We built this Evergreen SL (with S&S Couplers) for our good friend Tony at Velosmith Bicycle Studio on Chicago’s north shore. Tony wanted it for an annual ride he does with some friends. That ride involves a pre-dawn alarm clock, a train trip and a long, rambling food-filled ride back home.
Tag: On the Road
On the Road: Zand Martin Cycling the Chinese Altai
Checking back in with Zand Martin as he and his expedition partner stalk the Golden Mountains, the Altai, of central Asia. Below, more of Zand’s photos and his luminous prose.
We make certain assumptions when looking at a map. It is a designed object, the recipient of refinement, and bears a certain authority in its geometry. But despite the weight of accumulated knowledge they exhibit, maps are not infallible. The person who designed our map of Xinjiang lives, I believe, in Budapest. I don’t think this person has ever been to this lonely spot in north China, but they created a layered image representing it that was then printed, and is now in a plastic bag in my hands flapping a tih-tih-tih staccato around my thumb and forefinger.
I am in a town that doesn’t exist, and on a road whose route is deviant from the world as known to our Hungarian cartographer. In this barren stretch, we rely on sparse settlements to restock. Beyond the kilometer marker where our village should be, an empty valley of rock, sand, and scrub stretches to the horizon. This is our third phantom village today, and evening has begun to draw the curtain on our misfortune. The road is not right, and the towns we expect for food and water do not exist.
We camp behind a low brown hill, and use our last water to cook our last food. I find a scrap of rug fallen from a camel train and set it before Brian’s tent as an entry way to lighten the mood. I find a scorpion on it as I set it down, spoiling the gift.
The wind rises at 1AM, and we lose our sleep wondering if the tents will hold. They do, and at 6AM we move to the road and encounter an early morning resumption of the previous days direct, soul crushing headwind. Today it is stronger, and has come earlier.
With eighty kilometers to the next settlement and no water in bottles or landscape – not a drop to the horizon – we flag down a truck and are whisked into Beitun. I can think of no other activity comparable to cycling into a 35 knot wind. It is soul crushing. You can still crawl along without much risk, but it is excruciatingly difficult and slow. There is no rhythm. In this land, there is no where to hide and it roars in your ears the whole day long.
The steppe is utterly empty until we reach the abrupt edge of downtown. Our map uses font size to indicate settlement size. Beitun is marked as being the same size as Saribulak, one of the towns that did not exist. In reality, Beitun has 90,000 people in a compact city of modern buildings, leafy avenues, hotels, markets, and restaurants. It is the opposite of the countryside in every way.
Beitun is brand new, and under construction. It speaks of recent Han colonization, of a risen China appropriating its ethnic periphery and casting a web of super modern infrastructure across a landscape unaccustomed to such attention.
There is MUCH more to this story. Read here, here and here for our own past installments, or visit Zand’s expedition 7 for the full text and even more photos. Zand rides an Expat S, built to carry everything he needs over months adventuring in the farthest flung wilderness Earth has to offer.
On the Road – The Blayleys in Ireland, Part I
John says, in his ever-softening Irish lilt, “I am always trying to describe Ireland to people, and one of the things I say is ‘it’s just a rock, stuck in the ocean.'”
John Bayley and Pamela Blalock, collectively the Blayleys, are fixtures here in our Boston cycling community. We know of no couple who log more miles in a year than these two, everything from the Mt. Washington Hill Climb to Dirty Kanza to rambling tours of John’s home country. This fall, they spent three weeks day-tripping around the Emerald Isle, riding out and back from John’s home in Dublin, before heading to the west coast and then north to Donegal, a pilgrimage of sorts to many of Ireland’s natural, national treasures.
This churchyard sits in an idyllic corner of County Meath, north of Dublin. Many of the old buildings in Ireland can be hard to date just based on appearance. Some are quite old. Others are classic reproductions built in an older style by the wealthy landowners of the 16th and 17th centuries. Some are ruins. Some are museums. And they are all beautiful.
This is Ducketts Grove built in 1830, near Carlow, 60 miles south of Dublin. Surrounded by farmland, the approach to the old estate house is flat, if the road surface leaves something to be desired.
John says, “The riding there, it’s like mountain biking, but on tarmac. The roads curve and twist and undulate.” Over the years, he and Pamela have had good luck with the notoriously wet, Irish weather, but this trip delivered on all the damp, gray promise of that reputation. Pamela rode her Axiom SLX with S&S couplers, a bike we might call an Airheart SLX now, while John rode an Evergreen SL.
Here, Pamela climbs up a forbidding steep alongside a farm. Fenders can be a good idea here, if only to keep the ever-present manure off your backside. The Evergreen’s disc brakes, she reported, keep the bike cleaner, given the conditions, than a traditional rim brake.
John says everything about Ireland is “elemental.” The rain, the wind, the sun, the shift between them, constantly testing your mettle.
