The Radavist

March 14, 2020, seemed like a normal Saturday ride for our group of gravel enthusiasts (the “Dirty Bird Crew”). Our route guru Brian had put together another fantastic route, exploring dirt roads and trails a short drive from New York City. Every weekend, year-round, we are out exploring the (surprisingly!) high-quality dirt roads and trails in the greater NYC area. We’ve gone out in nearly every weather condition, from swimming holes in the summer, to snow rides in the winter, and even riding across frozen lakes with studded tires when it’s bitterly cold, but nothing had prepared us for the months ahead. Drinking post-rode beers there was some talk about Covid-19 and the possibility that we may be working from home for a few days. We said our goodbyes until next weekend, but little did we know this would be our last group ride for months.

1.25 million years ago, a volcanic event occurred just 40 miles northwest of what is now called Santa Fe, New Mexico. A large reservoir of magma was emptied as lava erupted from the earth’s crust, causing a massive depression. Upon this collapse, a 13-mile wide caldera in the middle of the Jemez Mountains was formed.

This area is the Valles Caldera National Preserve and is America’s newest National Preserve. The best part about the Valles Caldera is currently, due to the pandemic, it’s open to cycling and closed to automobiles and if bike fishing is your thing, it’s also free to fish, pending a New Mexico Fishing License and a free VCNP fishing permit.

We’ve got a great loop for you to check out that crosses this expansive caldera and brings you right up to some prime cut bank fishing. Check it out in this gallery from our ride in September.

Bikes are an extension of the rider in every sense of the word. Not only do the wheels and bars act as our contact points to the terra firma, but everything becomes more than the sum of its parts. Those parts bin grips or meticulously color-matched fasteners all create a piece of rolling poetry. Found art, master-planned, functional, beautiful.

In what I hope will be the first of many monthly(ish) articles, of varying lengths, Nikolai and I visited (in)famous bicycle designer Mike Burrows, who has been a constant in terms of support, inspiration and taking me down a peg or two when I need it (always). Nikolai filmed our trip on my Sony A7iii as part of an ongoing project, so I decided it would be especially fitting for Mike to document our trip on celluloid with my Mamiya C330, and a little Olympus rangefinder on Kodak Portra 800 film.

There is a case for wilderness in the American West, which is defined in the Oxford dictionary as “an uncultivated, uninhabited, and inhospitable region.” The problem is, this classification was written by colonizers and erasers of indigenous history. Humans have long inhabited these areas, before the Spanish or the Pilgrims infiltrated these lands, long before it was called New Mexico.

This topic is a heated one. Organizations like the Sierra Club lead the way in this classification, establishing rules about who can or can’t visit these lands: for instance, cyclists. I’m not here to talk about whether or not bikes should be allowed in areas classified as wilderness, so let’s step back a bit and discuss what that word, wilderness, means in the context of the original inhabitants of the Americas.

We’d like to add a note sending our love and support to all those affected by the fires in the Santa Cruz region. You’re in our thoughts…

Back in February, before the whole world was turned upside down, Jimmy Rosas and I took a quick trip up to Santa Cruz. We wanted to ride mountain bikes and eat deep fried zucchini burritos, but most importantly we wanted to visit the Whitney Ford-Terry curated show at the MAH, Trailblazers: Uncovering the Roots of Mountain Biking in Santa Cruz. The show had just opened, and originally this piece was going to be all about driving traffic to the show, but now it’s turned into more of a closing statement. A fare thee well to one of the best mountain bike exhibitions that no one will ever see. A true comprehensive look at the history of mountain biking in Santa Cruz, a place that has now become a mountain bike mecca for hundreds of thousands of visitors every year, a place where residents who don’t mountain bike are the weird ones.

