It was all about the potholes.

“All these streets had potholes in them,” recalled Kay Peterson Cook of Crested Butte in the mid-1970s, because most of the town’s streets weren’t paved yet. “And if you tried to drive through town, maneuvering around the potholes took forever.’

So a bunch of guys, including Kay’s boyfriend Don Cook, would get old paperboy bikes from Denver, take the fenders off and put ape hanger handlebars on them.

“You could maneuver around a pothole on a bike a lot easier than you could in a car,” she observed.

And then the guys started venturing out a little bit more, asking someone with a pickup truck to take them up to Paradise Divide so they could ride their Franken-Schwinns downhill back into town.

The whole thing really took off, though, after a bunch of yahoos from Aspen rode over Pearl Pass into Crested Butte on motorcycles in 1976 and tried to steal their women at the Grubstake Bar.

“And so these guys go, ‘Screw those Aspen guys, we’re going to get even with them,’” noted Peterson Cook. “’We’re going to ride our bikes, our klunker one-speed coaster brake bikes to Aspen and we’re going to steal all the women in Aspen.’”

On the way over the 12,723-foot Pearl Pass, the riders consumed one keg of beer, three bottles of Schnapps, 2 gallons of wine, and 3 bottles of champagne, according to an article in the Crested Butte Pilot that memorialized the whole thing. On the way down the paint-shaking wagon road, handlebars came off, tires popped and some bikes just disintegrated. But after two days and multiple repairs, the Grubstake Gang finally made it to the Hotel Jerome.

The stealing of Aspen’s gals was apparently less successful than the ride itself.

And thus the global mountain biking industry, now worth $12.7 billion, was born — of potholes and romantic revenge.

“Yeah, it was about stealing women and having some kind of Crested Butte bravado showing up over in Aspen,” Peterson Cook confirmed.

A little while later, some guys named Gary Fisher, Charlie Kelley and Joe Breeze, who had been playing around with their own early versions of balloon-tire klunkers in Marin County, read about the Pearl Pass ride and called up the Grubstake. They wanted to come ride the pass, too.

In 1978, they showed up on shiny new bikes with frames built for dirt that were equipped with hardy touring and motorcycle components.

They had the technology, Crested Butte had the terrain. Soon enough, this California-Crested Butte connection spawned a rich cross-pollinization of design tinkering, modification and proliferating gears until the modern-day mountain bike was forged. Fisher and Breeze went on to create the first commercial mountain bike brands. 

“So here’s this sport of mountain biking that is just getting momentum, and Crested Butte became the first mountain biking destination,” said Peterson Cook. Pearl Pass became the proving ground for all sorts of innovation.

“That summer of 1980, Don built us both mountain bikes,” said Kay. That was the summer he built his first singletrack trail as well.

Later, he built an ultralight so that he could fly around and map out all the old CCC trails and game trails to link them together in a 360-degree network of singletrack all around Crested Butte. Today, Gunnison County has over 800 miles of singletrack.

“We didn’t even know what we were creating,” said Peterson Cook. “Then it got bigger and bigger and bigger.”

Fifteen riders summited Pearl Pass in ’78, nearly a hundred in 1980, and by 1983, 300 riders came, including nearly all the well-known mountain bike pioneers in the country.

A whole slew of firsts followed in Crested Butte. First Fat Tire Bike Week. First singletrack park. First mountain bike stage race. First advocacy group for mountain biking, directed by Kay for 10 years. First mountain bike shop in Colorado, started by Don and Steve Cook. First Mountain Bike Hall of Fame, started by Kay and Don Cook, who finally tied the knot after dating for 18 years.

When the Fat Tire fest took off, Crested Butte became the Woodstock of mountain biking.

“It morphed and grew and it morphed and grew again and it became the epicenter of the world for mountain biking,” Don said in the film “Born From Junk: The Outlaw Origins of Mountain Biking.”

The Pearl Pass race continues this September in its 49th iteration, but it will be preceded, alas, by a memorial service for founding father Don.

He died of a coronary incident on June 24 at age 66 while riding his modified Lenz Leviathan on one of the trails he’d created himself.

Don was not just a mountain biking pioneer, though.

“There were so many facets where Don interacted with the community,” recalled Kay. He also was an expert backcountry skier, restaurant owner, bike and ski shop owner, bus driver and dancer. “He was many things to Crested Butte. And he always rode his bike around town and he always had a smile on his face.”

A friend put it this way on Facebook: “Don was the real deal of Crested Butte.”

“He danced through the mountains on bikes and skis, had a beautiful wife, a house in town … what more could a guy need? I was reminded last night that it’s not how many years you live but how you live the years you’re here,” Dave Bluestein wrote in a Facebook post.

In the end, Don believed the bike was “the noblest invention.”

“We got to be part of something that was so special,” Kay reminisced. “It was like a mustard seed that grew into something so enormous and something I feel so privileged to be a part of.”

As the narrator in “Born From Junk” put it: “We were just a bunch of outlaws with too much time on our hands and a couple million acres of wild country to explore. We set the wheels in motion without any plan or purpose at all.”

And when his big heart finally gave out, “Donnie was doing what he loved … riding in our beautiful mountains,” Kay wrote in a memorial. “And now he’s crossed over the rainbow. His angels took him to the big single-track in the sky.”