Biking the Blue Marble -- Guest Post by Ted Eliason

Back in 2019 we sold a Surly Disc Trucker to Ted Eliason, who rode it around the entire world. Yep, the entire world. 51,164 miles. This is his write-up about his garage-to-garage ride around—yes, it really is true—the entire world.

Have you ever wondered what it feels like to bicycle around the entire Earth? To measure the vastness of continents through the rhythm of your own effort? To grasp how immense—and yet how small—this water-covered rock truly is? To witness countries, cultures, languages, and cuisines as they transform and change, and blend, until you’ve finally completed a full circuit and are back to where you started?

        (Insert PolarSteps maps)

        The journey of 50,000 miles begins with a single pedal stroke. To quote world cyclist, Alastair Humphreys,

“For I now know that the hardest part of most adventures is summoning the nerve to begin, to just make it happen. The rest usually takes care of itself. “

On April 27th, 2019, all the preparations are made. The panniers are packed to the best of my ability. I meet with friends Lee and Pam and their road bikes near our 88th and Wadsworth townhome. My wife, Kendra, also joins for the start of the ride north. I don't know if I have enough money saved to complete the trip. I had never even been on an overnight bicycle trip before. And here I am, planning to attempt going around the world on a bicycle. Going for it, to see what happens.

(Insert opening day photo)

The back story is that I had wanted a break in my career. Perhaps a complete break. I had been on the corporate treadmill for a few decades. I was, “neither old nor young.” In India they call it the age of vanaprastha, the “forest walk”, when one is no longer burdened by the need to educate oneself or build a household, but is not yet ready to renounce an active life. I moved to Colorado in 1999 with a passion for mountain climbing. I had lived in 10 different states at that point, for reasons of education and work, and was tired of moving. Colorado offered the largest and most diversified job market in the United States next to the high summits of a folded mountain range with stable year-round weather. My dream was to use Colorado as a training ground to some day climb some of the highest mountains in the world.

My wife Kendra and I made a good run of it. We climbed together in the Alps, the Andes, in Canada, the Tetons, Rainer, Yosemite. We summited all of the Colorado 14ers together. But the world is always changing. And dreams change with it.

In the summer of 2011, I took a fall on the east face of Longs Peak and was helicoptered out with a talus bone fracture. My ankle would never be the same again. I acquired my first Trek road bicycle to work through the scar tissue. My career was relatively stable for a long period, but in 2016 I was given the tap on the shoulder and escorted to a room where HR informed me that my job had been relocated to Austin, Texas. I accepted a severance package worth six months of my normal annual salary and soon cycled through a different job in each of the next three years. I told Kendra at that time, “You know, the next layoff, when it happens, I want to take some time before heading straight back into the corporate job market.” The quote is attributed to Einstein that 'Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.' Sometimes when you are stuck in a bad pattern that appears to be repeating, shaking the “snow globe” and watching where the flakes freshly land is about as good a strategy as any.

“Go!” Kendra told me. “Come back better.” She knew first hand that I was struggling emotionally. I researched what dream mountain in the Himalaya I would try to climb and discovered the costs had skyrocketed over the course of my lifetime. I started watching “See the World” on YouTube by Iohan Gueorguiev, and was following 23 year old Instagrammer Fredrika Ek from Sweden as she circled the world by bicycle in just over 1000 days. I read Alastair Humphreys who chronicled traversing all of the continents by bicycle between 2001-2005. Traveling to mountains internationally for climbing had given both Kendra and I an appreciation for all of the experiences in and around the central focus of climbing that we admitted were often more enjoyable than the climbing itself. I started to calculate the cost of going around the world on a bicycle. Two to three years could be done in such a way as to roughly equal the cost of just one guided, permitted Himalayan mountain over 8,000 meters for three months with only a 50% chance of success. When the predictable layoff finally came I called Kendra and said, “OK. It’s time to buy a bicycle.”

We traveled down to Yawp! Cyclery in Edgewater and I purchased a brand new black Surly Disc Trucker I named “Morpheus”, because I was taking the red pill, and seeing how far down the rabbit hole goes.

(Insert picture of Morpheus)

That first summer I started up towards South Dakota with a plan to ride the “Northern Tier” into eastern Canada, the part of Canada I had never seen before. The plan in North America was to mostly wild camp, but to use the warmshowers.org network every four days or so to get access to a shower and a plug. (Most of my hosts over the years have since become social media friends that I still stay in touch with). At the Cadillac Carhenge art installation in Nebraska, Kendra called me to say she missed me already, “Come up for the weekend! Carhenge is still within driving distance from Denver!”

I don’t want to go into the details, but let's say we went into nearby Alliance to get some groceries. We put Morpheus up on the rack of Kendra’s Subaru so we could clean and oil the chain. On the way back to our campsite I watched in horror through the rearview mirror as Morpheus fell off the Subaru and landed on the highway, losing the seat, breaking both rims, and twisting the handlebars into complete unusability. I was only one week into the trip. We returned to Yawp! Cyclery for $1,500 of major surgery. Kendra drove me and Morpheus back to the scene of the accident one week later. It is a testament to Quality Bikes and Surly that even after the accident, Morpheus carried me for over 50,000 miles without frame cracks. It would turn out to be the most reliable piece of gear in my kit during my almost entire 4 years of bicycle travel.

From Carhenge the road took me to the Needles of South Dakota, through the badlands where I camped in the middle of a herd of wild bison in late season flooding. From Custer I turned east towards Minnesota, where my ancestors emigrated from Europe. I cycled up around Lake Superior, and was advised to travel through the Upper Peninsula of Michigan rather than take the Trans Canada Trail north where the “trail” is the shoulderless trans-Canada highway with trailer trucks blasting past at 80 miles per hour.

