Seven – Page 70 – Seven Cycles

On the Road: Dan Sharp in Oregon

It is easy to fall into the trap of the big ride, the grand statement. Why ride if you’re not going to put up big miles? Why stop to enjoy the view, if you’re not at the Grand Canyon. But adventure is everywhere, on our daily commutes, at our local trail systems, down roads we’ve just never turned onto before. Daniel Sharp lives in Portland, Oregon, and though his ambitions took him to the Alaskan backcountry, he is also willing to engage the wild in his own backyard, as on a recent trip from the Hood River to the Dog River.

Below you’ll find some of his thoughts on the trip.

Not all adventures are created equal. I wrote my friend Andy Waterman about doing an adventure for Benedicto and he mentioned Alastair Humphrey’s book Microadventures. I like the idea that not every adventure has to be an epic. Epics require lots of planning, free time, and money. Our Alaska trip was a huge eye opener for us in terms of thinking about exploring roads without cars and being fairly self sufficient. Trips like that open your mind to the possibilities and get you dreaming about traveling the world by bike…But there is also reality.

The cool thing about this route is that the only driving we would have to do is down 84 an hour to Hood River. The genius of bikepacking is less car time, more riding time and you really enjoy the process of getting there. Anyone that rides a road bike in Oregon has most likely ridden the fantastic Hood River-to-Mosier trail, which is the restored portion of the Historic Columbia River Highway that is closed to cars. Sunny Saturdays are busy there with weekend warriors both young and old, so we had lots of questions as we strapped bags onto our bikes in the parking lot.

Right away I was struck with the perfect temps and the quality of the fall light. The last time Tori and I had done this route it was the first week of July. This paved stretch is a great warm up for the day of dirt roads ahead – it’s a gentle climb to the tunnel and riders are treated to spectacular views of the gorge and a swift descent down to Mosier.

The route is good practice for long days of climbing. It’s primarily a dirt road route with a couple of rocky stretches…Really, for the climb a cross bike would be fine, but for the descent a suspension fork lets you bomb it properly. I guess our different bike setups prove the point that you can do this route on just about any bike. I’ve really been enjoying the ride quality of the Seven with 2.3 tires. With the proper tire pressure, I can really let it roll on the descents without too much stress. This ride affords some excellent views to the North of Mt. Adams, Mt. Rainier, and Mt. St. Helens. Looking East you get views towards Dufur. And of course as you climb South on the route Mt. Hood just gets bigger and bigger.

Knowing the route, I was confident three bottles would get me to the first water refill at Beaver Spring, which is 19.8 miles from our starting point, or 13.3 miles from Mosier. You have to hike in a bit off the route to get to a good place to filter, but if you follow the trampled grass and leaves on the East side of the road, and listen for the sound of running water it’s fairly obvious where to go. We also knew that we’d be camping by a water source, so we didn’t have to climb with all of our water for dinner and breakfast.

For me, it was great to share this route that challenged me three years ago on the hut trip and feel my familiarity improve with every successful run. I don’t have every turn memorized yet, so I still rely on the GPX track and the cues, but it gets easier every time. It was great to be able to share the ride!

We all marveled at how different the route seemed on day two. The morning light was different, the views were different and we got to descend everything we climbed yesterday. There was alot of incredulous “we climbed up that?” We stopped for every view we missed the day before. Sometimes the fun of bombing dirt roads won out and I had to just make a mental snapshot and keep on riding.

Cold Season Adventure – Evergreening Vermont

There is no off-season when you love to ride bikes. We were in Vermont over the weekend, and we couldn’t resist the opportunity to put our tires on dirt, even though it was 19° F when we rolled away from the house, a fresh inch of snow on the ground.

This seemed a good test for our Evergreen SLs, set up with disc brakes and file-treaded 32mm tires. The dirt roads were packed hard in the cold, and traction was challenging in the steep up and down of our route. The funny thing about riding a bike in Vermont is that distances don’t mean that much. There are few stretches of long, level ground to travel, so you are almost always either going up or coming down.

Even in the bitter cold, we worked up plenty of heat by the end of the first climb. The challenge then is to stay warm on each descent, where any sweat you’ve managed to generate amplifies the freezing wind of your hard-earned plummet.

You’d be far better off gauging the difficulty of your ride based on total climbing feet.

We had been eying these roads for a while, driving by, wondering where they went, whether or not they connected. This is evergreening in its purest form, exploring what’s in front of you, looking for trails, cobbling together long, dirt routes that take in the scenery and shut out the traffic.

We were sure we could find some trails that connected us all the way north to Lake Whitingham without having to touch the highly-trafficked Route 100. Google Earth yielded some clues about where we might find those trails, and our Garmins banked the info to make the search more efficient.

We found this Corgi Crossing just before heading into the woods for the first real off-road section of the ride. We came around a corner, nearly at the end of a dirt road, and there it was, a small wooden bridge over a creek, proudly maintained and serving almost no purpose. Beautiful.

This sign was reassuring, although we wondered for a minute whether or not we qualified.

This part of Southern Vermont is crisscrossed by trails for cross-country skiing and snowmobiling, and we picked up on some markers shortly after entering the woods. Then it was a case of keeping our bearings as the snowy path dipped and swerved along, crossing small streams half-a-dozen times before spilling us out by the lake. You have to tip-toe across these crude bridges. Covered in snow and packed with leaves, they’re dangerous, and we thought ending up with one or both feet soaking wet at this temperature was maybe not a great idea.

Finally at the lake, we stopped to toast our first victory and realized we needed to drink quickly, before our bottles froze.

After the lake, we climbed up and over a dirt road lined by farms, before plunging back down into the town of Wilmington. From there it was up, up and up over another steep rise on the way to Mt. Snow.

The last turn on this route was a merciful right-hander onto this trail. The alternative was to continue up still another pitched climb. Instead we smiled like idiots, our tires crunching softly over the snow until we were rolling into Dover, the town clustered at the mountain’s base. We’d covered only 15 miles, but packed in 2000 ft of vertical, discovered some useful new trails, and spent 90 minutes in the woods, evergreening.

On the Road: Zand Martin in the Altai Mountains

Zand Martin is an explorer. You met him here prior to this expedition. “Circling the Golden Mountains” is an attempt to circumnavigate the Altai by ski and bicycle and to tell the story of this region, its people and landscape, to as wide an audience as possible.

We outfitted Zand with an Expat S backcountry touring bike, which, as you’ll see, he packed with skis plus everything he might need to live in the wilderness for weeks at a time. Here are some photos from his trip prep, and some brief words about his plans.

We intend to trace a 4,000-kilometer route through Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and Russia, and to carry skis on our bicycles and execute between two and three dedicated multi-day ski tours in each country, with peak ascents and roadside missions as spring advances. We hold an absolute dedication to a light, fast, and low-budget aesthetic, and unless we hold to this style throughout, the route will not be possible.

When I first started running my own expeditions, sourcing maps was one of the most intimidating details for me. If you want to hike in the White Mountains or paddle in Maine, you can probably get by with an atlas and gazetteer, or a swing by a local outdoor store for a specialty map. Kazakhstan, rural France, or even more distant places in North America would at first seem impenetrable without the right tools, and a novice could have trouble finding those tools. To be clear, I am talking about paper maps. The ability to read terrain and landmarks, and associate them with features on a topographic or physical map printed on paper is the key skill in expedition navigation, both in the front country and the wilderness.

Watch this space for more installments and gorgeous photos from Zand in the Golden Mountains, the Altai.

