Moments: Anything You Can Do, I Can Do Klunkerer

On a late summer’s day in 1976, a crew of motorcyclists roared through Colorado’s Crested Butte, a sleepy former mining town high in the Rockies. Dirt caked their bikes and smoking brakes fouled the air. They’d come from Aspen over 12,705-foot Pearl Pass via a boulder-strewn mining road connecting CB with its swankier cousin thirty-nine miles north. An evening of the bikers chest-thumping in a town bar got the attention of the local cycling crew, which had been experimenting with decades-old single-speed cruisers fitted with fat tires—klunkers—on dirt roads in the surrounding mountains. If these Aspen blowhards could do Pearl Pass on their motorcycles, the cyclists figured, we can handle it on our klunkers.

A few weeks later, fifteen riders dressed in boots, blue jeans, and plaid flannels mounted their bikes in front of the Grubstake saloon, threw back shots, and pedaled out of Crested Butte. They were trailed by a booze-loaded truck as a “support” vehicle. After two days of