(Insert photo of wild bison)

I crossed into Canada at Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario and continued past some of the worst mosquito and black fly infestations I had ever experienced. Amish and Mennonite farms and yellow canola fields, a ferry ride across Lake Huron to Tobermory, down to Greater Toronto, to Union Loyalist, Ontario where the British mass-migrated after their losses in the American war of Independence. I enjoyed free camping along the Ontario canal system to Ottawa, up into Quebec along the Petit Train du Nord rail trail system, down to Monreal, across the Chemin du Roy trail to Quebec City, entering into New Brunswick with its Acadian French culture, to the extensive bike trail system of Prince Edward Island. On to Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, before a ferry to Newfoundland where they speak one of the most difficult dialects of English I have ever encountered. From Newfoundland, I reversed down through Nova Scotia to Maine, joined for a while by my friend Erick Barros from the Dirtbag Climber’s Coalition in Georgia, to wind up in Providence, Rhode Island with a one way ticket to Ireland.

(Insert photo of crossing the Canadian border)

Irish west coast. My friend Ian puts me up in a Dublin hotel for my first Irish breakfast and as a mental buffer to the disorientation of riding along the left hand side of the road for the first time. Ring of Beara, Ring of Kerry, Ring of Dingle. I've always seen rain riding as a skill, but this was new—a torrential coastal mist that saturates every inch of fabric until you give up on staying dry. Up to Galaway and back over to Dublin before turning north towards Belfast. A ferry to Scotland, Glasgow, a ride up to Fort Williams. A hike up UK highpoint Ben Nevis, over and down through the Cairngorms to meet Kendra in gothic Edinburgh where she joined me on a borrowed bicycle from our friend Shirl for the ride into England. Down to Newcastle on Tyne together, rejoining our long time friends Ian and Shirl in Leeds before exploring London. Kendra heads home and my solo trip continues, on to Dover and the ferry to Dunkirk.

Continental Europe, in retrospect, is a blur. I had never been. Castles, cathedrals, town squares, vineyards, rolling farm fields. I crossed through Belgium and the Netherlands where bicycle lanes are next to every road. Past windmills into Germany and the paved bikeways along the castle-topped cliffs of the Rhine. After meeting a past exchange student and friend Boris Bromm in Frankfurt, I headed along the Main river into the Czech republic past the iron curtain. Then Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, around the Alps through the cold winter red beech forests and milky green rivers of Slovenia. Down to Trieste, Italy and a month of cycling down to the heel of the boot. I spent Christmas in the Puglian town of Bari and realized I could spend every Christmas for the rest of my life in Italy. The ‘Natale’ is two uninterrupted weeks of dolce vita, honking and hugging and friends and beers and espresso and pastries and seafood and salutations, “Buon Natale!”

(Insert photo of crossing into Italy)

At Brindisi, Italy I caught another overnight ferry to Igoumeniza, Greece and escaped my 90 day limit in the contiguous “Schengen” countries of Europe. From Greece I headed north again through the white stone Venetian fortresses and Byzantine cathedrals of the Dalmatian coast of Albania, Montenegro, and Croatia. Then east into Bosnia & Herzegovina, through war ravaged regions into Serbia before following the Danube with its loose dogs and trash and makeshift Romani villages all the way down to the Black Sea. On the Serbian border with Romania, the television started to warn of a global virus and the need to wear a mask outdoors. Ebi Andrei, a Romanian border guard who invited me to stay with his family along the way, called to warn me, “Ted! Get to Bulgaria! They are closing the Romanian border tomorrow!”

By the time I reached the Bulgarian border just south of Bucharest, the border guards were wearing makeshift Hasmat suits and only let me through because I was a foreign tourist. I raced through Bulgaria trying to reach Turkey before all the borders closed. I arrived one day too late. On the ride to Turkey, people in the street shouted at me, “It’s closed! It closed yesterday!”

There was nothing to do but retreat to the coastal city of Burgas, Bulgaria and wait for the pandemic to subside, and for the borders to reopen again. I was there for three months. We all know what happened. After watching the number of planes departing from the Sofia Airport dwindle down to only six per day, and with no promise of a tourist visa renewal after three months, I loaded up Morpheus, rode through the armed highway checkpoints with my US passport, reached Sofia in 4 days and took one of the last remaining expensive flights home to Colorado.

(Insert photo at the monument to the Soviet friendship in Varna, Bulgaria)

I didn’t want the ride to end this way. I immediately fell into depression. My wife suggested I bicycle out to Oregon and spend some time with my brother in Portland. I thought someday I would want to ride US highway 1 down the coast from the Canadian border to the Mexican border. Getting trapped within the United States provided the pretext to do it now. I rode up to Glacier, experienced one of the world’s most beautiful descents down ‘Going to the Sun Road’, rode out to the Peace Arch on the Washington/Canada border, headed down the Oregon Coast which (in my opinion) is also one of the most beautiful coastlines of the world, through the sublime empty Redwoods in forest fire season, Golden Gate Bridge, Big Sur, Los Angeles, Tijuana river estuary before smoldering back through the California and Arizona deserts feeling like I was spending too much on this “expensive side trip” when crossing Asia remained the financial priority. When I returned home I rotted, and ate, and grew heavy, and waited for borders to finally reopen again. In April of 2022 it was finally time. My wife and I booked a trip together to Athens.

