We set out in 36°, bundled up for a winter ride, in Tucson. In February. Mike parked the truck in a school lot where we hoped the gates wouldn't shut for the 3 hours we'd be riding. We rolled into the rising sun, blinding. I put Bryn between me and the sun hoping he would find the right line. The air was as brisk as Wisconsin, but the wheels were rolling smoothly on the pavement and the surrounding desert spread infinitely around us. 2000 feet of climbing the day before had this Midwesterner feeling the previous 53 miles. The destination was McKenzie Ranch Trails Park , a 1700 acre park with multiple trails including 2 mountain bike loops adding up to 10 miles. We finally reached the turn off for the park and faced a mile or two of gravel washboard that pounded the hands and arms and made me think of Paris-Roubaix coming up in April. I hoped this would not be an indication of things to come, as we were surrounded by prickly pear, thorny brush on all sides, and rocks — rocks the...
I never identified with my career. I wasn’t tied to being an engineer, or a leader, inventor, mentor, or manager. Since I graduated from college some years ago now, I’ve been fortunate to have had just two “real” jobs. I often loved them, sometimes hated them, and most days just showed up and gave my best effort—but the job wasn’t me. It never was. I raced bikes. I traveled. I wrote poetry. I took thousands of photos that largely nobody has seen. I’ve had dogs pass through my life and have been fortunate to have a good wife who tolerated all of it. If we remove “work” from the last twenty-plus years, we’re left with those things. We have scribbled notebooks, hundreds upon hundreds of trip itineraries, and mountains of unprocessed photos capturing it all. I guess this is a roundabout way of saying that, at the core of it, I’m simply a traveler, a writer, and a photographer—but I’ve largely kept it under cover, with work providing the way to get paid for what I enjoyed doing. When circum...