There's a strange allure to snow atop Mt. Tam, it's so fleeting and transitory that before you know it, you find yourself drawn to it like a tourist trap self-exiting your car from the highway. It's almost embarrassing but locals flock to it, stunned into pilgrimage.
Fred heard the siren call in 2002, most likely the last time Mt. Tam received real snow (it's supposed to be 73 degrees here on Monday, at the end of January - is something wrong?) and he and Greg Biber, one of WTB's main frame builders who snapped this picture, woke up early and stormed their way to the top. Fred's blue beauty of a bike is an early, Mark Slate designed prototype 29" bike. This is not to say WTB hadn't been experimenting with 29" frames earlier, starting with prototype frames made in 1999 for the arrival of the Nano Raptor 2.1 29" tire. You can see Fred's very early Marzocchi fork - perhaps a 2002 Marzocchi MX Air Comp 29 (it was really hard to get 29" forks in the early days) and they're both sporting WTB Nano Raptor 2.1 29" tires, the first 29" mountain bike tire. For wheels, they're both running WTB SpeedMaster 21 x 11.3 700c rims laced to WTB Laser Disc XC hubs and what looks to be WTB SST K Saddles and lovely Original Trail Grips and WTB / Blackburn Bomber Cages for 1.5L bottles. Something to this 29" fad? Might as well try it out in the snow must have been what Fast Freddy and Biber were thinking.