(Insert photo of Going to the Sun road)

From Athens we ferried to Turkey and rode to the ancient library of Ephesus. We explored Istanbul together under the sounds of the adhan ringling out five times each day. Kendra returned home and I continued on a path that took me across Turkey, into Georgia, a flight from Tbilisi to Aktau, Kazakhstan (because the land border crossing into Azerbaijan still remains closed). In Beyneu, Kazakhstan I waited for two weeks among the camels, dodging locals who wanted to “invite” me to drink vodka (and pay for it all), for a space on a train ride into Uzbekistan (due to a curfew and lockdown in the semi-autonomous region of Karakalpakstan). Traveling through Uzbekistan, I explored the ancient Silk Road cities of Khiva, Bukhara, and Samarkand before crossing the rugged high-brown lower passes of the 24,000-foot peaks in Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. From there, I returned to the vast, flat steppes of Kazakhstan, reaching the Chinese border at Korgas, which remained closed due to China’s 'Zero COVID' policy.

(Insert photo in front of the Madrasas of Samarkand)

From Almaty I flew to Delhi, then to Leh in the remote, culturally Tibetan Himalayan province of Ladakh, India. Then descended 11,000 ft down Zoji La pass through Muslim Kashmir into Himachal Pradesh and the home of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, where I learned the meaning of life. I continued through Sikh Punjab and its Golden Temple at Amritsar, through filthy, crowded, polluted Uttar Pradesh around Delhi, into architecturally gorgeous Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Kerala, and finally Tamil Nadu, the most intensely colorful culture I’ve ever seen with its temples of gateway towers, gopurams, covered in brightly painted statues depicting the epic Hindu poems. Kendra met me again in Chennai, and together we visited the Taj Mahal and Rishikesh before flying our bikes to Bangkok.

(Insert photo with Kendra in Bangkok)

We shared a road through the flowing rice fields, motorcycles, chickens, and water buffaloes across Cambodia to Na Trang, Vietnam before she left again, and I continued up the Pacific Coast to the Chinese border once more. Through northern Laos, down through Thailand into Malaysia and Singapore, catching ferries to clove and durian-scented Java with its 150 million people and 45 active volcanoes, to another ferry that took me to Bali before flying to Perth. From Perth I rode across the tree-less cell-less Nullarbor plains for weeks into kangaroo-dense Victoria and New South Wales, ending in architecturally gorgeous Sydney for a flight to Christchurch, New Zealand. I spent five weeks cycling down to Queenstown and back up to Auckland through Wellington for the eight hour flight to Chile. Kendra told me, to my surprise, “I’m going to cycle with you for six months in South America, but I can’t meet you until December.” It was October. I suddenly found myself with two more extra months on my hands.

(Insert photo at the longest straight road sign)

I only planned to spend around two and a half years cycling the world. But once again, I had imagined one day I would like to cycle the length of Latin America. I speak fluent Spanish and wanted to immerse myself in the experience of crossing the Latin counties by bicycle. The reasoning followed, “We’re here. We might as well go now.” The long ride took on a momentum of its own that seemed almost beyond my control.

By Santiago I had crossed all of the Earth’s latitudes and took a brief “vacation”. A week off to attend a wine festival and take a bus through the 29 tight switchbacks of “Los Caracoles” (the snails), the steeply winding road over the Andes to Mendoza, Argentina (to sample the Malbecs). I returned to Santiago to head south down the famous cycle-touring route the “Carretera Austral” (southern highway), through rain storms and scenic glaciated mountains to wind blasted Patagonia at Los Antiguos, Argentina. The ride continued down through snow in Tierra del Fuego, to Ushuaia at the end of the map just above Antarctica. I reunited with Kendra in El Calafate and El Chalten, just north of Ushuaia where the Patagonian spires of the Fitzroy Massif reach the sky.

(Insert photo of Kendra in front of the Fitzroy massif)

We rode Calleterra 40 up through Patagonian herds of Ganacos (the wild ancestors of llamas), and Emu-like Nandus, to turn east towards the changing landscape of the Patagonian plains with its oil rigs and wind turbines. We spent Christmas summer on the Atlantic coast in the oil town of Caleta Olivia before continuing up through Puerto Madryn, Plata del Mar and European-style Buenos Aires and the ferry to Uruguay. We crossed scorching Uruguay to Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, and then crossed the rolling hills of Paraguay around Iguazu Falls to Asuncion. Back in redrock Salta, Argentina we accomplished one of the most challenging border crossings into Bolivia and spent three nights on the blinding white Uyuni Salt Flats, like a vast frozen lake, before continuing past rural altiplano homesteads with llamas and alpacas to La Paz, where Kendra would return home one last time.

After her departure, I completed the trip through the grueling but stunning Peruvian Andes, volcano-studded Ecuador, through the emerald green of Columbia to Cartagena, where I was tackled by two motorcyclists on a busy morning road and robbed of my cell phone–the only time I had an issue with crime during the entire trip. From Cartagena, I put Morpheus on a boat and sailed to Panama. From there, I rode through Costa Rica, and into Nicaragua, then started using some of the tourist buses between major destinations in Honduras and Guatemala for safety reasons. Mexico was perhaps my favorite of all the Latin countries. Gorgeous, safe, delicious, friendly, deep, all the way from Chiapas to the Baja peninsula, where I crossed back into the United States at the port of Mexicali in mid November. The end of the ride led through the Navajo Nation to the familiar roads of Colorado and then home, completing a garage-to-garage journey around the Earth in 1,379 bicycle travel days for 51,164 miles.

(Insert photo on the Uyuni Salt Flats)

I cannot do all of the memories justice. Along the journey I learned that most people in the world are as friendly to a traveling stranger in another country as they would be to a long lost relative, and that the fear we are often taught to feel about the world out there is mostly unwarranted. Most of the world trades as much in goodwill as in money.

