Bicycling USA – July 2019

A 1960 couples

holiday. From

left: Bob Harrison,

the club’s most

prolific photog-

rapher, his wife,

Mary, and Elsie

and Gerry Swift.

68 BICYCLING.COM • ISSUE 5

 thickets, boulder fields, mountain
streams and deep snow, in the U.K.
and beyond.
In their own, quietly headstrong
(very British) way, their adventuring
was rebellious in spirit, akin to their
funky Californian countercultural
counterparts who klunked together
the first mountain bikes on Mount
Tamalpais a decade or two later. In
fact, these two movements dovetail:
There has always been an interna-
tional cohort to the RSF, and in the
late 1970s and early ’80s, that included
a couple of West Coast natives, Char-
lie Kelly and Gary Fisher. Kelly even
contributed to the bimonthly RSF
journal, noting, in a Colorado ride

report in 1982, that, “In contrast to

the European rough-stuff style, nearly

all the riders here use the large 26 x

2.125 tires that have recently become

popular in the United States.”

RSF members have always been

ordinary people—bank clerks, fac-

tory workers, cabinetmakers, techni-

cians—doing extraordinary things.

Noteworthy feats include the first

self-supported bicycle trip across

Iceland’s mountainous desert inte-

rior in 1958; and in 1984, the first

trip fully by bike to Everest South

Base Camp. Everything has been

scrupulously documented, in Bill

Paul’s own scrapbook, in touring slide

shows, in the RSF journal, and in the

club’s annual photo contest. But club

members’ photos remained unknown

to the wider world until 2018, when

the newly appointed archivist, Mark

Hudson, began posting them on Ins-

tagram. They struck a chord with

a new generation. Bikepacking or

gravel or adventure biking, whatever

you want to call it, has been tempting

road riders to stray from the straight

and narrow and try something a little

dirty, and so the RSF’s penchant for

taking the rough with the smooth has

a resurgent appeal.

Perhaps we like their conviction

that you can go anywhere and do

anything on any bike. (“I never go for

a walk without taking my bike,” said

early member Bob Harrison, who took

many of the photos in the archive.) Or

perhaps we, too, now feel a certain

weariness with being told what to

do: Go this way, not that, wear this

and not that, use this bike only for

downhills and this bike for the ups.

And perhaps what we like most

about the RSF archive photos is how

democratic they are; that they show

women and men riding their bikes

simply because riding bikes is so

damn fun. They are having the time

of their lives. That’s something that

our training goals and our pain faces

and our cutting-edge tech sometimes

make us forget. Join us: The club’s

still open. Bo

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