In 1979 I was working for a newspaper in the Tri-Cities, the first newspaper to fire me and definitely not the last. Grab-On, a Walla Walla company famous for bike grips, sponsored a race in the region with several great venues. One of them was the road course in the Horse Heaven Hills near Richland, Washington. In the photo Dave Auker of Portland leads Seattle's Tom Broznowski up one of the many seriously steep climbs. Tom, as usual, wears a Pro-Tec helmet. Auker rides a Merz, Tom a Davidson. Both Pacific Northwest framebuilders were to have a major impact on cycling in the US. Grab-On dabbled in cycling and then went back to its core product: a field marking device for crop dusters to make their dusting more accurate.