1982 Pacific Crest Trail Poach (and More)

Okay, so this Daily Bike needs a little explanation, because there are a couple voices here, and the words are a little rough. It documents some communications between photographer Brian Vernor and his friend Jeff Traugott, a pioneering mountain biker from Santa Cruz, California. Traugott relates a story of attempting to poach the Pacific Crest Trail from Tuolumne Meadows to Mt. Whitney in 1982, which, regardless of how you feel about the legality, is righteously ambitious. Beyond that, though, Traugott’s stream-of-consciousness storytelling is a window into the earliest days of California mountain biking, and that’s pretty cool. I was going to shorten and edit the story, but Brian thought it was better in its raw state, and upon further consideration I have to agree. It might reduce the appeal a bit, but provides way more context.-Steve

Brian Vernor: About a year ago my friend Jeff Traugott sent me these photos. They were all taken by a fellow Santa Cruzan, Bob “Rat” Landry, and I sat on them for ages waiting for the right time to share them and when Bicycle Times Magazine asked me to photograph Jeff for their Issue 33 I figured now is as good a time as any. Jeff has an immense history on the bicycle, but if you read the article in Bicycle Times you will learn he is an incredible luthier, making guitars one at a time for world renowned guitar players.

Below is the contents of Jeff’s first email to me, which included the photos, and then I decided to ask him a couple follow up questions. This is all unedited, I only inserted a few clarifying names in brackets.

Thought you guys would dig these historical shots from 1982!

Below of me with Ross Shafer, Mark Michel, Alan Hariman (then owner of the Bike Trip with Rick Stewart) and Rat (Bob Landry). Featured are my Tunavega (Univega), Mark’s Salsa #1, Ross’s classic Pufta-Flauge, Rat’s chromed Salsa #10 and Alan’s early Forest Camo Salsa. Check out the head angles, even on the production Univega? These bikes had such fast handling it was insane! You can’t see but the shoes I was wearing were red Rivat high tops, best shoe ever!!

I know all you guys are true hammers both up and downhill but you should have seen how fast we went downhill on those bikes with no helmets? You think I crash a bunch now…..!!! Rat was the fastest climber we knew, he was the most naturally talented cyclist, he has that Greg Lemond lung thing and if he was a competitive person and hadn’t loved getting high so much he could have raced at a high level.

Before you ask, I broke that Univega on the very first ride after buying it with financial aid money from college. Mark and I were doing DeLa, top of the world and I broke it on my first downhill. The next year I had my custom Salsa #26 which I’ve broken 3 times but it still runs as do all the bikes pictured except for the Univega which I’ve lost track of.

The other shots are of me, Rat, and our buddy Marcus Kauffman, (check Marcus’s 650B Redbush!! [Red Bush were Shafer’s bikes before the Salsa moniker was started]) we attemped to ride from Tuolomne Meadows on the Pacific Crest Trail to the top of Mt. Whitney. The bikes with gear weighed 80 pounds and we had a food drop at Mono Lake. The bottom shots are the start through Tuolomne, then showing where we were headed, then you see us on the trail of the first pass where we had to walk due to ass loads of HUGE rocks!! Marcus burned out after hour 7 and at about hour 9 of day 1 we were busted by an off duty park ranger. We drove back to Mono and spent the week riding and camping on BLM land.

You guys don’t really know Rat too well but he’s always been a bit confrontational and when the ranger turned us around Rat asked him, “What if we won’t turn around?”

Ranger: “I’ll physically stop you.”

Rat: “How, what if we still keep going??

Ranger: “I’ll mace you.”

Rat: “What if that doesn’t stop us?”

Ranger: “I’ll take out my gun and shoot you!”

It’s tough being a public servant I imagine?

Needless to say we turned around but riding through Tuolomni Meadows was perhaps the greatest trail I’ve ever experienced. We split at 5 a.m. and were solo except for one lone 20-something woman hiker who we passed and chatted with figuring we’d never see her again, five hours later on the first pass she dropped us like we were standing still…well, we were kind of standing still as you can see, ha!!

