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On the Road: Zand Martin Cycling the Russian Altai

Last week, we saw the set up for Zand’s expedition. This week, we’re underway.

The Altai Mountains are quite probably where skiing was conceived, not in the modern form we know, which originated in Scandinavia, but in a more elemental way, practiced by the indigenous people of Central Asia. Zand’s expedition sought out some of the terra prima of skiing, but approached all the overland travel by bike. To get into the mountains, Zand and his partner first had to ride the Chuysky Trakt. Zand’s own words below.

This road, the Chuysky Trakt, was cut through the mountains in the 1930s by gulag inmates, and runs 1000km from the Trans-Siberian Railroad to the Mongolian border. We began in Gorno-Altaisk, the capital of the semi-autonomous Altai Republic, and will steadily gain elevation until we reach the highlands of Mongolia.

Across the pass, we push bikes along a snow drifted ribbon of cracked asphalt to the half-abandoned Soviet-era ski base atop Seminsky. We nearly missed it in the low cloud, but on emerging from the ail, the sun had made an effort and a few cuts were revealed on the mountainside.The road drops down and we find our way over plateau and valley back to the Katun, and a cold, dry steppe climate. The road is good, and easy to navigate: if you leave the spiderwebbed asphalt, you are going the wrong way. This 500 kilometer line runs through the heart of the range, and we follow it over passes and through small log villages clustered around shingled rivers.

Confederations of sheep and goats wander thawing hillsides under the occasional watch of dog and motorcycle-borne shepherd. Cows and pigs march the paddocks closer to home, though the pigs fade from prominence as we transition to a Muslim minority in the mixed ethnic map of Russian, Altai, and Kazakh. The Altai here is religiously diverse, with Russian Orthodox, Islam, Tengrism, Tibetan Buddhism, and less organized belief systems often called Shamanism, but really more a blend of animism and ancestor reverence.

As we leave the Katun Valley for the last time and begin to ascend the Chuya, we pass our last church in Aktash village and enter the Chuya steppe, a dry, barren, high altitude grassland hemmed in by mountains. Entering the frontier town of Koch Agash, we pass our first mosque, a humble green timber affair with a crescent moon of beaten sheet metal on the peak of the hall.

Here, we plan our first extended foray into the mountains.

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.

#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.

Being World Champion – Mo Bruno Roy Interview

Mo and her Seven Mudhoney

Seven-sponsored rider and good friend Mo Bruno Roy won the Single-Speed Cyclocross World Championship in Louisville on October 25th. We wrote about it first here. We had Mo and her MM Racing teammate/husband Matt Roy in the other day to talk about the race, where she is in her career, and what she wants out of riding her bike. This is what she said:

Seven: Did you believe you could win this race going in?

MBR: I was hoping I could. I was planning to, but I didn’t realize what it would take. Single-speed racing is full of shenanigans. People hand you bourbon shots and beers while you ride, and you can take shortcuts based on your willingness to engage in the fun. At Worlds you could skip the flyover if you chugged a beer. If you were willing to throw your bike over a four foot wall and climb over after, then you could avoid running through the sand pit.

At the start this year, none of us had shoes on. We had to slide down this giant slip n’ slide and then get on the bike and start racing.

Having said all that, I raced full gas the whole time, because honestly I didn’t know what was happening. There were racers everywhere, people I knew hadn’t passed me ended up in front of me. Maybe they cut the course. Maybe they found some other way. I took the hole shot at the beginning, and Matt says I had 30 seconds at that point, but then there were all these women in front of me. My plan had been to race hard the first two laps, and then relax and have some fun, but when I realized I wasn’t in front I went 100% to the line.

Matt: Don’t forget the feats of strength the day before. The whole thing starts the day before the race. They broke everybody up into groups of 15 led by a “colonel” who took the racers all over Louisville to stuff like a 100 meter cross course, a mass start hill climb on which you could score extra points by stopping to pick up a rubber chicken. There were trivia questions. All of it scored points to qualify for the race. It was just a big bunch of strangers roving the city in search of fun.

Seven: So it’s a whacky event. How does that make you feel about being World Champion?

MBR: The thing that is so attractive to me about Single-Speed Worlds is that there are very few rules. Ride a single-speed. Wear a costume. Don’t be a jerk. It’s just chaos, a bunch of really nice people having fun on bikes. I have taken racing seriously for a long time, and I needed to remember what it was like to have this much fun, so yes, I am totally proud of being World Champion. It also makes you appreciate the rules that govern the other elite races, that give those races structure. We complain about those a lot, but you can see what craziness takes over without that structure. I happen to be at a point in my career when I’m ready for some more craziness, so this is great for me, but I understand other people want to take it seriously. Honestly, this very well might be the highlight of my career.

Seven: This was all part of “taking it easy for the season,” but most people don’t associate World Championships, albeit whacky ones, with taking it easy. What is it you have really been trying to achieve in 2014?

MBR: World Cup racing is super hard work. You have to plan your whole life around it. There is so much expectation involved, and that ratchets down the fun level, or it changes it. You have fun, but it’s fun after you’ve finished, not right away. Sometimes it’s a long time after. So taking it easy, for me, means having fun WHILE I’m racing, actually enjoying each event, and single-speed races retain a part of the older spirit of cyclocross when events were weirder, and we were all less focused on results.

I think we need more of that spirit, and less of this sense that every race has to be pure and exclusive and elite. I have maybe been naive up until now, in thinking that bike racing was for everyone. Within the larger bike racing community we are more exclusive than I thought we were. So planning my season, I wanted to get back to a more open-minded approach to racing. I don’t think wealth should be a limiter, and that’s easy for me to say as a sponsored rider, but whether you show up on a mountain bike or need to zip tie your shifters to qualify for the single-speed race or whatever, we have to share this with as many people as we can. Honestly, if someone had suggested bike racing to me when I was a kid, there just wouldn’t have been any way, because we didn’t have any money, but cycling is really a community activity. We need to be drawing everyone into what we’re doing, and I don’t think there is any better way to do that than by making it fun, keeping it fun, and having that be our priority.

This isn’t some crusade for me to save bike racing. I’m just one person, but just like I ride a bike to work and to run errands, I can only try to be an example. As you get older, living your principles seems to become more and more important, so I’m happy with where I am and what I’m doing, and I hope it helps the communities that I live in, and either way I’m having fun, so it’s a win.