Mountain Bike News with Rama Jon - Vegas

Mountain Bike News
with Rama Jon 10/99

VEGAS

Each September the bike industry marks the model year changeover at the Interbike Trade Show. This year’s show was in Las Vegas and included an off road demo for the first day, then followed up with 4 action packed days of indoor trade show. The indoor displays make up one of the largest Trade Shows in the world. Each year the amount of media input is enough to boggle the mind. I’m glad that for us the Trade Show is more play than work, and play we did.

For us the dirt demo was more of a social gathering than a demo. The reason for this is that we are smart enough to know that riding mountain bikes in the desert without slime in your tubes is fool hearty and will always lead to flat tires. It was that way last year and it was the same this year with about half the demo riders returning their bikes with flat tires. After socializing at the dirt demo for a few hours we headed out for some real mountain biking in Boulder City.

Boulder City is the town just after the Boulder Dam on your way to Las Vegas. The town was developed for the dam workers and old town Boulder City is quaint and majestic. Bootleg Canyon is on the north side of town and 4000 acres have been set aside for human powered use. The trail system has been built almost single handedly by Brent Thompson, a local artist and avid mountain biker. After having heart surgery, Thompson’s doctor advised him to do yard work and I guess he got carried away and that’s how the trails at Bootleg Canyon began.

The trails at Bootleg Canyon are of two types, the ones you can ride up and the ones you can’t. The locals do a lot of car shuttling to ride the steep technical downhill trails. It’s not uncommon to do 3 or 4 shuttle runs in a row. Anyone who disapproves of the shuttles can pedal up the dirt road, but with temperatures regularly over 100 degrees, it just seems to make more sense to do like the locals and shuttle to the top.

The next few days were spent between the Trade Show and riding in Boulder City, with the riding predominating especially after the first full day on the inside. The report for the year is not much new other than Cannondale’s one armed bandit fork and better pricing due to the devaluation of the yen and other Asian currencies. It should be a good year to get value for your dollar.