunkers over 12,700-foot Pearl Pass to Aspen. The steep Colorado cobblestones of the 27-mile Pearl Pass road exploded all but one of the klunkers. But the legend survived.

Like-minded pioneers in Marin County, Calif. had been tinkering with similar fat-tire designs; they caught wind of Crested Butte's crew and, in 1978, made the pilgrimage over for the now-annual ride over Pearl Pass to Aspen. Soon, hundreds of entrants were signing up for the Pearl Pass Tour—the world's first mountain bike event.

Eventually, the Pearl Pass Tour morphed into Fat Tire Bike Week, a celebration of dirt-fueled debauchery, the template for bike festivals to come. And, with the influx of mountain bikers arose another first: the formation of the Crested Butte Mountain Bike Association (CBMBA), the first such entity of its kind, in 1983. CBMBA began working with the Gunnison National Forest, which manages some two million acres surrounding Crested Butte, in pioneering efforts to legitimize the nascent sport.

The organization began formalizing alpine trails such as 401, 403 and Doctor Park that have become legends in their own right—rites of singletrack passage for locals and visitors. Today, Crested Butte boasts over 450 miles of trails, and they complete that quintessential postcard image of biking: singletrack rolling across painterly wildflower meadows and aspen groves with snow-capped peaks towering overhead.

Downtown Crested Butte echoes that postcard image, with bikes of every type—boutique mountain bikes, BMX whips, ancient ape-hanger townies, brand-new e-cruisers—whizzing past the brightly painted facades of historic Elk Avenue. The streets might be paved now, but bikes still rule as the best way to get around—and out of—town.

“One of the things that makes Crested Butte unique is you can tackle a five-plus-hour ride and do a loop back to your house and have it be mostly singletrack,” says Horn. “The whole ‘ride from town’ idea, it’s a point of pride here.”

And mountain biking still retains its outlaw countercultural spirit, one that celebrates the mind- and horizon-expanding possibilities of the bicycle. Iconic trails such as 401 and Doctor Park inspire as much for their alpine settings as for the singletrack.

“Sometimes we call them ‘sandwich rides,’” says Horn. “Just bring a sandwich and sit and enjoy the views, the spirit of exploration, the banking of experiences that make life worth living.”

CBMBA continues to be at the forefront of trail advocacy and volunteer work, logging around 2,500 volunteer hours each season—more hours than there are people in the greater Crested Butte area. The organization has put increased emphasis on trail connectivity; for 2024 National Trails Day, the organization built a connector trail above Brush Creek Road, a popular trail portal (and route to legendary Pearl Pass), to get riders off the road and reduce user conflicts. The connections go well beyond the trail surface.

Says Horn, “That shared passion for bikes provides the connectivity” that keeps the community anchored to its hodgepodge history amidst decades of change.

“Crested Butte would be a completely different place without bikes.”

And bikes would be completely different without Crested Butte.