Gary Klein made road bikes for years before he built his first mtb! Gary (and Sheldon Brown's widow Harriet Fell) built oversized aluminium road bikes while studying at MIT in the early seventies. Even Cannondale had road and touring models before they branched out into mtb.Old Ned":2j0r3bnu said:Looks very nice but I've never been to sure about road bikes made by American MTB companies. They seem to be trying 'to hard' to get onto a bandwagon.