Tig Cross. Timeline

• 1968 – Parents Leigh and Judy Cross emigrate from New York to Hornby Island with baby Gideon, the oldest cross Brother.
• 1968 –Bogart, the 2^nd Cross Brother is born
• 1969 – Tig Cross (Me) was born, and Leigh and Judy buy Strachan Vally where they start farming.
• 1973 – Gabriel Cross, the 4^th Cross Brother is born.
• 1974 – Because of the oil crisis, Leigh believe that gasoline and diesel fuel will become scare so he started farming with Percheron Horses. We used the horses for logging, plowing, and making hay. They were also a big hit in the bi-annual Hornby Fair Parade
• 1979 – we started selling milk from our cows. Judy delvers around the island twice a week.
• 1980 – Leigh starts what would become the Hornby Festival with a six-concert series at the community hall.
• 1982 – I get my first mountain bike, which is the first MTB on Hornby.
• 1985 – Wayne Roberts opens Zucchini Cycles.  Tig and Sasha start building No Horse trail, which became a classic. That Fall We moved to Vancouver for Highschool but returned every summer.
• 1989 – Four friends, Tig, Pete, Leif, and Sasha decide to put on a bike festival on Hornby Island, it is a cool event with races, camping and music.
• 1990-1992 Each year the Hornby Island Mountain Bike Festival got bigger. Until after 4 years, in 1992, it got too big, with 2000 partiers invading the Island and causing a big disturbance and HUGE ferry lineup.
• 1992, I bought the bikeshop from Wayne and renamed it the Hornby Island Off Road Bike Shop, or HIORBS. We also started a race team and called it the Hornby Island Off Road Bike Society, or Team ORB for short. We used some of the money raised by the BikeFest to fund our off-island race trips.  Because I was renting bikes to tourists I had to tell them where the trails were, so I produced the first black and white photocopied paper trail map. Over time the map evolved into a full colour map that is sold by HIMBA to fund trailbuilding on Hornby. I still look after the map.
• 1993 – Team Orb stated doing Trials demonstration. We actually got paid to ride our bikes!!!
• 1995 – we scaled back the Bikefest party and concentrated on racing. I also met my future wife, Willow.
• 1995-98 – The race continued to grow until the last event in 1998. Over that time we hosted several BC cup races and the BC cup finals.
• 1995 – we started timing the race with a computer instead of on paper sheets. The process was led by Finlay Cannon. We were pretty good at producing the results and after a couple of years we started working for other races. This grew into a business, Ten36 race timing, and we spent many weekends in the summer traveling around the province. We wrapped up the business in 2004.
• In 1996 Team Orb became the Norco Factory Trials Team when Norco started sponsoring us. I spend the next several years dividing my time between running the bike shop, timing MTB races, and doing Trials Demonstrations.
• 1998 – we hosted the tenth and final BikeFest. It had been a fun ride, but all of us wanted to spend our summers doing other things.
• 2003 Willow and I got married, and we moved to Ottawa so that Willow could take a job with the Canadian government doing internation development work.
• In 2003 I built my first e-bike and started the development of the Electrom e-bike.
• 2004 – Our first Child Madeine was born
• 2007 – we moved to Honduras for Willow’s work. We spent three years there
• 2008 – our 2^nd child, Lucia was born in Honduras.
• 2010 – our posting in Honduras came to an end we moved back to Hornby Island for a year so that Willow could take a year off and spend it with the kids instead fo working.
• 2011 –Willow won a posing to Rwanda and we move to Africa for a year.
• 2012 – we moved back to BC. Willow left her job with the Federal Government and took a job with the BC Government. This meant we could live in Victoria and spend more time on Hornby.
• I became more involved with HIMBA, the Hornby Island Mountain Bike Association, which is an organization started by Jeremy Payne when he owned the bike shop. I’m still very involved today.
• 2017 – I decided that I wanted to make the Electrom a commercial product and started to work toward building them in larger numbers.
• 2019 – the first Two Electrom were built and sold. Since then I’ve made and sold six Electroms and the business is starting to speed up.

PinkBike Article
Tig Cross and Sasha LeBaron The Prophets

Tig’s  Electrom LEV project. electrom.ca