ABT058. Bikes From Hell

Who needs a spoon when you have a wrench? Who needs a whole paddle when you have two blades and a firm, sturdy stick? Welcome to Roman Dial’s world. In this action-packed episode, the legendary Alaskan adventurer recounts some of the harrowing tales that led to the birth of "hellbiking" in the 1980s and eventual worldwide recognition for this type of travel in a 1997 issue of National Geographic. We dive into his pioneering multi-sport journeys in the unforgiving Alaskan wilderness, his transition into a Stanford PhD studying predator-prey interactions in rainforest canopies, and his obsession with ultra-lightweight gear. Whether he’s big-tree climbing or inventing the fat bike’s prehistoric ancestors, Roman is a versatile explorer who has been at the forefront of several outdoor movements. Tune in and prepare to feel both thoroughly inspired and incredibly lazy.

You can view photos from Roman's expeditions on his Instagram. 

You can watch Arctic Alchemy on YouTube.

For links to podcast platforms, feedback via email, the podcast website, and Instagram:
https://linktr.ee/accidental_bicycle_tourist

Transcript

0:02

A bunch of Euros were like riding around Europe on dirt roads, thinking they were having the adventure of their lifetime. But this was real adventure, you know what I mean? You just heard Roman Dial, and when he talks about real adventure, he's referring to crossing Alaska's untamed wilderness by a variety of human-powered means, including skiing, rafting, mountaineering, hiking, and of course bicycling. In the 1980s and '90s, Roman and friends set off across remote parts of Alaska on titanium Merlin hardtails with absolutely minimal gear. This kind of groundbreaking wilderness travel required its participants to push, lift, or carry a bike through brush and tundra when necessary. To gain traction riding over glaciers, they used studded tires. To cross raging rivers, they inflated a packraft and paddled. There was no word to adequately describe the kind of trip they were doing. So what did Roman and friends call this important precursor to the bikepacking of today? Hellbiking. You're listening to The Accidental Bicycle Tourist. In this podcast, you'll meet people from all walks of life and learn about their most memorable bike touring experiences. This is your host, Gabriel Aldaz. Hello, hellbiking enthusiasts! Welcome to another episode of The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Today I have the privilege of introducing a guest who is on the show thanks to a recommendation from listener Leif from Wyoming. Leif was a high school student when he opened his dad's May 1997 issue of National Geographic and read in astonishment an article called "A Wild Ride," which chronicled a 775-mile or 1,250- kilometer multimodal expedition across the Alaska Range accomplished by three men in the span of seven weeks. Leif wrote me, "I have a copy of that issue and when I look back at it to this day, it brings me right back to that era, that white-hot feeling of adventure and excite- ment burning in my stomach." The author... Wow. The author of that National Geographic article was one of the three participants, Roman Dial. From watching the documentary film Arctic Alchemy, which I will be referencing during this episode, I learned that Roman is a pioneering Alaskan adventurer, an accomplished mountaineer, a packrafting legend, an early adopter of hellbiking, a big-tree climber, a professor of biology and mathematics, and a husband and father. Roman Dial, thank you for being a guest on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist podcast. Wow, that was a very flattering introduction. Thank you, Gabriel. You're welcome. It is well deserved, I think. The National Geographic expedition was, in a way, the culmination of years of outdoors adventures in Alaska. How did you end up living in the last frontier in the first place? The short version is I moved up to Alaska to go to college. The longer version is I first went to Alaska as a nine-year- old boy and spent the summer up here, having been born in Seattle and living at the time in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. And I had some uncles at a coal mine in the Alaska Range at the end of about a hundred-mile gravel road that's now a paved highway that links Alaska's two largest cities, but back then they hadn't completed the link- up, and I'd never seen anything like that. I had complete freedom because my uncles were working in the coal mines - it's like open-pit strip-mining coal - and so I had all the days to myself to do whatever I wanted, and they gave me a little motorcycle to ride that was small but too big for me. But I would jump up and kick-start it and run around, and I just had a great time, so I kept going back to Alaska. I made three trips before I'd graduated from high school, and when I graduated from high school there was only one place to go for me, and that was Alaska. Your life seems heavily geared towards