I learned it is a daily decision to view life as a gift and not as a series of debt payments. I learned to avoid looking at lists and top travel destinations because serendipity and personal fit with a place is often more satisfying than preconceptions. I learned through the measurement of my own physical motion across the Earth that it is much smaller than I imagined. By bicycle, India is not far from Greece, Latin America is like a cousin we have so much in common with yet know little about, Australians and New Zealanders share a common cultural parent with the US and Canada even though they are on the opposite side of the world. I learned the world changes faster than you can get around it, even if we ourselves feel much the same.

I was told by a woman in Romania, “When you tell your story, you need to tell about the inner journey and not just the outer one.” The journey changed me. The journey changed how I see everything now. There are an infinite number of pathways to the truth of the Universe, and true wealth is often finding a point where you have no more want for anything and no one left to impress. It is possible to just stop, watch the moments as they pass, and be grateful to be alive. It never required a journey around the world by bicycle. That’s only the form it took for me.

(Insert photo of friends upon the return home)

A technologist was once asked if he thought a machine would one day be invented that creates happiness. He quipped, “It already exists. It’s called a bicycle.” We live in a special moment in human history. There are roads across all countries, people are mostly on good terms everywhere, the climate remains stable enough to be predictable and the worst can be avoided, and we have phones that can keep us in touch with our loved ones daily across vast distances. And with something as simple as a bicycle, and the time and willingness to use it, an ordinary person can go out and see the world for themselves. But it’s not required. Sometimes it's good enough to just make that time to ride out to see another sunset, or to contemplate upon the stars once again.

(Insert photo of the Blue Marble)

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Sleepwalking The Vapor Trail 125

“The past,” Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Four months ago I participated in an event called the Vapor Trail 125, a mountain bike event that is 125 miles long and originally passed through the ghost town of Vapor. I first heard about this race twelve years ago, and it was the name that captivated me as much as anything else. “Vapor Trail” sounds exquisite, diaphanous, indescribable—something that is inhaled to affect the chemistry of the body. For years the idea of doing this difficult ride loomed like a star, not always noticed, but always there. I signed up for it both in 2018 and 2022, but circumstances prevented me from participating (this is called DNS for Did Not Start (or Did Not Suffer)). In 2023 that looming star aligned with the right celestial bodies as well as my own body, and I arrived at the starting line with a broken GPS and a tweaked knee. As getting what you want often goes, finally doing the ride answered no questions, scratched no itches, and solved no problems. The star is still up there in my sky, burning bright as ever, reminding me of this dream I had called the Vapor Trail that I neither fully remember nor understand.

The Vapor Trail begins at 10pm, and racers ride overnight—crossing the continental divide two times in the dark and once more in daylight—finishing anywhere between 11am and 8pm on the following day. I have been training for this with years of committed, regimented insomnia. No two days are quite the same, but most nights are, tossing and turning, bedsheets rising and falling like waves on a sea of endless anxieties and fears, made all the worse by darkness and a mind as opaque as the waxed paper served under greasy airport food. It leaves one feeling like a resident ghost in the town of Vapor (this is called DNS for Did Not Sleep). Because all long, sleepless nights bleed into one another, all of my dark waking hours are tinged by an experience I had several years ago when I was unknowingly drugged. I have no idea what I was given, but I do know that my mind fell apart for about twelve hours—from 10pm to 6am—and during those hours I had no idea what was happening to me. I did not know where I was (this was intensified by my being in a hotel), and even worse, I did not know when I was. Or rather, all of the events of my life seemed to be happening at the same time, accompanied by dreams, thoughts, fantasies, and horrors. There are quantum physicists who claim that while humans experience time in linear fashion, time itself is static, or happening all at once. This resonates with me after my experience, in which eternity felt like a place and not an amount of time, feeling all of my experiences orbit around me, occur without me. In some ways, the Vapor Trail was just one more of these sleepless nights; it was one type of struggle exchanged for another.

I cannot say why I am moved to ride long distances, but I’ve stopped trying to answer that question. I enjoy them and I keep doing them, and that, I suppose, is answer enough. When asked to name the fist city that comes to mind, one can’t really explain why one thinks of Cincinnati or Bruges instead of Bangladesh or Sydney; we are at the mercy of our own minds, and to some extent (or perhaps totally) aren’t in charge of the thoughts or desires that have us in their thrall.

Trying to explain the Vapor Trail to friends and family who don’t ride bikes inevitably convinces them that I am bonkers, which I can understand, but really what difference does it make if one is thrashing around in bed or if one is making circles with their feet in a dark forest, passing through a tunnel carved out of that darkness by a helmet light? Perhaps both things are happening at the same time.

For twelve years I wonder what it would be like to do this race, and then I am riding down F street with fifty other riders as pedestrians cheer without having any idea what we are up to, and then I am pedaling alone up a dirt road on a pleasantly cool evening like I have always been here, the night telescoping out before my headlight, the road ever changing but, within the confines of my light, remaining the same. It makes me think that my daytime life is written out linearly in a book, and my nighttime life is a hole bored through that book, cover to cover—a kind of tunnel carving through chronology like my headlight through the dark.

The forest through which the Vapor Trail winds is the same forest in which I grew up dinking around, with the same brisk mountain air, the same cicada chirps and coyote yaps, the same sprucey, mossy musk. The breeze sounds familiar moving through these aspen leaves and pine needles. The ride is by turns quite pleasant and brutally difficult. But who cares. We all face hard things, and in the end this is just a bike ride.

