Our route has been a broken meander on the smallest back lanes, cow paths, stony clusterfucked hike-a-bikes, with a dose of wading and lifting sweat skin biting fly swatting. Naturally, we’re having a splendid, demented time.
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.
Green Mountain Gravel Growler: Logan, Daniel, and I scouted an incredible bikepacking route linking together some of Vermont’s best craft breweries. Follow the link to Bikepacking.com for details.
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Kyrgyzstan Snapshots
August 2016
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.
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.
Vermont Dirt Tour
Gliding through all greens tans blue but for the red barn flash, sounding loudly still summer silence.
Search Brigade Journal
These first hours are the merest fragmental sliver of a ride across the USA to San Francisco to Los Angeles and then a New York return. But they’re the hours that set the emotions and put us on a road together where we’ll laugh and see and ride an idea, namely the idea that on a bicycle trip we’re in a place up close with our best vulnerabilities and openness, that we’re supporting each other not by insulating ourselves from the landscape but by enabling each other to breathe better in it.
Search Brigade is an out and back group ride across the USA happening right now and open to all. Live track the ride. Join and pedal as little or as much you like.
Rapha Portland Brevet Snapshots
(9-10 April, 2016)
