Mud and rain speckled my lenses. I squinted at the mucky, rock-strewn road in fading light and gripped my handlebars tighter. Focus. Exhale. Let go. At the next corner, Carston and Eric are stopped. Odd, I don’t usually see them until the bottom. Brakes shrieked in damp protest as I… Read More
The Continental Divide Trail is not often traveled, and rarely by bike. The sheer remoteness makes access tricky. With this in mind, Scott Rinckenberger, Justin Olsen and I set out for 11 days on our bikes, pedaling northeast from Chief Joseph Pass. We wanted to shed some light on this… Read More
“Disconnect to connect,” Leah Evans says to us, 13 total strangers standing in a circle at a remote trailhead in British Columbia’s Purcell Mountains. We’re about to embark on the inaugural Airplane Mode Camp led by Evans and her dream team of experts: Madeleine… Read More
“It’s like the Iditarod with a chance of drowning,” says Jake Beatty, one of the organizers of a bizarre, crazy race called the Race to Alaska. The course traces 750 miles of Alaska’s Inside Passage through complicated currents and tides, busy shipping channels and bear-ridden coastlines from… Read More
If you were to ask me what I did on the Danube River during my 21-day solo paddle from Ingolstadt, Germany to Belgrade, Serbia, my answer is simple. I fought crime, outran bad guys in speedboats with machine guns, almost died a few times from river monsters and 20-foot waves… Read More
“When we were living in a house, we were always compromising because we had the weight of a mortgage, of doing what we thought we should be doing,” remembers Kathy Holcombe. Until the day she, her husband Peter and their daughter Abby moved into a Winnebago to travel and work… Read More
It’s drizzling and a bag piper is piping—cliché but cute—as I roll through the steep, salty streets of Lamlash, on Scotland’s Isle of Arran, into a rooty, ferny slick single track, with 149 other bikers. Within the first quarter mile of the Grinduro Scotland, about half the… Read More
I can’t help but say or think or feel it: this is Abbey Land. Despite the various crusts that have formed over the years since Abbey was alive and well in the Moab area, this is still his place. Of course, it is the earth first, shifting and sliding and… Read More
I’d just stepped in human shit when I noticed Arun and Tilak praying next to the river’s put-in. I wanted to join them, but by the time I had scraped the squished feces from my sandal-clad toes, the young men were finished. “We made the offering, but the eggs were… Read More
We were craving it: fresh ribbons of single track, grinding climbs, white-knuckle descents, solitude, dirt. Four friends, four loaded bikes (rush-packed, survival-style), vague plan, limited time. The consensus was to leave it wide open and see where the trail might lead in a condensed time frame. Not a month. It… Read More
For those of you who don’t know surfing, Gerry Lopez is an icon of the sport. Since the late sixties, Gerry has made surfers from around the world hoot with hyper fascination as he dazzled them with his tube riding prowess. His flowing, effortless grace in heavy-water situations… Read More