Category: Bikes and biking
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The best trail
Last month I bought a new bike, my first brand new one in almost a decade. That one, nine years ago, was the first generation Salsa Mukluk, the first broadly available fat bike not called Pugsley. It has, because it still works great, a lot of things my new bike does not: straight steerer, one…
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Small bikes
Yesterday proved to be a momentous one; Little Bear pedaled his 20″ wheeled Commencal Ramones unassisted, for the first time. Over 20 minutes he went from tentatively agreeing to try it, in the extended flat grass near the bike park, to pedaling circles with me assisting, to gleefully upshifting for sprints along the paved path,…
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Ending tourism
“To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience.” -David Foster Wallace, “Consider the Lobster” If…
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Evolution of the Tamarisk: Shoulder Straps
First: what the hell is happening with those packs, maan? A lot. Unfortunately, almost none of that is helping to get you a pack faster. While the pandemic hasn’t impacted our family as directly or egregiously as it could, or still might, it has made the world more complicated. I’ve been and remain on a…
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The new rules for nature
There has been much discussion in the past few months about how the significant, perhaps even colossal, surge in those camping and going outside will in effect unite the insta-hipster trend of the past 5 years with the COVID-induced cabin fever and lack of options. Those who went camping twice last year, and wouldn’t have…
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Drones in Wilderness
You can’t fly drones in federal Wilderness. Not much debate on that, either from the legal side, or I would contend the philosophical one. If the essential spirit of the Wilderness Act is the tightrope of permitting/encouraging human access on the landscape while using restrictions on technology to reduce impact, aircraft restrictions are fitting. Though…
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Distance learning
There has been a lot of discussion lately concerning the new, or newly rediscovered, hikers and bikers and outdoorspeople the pandemic has brought out of rooms amongst the trees. It is logical, and I see it as an extension of the last decades trend of increased outdoor participation in profile, if not as a percentage…
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Evolution of the Tamarisk: features
Or; as few things as possible. Backpack features don’t make up the majority of a packs weight, but they do make up the overwhelming majority of the weight which is easily negotiable. There is only so much weight to be shed with material (before you sacrifice durability), only so much with suspension or frame elements…
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Panic
This began two days ago as a hopefully un-trite post about how parks, mainly national, should not be closed during the current Coronavirus crisis. I wanted to point out how both explicible and sad it was that Yellowstone closed Tuesday. How parks, however grand, are generally in someones backyard. Moab had an entirely reasonable request…
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Things I’ve broken lately
Last month Little Bear and I went backpacking. In and of itself this was not unusual, though it was the first time just the two of us had walked in to camp under a tarp. It was noteworthy because it was February, and we were in shoes, walking over a inch of crusted snow and…
Bedrock & Paradox 
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