The Rachel Dolezal saga kind of reminds me of Neil Murdoch.

There’s only one paved road into crested Butte, Colorado — Route 135, a meandering two-laner that winds up from Gunnison through wildflower meadows and jittery stands of aspen — and the locals have always liked it that way. A quiet mining town built tight against the Elk Mountains, it has long been a place where people with checkered pasts came to hide out, to hang low, to start over, no questions asked.

The prospect of starting over is apparently what lured Pennsylvanian Neil Murdoch up Route 135 in the winter of 1974. A bright, genial man of restless energy, Murdoch, who was then 34, would play a pivotal role in birthing the sport that’s now the town religion: mountain biking. In the mid-70s he started attaching cannibalized parts to battered Schwinn frames and field-testing the results on the old cow paths braiding through the Elk Mountains. Before he knew it, he’d become one of the entrepreneurial forefathers of the fat-tire revolution by opening what is generally considered the second mountain-bike shop in the nation, Bicycles Etcetera. Then, in 1982, he started Crested Butte’s annual Fat Tire Bike Week, which would ultimately become one of the country’s largest mountain-bike festivals.

Read the whole thing, it’s a fascinating piece. What does a mountain biking pioneer do when his cocaine smuggling past finally catches up to him? He rides like hell.