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.

Patagonia, az postcard

I frequently visited Patagonia when I lived in Tucson in the 1990s.

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.

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.

Arkansas Photo Album

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.

Appalachian Gravel Growler

This ride breathes and coils. Sometimes big climbs, other times flick woodsy singletrack turns. Logan’s route inscribes dirt road motifs in a more expansive land’s humps and berms and valleys movement.

Montana & Wyoming Search Brigade

Wyoming Postcard

We say it matter of factly, and the facts are just bricks, our talk mortar—one could build walls or a paved path.

Maine Search Brigade

Cuba Postcard

The identity of this place is that it is nowhere, towns that we will inertia through when we need to, but the network of agricultural tracks horizons into midmorning heat and we don’t have to intersect anything else.

Cuba Postcard

In the thick experience of movement and days, in the backroads dust and the chest pressing heat, in the hundred laughter cheek kiss embrace conversations we have, it’s there that the void gets filled, making me ride grinning at how close it was.

Three Days on the Colorado Trail

Altitude makes it so that you only have one burst for a rockpile or for a steep bit, legs twang tense up hard spin and the bike lifts but then the delicate state of your breathing spiral lofts into a wobble in an unstable trough and it’s all you can do to keep going forward.