Envisioning volcanoes, jungle tracks, salt flats and glaciers. Altitude and crater lakes and sawtooth crags, hypoxic dirt routes (if I’m not careful, tourist nonsense pan flutes). For me, South America is to Asia like ground is […]
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: Observation
Gathering Gear
Picturing the destination, half remembered images seen or interpolated from descriptions in books read while comfortable on a couch long before ever imagining I’d visit there. Reading a few other people’s packing lists and past […]
True cliché: Cyclocross bikes are excellent
Must have misunderstood the phone message mission description, somehow under the impression that we’d load up bikes, drive to the distant trailhead, do the mysterious on the map long loop, back in the truck and […]
Books about maps
In them danger, confidence, mystery, promise, potential. It’s the initial fantasy meets The Plan, then as part of the essential equipment that gives a unity and a steadiness in the span of the doing, found […]
Old timey mountain biking
I live again in the small New England town where I first started mountain biking. Sometimes I ride the same tracks that I did back then, but usually not, those abandoned 19th century woods roads, […]
Wrong Bike
Is there such a thing? Sure, if you focus on the very ends of various spectra. There are times when there is a right bike: full suspension for high speed super chunky descents, a time […]
Abbottabad, Pakistan
Newspaper and television images, then the images of our lowest and high sentiments take over. Abbottabad, Pakistan is in the media today. The narrative and emotional context for Americans interleaves our September 11th staggering heartbreaking tragedy, […]
Parks and Rides
Zion National Park
I remember half my life ago moving out West into gritscapes, furnace sunrises, impossible canyons and skies, cottonwoods. Where true myths like national parks or limitless wilderness were invented as a complement to wishful libertarian graspings, the ranches, railroad towns, mining claims, mountain enclaves. And now the glinty waterwasteful clean modern America superimposed in a dappled here and there.
I don’t live there anymore but the vital road tripping bikepacking high speed skinny tire touring hiking boots visits find their way into every future.
(Apologies for the awful pun of the title.)
Zion National Park
Mojave National Preserve
Joshua Tree National Park
Above St. George, UT (on the doucherocket)
Southern Utah
The question hardly has sense, “what’s the most beautiful place you’ve been?” but that doesn’t stop the asking or the answering. As if affect and mood weren’t substantial factors, if one’s history there, the afterimages […]
Cairo journal entry
I arrived in Cairo, a lone cyclist pedaling into a metropolis, on the evening of 28 January, 2011 at the end of a tour of the western oasis circuit from Luxor. From the warnings of local contacts I knew that I should keep vigilant. The city — indeed much of Egypt — was rising to a new pitch in the protest against the government. Today, Friday, a day off work and a day of consultation after prayer, was expected to be a turning point, and it was. By now the world knows of the events on that day from television images of burning and overturned police tactical vehicles, teargas braving mobs, rocks against rubber bullets and water canons, allegations of live fire in some cases, and tanks rolling across urban bridges and through downtown streets.
Bicycle Tour Planning
For years I’ve kept a notebook of places I want to visit. Sometimes just pen marked map scraps, sometimes drafts of speculative weekly itineraries, sometimes ideas from geography and history, or that have something to […]
Favorite cycling books
The Rider by Tim Krabbe Journey to the Centre of the Earth by Richard and Nicholas Crane The Lost Cyclist by David Herlihy Bicycle: The History by David Herlihy Across Asia on a Bicycle by […]