Rocky Mountain Bicycles
Rocky Mountain Bicycles is a Canadian bike maker with bases in North Vancouver, British Columbia, and Saint-Georges, Quebec. The name nods to the Rocky Mountains. It started in the basement of Vancouver’s West Point Cycles when two men in 1978 modified Nishiki road bikes with wider tires, straight handlebars, and five gears to ride and race on difficult West Coast trails. The company was officially created in 1981, with Grayson Bain as president until 1997. In 1982 they released their first production mountain bike, the Sherpa, working with frame designer Tom Ritchey.
In 1984 Rocky Mountain opened a frame-building shop, and in 1985 Paul Brodie began painting and welding frames, helping the company start producing its own mountain and road bikes across Canada. The distinctive sloping top tube came about in 1984 with the first Rocky Mountain Avalanche frame. The company began selling outside Vancouver in 1984 and started shipping bikes internationally in 1989.
Growth continued in the 1990s, expanding production to meet rising demand in the United States and beyond. Rocky Mountain was bought by Procycle Group in 1997, which later changed its name to Rocky Mountain in 2019. The brand won Mountain Bike Magazine’s Mountain Bike of the Year three times: the Hammer Race (1996), the Element Race (2000), and the Slayer (2002). Olympic silver medalist Marie-Hélène Prémont won in 2004.
In December 2024, Rocky Mountain announced a restructuring to avoid bankruptcy, and in 2025 it was acquired by Chaos Sports Inc. The company is best known for its mountain bikes and offers many models for different riding styles. They make carbon, aluminum, and steel frames, and began producing road bikes in 1984. Today they offer about a dozen road models plus cyclo-cross, urban, fitness, and hybrid bikes. They also sponsor the Rocky Mountain Race Face Enduro Team, currently with Jesse Melamed, Rémi Gauvin, and Andréane Lanthier Nadeau, and support professional freeride riders such as Wade Simmons, Thomas Vanderham, Hayden Zablotny, and Vaea Verbeeck.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 15:22 (CET).