Grasslands, Buttes, and the Maah Daah Hey

With summer ending and craving a last reflection: I’d been to 49 U.S. States, North Dakota was the only one missing. Flew to Williston, rode the Maah Daah Hey Trail down to Medora. The last week has been transcendent. Not a splinter of shade over the dust and palimpsest of extraction, geomorphology, western mythology. Riding solo through exquisite sadness and exultation, 150 kilometers of singletrack skimming a parallel dimension of 19th century lore and desolation, an infinity of heat or clay or cricket clouds. And then a headlong return back into corporeality on dirt roads and highways defined by oversized load trucks and hazy decoherence. Invited by heat and time to be tolerant of loneliness and grateful for the lucid fractal hallucinations it makes possible. Laying in the vanishing coolness thinking about how to make myself not think anymore, just waiting until massless photons crushed my gravity into cyclical forward existential abyss.

Scotland Photo Album II

Rider: Brian Berry

Scotland photo album I

Rider: Jack Lyons

West Virginia Photo Essay

West Virginia has a long and storied tradition of East Coast mountain biking. The pitched terrain, the remoteness of woods noisy with life, mountain tops holding up humid air and sunlight.

Overnighter to the high point of connecticut

A landmark, a place to focus a quiet fun story, a metaphor.

A Bikepacking primer

Bikepacking isn’t the slightest bit a novel or recent idea. Late nineteenth century black and white photographs of cyclists with bedrolls and framebags heading out into the countryside or on months long trips over international borders show that the bicycle has always been for freedom and exploration. If anything is new in the current enthusiasm for bikepacking, it’s firstly that specific and optimized gear is now widely available for it, and secondly and more importantly, there is a critical mass of the aesthetic sensibility to make it within the imaginative grasp of all of us.

Maine Journal

This inland Maine, mosquitoes and a low rippled earth, a thickness, a null-time and none-here, a forward that feels like a happy stuck.

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 Photo Album

Arkansas Postcard

I’m loving that it’s so dark. By which I mean the towering colossal stupid.

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.