The Radavist

While the 2023 Enve Grodeo was chock-full of some of the snazziest bespoke all-road bikes from around the world, Spencer Harding’s eye was caught by an eccentric build noticeably absent from the show floor. Fortunately, he was able to get the bike’s owner, Clint, to stop throwing skids long enough to snag a closeup. Pulling influence from some strange corners of the bike world and outfitting the frame with some amazing and unique parts, Clint’s SaltAir stood out for more reasons than its single rear cog. Clint rode this pink dream on all 92 miles of the Enve Grodeo, a feat in itself regardless of it being a fixed gear 26-er. Let’s have a closer look!  

I’ve always considered The Radavist a resource for inspiring people to get outdoors. While we primarily cover cycling, my interests don’t stop there. Many of my favorite springtime activities surround the Colorado Plateau’s canyons and rivers; two places you cannot take a bike, or rather, including a bike in those activities seems unnecessary. I love bikerafting and incorporating a bicycle in lieu of a car for shuttling, but sometimes nothing beats a bipedal venture into those wild and vast places.

Walking in canyons is my detox from the sometimes stressful job of talking about, photographing, living, breathing, and eating bikes. It’s a tangential experience, but when you do enough, you quickly realize the best places in the American West, particularly Canyon Country, are only accessible by foot.

Last week Cari and I brought along our friends Jay and Carrie on a backpacking trip down the Paria River Canyon. Jay and Carrie had never been to the Colorado Plateau, much less in a canyon, and had never backpacked in the desert. Widening our friends’ perspectives has been a real joy being closer to these places living in Santa Fe, and the trip provided equal parts  beauty, tough terrain, and ideal weather.

While fully loaded touring and sleeping under the stars provide an enticing self-contained experience, there is a unique allure to the quintessential hut trip. Hut-supported routes are rare here in the U.S., but our rag-tag group of cyclotourists has taken advantage of the proximal classics, including the San Juan Hut Durango-to-Moab and Telluride-to-Moab routes. When the Aquarius Hut Trail Network was announced last year, our exploratory interests were piqued. Home to the Grand Staircase Escalante National Monument, southern Utah has become one of my favorite destinations from time spent riding and touring in our 4×4 in its rugged backcountry. Even so, the beauty of the riding and surrounding landscapes still bowled me over.

We have a lot of thoughts about both the route and the huts—read on for a full review of this majestic trip…

In spring 2021, I decided to embark on a couple hundred mile bike-to-ski journey from my home in Telluride, CO to the La Sal mountain range near Moab, Utah.

During the winter season, I’m a professional skier. Usually, I’m traveling around the globe, doing photo shoots and film projects. I will acknowledge it’s quite the privileged life, and I’m very grateful to so many who make it possible for me. The winter window is short, and when I make my career happen. So when things don’t work out during those few months, it feels like a failure and loss of a season. With a film project that wasn’t quite materializing, 2021 was starting to feel just like that I found myself just wanting to get away – from my own winter’s demise and seemingly everything else. So, I decided to pack up my skis and hop on a bike, headed towards the desert of all places, far from any normal ski hill, to hopefully disconnect from it all.

My friend Sinuhe Xavier and I have always been “out of context” friends. By that, I mean that we’ve only hung out at coffee shops or lunch spots until a few weeks ago. The contextual slip is that we’re both known for our photographic work in the backcountry. He’s well known in the moto and auto world as always doing shoots deep in remote areas of the American West, and I, too, love those “big country” vistas but with cycling.

When my plans for Sea Otter were shaping up, I dropped him a note, asking if he would be anywhere on the Colorado Plateau in the coming weeks. We hashed out a plan and sent each other options for a campsite meet-up. Precious GPS coordinates were shared, and we settled on a date. The road to Sea Otter had begun…

I love being alone all day, deep in remote and wild areas, reliant only on myself to move through the landscape, over difficult terrain, and in bad weather. I enjoy utilizing the various ultralight backcountry travel skills I’ve gleaned since my early twenties. And I feel immense joy when I can be efficient and accomplish goals. I’m also really afraid of the dark. Not so much of wild animals, but rather of wild weirdos who wander the woods and kill innocent middle-aged women. I know. Super unlikely. But I never sleep much at night while on solo adventures.

Mostly I have backpacked alone or solo aid climbed big walls. But I stopped climbing after a gnarly accident where a friend fell 100 feet and nearly died. I also quit backpacking because the annoying arthritic autoimmune disease I suffer from incapacitates me if I hike more than a few miles with weight on my back. Luckily a few years ago I discovered the horizontal world of multi-sport adventure travel.

As the sun was setting on 2021, my good friends Greg and Nikki – people who constantly seek out adventures – invited me on one more trip before cold winter conditions reared their ugly head. In a year that contained a lot of personal firsts, they asked if I wanted to ride the White Rim Road in Moab. This was my first year of backpacking, so most routes were still unfamiliar to me and almost every trail is as exciting as the next. The only thing I knew about the White Rim was that it’s located in Moab – an area that always yields stunning photos. In a world that feels pre-apocalyptic, sometimes a weekend bike ride, with a focus on the shutter button, helps to reset my appreciation for life. Saying goodbye to the shitshow that was 2021, this ride was a time to reflect on what a struggle the year was for me, individually (and for everyone else), and how bikes and photography contributed to keeping me afloat mentally.

The Henry Mountains of southern Utah have fascinated me ever since one of my geology professors in graduate school eloquently described their unique setting and their unlikely stature in the field of geomorphology. As a student, I found myself eagerly diving into a century-old geologic report to learn more, and then as a professor, I found myself taking my own students to the area to experience its grandeur in person. But a deeper understanding of the landscape could only come from moving through it for days on end. I finally had the opportunity to make that happen in late November with the company of my friend Chase Edwards – nine chilly days, 350 miles of pedaling, climbing six range’s most prominent peaks, and endless awe.

While many of the sites and vistas here are fairly well known, we will not be providing names and furthering keywording the area for the Internets. We encourage you to find a Canyonlands map, a cup of tea, and a good reading lamp and enjoy letting your mind wander the nooks, grottos, bends, and spires on the map unfolded before you. 

Nothing triggers the wanderlust quite like daydreaming about a springtime road trip to the desert while you’re still stuck in the endless throes of a long, cold winter. The real yearning sets in as you mindlessly scroll the Gram, where every post seems to somehow find a way to reference that thing that’s missing in your life. The real trick, of course, is to transcend all the daydreaming and the scrolling, to put an actual plan, with your actual friends, actually into motion. This past winter, as we began to see a tiny light at the end of the pandemic tunnel, convening a small group of friends in the Southern Utah desert felt like the best way to emerge from that long period of collective isolation. Our crew has a long history with the annual springtime trip to ride bikes in the desert, so finding a couple willing accomplices wouldn’t be too difficult, especially after the stay-home sacrifices we’d all made for so long. Like the faint glow of a distant lighthouse on the horizon, the revived annual desert trip became the beacon of hope and group adventures toward which we were all now pointing our bows.