THERE IS A DISTINCT SHARPNESS in the Sunday morning Andean air as José Villegas plucks a tiny coffee shoot from the ground, barely as tall as an espresso cup. Looking out over the valley on the edge of the steep slope, the setting is idyllic, like something from a late 20th-century film epic. Dressed in little more than slippers, gym shorts, and a t-shirt, he studies the greenery carefully nestled in his palm, nods in approval, and continues scouting the steep slope around him for other shoots. His son, Juan Pablo, explains that this is how his father propagates new coffee plants on the farm, eschewing the far more common method of using commercial seeds. It keeps the fields GMO-free, organic, and high-quality. This is single-origin coffee grown at the perfect altitude (1800m/6000ft), something prized the world over. Everything on the farm is done mostly by hand. There are no chemical fertilizers or pesticides. The family has been farming like this “from the beginning”, José explained, not because it was popular, but because it was the right way to do things. The only way.

DISCLAIMER: Travel is limited to New Mexico at this time and there is a mask requirement. This trip was planned before the recent changes and we adjusted to ensure safe distances and to limit any small community contact. Be safe.

Starting at the border of Colorado and following along the Continental Divide Trail, some friends helped hatch a plan to traverse the central highlands of New Mexico by bike over 3 days, covering 100 miles of unbelievably-beautiful country.

Last Autumn, I found myself wondering, “How do I pack for a bike ride through Narnia?”. I had just been asked to sample a small section of the wonderful Oregon Timber Trail by my friend Gabriel. I packed a grocery bag full of Voile straps, my foul weather gear, a laminated local mushroom-foraging pamphlet, and prepared to step through the magic wardrobe.

Since no one is out riding the Tour Divide this year and I’m locked away in a lake house in Wisconsin, why don’t we take a trip down memory lane? Like, I found a backup of these images on my iPod kinda trip down memory lane, back to 2014 baby. This was my first proper “bikepacking” or off-road touring trip. I borrowed my dad’s 90s hybrid and put a Surly fork and some racks on it and hightailed it to Missoula after finishing my first few weeks working as a tour guide in Oregon. I met Kurt and Sam as they were working their way down the Tour Divide as the inaugural Blackburn Rangers, which I had applied for too, but didn’t get, so why not just crash their party anyway?

Towering over Flagstaff and the surrounding area, the series of mountain summits comprising what are contemporarily referred to as “San Francisco Peaks,” or just “The Peaks,” have held spiritual and cultural significance since long before Spanish colonists arrived and began assigning names to geologic formations.

May 9, 2020:

“Also, if you’re interested, riding from Mammoth to Tahoe and back in June…”

This non sequitur caught me off guard. It was also exactly what I’ve wanted to hear for a while. I have long admired the big days my buddy Connor puts in the mountains. Slipped in the middle of casual conversation (mostly about bikes) between two friends, was the invitation to join in on one of his epic adventures. An invitation to partake in the fun, madness, joy, suffering, and glory.

For decades, the little mountain overlooking my mother’s childhood home held a massive secret and my dad was in on it.

At just under 2,000 feet, Mount Weather sits along the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the rural Virginia town of Bluemont. It served as the backdrop to my childhood memories of time spent at my grandmother’s house. These days, whenever I visit the area on my bike and ride by the house, I look up at the mountain knowing it’s the reason I’m here.

And what my dad once told me, this mountain might be the reason we are ​all ​still here.

The current worldwide situation has forced Kyle and I, along with everyone else, to rethink our spring activities. With mountain bike races cancelled and out-of-state trips a no-go, we were suddenly left with a lot of empty weekends and an excuse to explore more of New Mexico. We finally had the time and motivation to give this bikepacking thing a try, something that had been at the back of our minds for quite some time. Despite both of us having spent thousands of miles backpacking the Sierra Nevada, Cascade Mountains, and the canyons of Southeast Utah, we still were new to the world of bikepacking.

Well, it had been since March since I left our quaint little town of Santa Fe due to the pandemic. All of my photoshoots, rides, and trips were either postponed or just canceled for the year up to this point. Which, as you all know quite well, can be quite the shock when you spend much of the year on the road! One of the postponed jobs that didn’t roll off the face into the abyss was shooting the new Argonaut Cycles frame and assemblage process. So that found me in Bend, Oregon for a few days and I had a hankering to ride something new…