Teddy Hayden does not seem afraid of death.
That’s what I’m thinking as I watch him bomb down Hyde Street on a mud-caked Dreadnought V2 mountain bike one sunny morning in January. Hyde is one of the city’s steepest streets; newcomers get nervous going down it by car. Hayden, however, takes it casually, threading cable cars and Waymos and unsuspecting tourists like he’s just passing through town. Then, about halfway down, he leans back, lifts his front tire, and rides the rest of the way on one wheel, which somehow makes him go faster. Tourists pause and point, agog.
As his Instagram attests, Hyde’s nothing for Hayden. For the last nine months, either with a GoPro strapped to his helmet or a drone fluttering behind his head, Hayden, 26, has been filming himself braving every death-defying descent — paved, rock-strewn, staired, and bushy — San Francisco has to offer. He’s clattered down rickety aluminum scaffolds, fog-slick brick walkways, the Lombard and Greenwich Street steps, hidden footpaths on Strawberry Hill, concrete ruins around the old Sutro Baths, and crooked rocky outcrops near Land’s End and Mile Rock Beach, usually at high speed, always in good humor. “It’s fun,” he tells me coolly, as we walk his bike back up Hyde. “You feel alive riding something that maybe nobody’s ridden before — or that you shouldn’t be riding.”
Since he started posting them nine months ago, Hayden’s urban mountain biking videos have racked up millions of views; each week, a new one seems to go viral. It’s not hard to see why. The videos are thrilling; the first-person POV evokes the same gut-deep sense of incipient catastrophe you get riding a roller coaster or walking a VR tightrope. They’re also genuinely impressive: For the dexterity and adroitness of the handling on display, the sheer strength required to ride as fast and with as much control as he does, the videos evince serious, labored-over skill.
But not everyone’s a fan; when he documents himself riding San Francisco’s green spaces, most of which prohibit mountain bikes, commenters accuse Hayden of disturbing native plants, annoying hikers, and worse. Some point out that he’s breaking the law. The San Francisco Transportation Code forbids riding a bike on city sidewalks, let alone historic staircases. The National Park Service, which manages the Golden Gate National Recreation Area, forbids riding mountain bikes anywhere other than designated trails. (Trails used by hikers and equestrians are off-limits.) The Marin Municipal Water District, which manages trails in the Mount Tamalpais Watershed, doesn’t allow mountain bikers on any trails at all. (Per Marin Water District Code section 9.04.002, bicycles are allowed only on public roads, parking lots, and fire roads in the Mount Tamalpais Watershed.)
Hayden admits that flouting the rules is a big part of what makes his rides fun; what few trails are available to mountain bikers in San Francisco tend to be for beginners, he says, with very little open to anyone looking to push their abilities. Venturing out beyond those trails functions as a form of vigilante protest. Hayden insists he’s careful about where and how he rides — always mapping his lines, coordinating with pedestrians and passersby, and taking pains not to disturb native plants or protected areas. “If you watch my videos, you’ll see I’m responsible,” he says.
Concerns about conservation and safety are legitimate, especially when you consider the prospect of other mountain bikers attempting to copy the way Hayden rides. Yet such concerns might be partially mitigated by the fact that very few people can ride a mountain bike where or how Hayden does, nor would most ever choose to.
Hayden’s built like a running back, with stocky shoulders, thick wrists, and calves like carved wood. The death-defying project he has undertaken is an athletic one, not driven by a quest for fame. He does not self-identify as a content creator. Rather, he’s one of the best and most passionate downhill mountain bikers in the Bay Area, and an essential member of the region’s proud — yet long-suffering — mountain biking community. He has ties to the founding of the sport. He also believes he’s playing a role in the ongoing political battle over its future.
“The region has this crazy, untapped potential,” he says as we hoof halfway up Hyde, a cable car jingling by. “It should be one of the best places to mountain bike in the world, but it’s not. It’d be cool to change that.”
‘Teddy’s insane’
As recounted in films such as “Klunkerz” and books like “The Birth of Dirt,” the Bay Area is the proud birthplace of mountain biking. In the 1970s, a handful of competitive road cyclists living in Fairfax started augmenting old, fat-tire Schwinn bikes with spare parts scavenged from local shops and taking them down deserted trails on Mount Tamalpais. They scratched their own trails between fire roads. They lugged in kegs of beer and raced for bags of pot. Any time they spent away from the mountain they spent fixing their bikes, so they could get back on it. “A party in the woods,” recalls Gary Fisher, one of the Mount Tam pioneers.
Another of the originals was Otis Guy. A former high school mountain biking coach and the current director of the Mountain Bike Hall of Fame in Fairfax, Guy became one of the best in the world after the sport blew up in the 1980s and remains a loyal steward of its culture in the Bay Area. That’s why he got into coaching. It’s also how he knows Hayden. “Teddy is a supremely skilled rider and an all-around great kid,” he tells me. “Fun to coach against. Great energy.”
“Teddy’s insane,” says Kyle Peck, a former professional BMX rider turned enduro racer who moonlights as a photographer for MASH SF, a renowned cycling collective. “He’s just gifted. The fastest guy around.”