The first forty miles of the course pass relatively quickly. There’s a fair amount of climbing on mellow dirt roads and some great Colorado Trail singletrack. Aside from my GPS crashing at the start line and dumping all of my data—including the course—those first forty miles are purely enjoyable. (Thank you, by the way, to the Vapor Trail event staff and volunteers for marking the course well enough that I could navigate solely by your little pink flags). As we climb up toward the ghost town of Hancock, my knee feels like it is made of sugarless chewing gum. We are headed into the only unfamiliar section of the course, and though I pored over the course maps and watched jeep videos on YouTube of Hancock and Tomichi Passes and had been told to expect some walking, I am not prepared for the insane hike-a-bike of these sections. I have done the Canyon Creek hike-a-bike several times (which will come after cresting Tomichi Pass) and was expecting that to be the crux of the ride. I was wrong.

We all face hard things. Most of them we don’t get to choose. For me, many of those things come to face me in the middle of the night when I am awake and alone with nothing to stop my overactive sense of responsibility and black-magical thinking. The midnight challenges of the Vapor Trail wear me out in a different way. In the middle of an increasingly chilly night, this bike ride becomes a hard thing. I’m pushing my bike up a road so steep that it’s at times difficult to keep my footing, and the road is full of loose rocks that range in size from softball to coffee table. When I feel I must surely be nearing the top of this climb, I see some exceptionally bright stars above that I realize with a twist of the stomach are racers ahead of me still pushing their bikes up this sysophysian cliff face. And it’s absolutely, unquestionably insane, this effort, that we are out here, and yet there is nothing to do but continue on, as we do in the midst of all the hard things we endure. As Becket says, “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on.” Because my malfunctioning GPS has reset itself twice since the start, I haven’t the vaguest idea how far I’ve come, or how much longer this is going to continue. Have I pushed for an hour? Two? You might as well ask Wilson the Castaway volleyball how many waves he traversed at sea.

(In the video above, I’m doing my best to hold the phone level. It doesn’t quite do justice to how steep this road is. We should’ve been on belay.)

As surprised as I am to find myself on this impassible road—the granite milling my shoes to powder and snowmelt soaking up into my shoes around the cleats—I am not as surprised as are the hunters in blaze orange who set up before first light at the top of Tomichi Pass and who clearly spent a lot of time and effort to get up here and who rose very early to make coffee and sandwiches and find the perfect, silent, remote vantage point only to have fifty grunting, wheezing, bike pushers scrape their derailleurs against boulders as they ram their way up the valley and mere feet from the hunters’ cover. Right place, wrong game.

The remnants of the shoe covers that Rebecca loaned to me flutter around my ankles, tattered as flags at a besieged castle, as I push on, skyward, toward a distant headlight that is in view at what must be the top of Granite Peak, the race’s high point. If the light weren’t fixed in space, I would think it was an airplane. I crane my neck to look up at that light,  lose my constitution, and decide that once I make it to the top of Tomichi Pass I will descend down the road to Snowblind campground and give up, rather than pushing all the way up into the jet stream. But as the faint outlines of the mountains start to appear in the morning’s earliest green light, I am in a place that I love, and I’ve pushed my bike for so long that my knee feels great. So I make a right onto the singletrack and begin pushing onward toward the top of Granite Peak. Once past a certain milestone of exhaustion, there is a peace of mind that is as near to living in the moment as I ever get.

As I drink hummingbird water for calories at the top of Granite Peak, I envy my dog, who found a meatball in a bush beside the Arkansas River before the race started (the very incident, in fact, responsible for my tweaked knee). Drinking my calories has served me well in the past, but it never occurred to me that there is likely a limit to the number of hours that I can function on even high dollar hummingbird water. (This is called DNS for Did Not Sandwich).

The daylight portion of the ride is all quite pleasant. I descend 9 miles down Canyon Creek, up Old Monarch Pass, along the spine of the country on the Monarch Crest trail, and absolutely shred the Starvation Creek descent—seriously, I’ve never ridden Starvation so cleanly. All of that riding passes about as quickly as this sentence. As soon as the sun rises, I can once again touch bottom, and with proper footing comes linear time, and like all linear time, it passes.

It’s the climb up Poncha Creek Road that gets me (this portion of the course is somewhat cruel, as Starvation and Poncha Creek Road make a ten mile loop, leading racers through Marshall Pass twice). I can no longer stomach the hummingbird water, and I’ve shortsightedly mixed drink mix into all of my bottles and I have a tough time hydrating during the heat of the day.

From 10pm through 3:30pm I rode (or pushed) 95 miles in 17-1/2 hours (whatever those are), and climbed over 16,000 vertical feet and dropped out at the final aid station, which is just before the fun part. The arduous Rainbow trail was still ahead of me, but I was about to descend 6,000 feet. What’s more galling is that I think I could’ve finished the race in less time than it took me to abandon it. Just one portion of that time—the ride back to town—took over an hour, and I regretted my decision each time my ears popped.

(I can tell you why I didn’t stop earlier. I just so happened to run into Mike Franco, the race director, at aid stations 1-4, and he was a supreme motivator. I was back on my bike with more hummingbird water in my bottles before I had a chance to feel tired. Thanks, Mike.)

I’ve long thought that doing difficult things on a bicycle has value—beyond simply enjoying the difficult thing—because it reminds me that my body can handle much more than my mind assumes it can. In turn, that helps me hold my resolve when real life challenges come unexpectedly in the middle of the proverbial night. “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on.” (And so on). It turns out that I don’t even have to finish these difficult things for the lesson to ring true. In fact, I never quit (Did Not Stop). I am out here pedaling through the dark, thinking about tacos and looking up at what might be stars.  

The Salsa Cassidy; Ride like the Pinkertons are in Pursuit

Rear wheel reflectors can keep you safe from cars.

