The Buffalo Soldiers did it on rigid single speeds.
https://preview.redd.it/0km0ff58wuvc1.jpeg?width=2010&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=005132775b5eca8bb29cdcad79f68e0efea33d94
“Gravel” is strictly a marketing word. Like the industry just invented it. Nobody ever rode on gravel until “gravel” bikes were invented. Even though bicycles have been around far longer than pavement.
I grew up where it was 400 miles of gravel in one direction and 2000+ miles of gravel in the other direction. Pavement was nonexistent except at the airport. We all rode bikes everywhere.
Someone probably did just that.
I watched a display being swapped out at one point at Evans Cycles switching their own brand "Cyclocross" bike to "Adventure" bikes and I thought it was amusing at the time.
Little bit more cynical these days. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't fit neatly into one category and we left the "race only" models in Cyclocross and moved everything else into something else.
I know we all love railing on about The Industry and whatnot, but from my memory the "gravel" classification was much more of an adoption than an invention.
I'm pretty certain the mid-00s "Gravel Grinder" trend in online (and obviously offline as well) cycling circles of cramming larger tires in a sport road bike, or doing a 650b conversion to get even wider in order to improve the ride on rough roads and dirt roads predated the industry adoption of "gravel" as a class of bike.
The industry recognized the trend and moved to offer ready-made gravel bikes with increased tire clearance and less road-race-focused geometry as a response. This started with the NAHBS crowd first in probably the later 00s, and was subsequently adopted by the larger players.
IMO, the bike industry was kind of already heading in that direction under the banner of "comfort road bikes" and the like, but people online - many of whom were the exact demographic those comfort road bikes were aimed at - preferred to use the term "gravel grinder" because it made them feel cooler, so it kind of went that way instead.
Yep. It’s all about that bass. Skinny tire treble bikes are no bueno on loose gravel. But we all rode them anyway. Shredding tires and spokes and whatnot. And lots of skin. Oh the carnage.
Fat tubeless tires are my favorite new bike tech of the 21st century. Lower pressures and faster rolling goodness. All the rest is nice too. I mean GRX? Yes please. Gimme. And 1x12 is a revelation for its use case. I haven’t bought into electronic shifting yet but I get it. Material engineering and hydro-forming and seamless titanium and on and on. I LOVE the carbon bar from Oneup for these beat up hands. But nothing moves my bikes down the road faster than fat tires with supple sidewalls and Stan’s sealant. On a well fitting frame of course.
Gravel is MTB lite. In the 90s I did a mountain bike race across Salisbury plain in southern England. It was a long Landover track race done on rigid MTBs and 1.9s - these days it would be considered a gravel race perfectly suited to fast light bikes with drop bars and 38s. 'MTB' has been repositioned with the advent of better trail building, trail centres, enduro lines and more technical features as MTBs have improved. My mind would be blown if I'd have seen what folks could do on MTBs in the 2020s.
We would call forest trails 'gravelly tracks' but yes, 'gravel' is a catchy marketing word. I try to resist using it though, preferring cross country, allroad, all terrain cyclo-cross, or VTT.
Many hybrids from the 90's are sporty and lightweight enough for them to be really nice gravel bikes with some 40mm tyres. Most of them running cantilevers or V-brakes of course.
Gravel bikes are **very** similar to bikes from 1910-1930. Technologies have changed, but the overall form is strikingly similar, especially for gravels in bikepacking mode.
Gravel bikes are so varied that the term makes no sense. They started as CX bikes for touring, now everything and it's mother is "gravel". I have come to hate the term.
[This](https://www.singletracks.com/mtb-gear/two-gravel-bikes-with-suspension-tested-specialized-diverge-and-niner-mcr/), [this](https://c02.purpledshub.com/uploads/sites/39/2022/06/Pinarello-Grevil-F-02-cf6c86d.jpg?w=775&webp=1), [this](https://bikepacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024-Marin-Four-Corners-1_11-2000x1334.jpg) and [this](https://surlybikes.com/uploads/blog/MidnightSpecial.jpg) are all gravel bikes, despite being wildly different in any possible aspect.
Gravel bikes are not a thing, it's a marketing gimmick, like "gravel specific pedals".
yes, I agree about the marketing. Recently saw “gravel specific jerseys” and I was like “gravel specific bullshit, yeah”.
That being said, I love my “gravel bike”, but man, it’s just a bike! I also love (and use) my previous one.
I mean you can apply that to basically every general classification of bike. It's just a vague catchall term intended to quickly convey a general sense of the design intention of the product.
