I had a permit to walk the Sierra section of the PCT but I wasn’t interested in dealing with the mega snowpack or dangerous runoff so I gave up my permit and got on my bike instead. I rode about 1,000 miles between the southern Sierra Nevada where I live to Bend, Oregon.
I left home on May 18th and got back on June 23rd. I pedaled all of it except between Reno and Truckee, which is about 25 miles. I took trains and buses back. I stopped for a week and a half in Northern California to attend a friend’s wedding, and I spent a week in Bend with friends and went to the Steampunk music festival.
The first night I sheltered from the wind in the lee of a concrete pylon that holds up the Los Angeles aqueduct. I couldn't hear the water flowing but every once in a while I heard a rock bouncing along the bottom of the pipe, a sound disjunct because it seemed to come from the bottom of the ocean but there I was in the high desert with the wind ripping.
The second night I rode longer than I should have and I got nauseous from exhaustion and the heat. I put my bivy down next to a high voltage tower and watched a lightning storm approach from across Owen's Lake. I didn't set up the tarp because I didn't yet know how, there weren't any good spots, it seemed like maybe it wouldn't rain on me, and I was nauseous and exhausted.
This is my I’m having lots of fun face
Around 2200 it started sprinkling on me so I packed up, put on my rain shell, and walked my bike along the powerline road. The rain stopped and I put my pad down and almost got to sleep before it rained on me again and I got up and walked on. I had my headlamp on red so I wouldn't trip and lightning flashed on the far side of the mountain ranges. It stopped raining and I put down my bivy and slept. It didn't rain on me again. The electricity in the lines crackled overhead all night.
The third day I rode the easy ten miles to Lone Pine, resupplied, and found a spot to camp just north of town along the river. Storm clouds whipped up over the Inyo Mountains and I set up my tarp for the first time.
The clouds approached from the north but the wind was blowing steady out of the south, so I storm-pitched the tent with the opening facing the approaching darkness. Five minutes before the storm hit the wind slowed, stopped, and then hurled itself at me from the north.
Thinking about it later I decided the storm must have been sucking air up into it but I’m not meterologist. At the time my tarp billowed with dry air and I knew I didn't have time to theorize. I said to myself 'slow is smooth and smooth is fast' over and over as I reversed the storm pitch, undoing and refastening all of my trucker's hitches and repositioning my gear. I got in under it just as the drops began to hit. I lay on my stomach with my foot kicked up to keep the tarp from pressing down on me, but I kept dry.
I wanted to stay on dirt roads and trails as much as possible. Between home and Bishop (140 miles) I only rode asphalt maybe 20 miles. I rode aqueduct, powerline, and rail line roads. You see more interesting things from dirt roads and navigation is less straightforward.
North of Bishop I ran into miles of deep sand and turned around back to the highway. A quarter mile north of Mammoth Lakes on a forest road I ran into a ten foot high drift of snow. So from Bishop I rode highway the entire rest of the trip.
Coming up Conway Summmit north of Mono Lake
Over the next few weeks of riding I stopped at two or three in the afternoon to set up shelter from thunderstorms more days than not. The first night I felt good about it was north of Walker. I pulled off onto 89 where it starts and found a little dirt track going up by the creek with cottonwoods. The clouds loomed dark and heavy over the mountains to the west and I couldn't see much of them but I knew there was lots. I set up the tarp with enough space for myself and the bike and it rained heavy for hours but I kept dry the whole time.
From that night on I felt comfortable with the tarp, even the afternoon outside Quincy when it dumped hail and the lightning cracked overhead and water ran off my shelter like someone were hosing it off, like there was a hole in the sky and an ocean above that. I prefer the tarp to a tent in most conditions now. I camped dry in places I wouldn't have been able to pitch a tent. I never felt claustrophobic under the tarp, although the two nights the mosquitoes were bad and I retreated to my bivy bag at 1700 were miserable.
