Joe Cruz
Pedaling In Place
2nd Annual NYC Dirt Audax Invitational
There is the steep rocky Ruckman climb, body english for traction, point the bike between the ruts and round the slick fallen leaves. Everyone is leaping now, rhythm. Familiar wide dirt tracks, we stop for cakes and coffee and then off again northward to a long lovely stretch by the water through stands of blazing yellow.
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.
New England Journal
One handed, it’s apple season and I’m biting fresh sweet clean bitter like the air. We’re on a route around the 1930’s Quabbin reservoir in Western Massachusetts, water collected to serve distant Boston and the communities in between.
Commute
Heading to work usually a means and a transition, an empty something in between important things, but not this time.
Norway Journal Pt. 3
Leaves and moss and sucking bogs and wind, the grey that cracks to sunshine and then the mosquitoes that figure 8 curve back and again on me, the tannic rivers and the suggestion if not reality of cold, ambient glow at 3am
Gear for Bikepacking Norway
For a month long bikepacking trip in Sweden and Norway in June/July I rode my main expedition wheel, a modified 2010 Surly Pugsley.
Norway Journal Pt. 2
I can’t hear what my companions are saying unless they’re up close. The hiss and knock of the drops on the gore tex whirlpool sucks all of our shouts down, and then the cold slows the light itself.
Norway Journal pt. 1
Edgeless days, us and the sky forward. Tonight we’ll belt mouthfuls of Jameson from a .5l plastic bladder that I refill at the wine monopoly government liquor stores in the bigger towns a week apart, but not if we’ve rolled through late. And the talk wanders, floats on thermals from our camaraderie.
Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook, 3rd Edition
The 3rd edition of the excellent Adventure Cycle-Touring Handbook has just been released. Neil and Harriet Pike have substantially updated Stephen Lord’s earlier editions, and the result is an indispensable guide to rough conditions bicycle touring […]
Traverse In Light (Sweden)
The settling serenity is that it’s lost the instant after it comes. What’s left is analog, elemental substance: brown bog grasses, hillocks, snowpatches, refracting droplets, stone.