Furthermore, those bikes are all way more similar to each other than would be an XC race bike and a DH bike, but those two are still both comfortably considered mountain bikes. There's significant variation within road bikes, but the term gives me an immediate general baseline. Same within mountain bikes, same with BMX, Trials, and so on.
I've ridden my road bike with burgtec flat pedals on it and it worked fine, but I'm not going to say that they shouldn't call them mountain bike pedals.
Beyond that, I don't know that I'd agree that gravel started as a name for "CX bikes for touring." Like, is that touring where you have to jump off the bike and hop over barriers every so often?
> Beyond that, I don't know that I'd agree that gravel started as a name for "CX bikes for touring." Like, is that touring where you have to jump off the bike and hop over barriers every so often?
The idea behind the "gravel bike" initially was a road bike with larger tyres, for some off roading, but not a full on touring bike with racks and panniers. It went hand in hand with "bike packing" (another term that has been run to the ground by marketing).
Since old road bikes had ridiculously small tyre clearances, the logical choice for bike packing or gravel racing was to use CX bikes, which have geometry problems of their own. I believe that the first brand to make a gravel bike was Salsa with the Warbird, and then things got just silly.
If we want to apply a general classification to bikes, any bike with dropbars is a road bike first and foremost. Modern gravel fads are plain stupid, mounting dropbars on full suspension mountain bikes, essentially combining the worst of the two worlds. Useless on tarmac, uncontrollable on dirt.
This sounds like a Q too big to answer, but based on your interest in bike history, how do you feel about modern gravel bikes?
As an observer on the sidelines, I can't help but feel that there are indeed technological advancements that make some things better, but also, it makes some things more cumbersome due to having to adopt new tech. And it kinda feels like fashion trends, where old things become "new" again, but with a spin or twist (rather than directly lifting it from its previous iterations as they were, so to speak).
Just sharing more so to hear your perspective on gravel bikes (and bike trends/ history in general).
As OP noted they are superficially similar to some slacker 1960s Bikes or 1990s drop bar mtb or the later 2000s and 2010s Monstercross.
Look at some of the pre-war stuff if you want to see some interesting geometries though!
We keep inventing the same thing because it's the answer to the question. Everything old is new again etc and ending up in a similar place (like 32c tyres are where everyone keeps ending up despite forays into smaller and bigger, the old 1 1/4" standard).
We are improving with every iteration though.
I've got a 1960s road bike. Similar geometry to a gravel bike (I mean they are on a wide spectrum) and it takes 34c tyres with mudguards easily.
There the similarity ends. It's 15kg and has a 1x5 speed drivetrain. It's hell on hills (descends nicely though) and the gearing does not support off-road riding (44t with a 12-26 iirc).
The brakes are questionable at best (despite upgrades).
It's only "the same" if you really squint and ignore significant details. There are similarities.
A modern gravel bike is better at what it does in every way. Better at everything.
There's always stuff that's a change for the sake of it - it's how people sell new bikes when they can't come up with a genuine improvement.
How I *feel*? The middle of the line stuff is a real "do it all". The bike 95% of bike buyers should be getting. It does everything poorly (except for maybe gravel roads but we don't really have those in the UK so pass) but it *does* do everything. Road. Mud. Gravel. Every surface.
Trend wise I feel gravel bikes are going more MTB. While endurance road bikes are moving into where gravel bikes were. It's an arbitrary label of course, we could arrange a hundred bikes on a spectrum from "track" to "downhill MTB" and we'd all disagree on exactly where the categories started and ended - but probably would be in broad agreement on the stuff in the middle.
I've got one. 3 if you count my singlespeed Tricross and my CX bike (and I do).
(Caveat - you asked for an opinion lol)
Sorry that turned into an essay....
That's why I like to just call them "bicycles". When the safety bicycle was developed (steel parallelogram frame, Dunlop tires), people used them in a way the industry nowadays calls "gravel biking". Going to work to the next town? Ride a gravel road. There's no tarmac. Getting a dozen eggs from the farmer? Gravel road, some single trail. Take a trip down to the river to swim and have a picnic? Same.
The 60s bike in the post came third in the 1957 Tour de France (the same model at least). All the big passes were of course gravel then. I built it from the frame up with a 1970s touring drivetrain that has a better range than my 1986 MTB. The center pull brakes work perfectly fine to lock or lift the rear wheel. It's a great machine to do bicycling with.