extreme adventure. Was there an accidental aspect to how you got started using bicycles for touring? My father, he gave me a ten-speed when I was quite young, and he'd had one. He'd lived in Paris, and he'd brought it back with him, you know, like a ten-speed with the drop handlebars. I don't think his tires were sew-up. I think I did my first bicycle tour across the mountains that the Appalachian Trail follows. There's the Appalachian Trail, and then there's a road called the Blue Ridge Parkway and Skyline Drive. I rode that when I was 13, by myself. Wow, that's mountainous. Yeah, it is. It's quite mountainous. And then I did a couple others. I think I did three, you know, long ones. I camped out, took my tent with me, and, you know, camped in people's farms. In 1976, I also bicycle toured from Washington D.C. along the coast through Delaware and Maryland and Virginia, all the way down to North Carolina, and then through the Outer Banks, you know, camping along the way. And that was when I was 15. And then with my girlfriend at the time, who's now my wife, she had never owned a bicycle. And I met her when she was 18 and I was 19, and she was the youngest of 10 kids. So she's kind of an accidental bicycle tourist. She bought her first bike when we were on a road trip, when we were in our early 20s. And then we took the bikes to Tucson, Arizona. They were road bikes, and we rode down Baja. And that was 1982, '83. It was like a, I don't know, like six-week bicycle tour. We camped the whole way, although every once a week we would stay in a hotel. I think the bicycle is just such an elegant, I hesitate to call it a machine, but just such an elegant invention of humans. It's one of the best things that humans have invented. You know, I've got a bunch of bikes. But mostly now, I like to do these beach rides. You know, like I ride on singletrack around here, but I don't really do much road riding. I feel like it's dangerous and roads seem like they're all constructed for cars. I don't really even like riding on gravel roads, because when a car goes by, there's a bunch of dust. I like riding on beaches and trails. But there was a time in my younger days when I liked to ride through the wilderness. I liked bicycling, so I started young and I progressed through the road bike. And then I got my first mountain bike in the 1980s, '85, I got my first mountain bike. And before that, I had a good friend, kind of a climbing mentor, and he would work in Greenland in the summers. And I was living in Alaska. He had a mountain bike and he let me ride his mountain bike while he was away. So I really kind of fell for the mountain bike. And then you started college. Yeah. And I got a degree. But mostly I was there, like climbing mountains. You know, at the time when I went to Alaska, you know, I'd moved out of my sort of bicycle touring phase and I had gotten into rock climbing. And I wanted to climb mountains. And so I went to school there and climbed mountains for about, I don't know, pretty much from'77 when I got there until 1985 when I quit. During that time, I got into other things, you know, like a lot of different things. Because at the time, there was a lot of neat things happening elsewhere that kind of inspired new stuff in Alaska. Because Alaska is quite different from everywhere else in the United States. You know, have you been to Alaska, Gabriel? I haven't. Well, it's very different. We don't really have freeways. You know, we don't have a lot of malls. When you fly across the United States and you look out the window, you can see little patches of nature, those little patches of nature, like surrounded by human farming or cities or golf courses. But when you come to Alaska and you fly over Alaska, you see little islands of humanity in a vast wilderness. That just alone makes it radically different. All these sort of ideas of outdoor experiences in the Lower 48, that's what we call the rest of the United States, because there's Hawaii and Alaska and 48 other states, there's very few hiking trails, for example. And so if you want to go hiking, you're not going to be able to go very far before you're confronted with a stream that's difficult to cross or even a river that you would never be able to swim. And so that forced us to kind of come up with new ways of doing things. It's interesting that you say that because I think in Europe, it's even more extreme. I think Europeans go to the Western states and go, "Oh, wow, look at all of this emptiness," and, yeah, wild rivers and whatever. From your point of view, it's obviously a big step further in that direction in Alaska. That's a good point. Yeah, because I feel it's extremely tame. Like just to give you an example, like a concrete example, in the Lower 48, the farthest you can get away from a road, okay? And I mean like a paved road is about 20 miles. Really? Yeah, it's in the southeast corner of Yellowstone National Park, just outside the border of Yellowstone National Park. It's called The