Mania man
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COURTESY PHOTO |
ROUGH
TRAIL: Bruce Brown of Sumas mountain bikes on Galbraith
Mountain. Brown took up the sport in 1997 and is now on his fourth
bike. He created the Web site GalbraithMt.com to make the area more accessible to
newcomers.
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Local writer
works hard at having fun
Fiona Cohen, The Bellingham Herald
Dr. Mark Adriance
once wrote Bruce Brown a prescription saying "have fun daily."
At the time, Adriance says, Brown was spending all his time in his
office, working furiously on a book.
"If he's into something, it's usually 150 percent," Adriance says.
While Brown wasn't exactly fat, he had the softish body you'd expect
from a middle-aged man.
That was before the Sumas-based writer and entrepreneur discovered
mountain biking in the spring of 1997. By chance he tried a friend's
mountain bike.
"I knew immediately that this could be big for me," he says. "In fact I
came home and said to my wife, I could be in the presence of a mania."
Now on his fourth mountain bike, Brown, 51, doesn't have an ounce of
body fat in sight, and moves like a man half his age.
You could say he's 150 percent into it.
"It really resonated or spoke to me," he says. "There's a point when
you get deep enough into the woods that the air has got a coolness and an
oxygenated feeling, and I love that and the mountain bike immediately gave
me a way to get there, and it gave me a way to do it right where I live."
Brown has lived in Sumas since 1978, when he quit his job at the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer to work on a book about salmon called "Mountain
in the Clouds." More books followed, as well as a curious newspaper called
the "Sumas Astonisher," which started as a list of items found around town
after a flood.
An interest in computers led to the creation of BugNet, a fast-growing
Web site for software fixes that left Brown comfortably off when he sold
it in the fall of 1999. Soon after he started mountain biking, he gained
an obsession with riding up hills; he reckons he covered more than 300,000
vertical feet in 1999 and 400,000 vertical feet -- the equivalent of 13 sea
level-to-summit trips up Mount Everest -- in 2000.
MOUNTAIN ON THE WEB
His latest obsession is Galbraith Mountain, its trails and the riders
who use them.
He believes that Galbraith Mountain's trails could be an economic
engine for Bellingham, much like the trails around Moab, Utah, or the
Winthrop area, which the Methow Valley Sport Trails association has helped
turn into a destination for cross-country skiers and cyclists.
For Brown, step one is a Web site, GalbraithMt.com,
designed to make the area more accessible to newcomers. He assembled maps
of the mountain's tangled net of trails, and put together a gallery of
Galbraith mountain bike riders he's met on the trial.
"I wanted to put a face on the folks and the spirit that I saw there,"
he says. Plus, when politicians make decisions about the future of the
land, it might be useful to have a record of the number and diversity of
people on the trails, Brown says. Some might think the mountain biking
crowd consists of pierced, tattooed, non-voting kids, he says, but the
reality is you can find old and young riders from many walks of life.
His devotion to his project sometimes tests the patience of his riding
partners.
"He pretty much tackles just about any mountain biker he sees and wants
to know their life history and photograph them and write about them," says
Mark Belles, 38, a frequent partner of Brown's.
The Web site also includes detailed articles on the techniques of
mountain bike riding. Brown will bombard Belles with questions about the
technical details of his riding.
"He wants to know how I made it up this particular log and how I
traversed this kind of trail and that kind of thing." Belles finds it hard
to answer the questions because unlike Brown, he doesn't analyze his
techniques.
"He's a thinker and I'm more of a doer," Belles says.
THE MAN KNOWN AS MONGO
Brown is a talker as well as a thinker.
If conversation were an Olympic sport, Brown's neck would be weighted
down with medals. On road trips to places like Moab, he and his friend
Russ Lambert, 57, talk to pass the time. Almost all the time.
"When we're not talking, usually one of us is sleeping," Lambert says.
Lambert figures Bruce holds up 75 percent of the conversation.
"His sentences are long. They just keep going. Lots of commas," he
says.
For example, get him going on the topic of Galbraith's trail builders.
"They are artists, they can walk through the woods and can see a line
that can be a trail. It's not just a trail; it's a complex thing that they
see. They see a line, which will not erode immediately or beyond
rideability. They see the possibility of technical challenge; they see
character and personality in a trail. I mean this is artistry. These guys
are going out there and they're not getting paid, they're not getting
recognition, they're all just doing it because it's a beautiful thing to
be a part of, and when I came on the scene, I saw these people giving of
themselves really, in a selfless manner. I was inspired, I was really
impressed: impressed with what they were doing and impressed with what
existed there as a public resource."
He throws himself into riding with just as much enthusiasm.
Lambert gave Brown the nickname "Mongo," which Brown adapts as the "The
Man Known as Mongo," when writing in the Web site.
"I thought it was a good name for someone who is a good hill climber,"
Lambert says. "He needs an aggressive name for when he does these things."
GALBRAITH THE ZINE
GalbraithMt.com
has been evolving, Brown says, into a 'zine. It has commercial
underwriters in the form of the three major local bike shops: Fairhaven
Bike and Mountain Sports, Kulshan Cycles and Jack's Cycle Center.
The headlines on the front page trumpet articles such as "Learn to Love
Mud!," "Mongo's Complete Over the Top Guide to Climbing" and "Tech Note -
The Heinous Fall Away from Pollo Elastico," all of which include
exhaustive technical instructions.
In the future, Brown plans a story on "the ideal Galbraith bike," a
topic which, he says, is bound to be controversial. And sometime in the
next few months he'll add some Web forums, allowing mountain bikers to
express their opinions about bikes, trails, or whatever is on the site.
"Bike geeks just love to talk about this stuff," he says.
Above all, he wants to keep on celebrating the place.
"I don't know of another city of any size anywhere in the country that
has anything like Galbraith Mountain in terms of the scope, the size, the
accessibility, the community of riders. I mean it's really
special."
Reach Fiona Cohen
at fcohen@bellingh.gannett.com
or 715-2276.
