Beautiful Bokeh

Cycling the Badlands

After quite a bit of research, I took two bikes with us to the Badlands: A cyclocross bike and my mountain bike. I knew that the main hiking trails in the park are off limits to bikes but that (1) the dirt roads are all fair game, and (2) riding is allowed in a good half of the park (the "South Unit") but I'd read it was more...well, brutal, than the other half: hence the mountain bike. What I didn't realize though, until the Ranger at the park explained it to me, was that not only are there no road or trail entrances into the south unit, but it's also impossible (almost) to enter that area without crossing private land or an indian reservation. It's still possible to get in, you just have to gain permission from an owner (and they have a list of them). Some warnings though, if you try to go riding in there....it used to be used by the Air Force for practice bombing runs and there are spent shells but also some unexploded shells still lying around. Also, NOBODY goes in there, so make sure somebody knows your flight path in case you get lost, and bring lots of water. And watch out for cliffs. The Rohloff hub performed spectacularly on it's first real I-will-die-if-you-break test. The only time I had an issue (I thought I had lost half my speeds) it turned out that when I replaced the rear wheel, I hadn't fully hand-tightened the screw on the Rohloff thingy that you're supposed to fully hand-tighten when you put the replace the rear wheel. Once I did that I was golden again.

Oh and I replaced the rear wheel a lot. Bring lots of tubes. The thorns out there are mean as hell.

One awesome feature of the whole area though is the ancient cars and stuff that the desert has reclaimed. Pre-dustbowl, the area attracted lots of settlers who were excited about the cheap land but disappointed to discover the land was, well, "bad." As a result you can run across some pretty cool stuff. The whole trip we had pretty bad luck with weather during the golden hours, but even though I was riding in the middle of the day in bad lighting at least it wasn't storming, so I took my little D40 with me in a little backpack (along with extra water). Some of my nicer shots ended up from the lil' guy. I guess sometimes luck trumps technology.

The cyclocrossing on the dirt roads turned out to be a bit tedious by comparison, although the scenery was still quite spectacular—especially on the (paved) loop road.

Thankless Speedwork: Domestic Pros in MPLS

Being a pro bike racer in Europe is one of the hardest jobs in the world. The doping scandals over the past several years have made it even tougher still. But at least in Europe the compensation is still good, the race locations are still sexy, the crowds are still big, and the admiration is still there.

But being a domestic pro in the US, even at the top level is almost as hard physically but they get little money, little love, and have to race on a lot of really boring roads. I don't know how they do it.

Recently the domestic pro peloton came to Minnesota's biggest race, the Nature Valley Grand Prix, and Brenda and I watched these guys turn themselves inside-out on the downtown Minneapolis streets. I hope most of the crowd understood just how impressive the show was.

Everybody seemed fascinated with the bad boys of Rock Racing though, especially David Clinger's facial tattoo.

Rohloff Progress Report #1

This morning I took the Moots out for it’s first real thrashing and while I didn’t quite have the right tires for the mostly-icy trail, the hub (and the whole bike really) continues to amaze. It’s been so long that I’ve had a mountain bike it’s hard to give the credit to any one thing. Yes, the hub is revolutionary and I love it. But it’s also the first 29” mountain bike I’ve ridden and as a tall guy, I’m sure that’s part of why it feels so good. Then there’s the fact that Moots frames aren’t exactly garbage....and then there’s the disc brakes and the modern White Industries fork. Whatever it is, the package adds up into the best bike I’ve ever ridden of any type. I just hope it doesn’t make me neglect my road bikes when the temperature starts warming up.

Brenda came with me to hike, and she hiked the trail loop in reverse taking photographs of strange trees and whatnot, while I did laps in the correct direction. She was mostly using her new “click” camera but I lent her my D200 for the shots of me since it was way too dark for her little film box to use high shutter speeds. So every now and then I’d come across her and she’d take some pictures as I went by. I’m just glad I didn’t run into her on one of the high-speed, icy blind corners!

The icy parts were pretty scary but the only time I fell was once when I decided to play it safe and get off the bike. I fell hard on the very first step I took. I think I’m more coordinated riding than walking.

B-ice-cycle Racing

The idea of a bike race on a frozen lake is intriguing. I know that mountain bikes with studded tires have great traction in ice and i was envisioning something like a criterium...just on a frozen lake instead of downtown streets.

