29in·CH+

First and foremost be warned, what follows is some 26er content. You know, those small-wheeled bikes we used to ride in the dark ages of mountain biking. Those bikes we look at today wondering how in the world we possibly rode them across trails. Yes, I still own not one but two of those museum-worthy off-road velocipedes. The mean green riding machine is a bike that I’ve now owned for thirteen years. Circumstances wanted that in all of those thirteen years, the bike only saw dusty trails during the first two. The bike went to Sea Otter, to Downieville, took me on many rides in Annadel and traveled to Switzerland twice. After two seasons, the clear coat on top of the green paint started to have lots of tiny, barely visible cracks. Chris Kelly offered to repaint it and as he was just starting to do all frame painting in house, the frame remained at his shop for a good amount of time. In order to continue riding, I put my Merlin back into service and then never built the Kelly back up again. My Santa Rosa apartment just didn’t have the space for yet another bike. Three were already sitting in my living room and that was plenty enough. In 2006 a Niner took the place of both and only after getting settled in Switzerland, the Kelly was pulled out of the box to become my wife’s mountain bike. She rode about 300 km on it and never really liked the fit. At the end of January, I vanished in the musty basement, armed myself with spanners and hex keys to take it apart, toss the parts on Ebay and have them forever disappear across the globe. Such was the plan. After hours of carefully cleaning one component after another, I changed my mind. The frame and all components are impeccable. Joined they make up a unique hardtail with an unmistakable Northern Californian heritage. The bikes’ steel tubes are filled with deep memories of unforgettable rides on dusty NorCal trails. So the same weekend, the bike was rebuilt with many of the original parts to stay here some more time.

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According to Swiss Ride Magazine, the Canton of Berne wants to ban mountain bikes. Their reasoning: mountain bikes cause permanent damage to the ground, especially when riding in wet conditions. What a bunch of bullocks! Whoever wrote this legislative draft, must have never set foot in a forest. If they really wanted untouched forests, they should start with a ban of all forestry machinery.

A 20 ton harvester slices through the forest leaving tire tracks two feet deep, yet it’s the slim 70 kilo mountain biker who is the cantonal authority’s bête noire. According to the proposal, mountain bikers caught riding single tracks would face a fine of 20’000 Swiss Francs. I hope this will never be signed into law else I’ll consider paying future taxes in a canton that appreciates residents with a healthy lifestyle.

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Well, hello 2012. I left the land of the holey cheese for Christmas and New Years and spent it in good old Northern California, which for my taste buds, makes much finer cheese than alpine Helvetia. The bikes had to stay at home and 29in.ch went forgotten while I overdosed on GT’s Kombucha, Maine Root Ginger Brew, Chai BaBa Chai and an occasional Zin. Yes, I was a regular at Whole Foods and wish they’d invade Switzerland so that the country would finally get a grocery store where choice isn’t a foreign word. One can always hope.

I’m glad to report that Apple USA fixed my MacBook without charging an arm and a leg and did so within a few days. Customer service and efficiency, Americans definitely got those down. Need another example? Went to Macy’s and bought a pile of clothes, 50-60% off. Telling the sales girl that we have no Macy’s card because we’re visiting from abroad, she pulls a bunch of extra rebate codes out of a drawer and scans one after the other until one goes through and takes another 15% off. The money saved on those clothes and the laptop repair paid for my plane ticket alone.

MacBook operating again, I whipped up a short video with the footage taken back in December. Still need to find the right settings to convert and upload an iMovie project to Youtube within a reasonable time frame. Any good tips on that?

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A titanium masterpiece by Firefly.

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I’ve been singlespeeding either in Shimano sandals or trail shoes but have not owned a racy MTB show in over a decade. Cyclo-crossing, my feet demanded something more akin to a road shoe so I consulted the web to get an idea of what the market has to offer these days. I stumbled across Mavic, who has some very good looking shoes that most importantly don’t break the bank. I opted for Mavic’s mid-level Tempo, a cross-country race shoe with a grippy rubber sole, two adjustable Velcro straps and one ratcheting strap. It can be quite a lottery to buy a shoe brand one has never worn over the internet, but the two commutes to work in these were verification enough that I ordered the correct size. This is a heck of a comfortable shoe. If it performs and holds up well, I might replace my aging Specialized road shoes with a pair of Mavic next spring. Bought for CHF 150 at Bikester.

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Last fall when I was walking through the aisles of Eurobike to get a peek at everything 29er, I overheard quite a few comments by European show visitors about how weird and unproportionate 29 inch wheels and the frames built around them look. This Sunday, I pushed the only 26er MTB I still own into the backyard to shoot the above photos. It’s a Merlin from 1994 with lots of awesome high-end bits from the good old early 90ies, most notably a 91 MRC Ti-fork and the one of a kind Hedgehog Hubs by none other than myself. I spent a lot of good hours on this bike, in places such as the Jura, the Swiss Alps, countless trails across California and the Moab region in the corner of Utah. A few years ago, I completely restored this titanium beauty and since then it’s been decorating the entrance to our apartment. I haven’t ridden it since I made the switch to big wheels some six years ago. Funny thing that Sunday morning. Carrying the bike down four floors and pushing it into the backyard I thought the same about this bike as the guys at Eurobike. This bike felt weird with its unproportionately small wheels. It’s all about one’s perception, isn’t it? The things that belong to our daily universe are normal. Everything else is strangely alien. Hop on a 29er and ride it for a while and a 26er will soon seem like a children’s bike.

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BikeRadar ran a pretty entertaining article about Google Trends today. Evan Cycles out of the UK has been looking at Google Trends and compared those results with their own sales figures. Looking at the numbers it appears that mountain biking is losing ground. If one looks at those Google Trends charts this trend is clearly noticeable. Fewer folks are searching for “mountain bikes”. But who fires up their web browser, and searches for “mountain bikes” on Google? Obviously only someone who has never thrown their leg across an MTB and someone who neither knows that market nor its brands. Alright, during the past couple of years fewer folks looked for information about a sport they know nothing about. Fair enough! Well, while we’re at it, we can obviously not forget to include “29ers”. And sure enough, since mid 2005 there’s a clear rise in interest in big wheels. Also interesting is the extremely flat line for “e-bikes”. As every manufacturer seems to be jumping on that bandwagon, “e-bikes” don’t seem to have tickled consumers’ interest very much.

And what about brands? Well, looks like Trek has been beating everyone else for the last couple of years, followed by Specialized. And look at Niner. From the second half of 2007, there have been enough queries for “niner bikes” to be included in Google Trends.

The above charts just capture a microscopic snapshot of all search queries by people looking for bicycles, so it’s sort of silly to try to read any trends. A lot more data would need to be analyzed to do that. It’s fun nonetheless, isn’t it?

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