Obsessive and Weird and Pretty Awesome

I had this crazy idea. It didn’t start out crazy; it started out like a normal, not-crazy idea. I was bored with riding the same old trails—thank you, Strava, for revealing that I’d ridden Mathis for the 100th time—and so I thought I’d push myself to ride new ones. And I did that for a few weeks. But when I looked at Google Earth and Google Maps and Gaia GPS and the little purple squiggles I’d drawn by recording my rides, the idea mutated into a strange and ridiculous beast. What if I rode every significant trail and street in the southern half of my 948-square-mile county? And what if in my home town, I rode every single road, alley, and dirt track? And in the towns closest to me, too? Would I have the fortitude to see it through? And if I did, what would I learn about the place I live, the people who live here, and myself?

So, yeah, I did this. And about halfway through the project, I told my friend Brendan about it and his response was to say, “That’s pointless,” except he emphasized pointless with an adjective that I’m not going to use here, and I laughed and agreed because I’d called it plenty of spicy things when I was in the middle of the rides. We talked about whether any adventure really had a point, and a couple weeks later he sent me a book, The Living Mountain, by Nan Shepherd, who spent a lifetime studying her beloved Cairngorm Mountains in Scotland. It was a book about place, and also about the quest to understand that place.

Whether it’s trying to find a way through a seemingly intractable problem, solving a mystery, or comprehensively experiencing some spot on earth by skiing every trail there or climbing every 5.9, I love a good quest, and I have a long list of ones that are in progress or waiting for the right time to launch. That includes but is not limited to visiting every national park and monument, skiing every continent, skiing every state that can be skied, riding every IMBA Epic, riding all the big dirt and pavement climbs in California, skiing every volcano in the West, searching for rumored and hidden panels of rock art and archaeological treasures, finding out what happened to Everett Ruess after he disappeared in Utah, looking for the world’s tallest tree, riding from Mexico to Oregon on dirt through California, climbing all the peaks on the Sierra Club’s Hundred Peaks Section, riding the Trans-America Trail, and driving to Tierra del Fuego.

As reported in this issue, multiple teams are trying to become the first to climb K2 in winter—the last of the world’s 8,000-meter summits to remain untouched in the coldest season. Alaskan adventurer Luc Mehl is using Nordic ice skates to explore the frozen north in an increasingly snowless era and creating a new kind of expedition travel in the process. Vermonter Leath Tonino keeps returning to the top of a peak called Camel’s Hump to see just how much cold camping he can endure. Each of these is a big, ambitious effort, and I don’t know if those guys would call them quests, but I would. And maybe “quest” is just a fancy name for dream or goal or desire, but I think there’s more to it than that. Quests are defined by a higher level of commitment and a stronger sense of mission. They stretch out over time, or they should, and proper ones have hardship and setbacks and doubts, to be met with creativity, fortitude, and hope. And they don’t ever really go away unless completed—you may stop pursuing it, but once started, that quest is there, waiting for you to come back, every once in a while popping up with a gentle psst.

My South County riding project came to an end on an otherwise uneventful Saturday in early November. I swung a leg over my drop-bar bike, pedaled seventeen miles of pavement, gravel, and dirt, looped back to my car, locked my bike on the rack, walked to a coffee shop, ordered a celebratory espresso, and looked at the final tally. Holy smokes, it added up. I’d ridden 5,217 miles, climbed 364,944 vertical feet, and spent five hundred forty-four hours in the saddle. But those were just numbers, not so different from any other numbers, and they didn’t begin to hint at the real things I’d gained: a far deeper sense of the place I’d lived for thirty years, a topography of the land embodied from the saddle up, the addictive joy of experiencing something new on every single ride, and, finally, the satisfaction of finishing something big, crazy as it was.