While I’ve been riding bikes since being a kid and never really stopped, the first time my tires ever really touched a dirt trail was while I was living in Alaska back in 2006. I guess I was about 34. I wasn’t even really looking to get into mountain biking and had never considered it. I was in the military and just walking around the base exchange and just happened to walk over to the bicycle section. 1 bike caught my eye, I thought “man that’s a cool looking bike with that weird front fork and beefy tires, it looks like it would be a blast on some off road type stuff. The bike was a Cannondale Scalpel with the lefty fork. It was sitting there with a 50 or 75% off tag on it and the retail showed something like 2 or 3k (I don’t recall exactly) but I thought “that must be some kind of high end mountain bike right there, this store must have no idea what this is to discount it so much” and I bought it. The base exchanges would have bicycles comparable to something you may find at a Target or a Sports authority (and that’s pushing it). I knew nothing about the MTB world but I knew that bike had to be mine because it looked like no other bike I have ever rode nd that’s where it started 12 years ago.