over 12,700 foot Pearl Pass. Joe Breeze, Charlie Kelly, and Wende Cragg rode their 1977 and 1978 Breezers, while the other participants, including Gary Fisher and Michael Castelli of Marin County and several Crested Butte residents, rode modified Schwinns from the 1930s to 1950s. Crested Butte became an important destination for mountain biking; the Pearl Pass Tour, founded in 1976, is the sport's longest running annual two-day event. In 1983, Breeze and several others founded NORBA (National Off-Road Bicycle Association), the first sanctioning organization for off-road bicycle racing. Breeze designed the NORBA logo and championed the rule requiring that racers do their own repairs during races. He maintained that a self-sufficiency rule for racing would ensure that manufacturers would keep their focus on durable bikes for all riders. NORBA is now part of USA Cycling. Breezer mountain and road bikes in 1980s and 1990s In 1980-81 Breeze built a second series of Breezer mountain bikes with oversize tubing in a diamond frame, and in 1982 to 1985 he built a third series. Breeze continued to develop and refine his mountain bike designs in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986 he designed the American Breezer, an aluminum mountain bike built in St. Cloud, Minnesota. In the 1990s he designed a line of steel and aluminum Breezer bikes sold worldwide. Mountain bike models included the Breezer Lightning, Jet Stream, Thunder, Storm, Beamer, Twister, and Tornado. The 1993 Breezer Venturi, a road bike, featured compact geometry, which later became standard in the industry. Bicycle transportation Breeze's long-term interest has been to see more people using bicycles in everyday life and not only for recreation. On a cycling trip in Europe in 1971 he saw excellent bicycle infrastructure in the Netherlands, and people of all ages using bikes for daily transportation; this suggested possibilities for the United States that continued to inspire him through the mountain bike boom of the 1980s and 1990s. Breeze has said that the mountain bike, being easy to ride and thus appealing to non-cyclists, "got more Americans onto bikes than any other bike since the 1890s." He observed in the 1990s, however, that as high-end mountain bike design (including his own) was geared increasingly toward race bikes, lower-priced mountain bikes followed suit and thus the bikes became less accessible to the masses. "The mountain bike opened cycling up to a lot of people by being friendlier than road bikes,"