Brenda and I went out to watch the bike race which was held as part of the “art shanty projects” festival on Medicine Lake in Minnesota. Turns out that while it was definitely a bike race on ice, it was a lot crazier than we expected. There were indeed some bad-ass ice racing machines in the mix, but overall it was more for fun than for real. The whole shanty project thing is very strange. It’s a bunch of artists who’ve created art inside, outside, and sometimes out of little structures on top of the frozen lake. Neither of us could quite figure it out, but it was pretty fascinating. There was a post office shanty, from which one could evidently send and receive actual mail, there was one that was built to resemble the last half of an airplane (?), there was the obligatory robot shanty, one that could be driven around.... it went on and on.

Regardless, it was pretty great for gawking at all the crazies who seemed to be having the time of their lives, and it was also the first-time out for my new telephoto lens...good practice shooting moving targets for the safari to come.

Simplicity from Complexity

“I would not give a nickel for simplicity this side of complexity, but I’d give a year’s wages for simplicity the other side of complexity.”

- Oliver Wendell Holmes

I hate mountain bikes. But I’m in love with a mountain bike.

An advance in shifting technology, the Rohloff planetary gear hub has completely changed my attitude and I’m back in the all terrain business.

In the early eighties when I became a cyclist, I was a road cyclist first because at that time there were no mountain bikes. The first bikes I ever loved, 80s road-racing bicycles, were the picture of simplicity. And while there have been several huge technological advances in road bike technology (clip-less pedals, index shifting, STI/Ergo, carbon fiber frames, etc.) the overall feeling that these are very simple, elegant machines has never left. They are, of course, more complicated now than they were in the 80s. It’s no longer the case that an average person can completely disassemble every component with a few wrenches for example. The number of moving parts has skyrocketed. But the complexity has been added in ways that make the overall experience of the road bicycle less complicated. For example, before index shifters, shifting quickly and effectively was extremely difficult and almost an art to pull off consistently. Index shifters were more complex internally, but greatly simplified the task of finding the correct gear, and even helped decrease wear since the chain was now always in perfect alignment, minimizing friction.

The story with the evolution of mountain bike technology has been different in some important ways, however.

The early mountain bikes were pretty simple. They were pretty much just beefier road bikes, with straight handlebars, stronger brakes, and knobby tires. They were sleek, clean, svelte-looking beasts. I liked them. But between the advent of full (front and rear) suspension systems, and the race to add the most ‘speeds’ (cogs) to the bikes, they have evolved into something I find disgusting and contrary to everything I enjoy about bicycles, aesthetically and otherwise. Rear suspension in particular I find to be an abomination but alternatives...”hard tail” bikes have continued to be available.

Unfortunately there has been no solution to the other, critical problem with modern mountain bikes: The 9-speed derailleur-based drivetrain is simply ill-suited to off-road use in my opinion. To permit such a large number of cogs, several sacrifices were made. The chain had to become impossibly thin, making it vulnerable to quick wear (amplified even more by the hypgerlide cog design to allow shifting under load). And the cogs themselves wear rapidly due to the very nature of the fact that shifting involves forcing the derailleur to wrest the chain from one cog and force it up to another especially under force. It’s really a violent act.

The Rohloff hub is a fascinating alternative to the derailleur+cogs shifting system that in my opinion corrects almost every single problem and makes the mountain biking experience infinitely simpler, but it does it through introducing a far-more complex shifting system.

In short:

— Only one chainring and one cog. Like a single-speed. That means the chain is never at any angle other than optimal, wear is minimized.

— Permits a dishless and therefore much stronger rear wheel, which means fewer broken spokes.

— 14 evenly distributed speeds, covering exactly the same range as a standard derailleur mountain bike.

— The planetary gears are sealed inside an oil bath and require no maintenance. Ever.

— Heavier hub, but this is offset somewhat by the components which are no longer needed (derailleurs, multiple chainrings/cogs, etc).

— Far simpler shifter, immune to damage during a crash. It doesn’t even have springs since all the “indexing” is done inside the hub.

— Almost silent operation offroad given the total lack of “chain slap” and clattery derailleurs.

— Able to change gears while stationary (this sounds trivial but off-road it’s pretty great since sometimes you come to a complete stop on a climb and need a lower gear fast)

— Dirt, mud, ice & snow can’t affect the ability to shift with this hub.

The thing is an absolute pleasure to ride. I got mine from Grand Performance bike shop in St. Paul and it came inside with a Moots frame which was specifically designed to accommodate it.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating of course, so I reserve the right to change my mind about this thing, which at present seems like the greatest thing to ever happens to mountain bikes. I’ll be riding the shit out of my new rohloff equipped 29”er mootox over the next year, and if it fails, I’ll let you know. But so far it’s fucking awesome and if it does live up to it’s promise, it’s more proof that sometimes to find simplicity you have to look for a certain kind of thoughtful complexity.