From that first good shelter at the foot of 89 I had the Carson Valley to traverse and I wanted to get up to Truckee because Dark Horse is in Truckee. I didn't know that I'd find a place to camp in the Carson Valley though, and 50 to 28 is a hard and sketchy route to take on a bicycle with all of the traffic on a holiday weekend.
I texted Robyn and told her if she came and picked me up in Reno I'd buy her dinner and top off her tank. I rode 82 miles to meet her in Reno and we ate mushroom enchiladas and tacos at Mexcal, and then she gave me a lift up to her place. I took my first shower of the trip and slept on her floor and the next morning I went to Dark Horse.
Dark Horse is one of those places where I feel at home even though I don't talk much and no one there knows me, and maybe some of the baristas think I'm odd if they think of me at all which they probably don't. The stone walls bermed by earth a hundred years ago and the thick timbers and steel beams holding up the floor above are a refuge for me.
The regulars who go there and the baristas are all certainly and objectively cooler than I am. I feel this when I'm there but it doesn't make me uncomfortable. It inspires me in a kind of way I can't quite put my finger on. I like to listen to their conversations which are small chunks of their life stories without any context except what I can infer from their clothes and their body language.
I order my coffee and I go and sit and so I belong there. I belong enough, rather. I sit and write and read and listen to the conversations and try to watch without being a gaper about it. I take it in. That's what I do when I'm not home building something, I take things in. When I'm in Dark Horse I feel like I'm absorbing something without taking. That's important to me. It's important that I feel like I'm not taking, net-negativing a place. Dark Horse feels like it can give without any depletion and so I sit and absorb and I feel wonderful about it in a dark and quiet way.
I wait out the holiday weekend and the rain forecasts with Robyn in Truckee. We go on walks and talk about our relationship. I try to help her understand why it ended. I try to understand why it ended. I try to understand why it started. I didn't think I had anything new to think about it but I did, we uncover some things I hadn't thought of before and I realize I wasn't as over it as I'd thought I was. But what we talk about gets me over it. I find closure I hadn’t known I lacked.
On my second day out from Truckee I ride through Greenville. The last time I'd been through Greenville was two weeks before it burned in 2021. I was riding south on my motorcycle then and the smoke was so thick I was concerned I'd crash from the dizziness. Two weeks later it burned.
This time I ride through downtown and there are metal shade structures in many of the lots, some with RVs underneath but some with nothing. It looks like the shelters were made for people who decided not to come back. There are not many buildings left standing but all the rubble is gone so it is a confusing place to ride through if you don't know what happened. There is a cafe operating out of an RV under a metal shade structure. A few of the old stone or adobe walls are still standing and there are diagonal struts holding them up.
I stop at the horseshoe club just north of town in unburned forest for lunch. The horseshoe club looks abandoned about two years. It starts to rain and I move my bike under a wooden shingled roof structure. It rains harder and the roof leaks. I set up my tarp hanging underneath the roof and that helps as the hail thunders and overhead lightning booms. I stand underneath the roof for three or four hours in wet shorts. The rain lets up and water drips from the trees. I walk my rig over to a national forest campground that looks like it's been abandoned for two years and sleep there that night with water dropping off the leaves and hitting my tarp.
Hour four of standing under a leaky roof thing in a storm at the Greenville Horseshoe Club
89 North from Truckee is beautiful and sometimes the shoulder is just the white paint line with logging trucks hauling ass next to you. I thought I'd be more scared of road traffic but I wasn't (which worries me). On windy mountain roads drivers have to pay attention to the road. If they look at their phones for a couple of seconds they'll immediately crash, no question, so windy mountain roads are safer for bicyclists than straight roads, I think. The roads themselves force the drivers to pay attention.
Every single logging truck I saw was hauling ass, loaded or unloaded. Sometimes when a truck would roar past on a tight turn with no shoulder and a sheer dropoff to a full river I would whoop. Once the truck is past and I'm not dead it's a rush, I feel more alive than anything.
Still, I think I'll avoid road riding as much as possible in the future. Getting hit on the side of a highway by someone texting their buddy a meme while driving a Hyundai Santa Fe seems like a mundane way to die. I'd rather stack the deck towards dying anyhow else.
