Fairfax sits right by one of mountain biking's home hills

Fairfax is a small Marin town, but it has a large bicycle story. It sits at the foot of Mount Tamalpais, a hill often treated as one of the key birthplaces of modern mountain biking.

The older bike story goes back well before the sport had a name. Marin’s valleys, ferries, railroads, and hill roads drew cyclists from around the Bay Area for generations. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, local riders were taking old balloon-tire bikes onto dirt roads and trails around Mount Tam and nearby canyons.

That experimenting turned into a scene. Riders fixed up heavy old bikes, tested parts, and raced down steep fire roads. One famous race series was called Repack, because coaster brakes had to be repacked with grease after the hot downhill runs.

Today, the Marin Museum of Bicycling and the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame make that history easy to see in one place. The museum covers road bikes, track bikes, touring bikes, everyday transportation, and mountain bikes. For Fairfax, that is a good fit: the town is both a small downtown and a way into a bigger riding landscape.