Great! Someone Still Riding A Real Bike!

In the last couple of months, I have put 543 kilometers onto my Stooge MK5. For the last two years, I wasn’t able to mountain bike as much. Now that I have spent more time on trails again, something strange has been happening with regular frequency. Hikers comment about the fact that I’m riding with my muscle-power only. I have been mountain biking since the mid-eighties, and while I rarely had a negative encounter with a hiker, most of the time I met a hiker, we briefly exchanged a quick "hello" or "good day." That was usually it. Now, I’m regularly applauded for riding without the assistance of a motor. Yesterday, for instance, someone remarked: “Oh great, someone still riding a real bike!”

It left a grin on my face for the rest of an extremely tough climb. A real bike. So, in the eyes of that hiker, an eBike isn’t a real bike. It still has me thinking. Much may have to do with the fact that a human-powered mountain biker isn’t much faster than a hiker when a trail points upwards. An eBiker, by contrast, flies by with a greatly elevated speed. I don’t know what is going on here. I only observe that hikers have become much friendlier to a human-powered biker like myself ever since they have to share the trails with motorized bikes.

Offtrail.guru isn’t getting updated as frequently as I would like to, but sometimes there are other priorities in life. That’s just how it is. If I have more time to ride, shoot photos, and share them here, I’d like to bring a drone along on my cycling adventures again. I got my feet wet with one in 2017. In those five years, drones have become a whole lot better and a whole lot more reliable. But as long as I can’t dedicate any time to such a high-tech toy, I’ll keep following the drone market without actually pulling out my wallet to get one.