skip to content
Current lead times: Unpainted bikes: 7 weeks. Painted bikes: 9 weeks.

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

Tag: Lands of Lost Borders

From the Silk Road to the Arctic Circle

We got this note and photo recently from Kate Harris whose book, Lands of Lost Borders, was just written up in the New York Times Review of Books. It’s been a good year for Kate, and if you’re looking for a good holiday (or any time) read, we recommend Lands of Lost Borders. It’s a good and powerful reminder of the value of exploration, no matter where you are.

a fully loaded expat on thick ice

Thanks so much for the newsletter love for my book, Seven!! I’m forever grateful for your support of our wild Silk Road ride, and I’ve taken my loyal Expat S steed on several bikepacking epics since, including a winter ride from Dawson City in the Yukon above the Arctic Circle to Tuktoyaktuk in the Northwest Territories via the now-defunct “ice highway.” Skinny wheels, studded tires, loaded bike, sheer ice—no problem. Warm wishes to all of you at Seven, and I hope I can someday get back to Boston and visit you!

Cheers,

Kate

Lands of Lost Borders – A Journey on the Silk Road

A book enititled

We are lucky. We know it. All day, every day, we work with people on bikes they will do amazing things with, and sometimes, as we found out recently, they’ll even write books about those things.

Longtime followers of this 7 will possibly remember the Cycling Silk Project, undertaken by Kate Harris and Melissa Yule in 2011, when, in their own words they, “lurched off the European shore of Istanbul, Turkey with overburdened bikes and quaking legs. Just a few days ago, in late October, we pedaled into Leh, a small city barnacled onto the Himalayan mountains in northern India. In the months between, we consumed roughly 10,000 packs of instant noodles to fuel nearly 10,000 km of riding, polishing our souls on roads rough as pumice on this pilgrimage to the Silk Road’s wildest mountains and deserts.”

We got a copy of the book in the mail recently, and it was nice to walk back down memory lane and hear an expanded version of a story we followed closely as it was going on. We were enormously proud to build the bikes Kate and Mel rode, a pair of Expat S off-road touring machines. These bikes played into our thinking as we evolved designs of the early Evergreens, so they, and this project, were highly inspiring and influential for us.

The book is available now.  We recommend it highly.