One family goes big

High in a remote corner of the Swan Valley we roll around a bend in the trail — 11-year-old Silas, 7-year-old Jonah, and me on one colossal mountain bike we call the Teasdale Train — when suddenly it’s there, not more than 30 feet away: a grizzly bear on its hind legs. I grab the brake levers of our rolling 200-pound behemoth and, in a motion practiced countless times, whip bear spray out of my pack’s side pocket the instant my feet hit the ground. As the boys would later revel in telling friends and family members, “Then dad said the ‘S’ word!”

The bear, it turns out, is tiny — which is even scarier than being huge. As the kids stare wide-eyed at the bruin, I twist my neck from side to side and scan the greenery for sound or movement. There is only one electric thought in my mind: Where’s mom?

Alive!

Well, that was something.

We made it back from the big trip. A monumental undertaking, I dragged my two boys for six weeks through some of most glorious wilderness still left in this world. We had a few challenges, but everyone is alive and has all of their important limbs still attached.

Tour Divide race and an S24O

Recently shot the start of the 2010 Tour Divide race in Banff, Alberta.  This is one of the coolest, hardest bike races in the history of bike races — over 2,700 miles of dirt from Banff to the Mexican border, entirely self-supported. Frankly, it makes the Tour de France look like a leisurely trundle through the vineyards.

Adventures with Dad

The map had lied — there were, in fact, no refreshing creeks on our climb — and now we stood at our drunkenly scenic high-mountain campsite without a drop of water. My Dad and I are pretty big fans of water, especially after turning into giant raisins after sweating out 20 gallons of the stuff while pedaling our bikes up mountainsides in 95° heat. In our subsequent dehydrated quest for liquid gold we had a face-off with a porcupine, got pinned by a biblical thunderstorm, and then, miraculously, found a crystalline mountain spring deep in mountainside forest.

Upon triumphantly returning to camp, a thick, fast-moving cloud swept up from the valley below and engulfed our campsite. "This definitely doesn't have any rain in it," I announced, confident, as always, in my astute meteorological forecasting abilities. In fact, for years my backcountry partners have been able to predict the weather with uncanny accuracy based solely on my forecasts — they simply take whatever I say and expect the exact opposite.

Minutes later, the clouds opened and the rain began.

Wend magazine and Bicycle Times

Wend magazine (www.wendmag.com) ran a few of my images in a photo essay on bikepacking in their current issue. Wend is a great, independent magazine for environmentally aware adventure lovers. You can get a copy at REI, newsstands, or check out a digital version on their website. Here's what they ran, plus my intro text for the piece...

If you’ve ridden a bicycle you’ve felt it — the magnetic pull of the open road or trail. Whether you are 3 or 93, there’s something inherent in riding a bike that makes you want to explore, to see what’s around the block, in the next town, over the far mountains. It’s no surprise that shortly after the bicycle’s invention, cyclist Thomas Stevens became the first person to chase the horizon around the entire planet, circumnavigating the globe in 1886.

But while road cyclists with panniers and trailers have been indulging their wanderlust and rambling freely over the Earth for over a century, mountain bikers have been more or less limited to day rides, forced to return to civilization each night. Sure, there are dirt roads, but the wild trails leading into the backcountry, the mountains, the alpine, were out of reach for multi-day riding.

Until now. 

Thanks to gear breakthroughs in the ultralight backpacking world, it’s now possible to carry a complete camping setup into the backcountry that weighs ten pounds or less. For the last few years a fringe group of mountain bikers in the Rocky Mountain West have been experimenting with this gear, riding for days at a time into some of our wildest mountainscapes with everything they need on their bikes and backs. 

It’s called bikepacking, and this is what it looks like.

More: 

www.bikepacking.net

www.adventurecycling.org/ultralight

www.carouseldesignworks.com

Three Cheers For The Brits

The British magazine Singletrack just came out with a story of mine from an ultralight bikepacking trip last summer. I love the layout and the images they chose. Funny captions, headers, and pull quotes, too. Plus, the editor is my man Chipps Chippendale, who has a flat-out classic name. Great working with you guys on the other side of the kiddie pool...

