Our route has been a broken meander on the smallest back lanes, cow paths, stony clusterfucked hike-a-bikes, with a dose of wading and lifting sweat skin biting fly swatting. Naturally, we’re having a splendid, demented time.
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.
Category: Journal
Kyrgyzstan Journal Pt. 3
Not wanting or wishing or chasing something else. I’m in stationary timestopped movement liberated from hoping for a better view or a softer light or a more ragged horizon. Kyrgyzstan is stasis that I know isn’t permanent but that I can at least be present in heat and contentment.
Kyrgyzstan Journal Pt. 2
I think that span, the morning snow, the frustrations of the mud slog up and past the high point, the clacking rollercoaster descent and then whooosh, silence of our big tires on green carpet doubletrack for days; I think that span snapped and adhered this place to us so here’s where we never want to have missed or ended.
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.
Search Brigade Journal
These first hours are the merest fragmental sliver of a ride across the USA to San Francisco to Los Angeles and then a New York return. But they’re the hours that set the emotions and put us on a road together where we’ll laugh and see and ride an idea, namely the idea that on a bicycle trip we’re in a place up close with our best vulnerabilities and openness, that we’re supporting each other not by insulating ourselves from the landscape but by enabling each other to breathe better in it.
Alaska Journal Pt. 2
This heat spell sets some of our plans back, but they were just wispy talk anyway, replaceable by any number of alternative excellent foolish ideas.
Alaska Journal Pt. 1
That geographic immensity is hard to contain in the imagination so it remains an abstraction, a blurred assurance that on the ground it keeps going and so might you.
2nd Annual NYC Dirt Audax Invitational
There is the steep rocky Ruckman climb, body english for traction, point the bike between the ruts and round the slick fallen leaves. Everyone is leaping now, rhythm. Familiar wide dirt tracks, we stop for cakes and coffee and then off again northward to a long lovely stretch by the water through stands of blazing yellow.
Slovenia Journal Pt. 2
A day with an end where you recall it and it doesn’t seem as if it could have been just one.
Slovenia Journal Pt. 1
Tiny gravel roads, sometimes one paved lane, single track double track, paths through crushed riverside rock. The plan is a nine day circuit round this half of the country, toes across the Austrian border and then later a thirty hours in Italy before crossing over again.
Kokopelli Trail, Pt. 2
We nohurry some more, marvel at the skying walls, then off again.
Kokopelli Trail, Pt. 1
Set off into a radiance and wind afternoon.