There's very little skill or action involved in trying not to die while road riding. You pay attention and stay as far right as possible and put something annoyingly bright on your bike and maybe you put a little mirror on your helmet so you can see death coming up on you but otherwise you just ride and hope today isn't your lucky day. I'd like to be very involved in something when I die violently, if I die violently.
I’d like to be doing something that involves very tight mental focus and is physically demanding from a skills and performance perspective. Getting hit by a truck while road riding seems too much like getting hit by a piano falling from the sky while walking down the sidewalk. Dead is dead, so who cares really, but the currently-living version of me requests a more interesting way to go.
I know that's an entitled way to feel about dying and nobody really gets to choose, and when I am about to die and I know it I bet I'll feel differently about it than now while I'm sitting here safely typing this out, but gun to my head with the experiences I've got that's how I feel about it. In the future I'll try to avoid exposure to boring ways to die.
I didn't see Mount Shasta coming because it was cloudy and the trees were tall and I put in long days riding up to it, but then one morning I woke up and got onto 89 and came over a hill where the road was straight and bam there it was, still 40 miles off probably but the damnedest thing I'd ever seen, snow-covered and pushing up out of the crust of the earth like a geological feature invented by the author of an epic fantasy novel who needed a mountain so grand, so enormous, so solitary, so differentiated that it served as a kind of character in its own right and the plot of the whole novel spun around the mountain which didn't move of course but without the mountain there wouldn't be the story. I'd seen Mt Shasta before from the 5 and from the top of Mount Lassen on a dawn summit, but on this trip I got the closest. I hung out in McCloud for a few days and then over by Lake Siskiyou for a few more days, and when I rode north on 97 to Bend I could look back and see Mt Shasta for days.
early morning view
I spent five days near a mountain town of a thousand people and went to the town’s one cafe every morning. By my second morning the owners greeted me by name and said it was good to see me again and they said that every morning to me. On my last morning it was just me and the two owners in there and I got up to go. They stopped their conversation and wished me a good day. I stopped and said I'm not much of a connoisseur of coffee so much as I am of coffee shops, and that this one was special and I said thank you for doing what you're doing.
I didn't tell them that I'd been to coffee shops in a purposeful way from here to Barcelona, to Athens, to Jordan, to London, but I thought about it later and thought it might have been nice to say that to them as well, but then maybe that would have been more of a brag than a compliment so I'm glad I didn't say all that after all. I told them I thought what they were doing there was special and I walked out and I haven't been back into that cafe since.
Pedaling 550 miles got me to the wedding through the desert, the mountains, and the storms, and I felt like that was a good ending point for the riding portion of my trip. I arranged for friends to drop me off in Bend on their way home from the wedding.
At the wedding many people asked about my ride. I liked the attention at first and then I got self-conscious because I saw myself liking the attention but I knew a couple-week ride wasn't a big deal and that I shouldn't let the talk get to my head.
At the end of the night of the ceremony a couple was leaving and said hey you're the guy who rode here right? and I said yes and they thanked me for doing the thing that created the story about the guy who biked to the wedding.
They thanked me.
Huh? I hadn't thought about it like that.
The comment made my trip less about me, or rather it decentered me from the story. That conversation helped me to realize that when people do things in the world it's not always all about them even if they did it entirely for their own reasons. The universe repossesses our stories and spreads them out through the world, it seems. I don't know exactly what my story meant to that couple but it meant something to them about themselves. It told them something about themselves. That’s fascinating.
I thought about all the stories of other people I've heard and I realized this is clearly true. I don't care about people's stories for them, I care about their stories for me. We're all solipsists deep down. Inspiring stories click something open inside my conceptualization of myself and subtly changes how I act in the world. So my story must tell other people something about themselves in some small way. Ah!
In that moment I wanted to continue my ride to Bend. It's not that I felt a responsibility to other people to hit some arbitrary mileage goal, it's that my experience somehow became more personal and less selfish at the same time. I saw that it involved other people and that felt good and I didn't want to end that good feeling. I wanted another few hundred miles of doing something by myself that involved other people.