Hayden is a product of the culture Guy, Fisher, and all the rest built 50 years ago. He was born in San Francisco and raised in San Quentin Village, though his upbringing had “nothing to do with the prison,” he says. “My dad is a draftsman, and my mom works at a nonprofit. They were renting a house there, and the owner offered them a good deal.”
He started riding mountain bikes as a kid, and by the time he was a freshman in high school, he harbored dreams of competing professionally. In 2015, as a 16-year-old sophomore, he won the Junior Men’s Enduro National Championship. He left school and started competing in the Enduro World Series, the major leagues of competitive mountain biking. In his first-ever Enduro World Series race, in Crested Butte, Colorado, he placed second, beating college-age competitors.
A few days after that first season ended, however, Hayden dislocated his shoulder while riding with a friend. Recovery was long and frustrating. He struggled to get back into shape for the next season. When he managed to get back on the bike, he performed poorly, at least by his standards. And that was basically it for Hayden, competitively speaking.
He went back to school, and though he flirted with professional racing on and off for several years, he has by and large lived a normal life ever since. After graduating from UC Santa Cruz in 2022 and moving back to San Francisco, he started organizing group rides in the city — and filming himself exploring new spots.
“One of the first things he said to me was, ‘I want to meet everyone who mountain bikes in this city,” says Ellie Curtis, a former all-American skier whom Hayden turned on to mountain biking several years ago. “He had this vision for bringing people together who ride.”
That’s his main inspiration now, and far more than collecting followers, it’s what he most wants to achieve with his videos. “There are lots of people who live here and own a mountain bike but don’t know what to do with it,” he tells me on the corner of Hyde and Lombard, the sun just starting to set into the blemishless blue sky — perfect for filming. “I want to meet those people. I want to grow our community.”
The community, as it happens, wants the same. For many years, Bay Area mountain biking has been ensnared in a confounding paradox. The birthplace of the sport — geographically blessed and temperate, with a playground of old-growth redwood groves and shaded subtropical forests containing trails that splay playfully into the Pacific — is also a pretty bad place to be a mountain biker.
For more than 40 years, the California Native Plant Society, the Marin Audubon Society, and the Marin Conservation League, among others, have lobbied to ban mountain biking on public trails. Their efforts have proved remarkably successful. Mountain bikes have been banned since 1984 on Mount Tamalpais — the same mountain where Guy, Fisher, and Joe Breeze basically invented the sport.
“It was not a well-understood sport at first, and land managers had a knee-jerk reaction,” explains Vernon Huffman, founder of Access4Bikes, a Marin-based nonprofit dedicated to expanding trail access for mountain bikers. “Unfortunately, there’s a long history of opposition to any improvements to bike access in the Bay Area. We call ourselves the home of mountain biking, but we just don’t provide the level of mountain biking the moniker deserves.”
Today, groups like A4B work to build new trails, change existing trail use designations, publish research proving the sport’s compatibility with other popular trail uses, and elect sympathetic lawmakers. Progress has been slow. In California, changing a public trail’s use designation is a multi-year endeavor, requiring environmental studies and approvals, and progress can be upended on the back of even a single lawsuit, as happened recently.
Yet the community remains hopeful it will succeed in challenging the long-entrenched restrictions. One reason for hope is how quickly the sport is growing. Today, not only do many high schools in Marin County have mountain biking teams, but so do many middle schools. The key, as Huffman sees it, is finding creative ways to grow the sport. Which is where Hayden and his viral videos comes in.
“Teddy’s a huge part of this movement,” Huffman tells me. “He’s looked up to by younger kids. Because of him, more people know this is here, and that we’re growing.”
Performing for a crowd
Jim Santos, co-owner of Outer Shell, a cycling apparel company, met Hayden not through competition but via Instagram. “For most of biking history, the bulk of the marketing has been about performance,” he says. “But most of us are just out here to have fun. And Teddy has more fun than anyone.”
Hayden, for his part, is happy to help, in his own way. This year he plans to double down on content production. He wants to dip his toe back into competing — starting with A4B’s annual Marinduro in April, which last year he won — but he’s aware of the potential of his social media platform and wants to leverage it.
“There are lots of people out here in the Bay Area who ride and rip and who love the outdoors. And I do think that community’s growing. In another year or so, it’ll be even further along.”
After I leave him that morning in January, Hayden rides over to Twin Peaks, where he meets up with a videographer named Eric Thurber. He spends the rest of the day doing what he loves, with Thurber following him around, recording him with a drone.
That night, Thurber sends me the footage. It shows Hayden gracefully carving steep, green hillsides like he’s big-wave surfing. I watch him skittle down wooden steps, leap rivulets. At one point, the drone pans and frames Hayden against a sun-drenched downtown San Francisco, looking weightless — boyish, buoyant, unburdened. When he reaches the path near the bottom of the hill, he levels out and — why not? — pops a wheelie.
Watching, I find it hard to reject Hayden’s central premise. The way he rides still strikes me as terrifying, physically near-impossible, and definitely illegal. But it also looks undeniably fun.