Mountain Goat Bicycles

Jeff Lindsay

Lindsay started road racing as a junior in 1962, racing alongside Gary Fisher. In 1972 he built his first road frame as a school project. Friends saw it and wanted their own, and before long he was building W.J. Lindsay road bikes. We have one of those too. By the late 1970s he had gone back to his other trade, glassblowing.

Then mountain bikes showed up. At the 1981 bicycle trade show in Long Beach, only three custom mountain bikes were on display: Tom Ritchey and Gary Fisher's MountainBikes, Victor Vincente of America's Topanga, and Lindsay's. Instead of his own name, his bike carried a new one built for the dirt: Mountain Goat. Lindsay was inducted into the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in 1989.

What made a Goat a Goat

In the early years there was no such thing as a mountain bike part, so builders made do. The first Goats wore French touring cranks and tandem brakes, Japanese touring derailleurs, American hubs, motorcycle brake levers, and BMX tires. What Lindsay couldn't buy, he made.

• Fillet brazing and oval tubing. The top Goats were joined with smooth, hand-shaped brass fillets instead of lugs, often on oval tubes Lindsay sourced from Phil Wood's tandem tubing.
• The one-piece bar and stem. Early bikes came with a handlebar and stem made as a single piece, a Goat signature.
• The goat-head fork crown. Cast fork crowns carried the Mountain Goat logo worked right into the metal.
• The Uni-Stay. A wishbone rear end that arrived on the Whiskeytown Racer in 1989.
• The paint. Most classic Goat paint came from Air Art in Chico, where Russ Pickett painted, including the green-and-orange team scheme, inspired by a Forest Service firefighting plane. Later bikes often came with suspension forks painted to match, back when everyone else's were black or silver.
• The small stuff. The Hall of Fame credits Lindsay with early work on center-clamp stems and braze-ons, details that are now on almost every bike.

It was never a big operation. According to a 1987 magazine, Lindsay had built about 250 mountain frames, 100 racing frames, 75 touring frames, and a handful of tandems by that June. From 1988 his crew included a young Paul Price, who went on to found Paul Component.

The models

Mountain Goat and Deluxe1981 on

The original oval-tube Mountain Goat, which took the Deluxe name by the mid-1980s, and the one most collectors picture. Fillet brazed, usually on oval tubing, built around what Lindsay called RAD geometry: Ride All Day. A comfortable, sure-footed bike for long days in the hills, and often the canvas for the most elaborate paint.

Whiskeytown RacerAbout 1984 on

Named for the Whiskeytown Downhill, a race near Redding, the Whiskeytown Racer was lighter and quicker than the Deluxe, trading a little comfort for speed. It got the wishbone Uni-Stay rear end in 1989 and became the Goat most people raced. It's also the model First Flight brought back first.

Escape Goat1982 on

Launched in mid-1982 as the affordable Goat: round tubing instead of oval, less finish work, and an off-the-shelf fork, all meant to keep the ride at a lower price. How they were built changed over the years, from fillet brazed with the joints left unfiled to TIG welded. We have both kinds on the ceiling. A complete Escape Goat cost $812 in August 1982. Plenty of them still got the full Air Art paint treatment.

Trench Goat1988 to 1989

As imports pushed prices down, Mountain Goat answered with an imported bike of its own, built in Japan. Lindsay designed it to ride like a Goat, and it came in salmon with splatter that changed color from one side to the other, with Shimano Deore parts.

Route 661991

A flat-bar bike on 700c wheels, often built with high-end American parts or Campagnolo and selling for close to $3,000. Some consider it a forerunner of the 29er, about a decade early to the idea of big wheels off-road. All it was missing was fat tires.

The 1990s: Mudslinger, Whiskeytown FS, Joule1990s

As the sport chased lighter bikes and suspension, Mountain Goat tried a little of everything. The Mudslinger was aluminum, built from Easton ProGram tubing. The Whiskeytown FS was full suspension, designed by Brian Hall as his master's project at Chico State. The Joule, from 1995, was the last new production Goat: oversized Tange Ultimate steel, made to run a suspension fork.

See every catalog, price list, and ad in the archive

The end of the first run

By the mid-1990s, mountain bikes were going from hand-built rigid steel to mass-produced suspended aluminum, and imports made it hard for small builders to compete. A long list of pioneering brands closed or were bought out, and Mountain Goat closed its doors in 1997. Lindsay later put it plainly: "the real problem was that I didn't know anything about running a business!" He went back to glass, and now makes tools for glassblowers through his own company.

The First Flight chapter

When Jeff Archer opened MOMBAT, the mountain bike museum once housed in our building, people kept bringing in vintage bikes they wanted to ride with modern parts. Archer's answer was to bring a classic brand back. He chose Mountain Goat and, with Jeff Lindsay's permission, put it back into production. Work started in late 2005, and the new Goats arrived in 2006.

Jeremy Sycip, a California builder who learned the trade from Paul Sadoff of Rock Lobster, built most of the new frames, with a few from other builders. Russ Pickett, the original Goat painter, recreated the classic paint. The new line included the Whiskeytown Racer, the Route 29 (the Route 66 idea, finally on proper big tires), the Road Goat, and the F-K-R. The first frame in the run was a Whiskeytown Racer for Archer himself, and it hangs in the shop today. Revival Goats went to riders across the US and Europe.

The new Goats aren't in production now, but First Flight is still the caretaker of the name. If you have a Goat, old or new, bring it by. We'd love to see it.

Further reading

• The Mountain Goat archive, our collection of catalogs, price lists, ads, and shop photos
• Goat History, the full timeline on the Mountain Goat site
• Mountain Goat at the MOMBAT archive, with a timeline and specs and photos of dozens of Goats
• Jeff Lindsay at the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame
• Jeff Archer at the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame
• The Radavist: 1988 Mountain Goat Dinoflage Deluxe, with an interview with Lindsay
• The Radavist: 1984 Mountain Goat Whiskeytown Racer
• MTB Timeline: Mountain Goat, year by year