It was in their first week, while still based in Dublin, that Pamela encountered her first ever tail wind. Up to that point, she maintained, she had never felt the wind at her back. Sure, she had ridden miles into steady breezes, turned and felt fast on her return, but that was just well-earned speed.
Then, while riding the coast north of the city with their friend Declan on another “elemental” day, she finally felt it, a wind so strong she was able to pass miles without pedaling at all.
Come back to see more from the Blayley’s Irish adventure, and their pilgrimage to the west of the country, or read more of their adventures on their own cycling 7.
On the Road: Zand Martin Cycling the Mongolian Altai
The soul of adventure is the unknown, those parts of a trip that can’t clearly be seen or arranged beforehand. Zand Martin and his expedition partner Brian engaged that unknown on so many levels as they approached the Altai Mountains, looking for the spiritual home of skiing in central Asia.
Here is another installment of Zand’s trip journal, with accompanying photographs. As ever, we are grateful to him and all those who seek adventure on a Seven.
“Da, yes. Kurgan.” The shepherd pointed behind him without looking. He hunched low over his horse, hands pressed between stomach and saddle horn. He wore a knit ski mask, black leather overcoat, and dark corduroys with patches of thick quilting showing at the knees. He presented an intimidating figure high above, and the gallop that brought carried him across my path reinforced this menacing countenance. Brian had rounded the corner without noticing the stones, and I was alone.Up the valley, where the shepherd pointed, a series of stone rings and cobble piles punctuated an angled plain. In the narrow space between mountain and river, these tombs showed on the surface in gray, weathered rock painted in crimson lichen. They hadn’t been excavated, and still held the remains of some long-dead chariot rider, goat herder, prince, or peasant. The Bronze Age denizens of central Eurasia – Scythian, Turkic, Indo-European – had ridden here, and buried their dead. Above the tombs – kurgans in Turkic – two standing stones marked another site. When I reached the first dark obelisk, I had heard the hooves and spotted the horse and rider hurtling across the plain.
“Turkic? Mongol?” I asked, pointing, trying to fill the silence.
“Kazakh.” Perhaps he misunderstood. The Kazakhs didn’t live here five thousand years ago. They didn’t really exist as a tribe or ethnicity until five or six hundred years ago, but this was a homeland now, and the tombs were, in a convoluted sense, those of their ancestors. While the Russians colonized the Kazakh steppe, many groups escaped over the border of the expanding Empire and settled here in western Mongolia. In Kazakhstan, some say that to find real Kazakh culture you need to look in the remote west of Mongolia.
Under the shepherd’s gaze, I calm and walk amongst the stones. I compliment his flocks, their health and number, and think I see him smile beneath the mask. Beneath hat and hood, zinc and sunglasses, I hide from the sun, while he wears a mask. I am in no danger. I walk respectfully, shake hands, and cycle away as he watches.
We were finally on a downhill run after crossing our last pass, the 3000m Rashin Davaa, and no major obstacles remained between us and China. The main road from Bayan-Olgii aimag runs southeast to Khovd, and then traces a huge loop southwest through a low point where Altai begins to taper into the Gobi. We see a shortcut on the map, a thin, dotted line that runs due south and reaches Bulgan soum and the Chinese border in half the distance. Already crunched for time due to the glacial pace of the Russian embassy, we roll the dice and trade the known for a chance at speed and wildness.
Instead of 800km on the main road, we cross the mountains over rough tracks and pitted roads. These jeep tracks show no sign of intentionality, but instead wander in a braid of ten or twenty lanes where one jeep followed another, and then bundle together over passes and rivers in washboard, sand, and boulder. With almost no information and the barest of navigation aids, we are certainly taking a risk. Not so much of physical harm, but of discomfort, despair, and time wasted. A friend in Olgii assures us there are towns, traders driving the route, and a public bus that goes everyday. In the event, we are passed by a handful of vehicles in five days, and only two dusty outposts with bare shelves mark the route. We eat ramen and carry water from one valley to the next, constantly fretting as bottles run down and we go without.
Over Rashin, we roll along the Buyant and Bulgan gol, descending from alpine to steppe to desert. We are dry. I wake each day with cracked lips and swollen eyes, dust in every pore and ephemeral daydreams of trees, green grass, and water. Scraggly poplars appear as we drop, and mud brick houses and gers show up along the river. We pass a string of Bactrian camels laden with baggage, household goods, and the stove, poles, felt and canvas of a packed ger. Women on horseback plod along with them as horsemen maneuver the flocks around the train. Bits of color trail the lumbering beasts of burden: bright felted rugs in swirling dual tone motifs, and bits of scarf or jacket were a young child has been bundled.
We rejoin the pavement as a sandstorm rages. The valley dissipates, the walls exploding apart, and the river is lost to sight. The mountains diminish. We turn into sharp hills of gravel and sand, and grind down towards China.
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.