What I’m after is carrying not very much, yet just enough.
Joe Cruz
Cycling adventurist, bikepacker, travel writer, photographer, speaker, professor of philosophy. Route designer of the VTXL, the Green Mountain Gravel Growler beer tour, the Silk Road Mountain Race course 1st edition, and many more.
Ethiopia Retrospectum
[Originally published in Bikepacking Journal no.2, 2019 with photos by Logan Watts. Shared here with my photos.]
We were in Ethiopia for twelve thousand minutes. The only tiny thing we gave back, all we could, is that we respect that we’re alive together and making meaning together and writing and rewriting memories. We are not owed anything, not kindness or regard or being taken care of. If these things are not given, we still owe our own herculean colossal effort of understanding.
Kyrgyzstan Journal Pt. 1
Mountains and steppe, high meadow yurt camps, Silk Roads and the history of Soviet presence, Islam and horsemen and crashing cold rivers. None of the confirmed superlatives will match our wide eyed slow heartbeat wonder.
Traverse In Light (Sweden)
The settling serenity is that it’s lost the instant after it comes. What’s left is analog, elemental substance: brown bog grasses, hillocks, snowpatches, refracting droplets, stone.
Bikepacking Portachuelo Honda
Unable to find any reports of cyclists making the ascent to Honda pass from Chacas via Juitush in the Parque Nacionale Huascaran, everyone simply ascends to glorious Punta Olimpica but we had giddy beer and […]
Tibet postcard
4,700 meters and it’s pitch black, can’t or at least shouldn’t stay at the top, and I’m on the craved for zombie pilot, but able to conceptualize the danger and foolishness of it retrospectively.
Two reservoirs
Like a hazy dream. Dereliction emerges from the trees, we marvel at the juxtaposition of machine and woodland.
Brutalist Cemetery in Sicily
We hold on by finding another fixity from which we spar with entropy.
Abandoned ranch camp
And then we burst on it, a basin in roughness. The house used to be there, the well pump has fallen over, a tank, and furtive gravesite when just then a sharp light is a spear impaling my breath against wooden crosses.
The Monumental loop journal 02
We talk into the pitch dark night, that fluent wobbling meander of two glasses of a vintage varietal on top of the beers, flames low, laughing guffaws, tales finding finally a looking up introspection everyone else goes to sleep.
The Monumental Loop journal 01
Falling asleep on soft sand that I made conform to my body, looking up at uncountable twinkles, my breath clouding into the Milky Way. There is no where we ought to be, just where we are.
Fool’s Loop Arizona journal 02
Curving, arcing, up down big rocks babyheads sand sharp edges, tearing flora on both sides. Riding I love so much, slow crawling problem solving, hard but not catastrophic.
Fool’s Loop Arizona Journal 01
Riding out of Phoenix is interesting, hiding in the seams between development. Like visiting a secret orthogonal dimension world, where we could see out of it but few could see in. And then a barely perceptible slide then a burst into open country, the angles of constructed spaces a memory of an echo.
BORMIO, ITALY
Zurich to Bormio Day 4
The publication last year of Isola Press’s Ride Bike! chronicling Jobst Brandt’s influence on cycling culture had me vowing a summer outing in the same spirit as his, namely a fast and light ride in Europe on dirt and tarmac tracks seeking some of the most Homeric Continental cols.
Burgundy, France
In the mornings we would ride from village to village through vineyards over quiet farm tracks and over gentle hills.
OVERNIGHTER BIKEPACKING TRIP WITH WILLIAMS STUDENTS
Taiwan Photo album I
Riders: Brian Berry, Sophie Edmondson, Johnny Hsu, Donalrey Nieva, Mike Simpson, Karen Yung.