The Radavist

In the 1980s, Queenstown was a small lakeside community with just a couple thousand residents. Perched on the foreshores of the majestic Lake Wakatipu; its unique mix of snowy-topped mountains, roaring rivers and stunning vistas made it the perfect summer holiday destination for nature-loving Kiwis. However, the mid-90s brought adrenaline junkies and stoke seekers to Queenstown’s shores and soon enough, the town got an ‘Xtreme’ makeover!

Gideon Tsang recently caught up with Kae-Lin, Steve, and Jim of Seattle’s Asian Bike Club (ABC*). The club hosts regular meetups geared toward sharing food and building community. Let’s check it out below!

It was in the back of my mind for about a year. Take a bicycle, load it up with camping gear and a surfboard, and tour every coastline around the world looking for waves. I figured it would be a trip of a lifetime. Get in shape, surf incredible waves, take photographs and pursue a dream I thought about every night before I went to sleep.

However, I had a problem. I knew nothing about bicycles. So I needed a warm-up trip. A trip to test my knowledge and see if I really wanted to pursue this idea.

Arizona is one of the most remarkable states in the lower 48. From saguaro-covered mountains to forests of ponderosa pine, the ecotonal shift across the state’s expansive footprint is only bested by the geologically awesome Grand Canyon. That’s part of the appeal of the mighty Arizona Trail, right? To see the state in its entirety from top to bottom. While the AZT might not be for everyone, there’s another trail system on the rim of the Grand Canyon that is perfect for those looking for a truly unique and characteristically Arizona experience via a quick overnighter or even a day ride.

Once we had samples of our Radavist Edition Mosaic GT-2X bikes, I wanted to put them to the test and do a proper shake-down overnighter somewhere memorable and beautiful. Pulling together this project was quite the undertaking with supply chain issues still running rampant. Our trip kept getting pushed back into the summer months. It was edging on being too hot to tour our original route, so we looked to the North Rim of the Grand Canyon and found a true gem of a ride, perfect for a weekend of sleeping out under the monsoon skies…

The route is just under 1,000km tracing the Westfjords of Iceland, the most remote area of a sparsely inhabited country in the Arctic. The challenge is to finish the mixed gravel and pavement route in 4 stages. The weather can be harsh. The wind can be fierce. But that’s what makes this place. It’s stunning and it’s brutal. Treeless mountains rise out of the sea. There’s very little development. Beyond a flawless road system, humans have left little impression. It’s a wild place and we get to ride our bikes through it.

There’s this truly magical culture of bike touring in Europe. You can go town to town and point to point on B roads and double tracks, stopping in at the local pub for a cold beer and a place to lay your head. The same culture doesn’t exist in the same way in the US — towns are too far apart, lots of paved roads, busy traffic thanks to decades of car-centric infrastructure and culture, among other reasons.

But there’s a little-known exception to that rule — northern New England. I moved here from New York in early 2020, along with the rest of Brooklyn, and was instantly taken by what locals call Vermont pavé, or miles and miles of dirt roads and unmaintained town highways that dot the state. It didn’t take long before I was plotting long-distance routes and multi-day bikepacking trips that captured as many of these roads as possible and adding them to the bucket list.

I honestly can’t remember the first time I thought about racing bikes or the fact that people might be motivated to race them. I had some inkling that there were professional road cyclists out there, a la Tour de France, but any notion was vague. For me racing was seeped in the nostalgia of a sticky summer day, riding a green BMX bike with a dysfunctional coaster brake. Most likely hurtling at an irresponsible speed, chasing friends down a hill in the hot and dusty interior of BC. Later in life, a university roommate and great pal, clued me into gravel riding, the Tour Divide Race, and so on. Call it bike pack racing, call it ultra-endurance riding, call it solo-soul-searching, or call it some sort of competition of human versus wheels.