Thoroughfare. And of course, I've been there. And you can walk out in a long day, you know, it's no problem. It's like a day's walk to the road. Whereas in Alaska, the farthest you can get from a road is 119 miles, 120 miles. And that's from a gravel road, you know, like not even a paved road, but a gravel road. And I included in that 119 miles any road or village, because there's villages that are not as far away as the road. The road's really far, but there's villages. And that's what defines this sort of center point is there's a village to the north and one to the south that are each about 120 miles from this remote place. So 120 miles is, you know, what is that, 200 kilometers? Yeah. That's a huge difference in terms of area. So anyway, every time I go to the Lower 48, and I hike on a trail, you know, I'm kind of like, I mean, it's nice, but it's different. Because Alaska is so different, you know, we had to come up with all these other ways if we wanted to explore and recreate there. It seems like you first started doing mountaineering. And so I have to now reference Arctic alchemy. It talks about this crazy incident that happened when you and a friend were on this mountain. Can you describe that? Sure. What happened is we'd climbed this really difficult face. It was as a couloir that went up a really challenging face and it had like little waterfalls on it. And this was back in 1985. And I was sort of climbing at my best right then. This friend of mine, Chuck Comstock, and I, we climbed this couloir, we called it Cut-throat Couloir, and then went to the summit of the mountain called McGinnis. And we felt so good about having done what we did, that we decided that we would traverse the mountain and go down this ridge that had only been climbed once. The southeast ridge of McGinnis had only been climbed once because the weather that comes from the south would build up this big rimy overhang. And rime is like the stuff that builds up in a leaky refrigerator. When it also snows, the snow blows over and makes like a frozen wave that curls over the other side. It's a long knife-edged ridge. So if you're right on top, you know, it's doubly corniced. And you know, you could traverse underneath of it, but it's a lot more exciting and more adventurous and spectacular to be right up on the top of the ridge. And you can't really see below you that there's a wave. And you can't really see on the other side that there's like this bulge. And then sometimes those two features will disappear. And you'll be on this knife-edged ridge that you have to kind of ride along like a horse, like a cowboy on a saddle. So we went down this kind of crazy ridge that hadn't ever been downclimbed, because the people who climbed it were like so freaked out they didn't want to get back on it. But we were full of hubris, that overconfidence that, you know, the gods love to punish the Greek heroes for. We started down and we made it a good way. We made it to the col, to the next peak, and it was getting late. You know, I was sort of getting stressed out because it was going to be really cold, like 30 below. And there was no place to camp. Like we'd missed all the opportunities to camp. I sort of took it out on Chuck that it was his fault that we hadn't stopped. And we had this little tiff. He was feisty and I was out of line. And he said, "Well, you know, Roman Dial," and he had this big wad of like... Chewing tobacco? Yeah, tobacco in his lower lip. It's a Copenhagen brand. It's like a snuff. He was, "Well, Roman Dial," and he spit some out. And he had like this blonde hair and he had blonde eyelashes and it was really cold. And his eyelashes were all frosted up and his eyebrows were all frosted up. And the sun was setting. It was in March. It was just a few days from winter into spring. You know what I mean? So it was really chilly. He goes, "Well, Roman Dial," he was from Iowa. And he spits out this cope and he goes, "You've got a stove and a cook pot and I've got a stove and a cook pot," which we'd use to melt water, you know, to stay alive. He goes, "You've got a shovel and I've got a shovel," and you'd need shovels to kind of like dig a snow cave. And then we had two ropes that we were tied together with. You could take two skinny ropes instead of one big rope. It's just safer to have two ropes, less rope drag and that kind of thing. He goes, "Here, take your rope and give me mine and we'll go our separate ways." And he untied... Whoa. One of the ropes on this ridge, this super- narrow ridge with a little flat spot where we were, in a low place between two peaks. It's like a thousand meters down on either side. I was like, you know, I didn't want to be untied from my partner there. So I was like, "Whoa, Chuck, I'm sorry, you know, I was wrong. You're right. Yeah, it was my mistake, my fault that we didn't stop back there. Please, please, Chuck, tie back into the rope." And he tied back into the rope. And I said, "Maybe we can find a place to dig a snow cave on this