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Last year I wrote a post that itself was a follow up to an article/post I wrote over a decade ago called The Beauty Of The Beast, which were a couple of odes to keeping old 90’s mountain bikes alive as bikepacking and/or utilitarian around-town bikes.  I’ve had really good luck with that theory, having gotten  – for very cheap – great bikes that I’ve ridden for years in rugged terrain in places near and…

Sometime around the year nineteen hundred and ninety-nine I met a young lass named Ashley Patterson, and as the sparks began to fly I knew eventually I’d get to the classic ritual of meeting her family.  Ash grew up in Yakima, and I believe it was shortly after she and I did a pretty extended trip to India that we went to Yakima for Christmas, and I met the fam.  At the time I remember…

The last few years a few of us have made a fun habit of heading to what I like to call The Great North (north of…Vancouver!?) for June packrafting trips and they have all worked out well:  bouncing around the Talkeetna and Susitna rivers north of Anchorage, the South Fork Nahanni/Broken Skull zone north and east of Whitehorse, Yukon, and last year the “Extra Happy” trip on the Keskowin and Happy Rivers in the “hills”…

A few years ago I had the pleasure of taking now-Utah Senator John Curtis on a snowy day-after-Christmas hike on the Bonneville Shoreline Trail on the flanks of Salt Lake’s Mount Olympus and – as it turns out – very near where Senator Curtis grew up. We were discussing the potential Wilderness retraction of the sections of the trail that were “Wilderness” (despite the noise of I-215 a few hundred feet below us) to enable…

About ten years ago Ashley and I did a trip with our old friend Rocky Contos, the intrepid river adventurer who – true to his exploratory form – had decided to set up a rafting operation on the Usumacinta river in Chiapas, Mexico.  The “Usu” is the biggest river in Mexico and was rafted commercially until the mid-90’s, when the Zapatista movement (where the indigenous people of southern Mexico rose up to protest the colonial…

In the past week two different men died in avalanches in the Utah backcountry; the first two this season, and hopefully the last.   As always in these daze of social media, there were the standard RIPs and “died doing what he loved” comments, and as per normal in fatalities in activities that some people think are extreme there were the righteous comments along the lines of  “what are they doing out there!?  They should…

Being on a recent river trip reminded me of another trip that happened pretty long ago, where we had a memorable incident.  It may be that it’s more memorable to me because I’ve told the story so many times – so many, in fact, that Ashley can tell the tale as well as I can – but I’ve never written it down, and it’s kind of a fun tale.  In about nineteen hundred and ninety…

As published in Cycling West’s Fall 2024 edition It’s no secret that Colorado has more than its share of great riding, from many long road passes that go high into the mountains to a big chunk of the Great Divide Route to a lot of great singletrack. Crested Butte (CB) – partly as the town credited with the origin of mountain biking, and partly as a famous destination for a zillion miles of beautiful, high…

We’ve had plenty of bike tours in really fun, somewhat far flung places, but the truth is that southern Utah has some of the best riding anywhere; thanks to the proliferation of old roads that – for better or worse, depending on your perspective – were hewn in the quest for oil and uranium back in the day.  Their industriousness – again, for better or worse – enables our ability to do surprisingly-big rides in…