Brian: At the time these photos were taken did you consider the bike a separate culture or scene from the other outdoor experience scenes/cultures, or was it part of how people went camping, explored our public lands, etc.? Does it seem any different to you today?
I would say it was a separate culture, when people saw us way out in the woods on bikes they were interested and surprised. The coolest part was how encouraging people were about us riding our bikes in the woods! We were even good friends with park rangers who turned us on to cool trails we didn’t yet know about. We did a lot of car camping trips with bikes in those days, we had a yearly trip to Gold Lake which is above Downieville. We were riding all around that area and all over what’s now called the Downieville Downhill long before anyone referred to it as that or had any race there. On these trips we never ran into anyone else with bikes, mountain bikes were pretty new and the trails were all open and sparsely populated which was fucking amazing!!

Obviously now MTB are all the rage and the areas are jam packed. That’s why we still try and find the under used areas or discover new places to ride. It’s harder but still doable. If you’re willing to ride closed trails it’s not as crowded but the vibe sucks with hikers and rangers write tickets.

Salsa #1? and Salsa numbers 10 and 25? What can you say about Ross and Paul’s business at the time-were the bikes just being sold to friends and when did other people start looking for Salsa bikes? Was he still in Santa Cruz then?
I knew Paul [Sadoff] in 1982, he was working at the Trip and between 1982-88 he made mostly road bikes, played guitar professionally and worked at the Trip. He needed three jobs to make ends meet back then. It wasn’t until 1992 after Ross [Shafer of Salsa Cycles and prior to that Red Bush Cycles] was in Petaluma that we all started road riding and buying our bikes from Paul [Sadoff of Rock Lobster]. In the 1980s it was all about Ross and the “New” MTB. Paul was selling his frames to some friends but my group didn’t start buying bikes from Paul until the early 90s.

We all bought our Salsas from Ross while he was living in Santa Cruz and had his shop at the corner of King and Mission Streets. He did a pretty good business with all of us and he was already known and seemed to be very busy. He had his famous warranty, 30 seconds or 30 feet, whichever came first…and he meant it!

In 1982 I was just riding bikes in the dirt, no road riding. I had a Univega MTB bike and had arranged a trade with Ross for my first custom-made bike, Salsa number 26. I traded Ross my first guitar for that frame, which I still have! Ross was making all our bikes, our whole group had custom, handmade Salsa’s and we LOVED them!!!

Back then I thought my Salsa was the BEST handling bike I’d ever ridden! That said this was before helmets and I seemed to fall every other ride. We were traveling extremely fast downhill and using 1.75 tires with Cunningham bottom mount rear brakes which were fantastic! You are right though, the head angles were very steep!

Any other technical details we might find interesting today? The bike camping gear has come a long way, but those bikes are timeless (if maybe steep in the head angles).
We had some semi-cool gear, I guess, those days we had very cool padded shoulder straps for carrying the bike, which you can see in the photo and when you took that off we had a bag that fit into the triangle for carrying stuff. I never had a big bag like I see today, we just put racks onto the bikes and piled our shit on there as you see in the pictures. Pre-internet it was hard to know what was happening around the country.

It’s funny, back then I could not imaging going downhill any faster than we were going, I thought the steep head angles and long chainstays were the most important innovation ever and we credited Ross for that. I recently rode one of my buddies Salsas from those days and it took everything I had not to fly over the bars, haha!

For years after my Salsa I told every frame builder to make my bikes with steep head angles and long chainstays even with shock forks. I had two MTB from Rick Hunter and one from Paul and a production Salsa from Petaluma but they never handled the same as I remembered from the no-shock, original Salsa days. Now I’m all into my Tallboy 2 and couldn’t think of using any other MTB but I still have dreams of repainting and rebuilding my original Salsa to see if the ride I so loved would still be the same today…We’ll see what happens!! So many bikes, so little time.

---

You can see Brian Vernor’s photography at brianvernor.com.

---

The Daily Bike is back by popular demand. It does not, however, appear daily.

---