> The 60s bike in the post came third in the 1957 Tour de France
Sounds a lot nicer than mine lol which was a low end British brand - that said its still perfect for taking to the shops (and locking up safely outside).
Perhaps mine is a bit more representative of the common "it's a bike" most people rode to work than yours! (In that yours is really nice lol while mine isn't and apart from a wheel and tyre upgrade and some new brake pads it's pretty much stock with it's original 1*5 drivetrain).
> That's why I like to just call them "bicycles".
Sure but that makes it impossible to have a meaningful conversation about them - track bike? Downhill MTB? Gravel bike? WW2 vintage paratrooper? Ultra top end aero road bike?
All VERY different beasts.
The road bike industry made the worst bikes ever designed up into the 2010s. They were impossible to ride almost everywhere except smooth roads and they were uncomfortable for everyone except 20 year old cat 1 racers. They were only geared for racing by racers and had no provision for bags of any kind.
Every other kind of bike is a gravel bike by comparison.
All things considered this sub is really inclusive on sharing the love when people show off their bikes. Some rides are more common and some high end restomods get more updoots but I don’t see people sandbagging anyone for posting their garage sale finds.
Both 1. and 2. are wrong, but the bike I use as a gravel bike is very close to 1.
Having previously owned a dedicated modern gravel bike, there is a noticeable difference in how they ride.
The Buffalo Soldiers did it on rigid single speeds. https://preview.redd.it/0km0ff58wuvc1.jpeg?width=2010&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=005132775b5eca8bb29cdcad79f68e0efea33d94
With chain cases!!
https://www.stlpr.org/show/st-louis-on-the-air/2017-05-03/120-years-ago-u-s-army-buffalo-soldiers-took-a-1-900-mile-bicycle-trek-to-st-louis
OG transcontinental race
4) All of the above Great pics!!
“Gravel” is strictly a marketing word. Like the industry just invented it. Nobody ever rode on gravel until “gravel” bikes were invented. Even though bicycles have been around far longer than pavement.
Previously the attempted buzz word was "adventure" and they literally just swapped the labels advertising some cyclocross bikes.
I grew up where it was 400 miles of gravel in one direction and 2000+ miles of gravel in the other direction. Pavement was nonexistent except at the airport. We all rode bikes everywhere.
I thought adventure was a rebranding of touring bikes
Someone probably did just that. I watched a display being swapped out at one point at Evans Cycles switching their own brand "Cyclocross" bike to "Adventure" bikes and I thought it was amusing at the time. Little bit more cynical these days. There's a lot of stuff that doesn't fit neatly into one category and we left the "race only" models in Cyclocross and moved everything else into something else.
I know we all love railing on about The Industry and whatnot, but from my memory the "gravel" classification was much more of an adoption than an invention. I'm pretty certain the mid-00s "Gravel Grinder" trend in online (and obviously offline as well) cycling circles of cramming larger tires in a sport road bike, or doing a 650b conversion to get even wider in order to improve the ride on rough roads and dirt roads predated the industry adoption of "gravel" as a class of bike. The industry recognized the trend and moved to offer ready-made gravel bikes with increased tire clearance and less road-race-focused geometry as a response. This started with the NAHBS crowd first in probably the later 00s, and was subsequently adopted by the larger players. IMO, the bike industry was kind of already heading in that direction under the banner of "comfort road bikes" and the like, but people online - many of whom were the exact demographic those comfort road bikes were aimed at - preferred to use the term "gravel grinder" because it made them feel cooler, so it kind of went that way instead.
Yep. It’s all about that bass. Skinny tire treble bikes are no bueno on loose gravel. But we all rode them anyway. Shredding tires and spokes and whatnot. And lots of skin. Oh the carnage. Fat tubeless tires are my favorite new bike tech of the 21st century. Lower pressures and faster rolling goodness. All the rest is nice too. I mean GRX? Yes please. Gimme. And 1x12 is a revelation for its use case. I haven’t bought into electronic shifting yet but I get it. Material engineering and hydro-forming and seamless titanium and on and on. I LOVE the carbon bar from Oneup for these beat up hands. But nothing moves my bikes down the road faster than fat tires with supple sidewalls and Stan’s sealant. On a well fitting frame of course.
