Like a hazy dream. Dereliction emerges from the trees, we marvel at the juxtaposition of machine and woodland.
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: Surly Pugsley
FAT BIKES ON POPHAM BEACH, MAINE
Overnighter to the high point of connecticut
A landmark, a place to focus a quiet fun story, a metaphor.
Sweden Grey
Lost in a watercolor smear between hilltops and sky until every shard was just a tighter spiral of repetition to a grey singularity. Windblow enough to not be able to hear what’s said, but the cadence and tonal shape is enough, the absence of reference points and yet we’re still here.
Fat Bike South Africa
Riding the Pugsley in South Africa confirmed its bona fides as an unmatched roughest conditions touring bike. It remains my favorite expedition wheel.
Brooks England Dashing Bike Contest
Brooks England Ltd recently hosted a photo contest for “you and your dashing bike.” MC’s photograph of me with the Pugsley was selected as one of the winners! Many thanks to Brooks for putting on their North American Dashing Bicycle Show, hosted in New York City by Bicycle Habitat.
Cleaveland Everything Bags
Carrying water bottles on the fork is standard bikepacking practice, and is familiar from touring bikes going well back. (My friend Ed Carman’s beautiful mid-1970’s Eisentrout Limited has a fork that is probably not the original but […]
Skinny Pugsley
Early in the Spring I asked my friend and cycling co-conspirator Nicholas Carman to build a set of 2-9 wheels for my Pugsley. We debated and joked our way between conceiving of the bike as […]
Return of the Pugsley
My Pugsley had been in pieces since I returned from touring South America over a year ago. I left most of the drivetrain, the threadbare tires, and anything else that had reached its end behind […]
REI Soho Presentation
Next month I’ll be giving a talk and sharing photos at the REI Soho store in New York City. Join me to chat about Fat Bike touring in South America on 18 October at 7pm. Space […]
Pugsley Mods
(All photos courtesy of Rob English from his news blog.)
The Surly Pugsley proved to be an exemplary expedition bike in South America. Though I remain tempted by Moonlanders*, I expect the Pugs to be the go-to machine for anything properly silly. There were a few things, however, that I wanted done for future missions to make it more suitable for carrying water and gear (cf., Cass’s Troll), and I finally got around to sending it to English cycles. These mods were surely embarrassingly brainless for Rob, who builds exceedingly clever and innovative machines, including my folding 2-9 and my road race bike.
White Mountains 100 Race Report
Tremble frigid, but thinking it in unfluid blocks stumbles far short of the cutting, the blades in your lungs, the warning away pain and strain in moving such that a warm pocket in your clothes might bellows inhale the cold. Exit the car when there is enough activity to confirm ten minutes to go, the way it always is before a race, even one that you didn’t conceptualize as it but instead as something perpendicular with a built in urgency…