Our December 2000 issue featured Jill Hamilton test-riding a KHS FXT Pro bike, which we reviewed in that issue. Jill Hamilton was one of our top test riders back then. She later ended up marrying Dean Bradley, who was the editor of Mountain Bike Action’s very first issue in July 1986.
Today, Dean and Jill live in Idaho together, and they’re both still riding mountain bikes. Jill has even been racing in some events.
Dean used to race in a lot of events in the early days of our sport, and you can still find his name in some of the race results in our older issues. More recently, Dean has even sent us some photos of Jill riding and racing in the last few years, and we’ve used some of those photos in our “Trail Mix” section of Mountain Bike Action.
By the way, if you’ve got some good photos of yourself, your friends, family members, or anybody else on the trails, and you want to see them in the magazine, please send them to [email protected] along with a few words about the people and places in the pictures. We pick our favorite reader photos for the magazine each month and put them in our “Trail Mix” section of MBA.
If you’ve got some old back issues of Mountain Bike Action, you might want to let your family know that they could be worth some money. One of our friends has been collecting copies of MBA for over 34 years, and he’s saved almost every issue. He occasionally goes on eBay to see if he can find any of the ones that he’s still missing. Out of roughly 470 issues of MBA that have been printed so far, our friend is only missing 27 issues to complete his collection. The latest issue that he added to his collection was one from 1988, and he had to pay $50 to buy that one copy on eBay, and it wasn’t even in great shape. Most of the issues that he’s still missing are from the years 1986 through 1989. If you have any of those issues that you’d like to sell, send an email to [email protected], and John will let his friend know about them.
Here’s the cover of the first issue of Mountain Bike Action from July of 1986:
By the way, if you want to see more of that first issue and read about how Dean Bradley wrote, photographed and edited that first issue of Mountain Bike Action, check out two-part interview we did with Dean on that subject several years ago: Here’s the first part of the interview: And here’s the second part: