BUNYAN VELO ADVENTURES ON BICYCLE // ISSUE No. 01
BUNYAN VELO ISSUE No. 01 – FEBRUARY 2013 Adventures on Bicycle
EDITOR and DESIGNER Lucas Winzenburg CONTACT bunyanvelo@gmail.com www.bunyanvelo.com ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Many thanks to Alex Ehlen for his logo design work, Josh Klauck, Hurl Everstone, Randall Dietel, M. Taylor Long, and the many talented contributors who graciously submitted their stories and photographs. CONTRIBUTORS David Berg Isaiah Berg Nathan Berg Nicholas Carman Paul Doffing Alex Dunn
Cass Gilbert Chris Klibowitz Jacqueline Kutvirt Natalia Mendez John Moon Aaron Ortiz
Kurt Refsnider Chris Skogen Karl Stoerzinger Jim Thill Jen Tillman Bradley Wilson
PHOTO CREDITS Cover: David Berg Opposite: Cass Gilbert Contents: Jim Thill COPYRIGHT All content copyright 2013 Bunyan Velo. Contributions have been used with permission and are copyright original sources. No unauthorized reproduction without written consent.
MADE IN MINNEAPOLIS, MINNESOTA
Welcome to Bunyan Velo, a quarterly collection of photographs, essays, and stories about the simple pleasures of traveling by bicycle. Issue No. 01 brings together a small group of bicycle tourists, commuters, mountain bikers, mechanics, and racers, each of whom offers a unique perspective and assortment of cycling experiences. Working with the contributors to help craft their stories and share their passion for bicycling has been an exciting process. It’s my sincere hope that you’ll find something in the following pages that inspires you to hop on a bicycle and go out for an adventure of your own – be it to the market and back or around the world. Please consider supporting an independent publication by donating or purchasing a copy on our website, www.bunyanvelo.com. Thanks for reading,
Lucas Winzenburg Editor
CONTENTS Contributor Biographies..................................................................6 No Stone Left Unturned...................................................................8 by Cass Gilbert The Beauty of Youth.......................................................................20 by Chris Skogen Bound South..................................................................................22 by Isaiah Berg On Bicycle Touring.........................................................................36 by Jim Thill Paying It Forward..........................................................................44 by John Moon The Sacrifices of Racing..................................................................46 by Kurt Refsnider How I Spent My Day Off...............................................................58 by Karl Stoerzinger Fireman’s Breakfast.........................................................................64 by Jen Tillman Letters from Alex...........................................................................68 by Alex Dunn The Greatest Lakes.........................................................................86 by Jacqueline Kutvirt Tuesday, Jan. 29.............................................................................90 by Bradley Wilson Rio Grande and Route 66...............................................................94 by Nicholas Carman Of Rust and Rubber......................................................................104 by Natalia Mendez Le Farm.......................................................................................106 by Aaron Ortiz The Bicycle Shop Decal Project....................................................110 by Chris Klibowitz
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NO STONE LEFT UNTURNED Written and photographed by Cass Gilbert
O
ver these last few years, I’ve been engrossed in finding my path across North and South America. As with many long bicycle journeys, it’s one that’s unfurled in ways least expected. Unforeseen detours, new friendships, and prolonged pit stops have all played their role in upturning any schedule I’d once imagined. And as the miles have accrued, I’ve become increasingly averse to riding pavement. The notion of following dirt roads has even become an obsession: a visceral desire to banish highways and their endless current of automobiles from my life. When I left Alaska, my bicycle wobbled with belongings like a reluctant pack animal. Although the desire to unearth dirt roads was there, the blurred realisation hadn’t yet shifted fully into focus. As it did, I saw the potential of new paths before me. Riding ceased so much to be a way of reaching a destination, and more a form of living. In my attempts to trace my map’s faint dotted lines, my bicycle and the gear I carry have also evolved. Tyres that revel in dirt and mud are more to my choosing than those that scythe efficiently on road. Similarly, heavy loads can tether one to pavement. Light loads uplift the spirit. Excess gear has been jettisoned – the possessions I carry are capped by the ability to manhandle my bicycle over a mountain pass, when the dirt road I’ve been following peters to nothing. Shouldering my rig and scrambling over a fallen tree is now more important than the merits of an extra pair of clean underwear.