Hi. My name is Levi, and you may remember me from such bike reviews as, Why a Rigid Mountain Bike will Dislodge your Retinas and Why it’s Good for You and, Why Buy This Expensive Shock When I Can Tape $900 to my Steel Seat Tube Instead? Yes, I’ve ridden a lot of miles on steel hardtails, and it’s unusual for me to be aboard a bike like the Cassidy. In fact, I’ve never ridden a bike with this much travel, this slack a head tube, or this quick a draw. For me, reviewing this bike is being trapped on a rocky ledge, and not knowing whether I’ll go down fighting or whether I’ll jump into the river below even though I can’t swim. What do I mean by that? It doesn’t matter. The fall will probably kill ya.

The Salsa Cassidy is a long-travel (165/180mm) full suspension bike intended for the steepest, gnarliest descents out there. It’s built for gapping, shredding, trunking, bending, sending, receiving, pulping, quelping, and chumbling. I’m not much of a chumbler, but when I saw that Salsa had released the bike in this color, I simply had no choice, and when I saw those long fork stanchions I thought, I’ll bet I can scratch those.

As you may know, we have an annual Goal Program. The goal I’ve chosen for myself this year involves something I don’t like doing (training). Past Levi committed to this goal and then got to walk away from it while I do all the suffering. Anyway, because I’m looking for high-mileage training rides, I’ve pedaled this bike up a lot of fire roads and around more laps at Buff Creek than I can count. I expected to suffer on that kind of terrain with all of this travel, and was concerned that the Cassidy would feel sloppy and saggy, that it’d feel like I was riding around on a bike made of balloons and bungie cords. Much to my delight, it climbed much like Salsa’s Spearfish (an XC bike with 100/120mm of travel) even with the suspension fully open. After I toggled the compression threshold to firm up the rear shock, it climbed fire roads exactly to my tastes, which I didn’t think a full suspension bike could do. The bike climbs so well that I haven’t bothered to flip the Flip Chip on the shock to tighten up the angles and raise the bottom bracket height. That a long-travel bike can meet the preferences of a hardtail enthusiast is a, well, a shock. The Split Pivot suspension platform was designed by Dave Weagle, of DW-Link fame, and it delivers on its promises. 

What do I mean when I say the bike rides well? It is the right amount of dynamite—it cracks the safe without blowing up the entire train. It’s predictable and does exactly what I want it to do. I don’t have to accommodate idiosyncrasies (that said, guiding a long wheelbase through switchbacks is a skill I’ve had to learn, but I’ve learned it and don’t really think much of it anymore). If you want to blow up the entire train, it can do that, too. The bike is pushing me to find new limits. Unsurprisingly, it handily absorbs high- and low-speed drops, is stable on the steepest descents, and keeps both tires firmly planted on weird chunk in order to remain fully supportive.

Because I’m used to descending on a 67.5 degree head angle, I was concerned that the Cassidy’s 63.8 head angle would put the front tire so far out ahead of me that I’d loose the front end on loose, sandy turns, but it never happened.

The Cassidy has a three-pack mount on the downtube, and will accommodate a 26oz bottle in the main triangle. You can see in the photos I’ve been experimenting with carrying more bottles in stem bags, which has worked surprisingly well (I protected the frame and fork with a lot of clear tape). Other times I succumbed to a hydration pack.

Part of what I dislike about training is that it can mean using yourself to ride more miles than you might want to, and it can turn riding into a chore. I never tired of riding this bike all over the place (I certainly got tired, but never bored). It made me feel like I could take on anything, including the entire Bolivian army, and it has impressed this humble chumbler.

A Tribute to our Friend Brian

I’m sorry to say that we lost our dear friend and coworker Brian in November. It’s been incredibly tough, as you can imagine, but all of your love and support has been incredibly helpful. Thank you. It’s really helpful to feel like we aren’t alone. Below you’ll find a a eulogy and a slideshow. We wanted to share this with you because you aren’t alone either. We all lost him, and we’re all in this mess together.

Eulogy

I. For Sorrow

After the third time Brian borrowed this book, Jurassic Park, from me, he returned it and said, “I’ve read this book for the last time. It’s stupid.” He borrowed it at least two more times after that. On the day we cleaned out his apartment I discovered that he stopped borrowing this from me only because he got his own copy.

To my surprise, I found a passage in this book that resonated with me. “Living systems are never in equilibrium. They are inherently unstable. They may seem stable, but they’re not. Everything is moving and changing. In a sense, everything is on the edge of collapse.” The passage does’t make me think of Brian, but it resonates because it pins me as the dupe who expects stability, like a goat tied to a stick, unaware that it’s in the T-rex enclosure, or that predators the size of a T-rex even exist.

I looked for other passages that did remind me of Brian, but it’s the book in its entirety that reminds me of him. The novel is comprised of three things, all of which Brian loved. 1. This book is a scathing indictment of a reckless billionaire. 2. Much of the dialogue in this book involves shrewd scientists lecturing overconfident ignoramuses on complex systems. 3. Much of this book is about people getting eaten by dinosaurs. Or at least mauled. Any time you want to feel a little closer to him, I have two copies of this stupid book, now, which you’re welcome to borrow from me as often as you like.

II. For Joy

Brian took great pleasure in color coordination. In signing everyone up for Me Undies. In talking about his own Me Undies. In showing off whatever Me Undies print he was wearing that day. In offering up for conversation whatever Ezra Kline had been talking about. In correcting other people’s misspellings. In quoting verbatim the advertisement for audible.com that opened every episode of This American Life for a few months. In writing raps about Harry Potter and revising the lyrics to Black Hole Sun. In keeping up with every new bicycle component on the market. In reading everything from stupid fiction about dinosaurs to forward-thinking non-fiction about every topic imaginable.

