Most of my life, I’ve lived in places with good mountain biking—the Adirondacks, Lake Tahoe, Santa Barbara, even my hometown in southern Connecticut—so it was with some trepidation that I moved to Manhattan. The name itself may mean “island of hills,” but the highest point I could find was paved, and a mere 265 feet above sea level.
So it seemed I would need new ways to recreate. But from the first afternoon that I mounted my silver, rock-scarred Sedona Giant and wobbled into the street, I was struck by a possibility: might there be a radical, urban counterpart to vertiginous heights, tree-laden steeps, and trails of soil and stone?