#TBT

Here is our own Skip Brown, just after a top-ten finish at a World Cup race at the Georgia International Horse Park in 1997, the year after this same course served the Atlanta Olympics. Skip and Matt O drove down from Boston in the Seven van, raced and drove home. For a while there was an annual 24 hour race on the course (24 Hours of Conyers). It also featured in the documentary 24 Solo. Skip rode a double-butted Ti Sola that day, a very early iteration of the bike we are still making today. A few years later, we would get to watch Mary McConneloug ride another bike in this line at both the Beijing and Athens Olympics. Some of THAT history is captured in the documentary Off Road to Athens, well worth a watch.

Matt Roy and the Art of Endurance

Matt Roy is a different kind of bike rider. Most of his exploits transpire in the middle of the night, alone or with a single partner, down a road not likely to show fresh tire tracks. He’s an ultra-cyclist and the other half of MM Racing with his wife and current single-speed cyclocross World Champion Mo Bruno Roy. High points of this season, for Matt, included completion of a full brevet series, 200km, 300km, 400km, 600km and 1000km. He rode from Bremerton on the western shore of Puget Sound near Seattle, down the Oregon coast and up to Crater Lake in Oregon, and then beyond that to Klamath Falls, a three day, 625-mile odyssey undertaken with close friend David Wilcox.

Riding a bike for three days is not a thing that most cyclists, even the most ardent feel inclined to do. The thing that’s hard to fathom is how you avoid the late night crisis of confidence and keep riding. Matt says, “Part of it is built on desire. Part is practice. You build up to it in palatable chunks, basically four hour units. You can ride for four hours, and then stop and assess what to do next. On the way to Crater Lake we were super-tired, but we were never not having fun.”

He laughs when he says, “All great art requires suffering. Seriously though, there are peaks and valleys both mental and physical, but if you didn’t fall asleep on a picnic table in a park at 2AM because you were so tired, they wouldn’t be worth doing. What keeps me going is that you see so much cool stuff over the miles. Nature changes so much from place to place, from urban to boreal forest to farm land to rushing rivers.”

If the Pacific Northwest provided Roy’s high point, the Green Mountain Double Century served as counter point. He was riding the GMDC with the aim of setting a new solo rider course record. He was, he says, “racing to prove something to myself,” and after 13 hours of hard work he was on track for a 15-16 hour finish. In spite of the rainy morning, the roads were fast and dry.

And that’s when it happened.

“I had just gone up Tate Hill Road,” he says, his tone foreshadowing the crash to come, “basically a wall of a road, so steep, and I was thinking ahead to the next flat section, the next 30 miles, bombing down Chunks Brook Road, and I just hit something. My right hand came off the bar, and I swerved into the sand at the edge of the road, and the front wheel went out and I flew. I ripped both levers off the handlebar. I laid there. I was sure I had broken something. My elbow was wrecked.”

At this point, Mo says, “I went into paramedic mode. I saw his elbow and knew it needed a dozen stitches. We cleaned him up, put him in the car, but the thing about GMDC is that it gets into all these remote corners of the state. Phones don’t work a lot. Eventually we found our way to the hospital in Bennington. It took them an hour to clean out his elbow, and he ended up with 16 stitches, four of them internal.”

The crash left him with severe whiplash. Some weeks later he saw a chiropractor who performed a “life-changing adjustment.” His elbow had hit the ground so hard in Vermont that 1000km into his west coast ride, a small abscess formed and later gave up a further small handful of rocks and soil. Can you imagine it? And he was “never not having fun.”

The crash cancelled a lot of Matt’s plans, but if anything, that seems to have made him more intent on finding a different way to ride.

He says, “I have this amazing bike (Seven Evergreen PRO), and I want to sort of throw as many stupid ideas at it, as I can. I rode the length of the aqueducts between Waltham and Wachusett. I want to do more adventurous, absurd riding, rather than structured events. I’m finding those unique adventures far more attractive now. I want to make some wrong turns, plan less. Mo and I have both said, ‘Let’s make more mistakes.'”

We should all fail so beautifully.

GMDC photos by Dave Chiu.