“It’s the best” must be one of the most common, purely subjective statements made so regularly with enthusiastic conviction. We do it all the time, but it’s ludicrous. You have to define a word like “best” in your own terms. It’s a value statement. Saying something is the best only tells you a little bit about the thing in question, but a lot about the person saying it and what they value. What’s the best gear ratio for a single-speed 29er? What’s the best tire choice for a course that’s littered with mud pits, rooty singletrack, and rock gardens, but is also interspersed with long, hot, 15 miles stretches of pavement? Do you like to mash or spin? Are you a confident bike handler and want to make the long road stretches easier? Are you strong-legged and get annoyed at spinning out on the flats?

So what am I really saying when I write that the MountainCat 100 is the best bike race in America?

For eight years running, around the time of the Summer Solstice, Swift Industries has put out a rallying cry for cyclo-touring enthusiasts the world-over to strap some bags to their bikes, head out for a couple days of pedaling and sleep on the ground. It’s a call to go out and have a memorable experience. The collective Swift Campout was this past weekend, but with some free time surrounding the actual Solstice, my partner Tony and I decided to ring in the best season for bikecamping a little early.

“We’re cultivating this weekend, a few weeks earlier than we normally do. It’s getting drier every year, and harder to grow grapes in a dry farm system”. This passing statement tickled somewhere on my brain stem as Steve’s words seeped in and we all gazed up at the Sierra Madres. I wondered if the mountains too might be getting drier every year just like down below at Condors Hope, the 20-acre ranch situated at the opening of Bates Canyon, the gateway into our four-day bikepacking mission.

Two years ago, nearly to the day, my friends Erin, Campbell, Ian, and I all came down to Condors Hope to embark on a similar long weekend trip to explore and experience the landscapes, otherwise referred to as the high steep broken mountains, that had, at the time, just been reopened to oil and gas leasing by the Trump administration. We returned from that trip two weeks before the world shut down from COVID, and well, you pretty much know the rest of that story.

It’s been over a decade since I’d been to Emporia to help establish Unbound Gravel’s Crew For Hire program. The world is a great deal different now. Having spoken at length with Kristi Mohn about things like generational change I was curious to see what, if any, of those changes had taken place in not just Emporia but also in the Unbound Gravel event itself. There was also the tragic passing of Moriah Wilson, the induction of the first class of the Gravel Hall of Fame, and a variety of other things going on that really made this year’s Unbound Gravel more significant than most.

Every day that I spent in Emporia had its own moments that showed me something new and unexpected. There were signs of the massive changes the cycling community, industry, and Emporia itself are going through. I witnessed grief, loss, love, and more. Throughout everything, there was one common theme: People who were doing the best they could.

This year brought about the return of the Handmade Bicycle Show Australia, and we had our mate Andy White from FYXO on the ground documenting some of Australia’s finest handmade bikes. Part 03 of our coverage showcases 15 unique builds from the show, so read on for more!

A year ago, I was sitting in a cubicle, drawing lines and shapes that would ultimately become bridges. A tedious job that encouraged daydreaming, so I spent a lot of my time distracting myself with podcasts, audiobooks and YouTube videos. I remember watching a series of videos called The Impossible Route and feeling like, “They’re out there living, I’m in here… not”. Now, don’t get me wrong, working a desk job in an industry that betters society can be incredibly rewarding, but I wasn’t having fun. I wasn’t living the life that was right for me, which in my mind was filled with cycling, adventure, and photography.

Fast forward a year and some change, and I find myself on a three-hour Zoom call with Jeremiah Bishop discussing routes and logistics for Season 2, Episode 1 of The Impossible Route. The journey of how I got here can be saved for another time, but here I was, on the cusp of living. This is The Impossible Route from my perspective.

Editing the photos from my visit to Baum Cycles this February, an eerie feeling came over me. I knew it’d been some time since I last took photos with the ‘big camera’ at 7 Seabright St, North Shore. For some reason, it felt like a precise period of time. My suspicion was confirmed. 10 years.