flat spot, on this col." So I started paying the rope out to him standing there on the snow, kind of with a rope wrapped around my waist. He got out of ways and there was a big pile of rope at my feet. And he dropped and the rope just started sliding. I couldn't stop it. You know, I had mittens on and I didn't have a very good belay. You know, I tried to stop him and I couldn't and I, you know, because of the way the ridge was, the only way I could really do anything about it was to go off one side of the ridge while he fell down the other. And so I went off one side of the ridge and cart- wheeled along through the snow, afraid that I was going to like get hurt really bad. Because a year before, Carl Tobin, another climbing partner of mine, had been washed down a north face of a big mountain in the Alaska range near to where me and Chuck were. And he'd broken both of his legs, getting washed down this mountain 50 miles from the road. And he had to wait for a few days to get help. That's awful. Like, if I busted myself up, I just didn't want to be dangling from this rope. I don't know how I would get down. You know what I mean? Yeah. And so I was like praying. I had to pray a few times, it seems. I just said, look, if you have to kill me, go ahead and kill me. Just don't break any bones, you know, because I didn't want to be stuck, hurt trying to get out of there with body parts that didn't function. But I bounced and came to rest. And I was on the sunny side of the mountain. And Chuck had fallen straight down this couloir where the cornice broke, you know, that wave of snow had broken. He'd fallen straight down. And I was able to Jumar up, you know, with some mechanical ascenders get up and see where the whole ridge had broken and fallen down. And there was Chuck in the sort of gully snow was whipping around. It was all black and nasty looking with rocks sticking out through the ice. And I told him, "Hey, hold on, you know, and I'll set up a rappel and we'll just go down from here." And he had hurt his hand a bit. You know, it was still functional, but he'd hurt his hand. And we rappelled down and then had to spend the night in a snow cave on top of each other because it was so shallow. And then the next day we got down. And that's when I thought, you know, I've had enough of this climbing, I'm going to quit, you know, it doesn't matter how good you are, the mountains don't care how good you are. It's just too easy to die. And I had a girlfriend, we'd pedaled down Baja together. And we'd been going out for about five years. I'd always wanted to mirror, but now it was the time, you know. I quit climbing and got married. Wow. Chuck, how did he react after the incident? Was he sorry that he had been so upset? No. No, he was real quiet. Here's what he said. "I was bending down and poking at what looked like a little hole in the snow. I thought maybe, you know, what is this?" And what it was was like a little funnel where the snow fell through the cornice and it broke and he collapsed. And he said he was falling down and then the whole world was coming down on top of him and it felt like a freight train was hitting him and it was so hard. You know, he's getting pulled on the rope by all this stuff falling on him that he thought it was going to break the rope, but it didn't. So you're both simultaneously having these thoughts running through your head? Yeah. Each one on each side. Yeah, it was crazy. And he kept climbing and doing some wild stunts. I'd had several alpine climbs that I'd been on where I'd be like,"Wow, why am I here? Why am I doing this?" This one finally pushed me over the edge and I'd have enough. Okay, you got married, but you obviously didn't stop your adventuring because we're still building up to the National Geographic Expedition. So what did you get into next? That was 1985. And so just a few years before that, in 1982, I'd gone to what we called a Wilderness Race. We didn't call it a Wilderness Race then. We came up with that word later. But if we went even farther back, like to 1980, I'd climbed this face with this mentor of mine. We'd flown in with an airplane, a small airplane equipped with skis that has a single engine and can only carry a few passengers, but they can land in all kinds of incredible places. Carl Tobin and I had flown in and climbed this mountain that was called 10910, which is how tall the mountain is, what its elevation is in feet, 10,910 feet. And we climbed this face and I was like a teenager. I was 19. And Carl was like the best climber in Fairbanks. It was kind of a dream come true for me to sort of be asked to go climb this beautiful face with the best climber, if not in Alaska, definitely in Alaska north of the Alaska Range. So after the climb, instead of flying out, we skied out. And it was like, I don't know, 30 miles, I guess, or 50. I don't remember how far it was. And we skied out. And it was a really neat experience. It was on glaciers and over a pass and past crevasses. And the