Curving, arcing, up down big rocks babyheads sand sharp edges, tearing flora on both sides. Riding I love so much, slow crawling problem solving, hard but not catastrophic.
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.
Tag: Arizona
Fool’s Loop Arizona Journal 01
Riding out of Phoenix is interesting, hiding in the seams between development. Like visiting a secret orthogonal dimension world, where we could see out of it but few could see in. And then a barely perceptible slide then a burst into open country, the angles of constructed spaces a memory of an echo.
Patagonia, az postcard
I frequently visited Patagonia when I lived in Tucson in the 1990s.
Mt Wrightson circuit
The terrain south of Tucson—rugged dirt roads, old mines, Elephant Head butte, thorny cactus single track, canyons and sky and dry—has filled me for 30 years. The bikes have changed but they’re a distant second to the landscape and emotions and riding with friends.
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.
Black Canyon Trail
The miles wind and snake and gritty crunch, achieving a clip and breeze until the balance tips and we can feel the sweat under our pack straps telling us that winter is someone else’s thoughts now.
Cattle Tracks to Snow
Thread of dirt like the path of unusually ambitious and purposeful cows through brush, the Lime Kiln Trail. Push the bikes up to a sharp crag ridge, then a short fast drop and it’s dusty and snaking through rolling brush, mountains in the distance, a scene from a dozen Westerns and we open it up.
Sedona Pt. 2
Endless traction sandstone, staircase drops through narrow canyon cuts, float across a wash, drift through mushy snowpatch. We’ll slalom switchbacks back and forth until the tap tap repetition is mantra.
Sedona Pt. 1
That first day bright simple sunshine pedal into clay paths through palo verde and brush, distant orange rocks, upkick buck drift with my timing all off out of the turns and lofting the front wheel.