skip to content
Financing Available: Bikes starting at $260/mo or 0% APR

U.S. Built Bicycles in Titanium and Carbon-Titanium Mix

Evergreening – The Friday Morning Epic

This time of year, if you want to get a longer ride in before work, you’re leaving in the dark, so we charged up our lights, plotted and planned with GPS and a map, and rolled out while the rest of the world was still listening to the gurgle and pop of their coffee-makers.

We are riding trails all the time right now, Evergreening our commutes, slithering and snaking through every suburban patch of woods we can find, and it’s so much fun, that we find ourselves wanting to do more. So it was with eyes bigger than stomachs perhaps that we planned a 23 mile off-road gambol that we had little hope of completing and still getting to our desks/workbenches by work o’clock.

Optimism is priceless in the first week of December.

Cold weather riding (it was 25F at 6am) demands a little sacrifice. To get your temperature right over the length of the ride, you have to know you’re going to be a little cold at the start. In the dark, this is an even bigger challenge to surmount, but today we all held fast.

Through the woods behind the middle school, around the Reservoir, through the Great Meadow, then Vine Brook and Willard’s Woods, out to the Paint Mines and up the power line cut to the Landlocked Forest, the narrow boardwalks all glinting with frost, slick as fresh pond ice, leaves frozen in clusters with mud and sticks, the banked turns crunching under our tires.

It was just that kind of morning. We were too far from home (work), but having too much fun to turn back early. That led to an exhausting hammerfest once we’re back on paved road, each of taking our turn on the front, until we were here at Seven, hot coffee steaming, smiles all around.

#TBT

Again, our own Skip Brown, circa 1991, racing for Merlin Metal Works at Temple Mountain in New Hampshire. The photographer is Jim Paiva, a local BMX legend turned newspaper photographer. We love the look on Skip’s face, the sleeveless “jersey,” and the quads of steel. We can’t be sure, but we think Skip won this race.

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.