The Radavist

Grinduro is my favorite cycling event of the year and when you include it in the Sierra Buttes Triple Crown, alongside Lost and Found, as well as Downieville, you’re in for a hell of a weekend. In its fourth year, you could tell the event is dialed but that’s mostly due to the amazing venue that is the Quincy Fairgrounds, Giro, the volunteers, the sponsors, and the Sierra Buttes’ impeccable ability to show everyone a great time!

Introductions to trips like this often times get wrapped up in marketing jargon, or storylines that revolve around re-imagining historical tales, and that’s not a bad thing at all! Finding a story on a trip gives it more meaning, more impact, and overall a better reading experience. Yet, the lack of a story doesn’t inherently doom a tale. Sometimes having fun on new trails is enough motivation to spur a road trip of epic proportions. To be honest, the story here is motivated by one thing: finding solid mountain bike riding along Nevada’s Highway 50, which was dubbed “The Loneliest Road in America” by Life magazine in July 1986.

A few years back, you might recall a story that Radavist author and contributor Kyle Kelley wrote, regarding a trip called the Steamboat Ralleye. There was even a video! 2015 seems like a long time ago, but that ride operates as a segue into this morning’s tale.

“Come to Colorado, see the aspens, ride a Moots to Fort Collins” pretty much sums up how I got to this point. An invite surfaced from Peter Discoe, the founder of the Ramble Ride, coinciding with my friends at Moots, to take on 220 miles between Steamboat and Fort Collins, Colorado, via steep and daunting mountain roads. We’ve covered the Ramble Rides extensively on the Radavist before, but I wanted to sink my teeth into some Colorado dirt before summer was over.

Sand Traps and Mishaps in the Argentine Puna
Photos and words by Ryan Wilson

There are few things in this world that excite me more than a faint checkered line on a map, meandering through wide open spaces.  As I’ve come to find out over the previous month, Northern Argentina has quite the collection of them.  While my completionist tendencies want to pull me in all directions, down every last trail, there are really more than one could ever explore in just one trip.  Often these tracks are meticulously sculpted into a bone-shattering washboard.  If not, they’re plunging you through pits of ankle-deep sand.  Either way, they’re always filling your eyes with sights unlike any other in the world.

Melancholic Beauty on the Silk Road Mountain Race

Words by Lian van Leeuwen, photos by TH Photos, Gianmarco Dodesini Valsecchi, Jennifer Doohan and Giovanni Maria Pizzato

There’s a melancholic beauty to first times. It holds the excitement of the unknown, the nervous expectations of true adventure. With the inaugural Silk Road Mountain Race, race director Nelson Trees set out to create just that: a great adventure. ‘I wanted to create a race in an area that is close to my heart but is unknown to many. A little daunting, a bit out there. Something that any reasonably fit rider would be able to pull off but would also push contestants beyond their comfort zone.’ And that he did.

The Driftless
Photos and words by Kevin Sparrow

When people hear of the Midwest, they typically think of farmland and prairie. Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, and Iowa have a rich history of glaciation that smoothed out a lot of the land we typically think of and gouged out lakes and terrain. Southeastern Minnesota, northeastern Iowa and western Wisconsin and Northern Illinois, known as The Driftless Region, is a unique area virtually untouched by glacial sculpting. As a result, this landscape greatly contrasts what one would typically think of the Midwest. Its narrow valleys, high bluffs, forested hillsides and beautifully sculpted topography is a real treat for cyclists in the region.

High Fives and Apricot Handups: Cycling the Pamir Highway
Photos and words by Amy Jurries

I pulled into camp early that afternoon, tired from a dusty, bumpy day in the heat with a slipped derailleur cable that forced me to ride the rolling terrain using only a couple of gears. I plopped down in the shade and chugged some sun-baked water as I began to hear rumblings from the Dutch cyclists in our group. They referred to a large number of texts from loved ones back home frantically asking if they were OK.

“OK how?” I asked one of the riders.

“A bunch of cyclists have been murdered right up the road,” he replied. “I guess it’s all over the news in Holland.”

As further, horrific details of the terrorist attack came in sporadically throughout the evening, we all sat in shock. A car filled with five IS-sympathizers rammed into a group of seven Western cyclists just outside of Kulob, then attacked them all with knives. Four died: two from the US, one from Switzerland, and one from the Netherlands. This was not only a little “too close to home,” but also completely opposite the Tajikistan we had come to know and love the past two weeks cycling along the Pamir Highway. Not to mention quite a blow to Tajikistan’s recently declared “Year of Tourism.”

If there’s one route people ask me to show them when they’re visiting Los Angeles with a road bike, it’s how to get to the Hollywood Sign. It turns out, cyclists can fall victim to iconic destinations just as commonly as non-cyclists. That’s what you do when you come to LA right? The one thing that separates this spot from other tourist destinations like the Chinese Theater or the Walk of Stars is you’ve really got to work to get up close and personal to the Hollywood Sign.

There’s an old joke in Hollywood, stemming from a conversation between Johnny Carson and Bette Davis. Carson asked Davis for advice on “the best way an aspiring starlet could get into Hollywood,” Ms. Davis replied without hesitation, “Take Fountain!”

