Word: biked
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Every industrial revolution starts with a great notion. In the Smithsonian Institution, resting only a short stroll away from Charles Lindbergh's Spirit of St. Louis, is a newer icon of American ingenuity: Stumpjumper, the first mountain bike. A crossbreed of rugged utility and European racing technology, the Stumpjumper scurried where 10-speeds would have crumpled: down mountain slopes, across fields and over city curbs. The chunky two-wheeler, manufactured by Californian Michael Sinyard in 1981, has helped transform the % U.S. bicycle industry from a sleepy business to a $3.5 billion family-sport industry as millions of Americans mount...
Idiot proof and practically maintenance free, the tough cycles are the transportation equivalent of the first oversize Prince tennis racquet introduced in the 1970s. Both represent high-tech sports magic in accessible form, an Everyman's ticket to an activity usually ruled by youth and muscle. Behind the growing bike boom in America are all those adventurous teenagers reawakening in millions of overtaxed grownups. Frustrated with sore knees, joggers are turning to biking. Desk jockeys once intimidated by drop-handle 10-speeds can now handle as many as 21 gears on a bike that looks more like something the paper...
...Mountain bikes, also known as all-terrain bikes (ATBs), borrow sophisticated metal alloys, titanium lugs, carbon-fiber tubing and other materials from the aerospace industry for lightweight strength. Average weight: 28 lbs., vs. 20 lbs. for a far more fragile touring bike. Perhaps most important, ATBs feature flat handlebars for upright seating and thick tires that take to sand and gravel as easily as to pavement. While these features have practical appeal for rough-riding wilderness cyclists, the changes also take the hassle out of bike riding for ordinary pedal pushers who never stray more than a mile...
Sports sandals, this summer's must-have shoe, are now standard equipment for hikers, mountain climbers and even some skydivers. Like the fanny-pack and bike-shorts crazes of the 1980s, they had their origins in the great outdoors. The footwear was originally designed eight years ago by Mark Thatcher, a Colorado river outfitter who found athletic shoes too slippery and spongelike for white-water rafting trips...
...continued into the Amazon basin by mountain bike and white-water raft, the temperature and humidity rose. Cloud-forest plants and animals began to give way to parrots, fasciated tiger herons -- a hunter of large fish and snakes that looks like it is wearing a herringbone overcoat -- and other lowland creatures. We settled for the night at Amazonia Lodge, a former tea plantation across from the tiny river port of Atalaya. The owner, Santiago Yabar, tells us that he first visited the plantation as a tax collector in the 1970s, then later bought it and transformed its run-down buildings...