The morning after the ceremony I packed up and pedaled north. I wasn't hung over because I’m not drinking alcohol this year but I'd gotten only a few hours of sleep after much dancing so I got only thirty miles and each of those miles were a slog but I smiled the whole time.
I had to get to Bend by Thursday to help volunteer at the Steampunk music festival. My friends hooked me up with the volunteer position to trade eight hours of work to get into the festival. On my last day of riding the grade and winds were favorable so I put in my longest day, 108 miles.
I stayed with my friends a week. Kyle is my old climbing partner and I’ve camped with him and Natalie all over the Sierras. I hadn’t seen them since their wedding in 2021. They’ve made a beautiful life for themselves in Bend and it was a privilege to get enfolded by them into it for a few days.
At the music fest Max sat on his heels next to me and looked at me and asked what it felt like inside and I said acceptance. The next day I saw some faces on the dance floor that seemed to me ugly underneath. I saw faces twisted subtly by fear, shame, and trauma seeping outwards into the world like light twisting underneath a door. I saw self obsession and clutching and grasping. I was able to see it all and, somehow, accept it and be with it. I saw it as something beautiful. I saw that surely someone was looking at me too and seeing bright ugly darkness seep out of the gaps around my eyeballs. If I could look around the dancefloor and see the wars within people surely at least someone could see the violence within me too and see the ugliness of it and want nothing to do with me.
And…
That's.
All.
Right.
And so I danced with the people some of whom were in a lot of pain they didn't know anything about and I felt some of my own pain and wondered about the pain I had that I didn't know anything about yet and then the BASS HIT and my mind emptied and I let myself go wild and I figured I was probably maybe making a fool of myself as I jumped and banged my head and my vest whirled around me and I wasn't as lean as I'd like to be dancing with my vest open and my thoughts whirled and swirled with the beauty and the ugliness together like a flame vortex spun around itself up to the darkness in the sky.
I'm a quiet kind of person in large groups of people. I've always assumed people thought I was either an asshole or socially incompetent. Maybe I am socially incompetent. I've decided that I'm just quiet in large groups of people and that's okay. I've decided that it's okay now. I've decided to accept that that's just who I am and either that's fine or it's not fine but either way I accept it and I don't worry about it. The world is full of things that aren't fine and I'm part of that.
Do you understand? I'm not saying I'm finally at peace because I realize I'm not as bad as I thought I was. I'm saying I'm at peace because I accept being as bad as I am. I accept being a bit malformed. I've spent my entire life making excuses for people and trying to make myself perfect. My ego is enormous. I want to be like god. But that's ridiculous. I'm broken in a hundred ways and instead of trying to perfectly colormatch the grout to make it look perfect well fuck it I'm going to patch it together with contrasting colors, gold, pink-dyed fake fur, turquoise, charcoal-and-resin, whatever's on hand and maybe it looks good and maybe not but it's fine.
This is where I'm broken - here, do you see? I'm quiet in large groups. Sometimes it looks like I'm angry when I'm really not. I'm emotionally intelligent but sometimes socially incompetent. I'm a bit off. A queer chap. Here - no here, do you see? Here is the war inside myself. Here's where I hate myself. Here's the crack where the violent darkness seeps out into my consciousness sometimes. Here's something terrible about me that I'm in love with and I've never told anyone.
Here. It's fine.
It feels like I packed six months of life into one month. Early May seems like a long time ago. The past winter is in the same bucket of memories as my Europe trip, as when I built Serenity, as when I went down the Grand Canyon. Old memories; long ago!
I read somewhere that experience is less about the passage of time and more about the number of novel 'moves' you make. This makes a lot of sense to me. If you want to live a long life, make a lot of moves. Even if you die young you will have lived a long life.
