Larsen was a well-known competitor in his prime, raced with Lance Armstrong on the Motorola team, but I came to associate his name with a great mountain-biking race/cross country tire he designed for Maxxis called the Larsen TT (a second one was the Mimo; both were named after his kids). Larsen was a Davis, Calif. native who lived in Bend, OR, named recently by Mountain Bike Action as the best mountain biking town in America (yet he died while…). We wish his wife Carrie and 5 children well.

We’ve been riding Bend for years and love its mountain bike trails and culture. It’s certainly deserving. There are some new kids on the block that bear watching, too, places like Leavenworth and Bellingham, WA and Aptos CA. Ashland OR is relatively unheralded. Idaho has some great spots, e.g. Stanley and the Sand Point area, and of course Utah and Colorado are brimming, then there’s Arizona…oh well, you get the picture.

This is a competitive category! Throw in British Columbia (Revelstoke, Chilcotins, Rossland, Golden, Kamloops) and it’s a whole new ballgame. We’re fortunate here on the West Coast and in the Northwest to be blessed with a wealth of opportunities.

Anyway, I’m hoping to make it back to Bend sometime this spring. Best times usually are shoulder months, June and October, because trails go to sand in the summer. Here’s my video, shot a few years ago but one of the ones that seems to stick with folks.

Oops! It looks like YouTube has disabled my video, probably because of the Hoobastank sound track. I’ll have to sub the sound and upload it again. A shame they do this. Mountain biking videos are a great way to introduce people to songs they haven’t heard before, which leads them to actually search out new bands and buy their stuff. In the end, this hurts the band and the so-called industry.