Instead of a bridge, there was a very wide, real muddy gap with a fair size stream running down the middle of it.  I stood at the precipice and looked at my shoes.  They are Sidi shoes and they’re made of something called Lorica, which I think translates from Italian to something like, not damageable by water or mud.  So I slung the Yellow Roadie over my shoulder and stepped over the edge.  I probably looked a lot like Jobst with my yellow bike over my shoulder.  

    I don’t have the bald spot yet and I was wearing a brown jersey.  And the slope was muddy, not rocky, but it was rocky at the bottom, where the creek was, and I dug my heals in as I went down the slope so I wouldn’t slide off into those rocks below.  I didn’t want to break my bicycle.  The creek looked about knee deep and twenty or twenty-five feet wide.  It was no sweat and the climb up to the road on the other side was easy.

    If you click on the Jobst Ride above, you should find 100 pictures of Jobst Rides.  If you look at them, you’ll see that washed out roads and missing bridges were part of the plan for those rides.  He rode on roads most of the time, I’m sure of that, but I heard Tom Ritchey say that Jobst Rides were about 150 miles long with half of that being off road and that Tom and the other Northern California road racers who joined them did so knowing they would get a workout.  Oh, he also pointed out that Jobst was about 45 then.  He must be in his 70’s now and I still see pictures of him out riding in the mountains.

    Jobst is one of those guys who doesn’t go for the let’s agree to disagree mantra.  Neither do I.  That retort is usually used by the fellow who’s wrong and won’t admit it.  Jobst is sure he’s right most of the time and he probably is.  He’s kind of a Sheldon Brown with an attitude.  How ever you feel about Jobst’s attitude, he’s been riding heroic rides regularly since the 50’s and he’s known most of the big fellows and gals in cycling so it’s worth paying attention to him even if you don’t want to emulate him.  (In the way old days, I think he used to visit with Cinelli, DeRosa, and Masi when he went to Italy.  He was sometimes a house guest with one of those families.)

    And emulating him might not be the best plan for lots of us.  If you look at his bicycles, you’ll not see a water bottle.  He says he knows were the springs are in the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Coast Range in California, where he lives.  And there’s plenty of water in the Alps where he rode most summers for over forty years.  You’ll also note that his small chainring isn’t very small.  He says he’s ridden too long and too hard to believe he’ll hurt his knees by not keeping his cadence up.  He also isn’t a helmet fan figuring that a helmet might save a life, but probably not his.  

    Tom Ritchey said that when he started building bicycles -- he was a road racer and built road bikes before mountain bikes came along and made him famous -- Jobst kept him from getting too far out there in his design execution.  Jobst evidently didn’t hold the reigns too tightly because I’ve seen Ritchey bikes with biplane fork crowns where the tops of the blades were open to the world.  

    Well, the gone bridge got me thinking about Jobst today and that’s good.  Bikes are made for riding and they don’t necessarily need roads to do it.  Also, even though it’s been your favorite bike for twenty years that’s not a good reason not to try to jump that ditch one more time; or to try getting down that cliff.  If the bike gets broken, call your buddy the frame builder and order another one.  Bike lifetimes should be measured in miles and kicks, not in years.