I camped in storms in gear I made myself, rode roads I'd never ridden before, met people I'd never met, had interactions I'd never had. I solved problems I've never faced and had my mind melted and reconfigured in ways new to me. I did something hard day after day after day and I learned to love my body, my body which can do so much and tell me so many things. My arena of competence expanded greatly. I don't apprehend storms like I did before. I am ready for them now.
About that: before I knew how to use my gear I watched the skies anxiously. I wasn't sure I knew what to do to not freeze to death if things turned out badly. Now I'm sure and I'm not anxious about storms. I know what to do. I know that I am more equal to the task of living in a world with storms now, and so I feel calm and relaxed.
A storm cell coming down off the Whites north of Bishop
The unknown induces anxiety. When your sphere of the known is small there is much in the world that causes uncertainty. As you make more moves and accumulate experience and skills, self-knowledge and world-knowledge, there is more area in the world in which you will feel calm and relaxed. Ah yes, a storm, my old friend, hello, welcome, good night.
I'm designing my life to maximize novel move-making. This will make my life quite long and it will increase my sense of calm. It's better to design carefully the experiences where you face the unknown and feel anxiety, so that when the universe throws circumstances at you that you didn't plan for you're more likely to face something like what you've already faced before and be able to be relaxed about it.
I don't want to be scared by sudden unforeseen circumstances: I want to be scared by a situation I put myself in because I'm much more likely to design something scary but survivable than the universe is. The universe will kill me without a thought, without even trying, by rolling over in its sleep or reaching to scratch itself.
It's not about not dying, though. This is important to make clear. What Hanzi Freinacht calls our little immortality projects are hubris. They're a waste of time. I'm not trying to not die, I'm trying to not waste my time. I'm trying to inhale energy and exhale aliveness. There's a web of aliveness out there except it's not 'out there' we are in it, we only sometimes feel like we're not in it because we're not paying attention. The point of making moves and of scaring myself is to ensure that I'm paying attention to the fact that I'm alive.
I almost reflexively wrote "...to pay attention to the fact that I'm alive and that I should do something with my life" but no. Paying attention to the fact that I'm alive is enough. I'm not alive in order to do any thing other than notice that I'm alive. Noticing that I'm alive is enough. Everything flows from this:
I'm alive.
Hmm.
Whoa!
...
Fucking whoa, man!
I live in a place surrounded by wilderness so I don't go on trips to 'escape to nature'. Few landscapes are as dramatic and heterogeneous as the bioregion I call home, and of all the kinds of ecosystems out there the one I live in is most to my liking.
I also don’t go on trips to make some sort of athletic achievement. I have no athletic gifts to give the world. Increasing the strength of my body or discovering what I’m physically capable of is a side effect of trips.
No, I realized on this trip that for me leaving home is about coming home different.
It's easy to fall into a routine and while I value consistency the best way to live a short life is to do the same thing every day. Doing the same thing every day is to repeat the same moves over and over which is the same as having a short life.
Not only does a trip involve making a lot of moves I've never made before, I always find new moves to make once I get home. I don't fall back into making the same moves as I was making before because I've changed myself enough on the trip to be someone who moves differently.
While pedaling north I had a lot of time to think. I thought about the kinds of moves I'd been making in the months up to my trip and I weighed what was good about them and what was not so good and I thought up new moves I could make once I got back. I thought through my new moves in great detail and got excited about them.
In the end this is what motivated me to get back home soon: I was stoked to begin making my freshly designed moves. I wanted to see what they'd feel like and what effects they'd generate. Now that I'm back I'm in the same place as I was before but I'm making different moves and it feels like my life is getting longer every day and I sense that I'm alive.
This sense will fade with consistency, of course, and my life will begin to get shorter. I'll have to go on another life-lengthening trip. The issue of timing is delicate. What if my consistently repeated moves are producing great effects? What if my next trip too soon disrupts the compounding effect of consistent effort and I never get anywhere?
My current guess is that I should go on a 7-20 day trip every three months. If anything this is too frequent, too disruptive. But I'll happily err on the side of too many moves, too long of a life, and I can adjust the frequency down if necessary.
