Deep in the Weeds: The Action of Mountain Bike Action

Deep in the Weeds is our semi-regular column about bike wrenching, bike bits and getting your ride on. Written by our boy, Ben T. Spokes.

I must have close to 800 of these vintage dusty and dated Mountain Bike Action magazines.

I remember when they first came out. I was at my local bike shop in Southwestern Pennsylvania looking through a bunch of promo stuff the owner had laid out for me. Up to that point, off road magazines had mostly consisted of the Fat Tire Flyer which was printed in one color and had no color separation. The later Flyers did use gloss paper with four color printing and slicker design, but Mountain Bike Action took the whole MTB thing to another level.

At the time, this was important for me. I was in Johnstown and the magazines were a lifeline to all points beyond the stuck-ness of life in a crazy, depressed and dying steel town. Virtually no one there rode a bike in those days.

---

---

This is also right around the time marketing for high end off-road bikes and gear kicked into overdrive. Mountain bikes were transitioning from rebel culture and klunkers into high performance muscle machines looking for their own slice of the arcobaleno.

I still have the premiere issue I purchased in July of 1986. I remember because I got married the following month in August of 86′.

When I got my first real paycheck later that month, ironically, working in a print shop, I bought an actual subscription and a bike I had seen in the magazine. Their trickery worked on me, and boy, did I ever parlay that into some serious thrills. I rode that bike like a fiend in the rain, snow and sleet.

Taking off on a 35-mile ride over the Bedford mountain purely for the sake of riding to the Cannondale facility was something I did more than once. I was more than happy to put my life at risk for a brief encounter with something worldly. I kid you not, you could literally ride right up to the front door of the production facility.

Motorists would try to run me off the road, throw shit from their vehicles and yell all kinds of rude and obscene insults. The equalizer was the magical scenery and terrain that makes up that part of the country.

Looking back today, some of the ads and articles are priceless. This rag really captured the essence of what riding off road was all about. In a lot of ways, looking through it again after all these years is like looking back at my youth.