The Radavist

The idea of a true-to-form vacation, or holiday, is pretty foreign to me. As someone who’s spent their entire adult life living, breathing, eating, photographing bicycles 24/7, it’s hard to leave work, i.e. a camera, behind. A few years ago, right after Josh posted his Reportage from the Durango to Moab route along the San Juan Huts network, we put a reservation in for the Telluride to Moab route. Then the pandemic hit, delaying the trip indefinitely. We finally agreed upon a week this year and began planning. I hadn’t been on a week-long tour in years and with work seemingly stacking up, I was glad to disconnect with seven other riders touring across the Uncompahgre Plateau from the San Juan to the La Sal mountains. We all began packing, preparing, and the excited chatter resonated through my email inbox daily…

Today we’ve got a special bit of Reportage from the crew at Squid Bikes showcasing their new handmade in Taiwan steel gravel model, the Gravtron. Read on below for a look at the owners’, Chris and Emily, personal Gravtron builds as well as a friend Nick’s bike loaded down for a trip from Reno to Sacramento with a trip report by Emily. Check it out below!

Babad Do’ag, roughly translates to “Frog Mountain” in the O’odham language. This mountain is now commonly referred to as Mt. Lemmon, named after botanist Sara Plummer Lemmon who studied the botany of the mountain in the late 1800s. The imposing profile of the sprawling mountain range that lines the north and east sides of Tucson is impossible to ignore. While the paved road up into the range is the stuff of road biking legend there is a huge spectrum of unpaved roads that circle the mountain as well. While Patagonia, AZ has been an epicenter of gravel cycling in Southern Arizona, I wanted to bring some attention to a route that was more Tucson-focused.

There it was, carved into the side of the mountain like a serpentine scar, slithering its way up toward a sky riddled with barren peaks; their toothy prominences ripping through the leading edge of a building storm. A keen eye and a pointed finger could trace its path, lurching upward from where we stood at the western edge of the Great Basin Desert, zigzagging all the way up through Pinyon/Juniper woodland, wandering between stands of Ponderosa and getting steeper as the Foxtail pines got shorter. Miles away it could still just barely be seen, emerging atop an alpine ridgeline some four thousand feet above.

I don’t consider myself an avid bikepacker. Yet, neither I think nor talk about riding my enduro bike (which I don’t have). Terminology in general has lost meaning for me in the past years in the bike world. I guess at the same time as many of us, I got overwhelmed with all the new kinds of everything, and the speed of development and diversity the market has achieved in such a short time. I tried to back off a little and find a short of safe place from where I can observe it all. And at the same time, the kind of biking I try to practice more is also quite determined by the act of observing.

I like to shoot the first frame on a roll of film no matter how carefully I load the roll I always end up getting something kinda strange and wonderful out of that first exposure – an effect yielded by the film’s interaction with light coming from two separate moments in time and space – the exposure of the film through the camera’s shutter, but also the light leaked onto the frame during the loading of the roll. One of my favorite photos ever is of my 17-year-old beagle/spaniel mix, Bucky, where he looks like he’s peeking out from behind a cascading sheet of liquid sun. The first exposure on this roll is of my friend, podcast co-host, and riding partner, Sarah rifling through overstuffed bikepacking bags outside of a country store in Damascus, Virginia about 15 miles into our 550-mile bikepacking trip through the mountains of Virginia and West Virginia. The image of her trying to squeeze a snack bar into a nonexistent empty space in the top tube bag is itself neatly constrained into the 2/3rds of the frame not devoured by light exposure obtained while the roll was being loaded.

La Costa de Hermosillo is the name for a vast expanse of land that covers from the west of the city of Hermosillo all the way to the coast of the Gulf of California, 100 km (60 miles) away. Once part of the territory where the Comca’ac Natives thrived, nowadays it’s mainly used for agriculture; during the 19th century, the Comca’ac, most frequently called “Seri” which means “people of the sand” in Yaqui language, were persecuted and almost wiped out completely by the Mexican army and ranchers who had interest in this territory, and the few survivors of the already dispersed Comca’ac Nation were progressively displaced further and further towards the coast till they reached the land they occupy today, where water is scarce and life conditions are harsh. Rain is not often seen around here, and agriculture is only possible via drilling wells and bringing water from other parts. La Costa de Hermosillo is flat as it is possible for land to be, so making long distances by bike in this region is a matter of keeping your bars straight and moving early, because it’s usually around noon that the wind picks up.

I woke up to the sounds of a struggling motorcycle engine. When I set up my tent the previous night I’d pushed my bike up a tiny double-track offshoot road that steeply climbed to an isolated hilltop. I was perched above the primary road that already gets very little traffic and totally out of sight, but with the sound of that engine, I knew the motorcycle wasn’t simply cruising by on the road below, it was making its way up toward me.