Many of the little things he enjoyed are indications of how he was a tireless investigator, ever curious, committed to seeking out the new, and improving his life from his mind all the way down to his underpants. He delighted in sharing these discoveries, and without him the rest of us are doomed to lives of obsolete knowledge, last week’s news, and bunched undergarments.

III. For Girls

To say that Brian played what we called his Sad Lady Jams at the shop constantly is not hyperbolic. Big Thief. Cate Le Bon. Sharon Von Etton. Phoebe Bridgers. Adrianne Lenker. Angel Olsen. Big Thief again. He wore a t-shirt that said ‘The Future is Female.’ He wouldn’t stop talking about a trilogy of books about lesbian necromancers as well as the book Vagina Obscura.

The poet Eula Biss explains a connection between the bicycle and feminism that makes me think of Brian. “A bicycle in traffic must be predictive to the point of clairvoyance, must know the cars better than the cars know themselves, must understand their motivations and their common blunders. Cars don’t always signal their intentions. And cars aren’t always nice to each other, through they usually show each other some respect in deference to the damage they can do to each other. They are like important men in conversation with other important men. Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.” This seems like a comparison that Brian understood intuitively. He refused and refuted the patriarchy at every opportunity.

IV. For Boys

One of the first moments that Brian and I shared together, we shared as coworkers, and it was one of the first times I wondered whether we might become friends. It was the day that David Foster Wallace—a writer for whom we had mutual respect—died. I stopped by the bike shop where we both worked to tell him the news, which sounds weird but back then news spread by something we called word-of-mouth. Brian stopped the music and called for a moment of silence. He and I shared thousands of other moments of silence over the years but without occasion. In the beginning of our relationship there were so many silences that for a long time I wondered whether perhaps he didn’t like me. I’d arrive and work and say, “Good morning, Brian,” and he wouldn’t respond. Often, though, twenty minutes later he’d lean around the corner to blabber on about the film Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, or to ask what I thought about Thomas Pynchon. I decided to behave as though he liked me, and then we became friends. Presumably. He could be difficult to get to know and to get close to, but once you were close enough he was wonderfully funny, inventive, and never dull.

Speaking of David Foster Wallace, there are a couple of passages in Wallace’s works that make me think of Brian.

“Lonely people tend to be lonely because they decline to bear the psychic costs of being around other humans…People affect them too strongly.”

And another, “Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to chose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot or will not exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.”

V. For Silver

Many of the gifts that I’d given him over the years have suddenly returned to me now, such as this notebook I’m reading from, which I made for him years ago. These things have been especially difficult for me to accept back into my life, and for awhile I wasn’t sure why.

I read a fantastic book called On Having and Being Had, which is a critique of capitalism written by a poet who wants to write for a living but cannot without being ensnared by the system she’s critiquing. She says money is our most common yardstick for success, but also for everything else. Around the time of his divorce, Brian told me that his ex-wife (and I’m paraphrasing an old memory here, so I’m sorry, Kate, if I’m getting this wrong) had wanted him to grow up and make something of himself. His response was that all he wanted to do was fix bikes. He never compromised about that. (Or about anything, which was both admirable and annoying.) How many people can say that they pursued doing what they loved for their entire lives?

If we use units of measurement other than money, Brian was more successful than most. He didn’t hold a single conviction he hadn’t thoroughly examined. He challenged others  on their bad ideas and sloppy thinking rather than indulging them. He had a sophisticated worldview born from a whole lot of critical reading.

I know he would’ve liked this book about capitalism. In it, there’s an excellent short essay about the bicycle. The poet writes, “Cars make you stupid, in the way that wealth makes you stupid. In the way that any sort of power makes you stupid, really. And it is this, my own stupidity, that I dislike most about driving.”

I know he would’ve liked this book about capitalism, because I gave him a copy for his birthday last year and he told me he liked it. It was another of my gifts to him that came back to me, sitting at the top of a box of books that I carried out of his apartment.

I’ve heard the analogy that losing someone is like a door closing, and you can never go back into that room you shared. There’s no knob on your side, and everything you loved about being in that room is forever unavailable. What this analogy omits is that sometimes all of the furniture that had been in that room ends up on your side of the door, purposeless. These objects no longer hold the magic they held when they symbolized a friendship. They are painful reminders that you have really lost two people—your departed loved one as well as the person you were when you were in that room who you can never again be.

VI. For Gold

Thank you, Brian. For everything. The current of your influence runs through me more deeply than you supposed, and I know the same holds true for a greater number of people than you could ever have accepted. You taught me to work on bicycles, which very directly changed the course of my life for the last fifteen years. Thank you for teaching me to clean the kitchen as I cook instead of piling up a mess until the end. You changed my mind about so many things that matter more than kitchens, from my estimation of how kind human beings generally are to the trouble with eating meat. You taught me the value of admitting to ignorance.

Thank you for your precision in everything.

Thank you for your verbal horseplay, silly portmanteaus and puns, and your exacting, cutting jokes.

Thank you for unremittingly being yourself.

Thank you for the time that we had together.

VII. For Secrets Never to be Told

I’ve been having dreams. In one, Brian’s head was extra narrow and kind of quashed like a parallelogram, but otherwise everything was fine. In another, I was at work and Brian was running late and I sat there waiting for him to come through the back door but he never did. I woke from that sleep but the dream relentlessly continues. In another, we were snowmobiling, which he absolutely would’ve hated, and I also would’ve hated it, but in that dream I saw him walking up a hillside in the show, casting shadows on the winter sky as he stood there, counting crows.

One for sorrow.

Two for joy.

Three for girls and

Four for boys

Five for silver

Six for gold

Seven for secrets never to be told.