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B O U N S D O U T H
Written by Isaiah Berg, photographed by David and Nathan Berg
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W
e rode our bicycles from Alaska to Argentina last year. We were three brothers from a family farm in North Dakota, making up for a lack of experience with a healthy amount of enthusiasm. We called it Bound South, and we managed to ride our bicycles right to the end of the world at Ushuaia. Every day on our bicycles was a small miracle, each filled with variations of uproarious laughter, bitter exhaustion, sheer terror, and the simple, primal joy of eating. Among the many realizations I have come to since Bound South was that our adventure by bicycle wasn’t really about the technical details of our gear, or more surprisingly, the physical act of pedaling a bicycle over 15,000 miles of desert and timber and mountains and dirt. Gear is certainly important, and I will attest that Angus the Surly Troll and I are in a very committed and passionate relationship. The feat of pedaling a loaded bicycle across the Americas is also a profound and life-changing experience. But when I let my mind wander back to the places between Anchorage and Ushuaia, transporting my consciousness back to the amazing new lands we uncovered each day on our bicycles, the sounds and smells and sentiments that overwhelm me are not specific to a bicycle adventure. What we shared was something inclusively human, more remarkable for what connected us rather than what set our journey apart. We shared something profound, a capital-lettered Real Adventure. It just so happened to be on bicycle with three bags. The bicycle taps into that eternal part of the human spirit, the part that sheds risk like water on a rain fly and revels in the trials of a simple and rigorous life. We were always like little kids at a raucous slumber party in our small threeman tent, crammed in every night so we could smell the sweat and grime and chipotle pepper on our breath. We camped out in dodgy Latin American cities, fire stations, restaurants, pastures, barns, and in close proximity to way too many chickens. We made terribly inappropriate jokes and laughed at them till our stomachs ached. The bicycle unlocked a new life for us and forged a bond between us. This was a life we lived while we still could, a life of great risk and few possessions and zero planning. Life back in the United States wasn’t even close, and I worried that this contrast would purge us of what made our journey so special. Would we just return home, become accustomed once more to running water, blue jeans, and good beer, and forget the simple joy of pulling on a warm down jacket as the cold evening winds start to pick up in Patagonia? Or the magical way that Mexico produced an Oxxo exactly when we thought we were going to perish for lack of peanut butter, tortillas, honey, carrots, cucumber, avocado, bread, and a 3L of Mexican Coca-Cola? Would we just file away the photos and stories for later reminiscence? Life could go on as normal, with the bicycle journey a trophy that could be pulled out for a barstool conversation or an impromptu Bunyan Velo 25
THE
SACRIFICES
OF RACING Written and photographed by Kurt Refsnider
M
y third day on the trail, I awoke to yet another crystal clear morning. A gentle breeze blew cold air over my nose, the only part of my face protruding from the hood of my thin sleeping bag. I wriggled around and popped my head out just far enough to survey my surroundings. It was an hour or so after dark the prior evening when I decided to stop rather than continue on the loose, treacherous descent down the narrow ridge to Sergeants Mesa. The southernmost of the majestic Collegiate Peaks towered to the north, and the rolling, densely forested Cochetopa Hills stretched as far as I could see to the south and west. I lay back down and watched the branches above dance gently in the pastel twilight. I was a bit over half way through my journey from Denver to Durango on the rugged Colorado Trail, a route a few dozen bikepacking racers had tackled the previous week. For the fifth straight year since I began competing in multi-day mountain bike events, I had reluctantly skipped the Colorado Trail Race. But at that particular moment as I enjoyed the warmth of my sleeping bag before setting off for another relaxed day of riding through the mountains, there was no other way I could imagine wanting to experience the trail. In this year’s Colorado Trail Race, the top three finishers all broke Owen Hanley’s impressive course record of four days and change. Jefe Branham won in just under four days, doing so on a scant 4 hours of sleep while crushing 485 miles of mostly challenging singletrack. He told me a few days later that he had spent far too much time in the pain cave and didn’t enjoy much of the experience. He had ridden the course several times before, so it was familiar territory, but, given that it was a race, a high coefficient of suffering is to be expected. I’m sure as the memory of the pain has faded, Jefe probably feels a bit differently, but his comments shortly after the race were thought provoking. There is something unsettling about so many riders taking on spectacular routes like the Colorado Trail, the Arizona Trail, or the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route for the first time with a tightly-focused race mentality. They miss so much of the surrounding natural beauty by pushing through the night, spend consecutive days pedaling through the fog of exhaustion, and forgo the opportunity to exchange stories with other adventurers out on the trail. The more I ponder this, the more I’m reminded of the Mayan creation story in which the second race of humans was created from wood by Heart-of-Sky. They wandered through life, spiritless with empty minds and no respect for their creator. I’ve lost count of how many ultras I’ve raced, but in nearly every one, I’ve felt like one of these wooden people, a lifeless body passively churning the pedals. Fortunately, I have yet to be smote like Heart-of-Sky Bunyan Velo 48
