Day 1: Long traverse through suburbs via bike infrastructure and social trails that wind in and around dry desert washes. I never visited or thought much of Phoenix during the days that I lived in Tucson, but I realize now that that was an oversight. The riding is interesting, hiding in the seams between development. It felt like visiting a secret orthogonal dimension world, where we could see out of it but few could see in.
Spectators streaming into a car auction pavillion, a baseball stadium where I’d once seen pre-season play and I know I’m close to Frank Lloyd Wright’s Taliesin West. We rue the fact, it won’t be the last time on this trip, that our schedule isn’t built to allow us to pause. You picture being able to linger on a bicycle trip, but instead have to remain satisfied with, see the virtue in, continuity and movement. So when there’s a forced halt, it’s a snapback to corporeality.
Lunch at an empty Indian restaurant. A Walgreens with a very lackluster selection of bikepacking essentials. Then in to an incredible beautiful singletrack area Browns mountain, fast float gravel tracks, love it.
And then a barely perceptible slide then a burst into open country, the angles of constructed spaces a memory of an echo.
Powerlines and sand swells, A long climb to a ridge. We stop to chat with a motorcyclist who has run out of gas on a quiet winding highway. He uses my phone to leave a message with his son to rescue him between mile markers, as we pedal away he goes back to his serenity that hints that maybe he wouldn’t like to be found. Sun goes down, a jackhammer descent with shuddering headlamps into a valley, in the distance we can see camper lights. It’s cold but movement at night with dust and stars and a once more diffuse presence, I know at this pace there could be indefinite pedaling because marking time is for an ordering of daylight objects. Camp at Horseshoe.
Day 2: Hilly dusty demanding vocal wind.
From camp we come to Horseshoe Dam, improbably massive infrastructure which could be imagined as a relic from another civilization. That it’s insistent, brash water in this dry place contributes to the sense of displacement far from gravity and logic, linearity viewed from underneath.
Back to spectacular desert country, no conspicuous souls, maybe not even ours. This is a day spent winching into the sky, wincing into thoughts of the pitch to turn them inside out into gladness at the effort. We could tell that our progress was not sufficient to meet our most ambitious destination plan, but that was fine as there were ways to reroute onto equally scenic tracks.
