On (NOT) Keeping up with Gary Fisher

Mountain Life

Fall 2008

Mountain Biking Portugal with Gary Fisher

Only a few pedal strokes into this 200-metre clamber and I’m shamelessly off the bike. Someone with an abnormal sense of humour decided the best route up to Monsanto is this long forgotten, ill-matched, uphill Roman path. Shannon Mominee, a 34-year-old musician from Pittsburg is fairing better.

“WTF was that?” he inquires breathlessly as I make it up, a tad slow and dour faced. Several minutes later the legend himself Gary Fisher, prinked in a kaleidoscope of cycling attire, arrives, carrying himself like this is just another day at the office. For him, it is. 

Anyone who has ever taken their two-wheeler where cars can’t go owes Gary Fisher. Yearning to explore the hills surrounding his abode in Marin County California in the late ‘60s, Fisher blended road bike and motorcycle parts onto a patriarchal Schwinn and spit out the inaugural mountain bike. A few years later he brought to life a company aptly dubbed Mountain Bikes and the rest is free riding (slash) endo (slash) pinch flat (slash) chain sucking history. Now 57 years young and the father of four, Gary still has an elephantine love for the fat tire and is content as ever gabbing about bikes, refining bikes and riding bikes.

“The bicycle is the best way to enter into a location in the least invasive manner possible. Using it, I want to experience this land called Portugal and hear the stories of the people who occupy it,” he says brightly to the smitten group during our van ride from Lisbon to Castelo Novo. But most of time, Gary’s nose is planted in an array of cycling paraphernalia. You quickly get a sense that he just can’t get enough of his sport. Although he now concedes that when he eyes Gary Fisher on almost everything we are wearing and riding on it’s become a third person. 

The 500-kilometre contiguous Grande Rota das Aldeias Históricas (The Grand Route of Historical Villages) was routed using a series of farm dirt roads, roman cobblestone paths and thorny foot trails to connect twelve 12^th century historical villages in rugged central Portugal. Call it an attempt to draw some of the adventure minded away from the country’s well-trodden natural emblem – its southern beaches. I, along with Fisher and a dozen other fat-tire aficionados are here to experience why this circuit is becoming one of Europe’s epic multi-day mountain bike circuits.

Despite an obnoxious sun, ornery mutts and demanding terrain with more ups and downs than a ‘80s guitar solo, our biggest nemesis is thorns. There a many, and, in turn, many flats. After his fourth limp tire in as many hours, Paolo Sangregorio, a 41-year-old angular graphic artist from Sweden, seems keen on tossing his bike over the Meimoa dam. In the ninety or so kilometers of dusty track between Sortelha, another fine example of an ancient, castle-adorned hilltop village towering above golden plains, I’ve, sigh, caught up to Paola in the flat department There’s little pouting though as the trail is becoming increasingly tantamount to mountain biking utopia. I’m wending through a big, untamed mural dotted with high peaks and lazy rivers.

Equally cheerful is Gary, who today, riding like Bugs Bunny on a latte binge, already crested the summit to Almeida and has been sipping Super Bock’s for hours. Breathless, I inquire whether he explored this 18^th-century stronghold within towering walls built to fend off the Spanish. “Nah, just been chilling,” he responds, revealing his relaxed ways that are quickly winning over his travel companions and the Portuguese alike.

Advancing to the South, the Grande Rota takes us through a central plateau and the rough grounds of Serra da Estrela Natural Park where Iberian wall lizards, Tawny owls and the occasional wolf mingle in the country’s largest mountain range. We ride through central Portugal villages like Moreirinhas, Carrapichana, Venda do Cepo, and finally, after a day with 1300 feet of lose dirt climbing, followed by an 1800 foot mind-blowing descent through green Muxagata valley and another heart-pounding 1300 foot ascent of a boulder-strewn Roman path, a weary spandex-clad group pulls into Linhares da Beira.

Once again, Gary is already there, ale in hand. If our faces weren’t painted by signs of exhaustion perhaps you would see indications of disappointment as many of us thought this would be a cozy pedal through the countryside while chatting with the grand daddy of mountain biking. Instead it’s turning into a seemingly Sisyphean effort just to keep on his back tire.

“I haven’t been training as much as usual so this is good practice for me.”

He’s 57. I’m 33. So that comment leaves me resentfully humbled. During each day’s ride, though, Fisher does his best to restrain his pedal stroke in the name of conversation and plain decency.

 Eighty kilometres from Linhares is our terminus for day seven: Piódão. And, being nestled in the middle of three mountain ranges, there will be more climbing. Indeed, the first 10-kilometres of this atypical leaden skied morning are just that. At times the sand is six inches deep making pedaling exhausting. Passing by wolfram mines employed by the British during the Second World War, I notice even Gary is struggling. As I alight from my bike to snap a picture of him laggardly riding by he announces “this is what it’s all about,” trying to keep his game face on.

I’ve come to anticipate riding through these aged villages without much fanfare. It seems the young and ambitious have vacated the countryside seeking more prosperous fortunes in the country’s capital. This has left only hard-as-nail seniors in this hardscrabble land to rise against the pace of the modern world. I wonder what will become of Linhares and other hamlets strewn across the central Portugal hills when they pass away. For now, it’s wonderful to find spots unbent by tourism.

Leaving Piódão, a particularly romantic village with brown slate homes meshed into the mountain, I conclude that with 90-kilometres and 10,000 feet of climbing among ridges and valleys, this will be one of my most harrowing pedals. A fitful sleep occurred worrying about failed ascents, battered body parts and an unheroic van ride back to the start line. But these concerns do not come to fruition. Somehow, like some sort of medieval fairy tale, I arrive back at Castelo Novo unscathed and pumped to do more. As if pedaling in the dirt among a sea of varicolored misty mountains never really happened today. While not always the reality during these past eight days, I stand here not with unalloyed relief that it’s over, but heavy-hearted to be unclipping for the last time in this land of gentle ways.

That night while sipping port, sending copious amounts of salted cod and chouriço sausage down the gullet and sharing harrowing experiences with my new friends, Gary stands and joyfully toasts his fellow adventurers. “To those who took on this challenge and kicked it in the ass.” Challenge, yes.  Kicking it in the ass? Often, it was the other way around.