HOW I SPENT
MY DAY OFF Written and photographed by Karl Stoerzinger
I
t was about two hours before closing time on a busy Thursday evening at the bike shop when we received a frantic phone call from a woman at the airport. She was a local organizer who was assisting a number of foreign athletes who had arrived to compete in the Twin Cities marathon. Over the din of the crowded baggage claim, she explained that a woman from Spain (one of Medtronic’s Global Heroes) had a big problem: the airline crushed and broke her hand cycle. After calling bike shops and wheelchair-related businesses all over town looking for someone to work on it, Courage Center (a local non-profit I’ve helped out a few times) finally gave them our number and said to ask for me. She wasn’t sure exactly what was broken, but asked if I’d please look at it. How much time did I have to repair the bike? It needed to be at the starting line in exactly 36 hours. Oh boy... We made hasty arrangements, and half an hour later a limousine driver showed up to deliver the hand cycle. When he opened the trunk, I had to ask him if it was the whole bike, or if perhaps the rest of it was missing. I’d never seen such an alien, unicycle-like contraption before. It was the
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whole thing, he assured me. He said he’d done some unusual runs before, but this one probably topped the list. Once I got it down to the bike shop and examined it more closely, I deduced that it clamped onto the front of a wheelchair to turn it into a tricycle. I’d worked on several hand cycles, but never this type before. My heart sank a little when I examined the broken part; the non-drive-side crank arm was snapped in two. I had all sorts of replacement crank arms on hand, but this was no normal crank arm; it was made from the sawed-off center portion of a normal square-taper bicycle crank, but with a proprietary arm welded on. It broke at the weld, an inevitable weak point. If it was made of steel, I could have brought it over to local framebuilder Erik Noren at Peacock Groove, who would have it TIG welded back together in no time flat. But it was aluminum, and nobody I know is willing to do weld repairs on aluminum bike parts due to the tricky metallurgical complexities involved. The manufacturer, Stricker Handbikes, is straight out of Germany, and their website is only partially
translated to English. I doubted if they’d be able to help me out in the tight timeframe available. No spare parts or loaner bikes could be located anywhere nearby, so I began formulating a plan. This was no normal bike shop repair; I would be spending my day off at TC Makers’ Hack Factory, a shared shop space in South Minneapolis. They have the precision heavy machinery, and I have a personal collection of tooling and accessories. It was time to make a part from scratch... Leaving work Thursday night, I rooted through the scrap metal bucket and found a discarded left side Shimano crank arm. The arm portion and pedal threading were useless to me, but it had the square-tapered hole to mount to the hand cycle. I packed up the broken crank parts and the donor crank arm and headed home to take measurements and make a few quick sketches before turning in for the night. The next morning, on my way to the Hack Factory, I paid a visit to Amble’s Machinery & Hardware, my favorite local surplus/junk dealer, and picked up a block of solid aluminum
billet the size of a Kleenex box. It was the smallest piece Jim had that would do the job, but it was still much larger than I needed and would need to be sliced up later. This block was going to allow me to build a crude mechanical adapter to connect the broken-off round crank arm to the donor Shimano crank. At the Hack Factory, we have a wonderful Bridgeport milling machine that we affectionately call Bridget. We got Bridget from a machine shop at Medtronic, and now it was being used to make an emergency part for a woman who would never have come to Minnesota if not for Medtronic. This amusing connection was not lost on me. Bridget was going to get quite a workout making all these parts fit together the way I needed them to. I mounted the donor Shimano crank arm in the Bridgeport’s vice and machined the crank arm’s curvy shape into a perfect rectangular cross section. The chunk of aluminum got a similar treatment to make all six rough-sawn sides flat and square. I began milling a groove down the middle of the block, aiming to make it
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PART ONE
LETTERS FROM ALEX Written and photographed by Alex Dunn; Edited by Nicholas Carman
In search of dirt roads and remote beaches along azure coastlines, my friend Alex has set out to ride south through southern California and Mexico’s Baja peninsula. Traveling the northern half of the peninsula with a friend, he finds much of what he is looking for, and more.These are excerpts of his letters to me. They are intensely personal notes, exclamations, realizations, and mental exhalations. These are his letters from the road. –Nicholas Carman Ensenada to San Felipe, first dirt in Baja the ride from coyote cal’s at san ysidro along highway 1 to the turnoff for cañón la calentura was made quite difficult and slow by an incredible side wind. we went two miles past the turnoff before asking a farmer for directions, turned around and went back to the military checkpoint where we had semi-nervously passed the unmarked farm road. the soldiers laughed but were impressed with our endeavor and happily directed us on our loco path. after making it about ten miles down the sandy