Category: North America

Read More

Gold camp overnighter

We were a happily motley bunch, with nary a “normal” bike amongst us. Fixie Dave and I were on Bike Friday’s new All-Packa folding ATB (Dave’s was fixed gear, of course), Chris was on a Velo Orange Neutrino mini-velo with a fixed gear and pulling a trailer to haul Eddy Merckx, and Micah rode his singlespeed Surly Karate Monkey.

Read More

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.

Read More

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.