Its Not About Fun! (Well, maybe just a little!)

"May your trails be crooked, lonesome, dangerous, leading to the most amazing view. May your mountains rise into and above the clouds, May your rivers flow without end, meandering through pastoral valleys tinkling with bells, past temples and castles and poets towers into a dark primeval forest where tigers belch and monkeys howl, through miasmal and mysterious swamps and down into a desert of red rock, blue mesas, domes and pinnacles and grottoes of endless stone, and down again into a deep vast ancient unknown chasm where bars of sunlight blaze on profiled cliffs, where deer walk across the white sand beaches, where storms come and go as lightning clangs upon the high crags, where something more beautiful and more full of wonder than your deepest dreams waits for you - beyond that next turning of the canyon walls."
-Edward Abbey

"Climb the mountains and get their good tidings. Nature's peace will flow into you as sunshine flows into trees. The winds will blow their own freshness into you... while cares will drop off like autumn leaves."
- John Muir

Sometimes I have a difficult time explaining why I put myself through some of the experiences I have found. It is the "whoaness" that results from the hard won summit, the "A" group ride I managed to hang on to, the freezing night in the tent, the steep and long mountain road, the flying downhill ride, and the 10 knot reach across the empty Lake. Its not found in a video game, it has to be earned.

Where most people glide down the hill, I rode up it. Where some drive their jeeps, I rode my mountain bike. It is the near collision with a white tail while riding the trails, the quick photo of a moose hiking Isle Royale, the stars in the middle of Lake Michigan, and the end of the 50 km VASA. Its a test, its all a test.

I enjoy the challenge, the solitude, the quiet, the view. Earning the speed, the endurance, the peak, the run!


You have to be out in it to experience it, there is no reading about how someone else did it, it has to be done first hand.

My best advice, go do it!