In honor of singletracks.com’s 10th anniversary this year I’m starting a series of posts looking back at the history of the website. It’s hard to believe that it’s been 10 years already- did they even have the internet 10 years ago? Today I’ll fill you in on the singletracks origin story where it all started in a tiny town called Modoc, SC.
The Stevens Creek trail near Modoc is a narrow out and back trail that was probably built for hikers decades ago. The trail sits just off the side of a rural highway and if you drove by the trail 10 years ago you probably wouldn’t have noticed it. This was the first real mountain bike trail I rode with my high school friends back in 1992 (real meaning you had to drive to it) and on this early spring day in 1998, almost 6 years later, I decided to ride the trail with my girlfriend.
Leah was riding her new Jamis Durango and I was on the blue Bridgestone MB-5 I had purchased used from the local bike shop several years before. It was a beautiful day and we had a cheap 110 speed film camera with us to take some pictures of our adventure. As we rode and snapped a few pics I had an idea: Wouldn’t it be great if we could somehow share our reviews and photos of this trail with other mountain bikers who hadn’t ridden here? I mentioned the idea of building a website to Leah and she said she thought it would be a great idea. We continued to ride.
As we pedaled I kept adding to the idea in my head: What about classified ads to help folks sell their used bikes? How about message boards where riders could meet up and schedule group rides? I was really starting to get pumped. As Leah and I stopped to take a water break we both brainstormed the possibilities and we resolved then and there that we would make a mountain biking website.
When I started mountain biking in the early 1990s finding out about the trails was really a word of mouth endeavor. I found out about the Modoc trails from my friend Joey who had in turn heard of the trails from his neighbor. Bike shops were a decent source of information on local trails but the sport was just so new that really any trail was fair game for riding- though some trails were better suited than others. As I went off to college in North Carolina I found it slow going to build up my MTB word-of-mouth network for the new area. A centralized website with MTB info seemed like the perfect solution to this trail information dilemma.
I decided to let Leah take the reins on the project since I already had a website I was building and maintaining called Philomath, an R.E.M. fan site and lyrics resource (how 90s’ is that for ya?). Leah named the mountain bike site “Mudhunny” after her own trail name and we filled the site with photos and descriptions of the mountain bike trails we had ridden together in Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina.
In wrapping up this portion of the story it’s important to note that Mudhunny wasn’t the first mountain bike website and even my trailside epiphany wasn’t exactly original. It turns out there were already many regional mountain bike websites and even a few national sites like MTBR that had been around a couple years. In fact had we known this at the time we probably wouldn’t have decided to start a mountain bike website. Now that it’s 10 years later it seems strange to think I could have been scared off from the idea so easily. It has certainly been a long road – err trail – and we’re excited to see what the next 10 years will hold!
Next stop on the 10 year anniversary tour: The original Mudhunny website – resurrected!
