How time flys! MountainBikeBill.com turns 20 today. When this thing started it were no smartphones, high speed data, GoPros and YouTube. Even a hand-held mapping GPS was a tough thing to come by in those days.
Thank you all for the motivation to share my love for the outdoors and mountain biking over the last 20 years!
The site came about as more of a progression of information vice a thought out plan. While I do consider my time in the 80’s riding my 10 speed on old logging roads and game trails of North Carolina mountain biking (Or should dare to say Gravel Biking), I got into I got into modern MTBing in the late 90s here in San Diego.
I love the exploring aspect of the sport and it was much more exploratory in nature back then. Bringing along a guidebook on a ride was very much a thing. Before long I was checking out places “not in the books” and friends would want me to lead rides or explain to them how they could get there. This lead to hand written directions and maps that got photo copied and passed around. Then came scans and me putting hosting on my cox.net personal account. Somewhere along the line I picked up the nickname Mountain Bike Bill. On Feburary 6th, 2002, MountainBikeBill.com became a thing.
If you want a historical chuckle you can check out these historical nuggest of the site that I’m probably going to leave as is and make a whole next page.
- GPS and TOPOS! https://mountainbikebill.com/GPSandTOPOs.htm
- Best Viewing Methods HAHAHA https://mountainbikebill.com/BestViewing.htm
- The FAQ section is horribly outdated https://mountainbikebill.com/FAQ.htm
The site has gone through four major revisions over the years, and while I should have moved to some type of content management system long ago, I will probably keep the old school html thing going. I latest bit of work involves migrating all the pages to a mobile friendly format and tweaking the GPS files to work better with more simplistic mobile applications. Moving videos to my YouTube channel is also another thing to do when I am not doing life stuff like you know, riding a bike and loving on wife and dogs. Then there is that whole pesky work thing.
So thank you all for the motivation to share over the years. While social media in its various forms calls into question the relevance of websites and blogs these days, I plan on keeping this thing going for the foreseeable future. So if you like bad grammar, misspelled words sprinkled with some MTB blabbage stick around.
Nice site! Was feeling nostalgic from the old racing days (Mission Cyclery out of Chula Vista). Functional amateur. But we always did well! (Had some far better riders than me.)
Stumbled across your page. Well done! Thanks for the memories!
Great! It’s amazing how your website has been around for such a long time. Your website is now very complete and useful. The age of technology has helped us to create more good and engaging content. Thank you for your photos, videos, enthusiasm, and contributions so far.