I'm getting a lot of grey hair now. I'm 59!
Riding in the 80-90's there was no discussion about wheel size. All the tires were pizza cutters by today's standards.
Tubeless was not even on the horizon.
Just to survive a weekend of gnarly riding would entail all kinds McGuivery.
The style of riding was heavily influenced by the exacting requirements in equipment preparation and riding technique.
Low air pressure was dangerous back then. If I wanted to shred down something, in direct contrast to today, I'd air up the tires to resist pinch flats.
Suspension was non-existent or ludicrous. Suspension was in the arms, legs, neck, back, and ass.
Vision could be impaired by vibration. We'd take hits so hard that loose helmets and glasses could shift position on the cranium. Hilarious.
It was important to know the trail very well, so as to anticipate the deep pockets, ruts, rills, ramps, and tombstones.
Of course usually the action was not based upon recall.
Typically, as it is today, you just took it on the fly, making adjustments in body positioning, and arm and leg piston retraction and extension, to enable the rigid 26" bike wheels to track over the obstacles, rather than conforming to the terrain as modern full suspension bikes do.
There was a lot more on the line in those times.
Hell yeah, as mentioned earlier, the trails were different, and so was the attitude. Things were as they were, so to speak. Trails weren't made for mountain bikes.
We sort of arrived on the trails, maybe uninvited, yet certainly fulfilling an inevitable destiny.
And we discovered trails that were overlooked by a few generations of hikers. We discovered game trails, log skids, gulches, washes, fall-lines, ridges, landslides; any place you could fit a bike, we'd be there.
No Google Earth either.
Some of that stuff was burly as ****!
And the brakes were so lousy that many times the descents were unstoppable, and a rider was forced to a continuous involuntary commitment of unpredictable velocity.
All this with your belly or chest on around saddle, thighs flared so they don't get too scratched up from the cantilever brakes at the extreme.
Since there wasn't as much riding going on, the "trails" would often be filled with all kinds of loose materials such as of course rocks and sticks, moss chunks, clods, logs, hummocks of bunch grass, fern clumps, deep drifts of leaves, thorny vines, low branches, and occasional huge fallen logs, springs, bogs, mud pits, and quick sand.
Almost all of the charismatic descents are extinct now due to the land management agency trail emasculating activity.
We would celebrate sections of "buff" trail with hoots of joy to cover a quarter of a mile without resorting to trials riding.
So yeah, trials was a thing.
It was good enough to descend a trail without dabbing, let alone setting some sort of time record.
If anything comes from this rant, it's that trials skills were a part of original 26" bike riding. Flow really didn't exist, per se, in my neck of the woods.
I don't mind today's flow trails, but I do not seek them out.
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