A summertime close to home ride with friends. Laughter and conversation both light and serious, the rolling dirt hills and hug of green in southern Vermont, visiting the smiles and textures of the place.
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.
Author: JoeCruz
Colombia paramos Photo Essay
This project with Conservation International attempts to harness the deep and longstanding cycling culture of Colombia to highlight the need to look after these paramos.
Arkansas Postcard
I’m loving that it’s so dark. By which I mean the towering colossal stupid.
Portugal Postcards
Cloud riding but the land seems already halfway there in Portugal, already an equilibrium of greens, dust, blue.
Bosnia Travel diary
Seems like it was uphill all day, intermittent hike a bike way into the mountains, towns receding below. Went to one of the cool Spomeniks and then this old guy came out with a bottle of some kind of wicked alcohol and talked our ears off, we didn’t understand a word of what he said but he was very kindly and hammered and I drank some too.
Bosnia Journal 02
Juxtapositions are a unexpected source of warmth and attentiveness. Kilometers of rolling dirt paths between farmhouses, images of an idyllic shire in mist gusting half light, and then a heap of rusting military vehicles, abandoned at a crossroads like children’s toys.
Bosnia Journal 01
Into the countryside, we’ll link spomeniks while harassed by sheets of rain that turn the track into mud and leave us shivering wrapped in grey. Unphotographed moments that have now only retrospexistence, which can often be truer.
MUNICH TO MARSEILLE SEARCH BRIGADE PHOTO ALBUM II
Munich to Marseille Route Link
Munich to Marseille Search Brigade Photo Album I
Munich to Marseille Route Link
Spomeniks
The Spomeniks of former Yugoslavia are future thinking, political, and mnemonic. They are notable in how their materiality achieves spirituality. To me they have a powerful beauty and they continue to speak even as they decay and are in many cases neglected.
Notes from a Border
A line that in this part of the country doesn’t follow something natural like the Rio Grande but instead is a cartographer’s dashed euclidean creation. Maybe that’s more honest with respect to the contingency and arbitrariness, maybe it doesn’t let us off the hook by encouraging lies about the separation and the essential unalloyed luck of being born on one side or the other of it.