Huh? What? Oh, nothing, just window-shopping the Farbmans, thats all: View this post on Instagram Wait, hold on, what the hell is this!?!?Well Ill be, someone stole my goddamn name. I mean thats the only logical explanation, since Id never even consider riding a road bike without dick breaksNo, Id take something classy like this over a Farbman any day:Egads, thats not a bicycle, thats an insect!Someone please fetch me a can of Raid so I can be rid of these things once and for all.I tend to prefer frames that evoke the human form to ones that look like a bug mandible: View this post on Instagram But I suppose some people like to follow the wind tunnel data and others prefer to follow their hearts.Speaking of stealing things, some say thats what the pioneers of the Old West did, but whatever you may think of them theres no denying they were adventurous souls:However, in modern times the bar has lowered considerably, and today youre considered an adventurous soul of the American West by the Smithsonian if you rode a bicycle on a less-than-ideal surface before there was a special bike for it:In the frontier days, an immigrant family might undertake an arduous months-long wagon journey beset by disease, blizzards, hailstorms, starvation and Indian attacks only to settle in a sod house and eke a meager living from the unyielding land. But the real challenge came generations later when some hippies rode their bikes over a hill: In September 1976, 15 cyclists attempted a seemingly impossible feat: riding these klunkers over 12,700-foot Pearl Pass to Aspen. The next day, just two riders rolled into Aspen; the steep Colorado stones of the 38-mile road had destroyed all the other klunkers.They dont say what happened to the 13 riders who didnt finish, but Im guessing they didnt all have to eat each other like the Donner Party. Probably what happened was they got flats and had to go home. Heres another account of this harrowing journey:That was enough to get 15 Crested Butte men and women to take their bicycles over 12,705-foot Pearl Pass, covering 39 miles over two days. When the group triumphantly reached the Hotel Jerome in downtown Aspen, they were battered from a horrifying downhill, but amazed by the good times theyd hadand eager to do it again the next year. Were trying to get a grant from the National Geographic Society to go over to the Andes, rider Bob Starr said to the local press, completely straight-faced.I wonder if these people would have said the same:[That was amazing! Cant wait to do it again next year!]But yes, the outlaw spirit of mountain biking is still very much alive:Perhaps mountain biking required two birthplaces, in Crested Butte and Marin County: one to generate its freewheeling festival attitude and the other to establish its envelope-pushing adrenaline rush. Regardless, the sport that could only have been invented in the American West still retains its outlaw spirit, one that celebrates the mind- and horizon-expanding possibilities of the bicycle.You can see it in bikes like the $12,499.99 Specialized S-Works Turbo Levo 4:Which will transform you into a cycling cyborg:Butbutbut I dont wanna be a cyborg!I really do my best not to be a conspiracy theorist, but how am I not supposed to believe that the AI is effecting a takeover of humanity and the recreational cycling industry is going to be one of its chief methods of ingress?And sure, the stories about the origins of mountain biking in Marin County and Crested Butte are entertaining and all, but its hard not to come away from them thinking its mostly just the story of some extremely fortunate proto-hipsters who fell ass-backwards into some fantastic real estate when you could maybe still manage to live in these places and be a dirtbag, unlike today:I got excited about the place for $99K, but its kind of a fixer-upper in that a home does not exist on it:But Im sure its really easy to build a house in Marin County because there arent any NIMBYs there.Anyway, people are always deriding road cycling as the new golf just because billionaires like to do it:But how come nobody ever calls mountain biking the new skiing?I mean they literally do it at ski resortsI had to skip over five minutes of video before he actually rode the bikeand thats not counting any driving he had to do to get there.Outlaw spirit indeed.