Fountain Ave is a bicycle-friendly connector between Silver Lake and West Hollywood. It runs east to west and is parallel to Sunset Boulevard and Santa Monica Boulevard, two very congested arteries and very dangerous to ride bicycles on, especially during rush hour. By contrast, Fountain takes you past cafes, farmer’s markets and while the beginning is a two-lane road, it widens up once you reach Hollywood. There are “sharrows” the whole way, reminding motorists to share the road with cyclists but don’t be surprised when a Maserati goes 80mph past you, tailpipes brapping.

La Ruta Del Diablo
Photos and words by Ryan Wilson

After coming away from my first Puna de Atacama experience with a renewed sense of excitement for the other-worldly landscape and solitude of the high Andean desert, I was really looking forward to what else this region of Northern Argentina had to offer. Once again, there were a few different route options on the menu. One being a rather well-worn affair (for the Atacama at least), with a few extra towns dotting the map to make re-supplying a bit easier, along with rumors of a better riding surface. The other, a rarely used track setting off through a string of Satan-themed canyons, salt flats, and remote mountain passes….

“Come to Montana this summer, it doesn’t get too hot, there are no mosquitos, and the mountain biking is awesome!” At least one of those was true and luckily, that’s all that matters at the end of the day. This was Adam Sklar’s invite to a handful of frame builders and makers, welcoming us to ride bikes in Bozeman for a week in an event initially dubbed “Sklar Camp” but later was turned to “Builder’s Camp.” This idea stemmed from the disdain of trade shows and convention centers and a love of riding bikes, something many frame builders just don’t have a lot of free time for. It happens every year at NAHBS, usually Saturday evening after the show has closed and people get a few drinks in them. A lamentation of epic proportions take hold as someone blurps out “Why don’t we just skip NAHBS next year and ride bikes instead?” A few more drinks and a roundtable discussion ensues, resulting in “Ok, yeah we need to go to NAHBS, but let’s make plans to ride bikes this year!”

Idahome: Bikepacking in God’s Country
Words by Aimee Gilchrist, photos noted in Gallery Captions

God’s Country Day 1:  Captain’s Log

The pain felt like a feathery flame, arriving fierce and lacing itself into the layers of fibers in my quads.  I bend over my bars to stretch and shake the lactic acid bath pooling in my legs. My chest strains to keep air in my lungs when it desperately wants to escape.  I glance around to see if the others show similar conditions to help calm my mind. Although I had fared well earlier in the day when we were sticking to the fire roads, now the steep grade of this narrow, rutted trail has me feeling worked.  I’m barely keeping my inner dialogue silenced. The steeper and higher we climb up the pass, the weaker my mental fortitude becomes.

It’d been a while since the last time I had been to Portland. 2015 or so, if I recall correctly. In that time, a lot has changed in the city, and over at our friends at the Vanilla Workshop.

While I was in Portland at the Workshop Buildoff, I did my best at documenting the space, a few people, and the party scene from the kickoff. Portland’s got a deep cycling culture, and seeing it come out for this party was a great way to spend a Friday night. Feeling the frenetic buzz leading up to the event, only to be released with the first can of beer opening was a real treat and one that I enjoyed watching unfold.

The Downieville Classic has been a work in progress since its inception in 1995, yet most recently the Sierra Buttes Trail Stewardship – the trail organization that throws the race and maintains hundreds of miles of trail in the Lost Sierra – made a massive leap in progress, but not without a lot of persistence, a little luck, and yes, tons of practice. Whatever mountain biking is to you, be it sport, hobby, lifestyle, or all of the above, it requires practice. The SBTS has logged over 25 years of practice working with various Forestry departments: learning the ins and outs of trail stewardship, including but not limited to the politics and practices of making and maintaining mountain bike trails.

A Solstice Ballad for My Hometown
Words by Tenzin Namdol, photos by Ultra Romance and Thomas Hassler.

While the God-fearing Christians of the lower Connecticut River valley ended their day cleaning off their lawn care equipment, a small group of Wiccan-observing, season-worshipping heathens rolled their tires through the forested glades of the Nutmeg Country triangle in honor of the Swift Campout. We smell of essential oils and the crystals around my neck jingles at each pedal stroke. The leaves on the trees have matured from their Spring-emerged highlighter green to a darker, more robust hue, properly at the ready for the next summer storm. The back-to-back Nor’easters these trails have endured in recent months have left branches and huge fallen trees in the path as we head for the lean to’s in Cockaponsett State Forest- a mouthful, I know, especially paired with the Pattaconk Lake that nests inside. This area is full of names like that: Hammonasset Beach is a rock throw away from Benedict’s home, the Quinnipiac flows into New Haven harbor several miles away. Connecticut is a colonized spelling of the Native Algonquian, Quinnehtukqut, which translates to “place of the long river”.

If you build it, they will come, and by “they” I mean women. Yet not the women we typically see the industry sinking hundreds of thousands of dollars into R&D to make the perfect bike. No, this segment of the industry often gets the back-burner.

Let’s backpedal a little bit. Gladys Bikes is, as their Google profile so succinctly puts it, “a cycle shop for women.” The owner, Leah, felt there was a void in Portland’s current bike shop offering in one key way: they tend to leave out the hybrid, or commuter market, especially for middle-aged women. Particularly when it comes to bike fitting and saddle selection. Leah and her crew cater to this group, dare I say the “forgotten demographic” in the cycling industry.