As 2008 draws to a close I want to highlight some of our favorite articles of the year and talk about some of the trends we’ve observed in the MTB world. Believe it or not we managed to crank out 350 unique posts in 2008 – read on to get caught up!
Mountain Bikes
The mountain bike story of 2008 has been the 29er and at Interbike I had the chance to demo 29er mountain bikes from Rocky Mountain and Redline. We also wrote about the bamboo 29er mountain bike from Calfee Designs that claims to have better tensile strength than steel and better compression than concrete. In September and then again in November we wrote about chainless mountain bikes from Maverick and Trek. But 2008 wasn’t all about new stuff – Joel wrote about his Nirve Klunker project and showed us that retro mountain biking can be just as sexy as the latest tech.
Mountain bike trails
In 2008 we managed to ride some pretty sweet new dirt and it all started on New Year’s day with a chilly ride at the Stonewall Falls trail in North Georgia. The highlight of 2008 was a ride at Gooseberry Mesa in St. George, UT with our new friends Bryce and Danny where we were introduced to southern Utah mountain biking. We also explored some of the great mountain bike trails in our neck of the woods including Tanasi in Tennessee (one of our new favorites), Santos in Florida (on a 40 mile epic ride), and the trails in the Sumter National Forest outside Augusta, GA. We also profiled some of the best urban mountain bike trails in the US for those in search of in-town rides.
Mountain bike races
There were several unique and gnarly mountain bike races in 2008 and one of our new favorites has to be the 400-racer-strong Mega Avalanche downhill race held in France each year. We were also introduced to Pixie Bike Racing and are stoked to try our hand at it – if we can only find a 12-inch bike that won’t buckle under our weight 😉
Trends
Yep, in 2008 the environment took center stage and we wrote about “green mountain biking” back in January before anyone was talking about their MTB carbon footprint. We also considered whether mountain or road bikes make the best commuters and you can guess which one we recommended 😉 In 2008 Facebook became the defacto social network for keeping in touch with friends and singletracks jumped on the bandwagon with our own Facebook application called ‘Mountain Biker.’ Gadgets were hot once again in 2008 and we provided an early preview of how the iPhone stacks up against the Edge 705 cycling GPS from Garmin (which was also released in 2008 and which we recently reviewed). Tough economic times for some has meant a resurgence of DiY tinkering and we talked about some of our favorite mountain bike DiY projects.
Popular MTB articles
Every now and then we manage to find entertaining stuff to write about in the mountain biking world and here are some of our favorite ‘beyond category’ posts from the past year:
- Buffalo soliders: The original mountain bikers. Who knew people were riding bikes off road in the 1800s?
- Mountain bike brews: get up to speed on what to order at the bar.
- Cyclist impaled by a tree branch: yep, there are photos and the story behind the pics is pretty unbelievable…
- Sheep crap sickens mountain bikers: the title pretty much says it all. Wipe off that water bottle!
- Mountain bike art: since posting about mountain bike art we’ve come across even more examples – look for a follow-up post coming soon…
What will 2009 hold for mountain biking? We can’t wait to find out!
