charlie-kelly

Words and photos by Rob Korotky It’s Oct. 21, 2016, and a beautiful autumn morning in Marin County, California. A group of 12 guys with their bikes mill around under a canopy of trees at the end of a dirt fire road in the hills above Fairfax. A few minutes ago, the last rider skidded ...

VeloPress is the leading cycling publisher and is giving away three of its most popular books. From the Marin Headlands to Morocco, travel through amazing stories from the earliest days of mountain biking in Charlie Kelly’s “Fat Tire Flyer.” In Rebecca Rusch’s “Rusch to Glory,” written by the Queen of Pain herself, read how one woman went from ...

Editor’s note: Charlie Kelly’s Fat Tire Flyer began in 1980. It is considered the first ever mountain bike publication and until 1987 it was the only one. Kelly wrote most of the copy himself using different names, took photos, did the layouts, edited submissions, handled publishing and took care of the mailing list. The magazine closed ...

In the early years of Dirt Rag, I got a package from some guy out west, a guy by the name of Charlie Kelly. In the package were some magazines. Fat Tire Flyer it was called. It was the first MTB magazine, published from 1980 to 87. Charlie had come across a copy of Dirt ...

Charlie Kelly’s brother Jim wrote a series of poems about their mountain bike adventures. He is currently working on turning this series into a publication called “The Bike Cycle.” Here is one of the poems, titled “Repack,” recounting the infamous Repack Downhill races.  Riding a bike on the street isn’t hard, Up on the sidewalk, around ...