road we dipped off and hid in the bushes of a little slot canyon. only a few cars passed in the night and we fell asleep under stars and silence. the next day proved to be one of the more beautiful, yet challenging riding days i’ve ever had - those thirty miles of dirt were even tougher than the ninety mile push from hollywood to laguna beach, california. such a beautiful way to travel, biking in solitude and dirt (reminded me of edward abbey’s proclamation to allow only feet, bikes, and hooves as a means of travel through national parks). we only encountered two trucks passing, and a few men on horseback, nothing more but swirling sand and gusts of wind in the high desert. the climbs were intense but the views were more than rewarding. made me feel i had finally found what the hell i was looking for down in this godforsaken land. we finally reached the top of the pass and descended into a high, dried up lake bed where we started to run low on water. close to the top of our last climb a truck came barreling down the road towards us and i stood with hand up, desperate to confirm our proximity to civilization. the truck stopped and in confusion and awe, the four skeptical old men told me ten to fifteen more kilometers. i waived them on and we immediately collapsed by the side of the road and stuffed our bellies with all the fats and sugars we had - even took big gulps of agave nectar, straight shots of glucose to the blood stream. reminded me of the way you would drink maple syrup back in tacoma. drinking the last of our water, high as kites, we crested the final hill and could see lázaro cárdenas off in the distance. the next eight or ten miles were beautiful, slowly rolling down the washboard dodging frequent patches of what seemed like quicksand. the dirt road would be solid and washboarded, or smooth and soft, but never smooth and solid at the same time. as we reached the ranchos outside of valle la trinidad, exhausted and parched, we evaded quite a few groups of angry guard dogs - which proved Bunyan Velo 70
rather difficult and frightening as we slid through the wash and repeatedly had to stop to throw rocks to ward them off. finally, we reached valle la trinidad as the sun set and by luck rolled right into a nice, cheap hotel in the center of the quiet little pueblito of sand. steaming hot showers, the best tacos of my life, a six pack of dos equis, and twelve churros were my ultimate resolve for such a tedious day of pedaling. the man and woman who ran the taquería asked if we were there just a year or two ago-- was that you, nick, and lael? I said no, but told them of our recent adventure, and the man said we were ambitious fools for having ridden and camped on that road, for only outlaws and bandits traveled through there, assaulting anyone else who tried to pass. in retrospect, maybe those men in the truck i stopped were crazy banditos who were too befuddled by my giant, dirty bike and bearded self to really think of assaulting me. or maybe they wouldn’t have deemed any cyclist as worthy prey. or maybe they were simply old cowboys headed to a dusty ranch and that taco man’s worries only reflected a universal fear that many have of remote places. i take the latter. rising early to thaw our milk for the morning’s coffee, we packed up and headed north of town where the sandy road meets the pristine pavement of highway 3. heading east, we stopped at the last outpost for water and tortillas and by chance crossed paths with an ex-military man from fort louis, washington passing through with his wife and father. they had been coming down here for fifteen years, sailed around the entire peninsula, and even done a three week cattle run in the area with a mexican cowboy friend of theirs. he assured us of the safety of the region and insisted that we camp only twenty five miles or so in the valle santa clara on the southeastern foot of the sierra san felipe. and that we did, after a relaxing, gradual drop down such a grade of road that would make any cyclist blush. hardly ever needing to pedal, banking through mellow canyon turns, and cruising along smooth highway in high gear, shooting off into great expanses of only more sand and cacti scattered in the bright light. this truly was the most beautiful ride so far. we climbed off our bikes around 2pm and pushed them a quarter mile off the road, through sand and mesquite, constantly evading the dreaded jumping cholla cactus - those little buggers gave us such annoyance they even haunted erin in her sleep that night. we set up camp out of sight of the highway, dug a big fire pit, and had infinite mesquite for fuel. when the sun fell the heat turned immediately to a dry, piercing cold, perfectly illuminated by the extreme clarity of the desert moon. waking with the coyotes and leaving erin cocooned in her bag, i went on a two-mile hike by myself through the changing darkness, black to blue, and gathered firewood for sunrise coffee
THE BICYCLE SHOP DECAL PROJECT Written and photographed by Chris Klibowitz
Photo: Ted Rogers
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T
he stories of some bicycles begin with the artisans who created them, but for most, their stories begin once a bicycle shop has built them, marked them with a small decal, and placed them on a sales floor to be given a life by way of a customer. That decal can be a little piece of artwork, it can say many things about the shop, but it always says, “This bike came from here.� This gesture is small, yet meaningful in the context of a bicycle’s long life, its potential for travel, and its importance to the well-being and livelihood of its owner. To see that decal, to study it, to find that shop (or find it has long since closed), can tell you a lot about where that bike has been, and maybe where that rider has been too. BV
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