Promoter of the Repack race, publisher of the first mountain bike magazine Fat Tire Flyer, founder of MountainBikes with Gary Fisher and Tom Ritchey: These are just a few of Charlie Kelly's stations.

Currently, Charlie Kelly's archive is in a storage box - and the cardboard boxes are stacked with product catalogs, newsletters from MTB clubs, newspaper articles about mountain biking, almost all issues of almost every MTB magazine published in the USA - and the rest of the world - up to 1992, rankings from early MTB races, photo collections and much more.

The collection also includes the collections that Joe Breeze, Gary Fisher and other mountain bike luminaries passed on to Kelly. There are particularly many documents from the 1980s - the time when mountain biking exploded in popularity in the USA.

From the cardboard box to the web

To ensure that this treasure trove of information about the early days of the mountain bike does not disappear, Rob Korotky, Charlie Kelly and Tommy Breeze have set themselves the task of digitally recording the collection and making the documents accessible via a website. A Kickstarter campaign is currently underway to raise funds for the complex project.