Yawp! Cyclery's 2021 Gift Guide

People are telling me that it’s December, which clearly can’t be correct. It’s sunny, seventy degrees, and my internal clock is telling me it can’t be later than June 15th. In any case, I’ve put together a gift guide so that when December does actually roll around—because 2015 will be over before we know it—this list will be ready.

We’ve been making gift guides for a lot of years now, and because we sell products we use and love and believe in, we end up selling many of the same things year after year. You can check out some of our past years’ guides if you need more ideas, because a lot of those things are still in stock and still awesome.

First Ascent Instant Coffee

I tend to be the kind of person who would rather carry coffee beans and a small grinder and a pour-over apparatus and some filters and a baggie for the spent grounds than settle for anything else just because it would be easier. However, this instant coffee from First Ascent is so good that there’s no compromise involved, and it takes up so little space that I can now carry an extra book in my frame bag, which I no longer need because without the pour-over apparatus there’s less sittin’ around time, which means I have to find other ways to make some sittin’ around time. Like by drinking EXTRA CUPS OF COFFEE. Everyone likes drinking EXTRA CUPS OF COFFEE. I may have had EXTRA CUPS OF COFFEE this morning and everything is BETTER.

Fernweh Dehydrated Adventure Meals

You know what it’s like to be in the middle of nowhere, surrounded by only nature without a single human-made thing to see/hear that might remind you of all of the hustling and stress and conflict and bad news that you might be in the wilderness to try to get away from, and then you round a corner and find a few pieces of plastic strewn about, and all of the good feelings you’d had collapse under the weight of the ill feelings about humanity that come rushing back to fill the space you’d finally emptied of them? There’s no guarantee that people won’t litter their Fernweh packaging, too, but it is omnidegradable and compostable. The meals are also 100% plant-based, which means they have a smaller carbon footprint that other meals to begin with. These help preserve for you and for others the unadulterated naturalness that you went outside to enjoy.

pies

No, we don’t sell or make pies, but we do eat them, and we recommend that you and all of your loved ones eat them. Why? If you have to ask why, then perhaps you need to eat some pie to remind yourself that the latticey answer to that question is self-explanatory. Who wouldn’t like getting pies? There aren’t many perfect foods in the world, so why waste time giving anything else? We can’t help but be consumers, and consuming things that make us happy and make our bodies go is a great alternative to consuming things that end up in storage closets and eventually a landfill.

Bivo Stainless Steel Waterbottles

You are probably already aware of the downsides of plastic bottles, being that they are bad for both humans and for the planet. Even “safe” plastic bottles start to break down after a year or two, exposing hydrated individuals to toxic chemicals. Bivo is the first stainless bottle that has an adequate flow rate and also fits in a bottle cage. They’ll last forever, and when your favorite cyclist stops drinking toxic chemicals, they probably will too.

The All-Road Bike Revolution by Jan Heine

This book is full of fun and nerdy research that yields counterintuitive results. It will help you find any incorrect assumptions you might’ve made about bike handling, tire pressure, and so many other things. It’s the perfect book for the bike nerd who likes having their mind blown.

Vargo Triad Stove

If sleeping on the ground were so great, we’d all do it at home. Because sleeping on the ground isn’t so great, eating hot food and drinking coffee outside make bikepacking a little more pleasant. This stove weighs next to nothing and will burn denatured, ethyl, or methyl alcohol, as well as gels or tablets. It’s more predictable than cooking on a campfire (which is getting tougher as more and more more fire bans go into effect permanently), and easier to replenish fuel stores on the road, as a lot of hardware stores and convenience stores carry denatured alcohol (HEET works, too).

Churros

No, we don’t sell or make churros, either. We aren’t a bakery. For goodness sake, though, who wouldn’t like to receive a plate of hot churros, like, right now? I propose that anyone to whom you might give a plate of hot churros who doesn’t love you for it doesn’t deserve to be a friend of yours, or at least to receive gifts from you. If you were to say, “Happy Love Day, Terrance,” and hand Terrance a plate of hot churros, an he were to reply, “But I wanted a Tesla,” then you should take a long hard think about what exactly of import you and Terrance share, in terms of admirable qualities. In my opinion.

Occam Apex Strap

This cool little strap provides a way for riders to carry all of their repair stuff safely and conveniently on their bike. Just about anyone with a bicycle can use one of these—unless they don’t like being prepared.

King Cage Sideloader Ti Cage

Like all King Cages, these are handmade in Durango, Colorado. They’re titanium, so they’re very strong and barely weigh anything. Side loading cages are great for full suspension mountain bikes, or bikes (like the Salsa Warbird) that have two bottle mounts on the downtube. They’re suitable for any rider, of course, provided they like convenience.

Oveja Negra’s 925 handlebar bag

This bag is intended for those who work 9 to 5, but we at Yawp! work 10 to 6 and still this bag is great! It’ll hold a surprising number of burritos, pies, coffee supplies, maps, marbles, crayons, churros, chopsticks, or whatever you need to take to work. Or to “work.”

Bikes for Kids

If some of your favorite bike riders are very small, perhaps they’d like a new bike. Cleary bikes are built to last, and they ride much better than department store bikes. We have them in 16” and 20” sizes, in a few different colors.

Yawp! Stuff

We have shirts, hoodies, socks, caps, hats, Silipints, water bottles, patches, koozies, and jerseys. If your loved one likes to rep their LBS and also not be naked in public, we have them, uh, covered.

Cakes

As a matter of fact, I posit that just about any baked good would make a more than adequate gift. “All baking is done from the heart,” they say, which sounds unsanitary, but the gist of which I think conveys that even something you burned or forgot to add sugar to is going to be appreciated. Or maybe I haven’t eaten in over an hour and my stomach is writing this gift guide (also unsanitary).

That’s it. Happy holidays!