Why are Porter and I on this four-month, 2,700-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route adventure? It’s a fair question and one we’re often asked, in light of Porter’s bike exploding, grizzly bears, logging trucks on narrow mountain roads, getting lost in the wilderness, storms, and all manner of physical and emotional risks. Nearly 2,000 miles […]
Infinitely deeper than our crossing from state to state, as Porter from Montana to Idaho, is the liminal space in which we now live. Day to day, moment to moment, we move not just from the ranch lands of Montana to the green farms of Idaho, but hover on thresholds of being. While Porter taxes […]
Porter’s fine carbon fibre rear wheel exploded beneath him with a deafening KABLAM! and blew apart his Santa Cruz Tallboy mountain bike on a remote Montana road. “Lying on the ground, my first thought was the flare I carry to scare off bears went off,” he said. “My second thought was I’d been shot. My […]
Porter blazed over the Canadian border at Roosville into Montana, to camp in a wilderness described in Cycling the Great Divide as “so wild that grizzly bears too unruly to live elsewhere are relocated here by wildlife officials.” That little orange can outside his 7 oz. tarp is his bear spray. He had a mutually respectful […]
Our son, Philip, and friends Martha and Randy (Porter’s mountaineering mentor, best man at our wedding, and Philip’s godfather), gathered in Canada to give Porter a great send-off from Banff on our change of direction, now north to south. Believe it or not, the northern end of the 2,774-mile Great Divide Mountain Bike Route is […]
I thought what you’re probably thinking when I read this headline in a local Wyoming newspaper! But it refers, thankfully, to retraining oil and gas workers to work in wind energy. We’re endlessly fascinated by what’s going on in the places we’re visiting on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, from watching the National Finals […]
With deep snow in the Colorado mountains, we leaped from the northern border of New Mexico to the southern border of Wyoming, where we had our most fascinating overnight stay yet–at Ladder Ranch, WY, a massive working sheep and cattle ranch since 1881, for six generations. We stayed in a comfy room in the cookhouse, […]
With a mix of wonder, gratitude and relief, we made it 620 miles from the Mexico-New Mexico border nearly to Colorado before we ran into deep snow. As we did hiking the Continental Divide Trail, we’ll leap over Colorado for now and continue north on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route in southern Wyoming. Sections […]
We’re opening to our vulnerability out here, physically from the vicissitudes of body, weather, and gear, and emotionally from the astounding spaciousness of blue sky and sagebrush terrain. Porter awoke in the New Mexico desert one morning to snow falling. He had camped a mile down a red clay trail to find a bush out […]
This journey is a mix of assiduous attention to detail for survival and contemplation of luminous landscapes for the soul. After driving, sometimes for hours, to Porter’s drop-off trailhead, together we work for almost an hour to unload his mountain bike, Goat, from its vertical bike rack with its various locks and accoutrements, put on […]