The Flathead: a celebration

British Columbia's Flathead Valley is a special place. In fact, it might be my favorite special place on Earth. The last undeveloped and uninhabited valley in southern Canada, it's one of the wildest of our remaining wildernesses. An international border bisects the valley, and its southern half lies in Montana where my family has a small cabin. The North Fork of the Flathead River flows through the valley bottom and forms the western boundary of Glacier National Park. (It's also a river I had the pleasure of fording a few days ago on a ski trip into the park, but that's a story for future entry.)

For now, it's enough to know that the Canadian Flathead is a stomping ground for grizzly bears, wolves, wolverines, mountain lions, and every kind of toothy creature that lived there when Columbus landed. But for years this sprawling nursery for everything wild has been under threat. Turns out it's rich in more than animal life and soaring mountains. First there were proposed coal mines, then coalbed methane, then gold mines. Things didn't look good.

I started heading up to the Flathead for adventures — and for stories that could help inspire people to demand its protection. Then, just yesterday, out of the blue, the B.C. government announced that they've decided not to allow mining or energy development in the valley.

To say that I'm jumping out of my underwear with excitement is an understatement. I'm rocketing out of my underwear until it's just a speck far, far below me and I realize, wow, it's really cold up here with no underwear, but I'm so excited it doesn't matter, so I just keep rocketing and rocketing.

In other words, I'm excited.

My story in current issue of Mountain Bike magazine

Anyone that has enjoyed my recent posts of bikepacking images might want to head to their local newsstand (assuming they still have a local newsstand) and pick up the current issue of Mountain Bike magazine. It's been out for a while, so may not be on the stands much longer. The story is called "Riding Loaded" and it's about using the latest in ultralight camping equipment to take a five-day, backcountry mountain bike ride in the Canadian Rockies. A shout-out to Jeff Boatman over at Carousel Design Works who was a great riding partner on the trip and who designs the excellent bags we used to carry our gear.

Below are a couple pre-production spreads of the story. To see the entire piece, visit my issuu page here.

still more campfires of 2009

This is John Stamstad and Todd Tanner attempting to dry out their feet around the fire. We'd crossed approximately 5,000 bone-freezing creeks that day and were seriously wet. Which is yet another example of how campfires are both hypnotic and practical.

If you're curious about our trip, you can read the article from Mountain Bike magazine here.

Yet more campfires of 2009

Heavenly descent

Continuing yesterday's singletrack tangent from the ongoing campfire series, here are a few images taken the morning after the campfire from the previous post. It was the last day of a spectacular five-day bikepacking trip in the Canadian Rockies and all that remained was the three-mile descent from our campsite high in the mountains to the truck at the trailhead below. Fortunately, it was three miles of singletrack so good, so beautiful, so seductively sinuous, that it left us buzzing for days. A perfect way to end a glorious trip...

More campfires of 2009

This was one of my favorite campfire spots of the year. Super secret location in the Canadian Rockies. Though I guess it's not actually all that secret since my article on the trip ran in Mountain Bike magazine. (the curious can view it here.) We slept 50 yards below here in the shelter of some trees, but it was the campfire perch overlooking emerald alpine lakes that I'll always remember.

New story hits mailboxes

My latest story should be arriving in mailboxes any day now. Encompassing a summer's worth of overnight bike rides, or S24Os, it features epic riding, family shenanigans, and a big picture of me and my two boys mountain biking on our super-long, three-seater bike. We call it the Teasdale Train.

The cover is a self-portrait from a solo-overnight on Sheep Mountain, my favorite near-Missoula backcountry ride, with ultralight camping gear this September. Took about ten tries to get the shot right. I'll do another post about that soon, with a few alternate covers we considered from the same shoot.

The cover and opening spread are below. If you'd like to see the entire article, go here.