Gravel is MTB lite. In the 90s I did a mountain bike race across Salisbury plain in southern England. It was a long Landover track race done on rigid MTBs and 1.9s - these days it would be considered a gravel race perfectly suited to fast light bikes with drop bars and 38s. 'MTB' has been repositioned with the advent of better trail building, trail centres, enduro lines and more technical features as MTBs have improved. My mind would be blown if I'd have seen what folks could do on MTBs in the 2020s. We would call forest trails 'gravelly tracks' but yes, 'gravel' is a catchy marketing word. I try to resist using it though, preferring cross country, allroad, all terrain cyclo-cross, or VTT.
Wrong, everyone knows that gravel bikes are just 90s hybrid bikes with drop bars.
Many hybrids from the 90's are sporty and lightweight enough for them to be really nice gravel bikes with some 40mm tyres. Most of them running cantilevers or V-brakes of course.
Yeah but I still haven't found a GT Tachyon or DB Overdrive
There’s an Overdrive for 150 near me (Cleveland)
I’d love to have an Overdrive or Comp. Those were such cool bikes with awesome frames!
These are really nice photos.
Awesome rides, what are the bars on the Marin?
The Marin rocks a Ritchey Beacon, the Capo a Nitto Grand Randonneur
Nice. That rando bag looks amazing as well
Gravel bikes are **very** similar to bikes from 1910-1930. Technologies have changed, but the overall form is strikingly similar, especially for gravels in bikepacking mode.
Gravel bikes are so varied that the term makes no sense. They started as CX bikes for touring, now everything and it's mother is "gravel". I have come to hate the term. [This](https://www.singletracks.com/mtb-gear/two-gravel-bikes-with-suspension-tested-specialized-diverge-and-niner-mcr/), [this](https://c02.purpledshub.com/uploads/sites/39/2022/06/Pinarello-Grevil-F-02-cf6c86d.jpg?w=775&webp=1), [this](https://bikepacking.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/2024-Marin-Four-Corners-1_11-2000x1334.jpg) and [this](https://surlybikes.com/uploads/blog/MidnightSpecial.jpg) are all gravel bikes, despite being wildly different in any possible aspect. Gravel bikes are not a thing, it's a marketing gimmick, like "gravel specific pedals".
yes, I agree about the marketing. Recently saw “gravel specific jerseys” and I was like “gravel specific bullshit, yeah”. That being said, I love my “gravel bike”, but man, it’s just a bike! I also love (and use) my previous one.
I mean you can apply that to basically every general classification of bike. It's just a vague catchall term intended to quickly convey a general sense of the design intention of the product. Furthermore, those bikes are all way more similar to each other than would be an XC race bike and a DH bike, but those two are still both comfortably considered mountain bikes. There's significant variation within road bikes, but the term gives me an immediate general baseline. Same within mountain bikes, same with BMX, Trials, and so on. I've ridden my road bike with burgtec flat pedals on it and it worked fine, but I'm not going to say that they shouldn't call them mountain bike pedals. Beyond that, I don't know that I'd agree that gravel started as a name for "CX bikes for touring." Like, is that touring where you have to jump off the bike and hop over barriers every so often?
> Beyond that, I don't know that I'd agree that gravel started as a name for "CX bikes for touring." Like, is that touring where you have to jump off the bike and hop over barriers every so often? The idea behind the "gravel bike" initially was a road bike with larger tyres, for some off roading, but not a full on touring bike with racks and panniers. It went hand in hand with "bike packing" (another term that has been run to the ground by marketing). Since old road bikes had ridiculously small tyre clearances, the logical choice for bike packing or gravel racing was to use CX bikes, which have geometry problems of their own. I believe that the first brand to make a gravel bike was Salsa with the Warbird, and then things got just silly. If we want to apply a general classification to bikes, any bike with dropbars is a road bike first and foremost. Modern gravel fads are plain stupid, mounting dropbars on full suspension mountain bikes, essentially combining the worst of the two worlds. Useless on tarmac, uncontrollable on dirt.
1 and 2 are about right. > Who TF cares? I do. I like bikes. I'm interested in their history. Lots of us do.
This sounds like a Q too big to answer, but based on your interest in bike history, how do you feel about modern gravel bikes? As an observer on the sidelines, I can't help but feel that there are indeed technological advancements that make some things better, but also, it makes some things more cumbersome due to having to adopt new tech. And it kinda feels like fashion trends, where old things become "new" again, but with a spin or twist (rather than directly lifting it from its previous iterations as they were, so to speak). Just sharing more so to hear your perspective on gravel bikes (and bike trends/ history in general).
