Scotland Photo Album II

Rider: Brian Berry

Scotland photo album I

Rider: Jack Lyons

Overnighter to the high point of connecticut

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

Arkansas Postcard

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

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.

Ethiopia Retrospectum

[Originally published in Bikepacking Journal no.2, 2019 with photos by Logan Watts. Shared here with my photos.]

We were in Ethiopia for twelve thousand minutes. The only tiny thing we gave back, all we could, is that we respect that we’re alive together and making meaning together and writing and rewriting memories. We are not owed anything, not kindness or regard or being taken care of. If these things are not given, we still owe our own herculean colossal effort of understanding.

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.

Gear for Bikepacking Kyrgyzstan

I don’t care about the equipment, I just want it to be perfect.

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.

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.

Santa Fe Bikepacking Pt. 2

A trail that is a half finished sculpture, the figure’s pose clear enough but all the cuts merely confident drafts, a roll over a tree bowl here, thread through fresh hack there, soft soil or sand trap.

Santa Fe Bikepacking Pt. 1

Brought a small duffel of essentials and attached a Tangle, seat bag, top tube bag, and harness. Switched the bottle cage to a fork mount and borrowed another for the other side.

Norway Photo Album II