Punch line: I scratched after about 13 hours of racing, in 8th position, 2.5 hours ahead of schedule despite a 45-minute trailside attempt at repairing my front brake, which I had been finicky with since about mile 20. Six other riders had stopped at a motel in town, but I was planning to swallow the next 40–80 miles of paved road through the night. I knew my Donkey and big gears had a more than unfair advantage then.
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I did NOT want to be the one to say I was cold.
It was pre-dawn in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert, and my toes were rapidly losing feeling. In packing the bags I strapped to my bike the previous morning, I had left my thick wool sleeping socks in the hamper.
The weather report for the nearby town of Cave Creek called for a low of 45, the internet said, and I had promised the dozen riders on the trip of my design through my backyard the warmth and goodness of a winter escape to the Arizona desert. A Rodeo Migration, to put it more accurately.
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It has been six months since I participated in Pinyons and Pines, a 350 mile bikepacking race through the arid mountains of Arizona. Time heals all wounds, but the fingertips of my right hands are still ever so slightly numb from the experience. Perhaps time heals only some wounds.
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On a 2,588-mile bikepacking adventure, the worst moments can become the best
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Editor’s note: Edyn sent in this writeup of his 2024 Smoke and Fire ride with friend Oliver Smith. Not many photos were supplied with this piece, so we’re including those, but Oliver and Edyn also described some lovely sleep deprived imagery in their own words, so their descriptions were fed into Midjourney to generate some fun and abstract renderings of what bike hallucinations can feel like sometimes. If you’ve never ridden We hope you enjoy!
The Smoke and Fire is a 400ish-mile bike race on the backroads of Idaho deep in the backcountry. I did this race in 2022 as my first ever bikepacking race, and I came back to take it on again in 2024, this time with a friend. Typically this route is a loop but in 2022 the route was an out-and-back on the north side due to fires. With more big fires in the area, it also looked like there would be a reroute this year. The course ended up being an out-and-back on the south side so I have never raced the full loop but I have raced both the north and south sides. I decided I was going to do the Smoke and Fire while I was racing the Tour Divide in June. I texted one of my friends and told him “we’re gonna set a fkn FKT on the Smoke and Fire”. I’m not sure why I decided I wanted to do more bikepack racing while I was on one of the biggest races in the world because typically after pushing your body like that you don’t want anything to do with it for a few weeks after until you forget all the bad parts and how hard it was. But my friend, Oliver, was down so once I got home from the Divide we started getting ready for the Smoke and Fire.
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Darkness surrounds me. There’s a smell of moisture in the air, and the only noise I hear is the sound of my bike moving slowly up a gravel road toward the edge of the world. I am riding toward the end of an island—Tierra del Fuego—a place touched by few and known by even fewer. And I am inspired. On the horizon, I see traces of the sun rising. The sun brings hope for a new day, a race finished, and a decision made.
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In December I had the most incredible solo ride across Utah’s White Rim Trail, located in Canyonlands National Park. December is not, as far as I know, a particularly popular time to embark on White Rim, probably because the desert’s fickle ability to be quite warm, or utterly freezing, within hours. Thankfully, my trip wasn’t planned, it was entirely impulsive: I looked at the immediate forecast, saw a window with lows in the high 20s F, and highs in the low 50s F, and knew deep down that as long as I was dry, those temperatures would be doable, if not a bit of an unknown to plan for. I’ve ridden White Rim five times, always in a day. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. On this outing I wanted and needed to go alone, to get some think time and rekindle the flame that keeps me excited for the wild, unscripted bicycle lifestyle. The trip was a spectacular success. On the first day I started late and rode to camp in the sunset and utter darkness. Magic. On the second day I woke up to a cold morning that warmed quickly, and had the entire place to myself as I completed the loop. Having done the trip, I had an idea: Why not try to invite others to come and do this same trip with me? So that’s what the White Rim Micro-Invitational is: An incredibly limited space invite for people I know and don’t know to come and do that same trip with me again in late February, 2025.
Continue readingWe are back with another round table conversation, this time focusing on the 2024 Tour Divide and, in particular, the two Rodeo Lab-affiliated riders who took on the challenge this June. Both Cade and Edyn had a massively successful outing with Cade arriving in Antelope Wells as the fourth finisher and Edyn finishing a few days later as the youngest-ever finisher of the Tour at just 15 years old.
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If you missed our January Southern Migration rally last year, you might have felt some FOMO. Good news: We’re rallying again this January, this time slightly more north in Georgia!
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In June 2024, Edyn Teitge became, at 15, the youngest solo rider of the Tour Divide. This is his story via his own words, day by day through the ride. Images throughout by Edyn and Eddie Clark Media.
The Tour Divide is one of the world’s longest and most well-known off-road bikepacking races. Stretching nearly 2,700 miles from Banff, Alberta, Canada to the US-Mexico border at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, it closely follows the Great Divide Mountain Bike route along the spine of the continent. The route gains around 150,000 feet of elevation with conditions ranging from unkept narrow single-track sections of the CDT, to smooth gravel and dirt roads, to death mud, and to long stretches of pavement. And somehow I got it in my mind that it would be a “fun” thing to do.
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