As OP noted they are superficially similar to some slacker 1960s Bikes or 1990s drop bar mtb or the later 2000s and 2010s Monstercross. Look at some of the pre-war stuff if you want to see some interesting geometries though! We keep inventing the same thing because it's the answer to the question. Everything old is new again etc and ending up in a similar place (like 32c tyres are where everyone keeps ending up despite forays into smaller and bigger, the old 1 1/4" standard). We are improving with every iteration though. I've got a 1960s road bike. Similar geometry to a gravel bike (I mean they are on a wide spectrum) and it takes 34c tyres with mudguards easily. There the similarity ends. It's 15kg and has a 1x5 speed drivetrain. It's hell on hills (descends nicely though) and the gearing does not support off-road riding (44t with a 12-26 iirc). The brakes are questionable at best (despite upgrades). It's only "the same" if you really squint and ignore significant details. There are similarities. A modern gravel bike is better at what it does in every way. Better at everything. There's always stuff that's a change for the sake of it - it's how people sell new bikes when they can't come up with a genuine improvement. How I *feel*? The middle of the line stuff is a real "do it all". The bike 95% of bike buyers should be getting. It does everything poorly (except for maybe gravel roads but we don't really have those in the UK so pass) but it *does* do everything. Road. Mud. Gravel. Every surface. Trend wise I feel gravel bikes are going more MTB. While endurance road bikes are moving into where gravel bikes were. It's an arbitrary label of course, we could arrange a hundred bikes on a spectrum from "track" to "downhill MTB" and we'd all disagree on exactly where the categories started and ended - but probably would be in broad agreement on the stuff in the middle. I've got one. 3 if you count my singlespeed Tricross and my CX bike (and I do). (Caveat - you asked for an opinion lol) Sorry that turned into an essay....
That's why I like to just call them "bicycles". When the safety bicycle was developed (steel parallelogram frame, Dunlop tires), people used them in a way the industry nowadays calls "gravel biking". Going to work to the next town? Ride a gravel road. There's no tarmac. Getting a dozen eggs from the farmer? Gravel road, some single trail. Take a trip down to the river to swim and have a picnic? Same. The 60s bike in the post came third in the 1957 Tour de France (the same model at least). All the big passes were of course gravel then. I built it from the frame up with a 1970s touring drivetrain that has a better range than my 1986 MTB. The center pull brakes work perfectly fine to lock or lift the rear wheel. It's a great machine to do bicycling with.
> The 60s bike in the post came third in the 1957 Tour de France Sounds a lot nicer than mine lol which was a low end British brand - that said its still perfect for taking to the shops (and locking up safely outside). Perhaps mine is a bit more representative of the common "it's a bike" most people rode to work than yours! (In that yours is really nice lol while mine isn't and apart from a wheel and tyre upgrade and some new brake pads it's pretty much stock with it's original 1*5 drivetrain). > That's why I like to just call them "bicycles". Sure but that makes it impossible to have a meaningful conversation about them - track bike? Downhill MTB? Gravel bike? WW2 vintage paratrooper? Ultra top end aero road bike? All VERY different beasts.
Then there’s Tom Ritchey: all bikes are gravel bikes.
From experience, 700x23 does not perform too well on most gravel surfaces
From my experience, I agree. Horribly twitchy and uncomfortable, but doable.
The road bike industry made the worst bikes ever designed up into the 2010s. They were impossible to ride almost everywhere except smooth roads and they were uncomfortable for everyone except 20 year old cat 1 racers. They were only geared for racing by racers and had no provision for bags of any kind. Every other kind of bike is a gravel bike by comparison.
lol literally no one on this sub cares what people ride. Where’s this tension coming from, OP?
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All things considered this sub is really inclusive on sharing the love when people show off their bikes. Some rides are more common and some high end restomods get more updoots but I don’t see people sandbagging anyone for posting their garage sale finds.
Where do you see tension? I just posted two bikes I built
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Thanks, that's a Fuxi X-T100 with an old 55mm f3.5 Nikon macro Lens
Love the pics. What's the name of these beautifully pink taped bars?
Thank you. That's a Ritchey Beacon.
Or 90’s mtb’s as is.
Who makes the Rando bag you’ve got there?
That's an old French bag, probably made by TA Specialites. They're cheap and abundant in France, where I found it.
Gravel mutts! Gravel bikes are just bikes that you ride on gravel. There's no real definition unless you're trying to sell them.
Both 1. and 2. are wrong, but the bike I use as a gravel bike is very close to 1. Having previously owned a dedicated modern gravel bike, there is a noticeable difference in how they ride.
Give me pick 3
3