glaciers are really long in Alaska. So like almost the entire 30-mile ski was on glaciers, only the last few miles were off glacier, where we hiked to the road over the moraine. So that was 1980. And then the next year, Carl and I and a third guy, we went to climb the same face that Carl would eventually tumble down and break both of his legs. That peak also just has a number, 9448, which is 9,448 feet high. And we got on the face and it stormed and we were stuck in a crevasse, the last crevasse on the mountain before the mountain gets tall. And we were camped in there for several days and we ran out of food and it was still storming and avalanching and we repelled down. And it didn't look like we were going to get to climb anymore. And I decided that I didn't want to just sit and wait for the airplane to come pick us up. I wanted some adventure. And I wanted to ski out and walk. I tried to get those guys to go, but they didn't want to go. They wanted to wait for the plane. So I headed out by myself. And it was like 55 miles to the road. So I guess it was about 50 miles. Yeah, it must have been 50 miles from 10910 to the road. And it was 55 miles from 9448 to the road. But most of it was on tundra, because I was alone and there were no glaciers that ran east-west on that side of the Alaska Range. There's just these big tundra benches and it was walking and skiing. And I didn't have a map. I didn't have a tent. You know, I didn't have a partner. I had was a compass and a bivvy sack and a stove and a cookpot. And I got to the road in 55 hours and I thought, wow, I wonder which way is fastest, you know, like to ski on the north side of the Alaska Range or to ski through the glaciers in the middle. And I thought the only way to find out would be to have a race. And so that was in 1981. And soon after, like, that fall, like about six months later, I guess, I saw a flyer where this back-country wilderness guide from southern Alaska had this idea of having a foot race across the Kenai Peninsula. And so the Kenai Peninsula, if you see a map of Alaska, you know, Alaska's got this big southern coast that curves and at the apex of the southern coast that curves, there's like a little peninsula that dangles, kind of like the bell on a moose. You know, it hangs down. And that's the Kenai Peninsula. The guy's name was George Ripley. And Ripley's race was going to be a foot race that started on the north side of the Kenai Peninsula and went to the south side. So it went from Hope all the way to Homer. That was what he called it, Hope to Homer in the Alaska Mountain Wilderness Classic. And the first 40 miles would be on trail. And then the next, you know, 110 miles would all be off trail and in wilderness. And the rules were simple. Everything you needed, all your food and all your gear you had to carry with you. And any gear you brought, you had to finish with and you couldn't accept any help from people outside the race. You could forage, but you couldn't have any caches. You couldn't have a motorized vehicle. You couldn't have an animal help you. You couldn't travel on a road. And there were three rivers that you had to swim. And so these rivers were, it was extreme to swim because we didn't have PFDs. We didn't have dry suits. We had a backpack and rain gear. And these were big rivers that came right off of the glaciers. You couldn't do anything but swim them. You couldn't wade them because they were over your head. And they came right out of the glaciers fully big. You'd have to hike way up on the glacier and go around. And some of these glaciers came down between towering walls that you couldn't get past. So you had to swim them. And so on that race, there was an old man who showed up. He was like 55 and he had white hair. And I thought, what is he doing here? He shouldn't even be here. He's old. Old man. Yeah, If I could be 55 again, I would love it. I kind of had written him off. And me and this guy named Manzer, we were out in front and we came to the first river we had to swim. We were like, whoa, we didn't want to swim. We had to psych up and we thought we'd wait till morning when the glacier wasn't melting so much and the river would be narrower and we could swim it more easily. And so we made camp and had a fire. And then the old man showed up, Dick Griffith, and he kind of was chuckling. He was like, "What are you guys doing here? I thought you'd be halfway to Homer by now." We said, "Well, yeah, we're waiting to cross in the morning when the river is lower. We're going to swim when the river isn't so deep." He goes, "Swim these rivers? You can't swim these rivers. You need one of these." He pulled out this kind of inflatable raft, vinyl inflatable raft out, of his pack. Just to really rub it in, he put on like this Viking hat, this goofy Viking hat with horns. Oh, with the horns even. Yeah. He said, "You young guys, you eat too much and you don't know nothing." And we're like, "Wow." He goes, "Old age and treachery beats youth and skill every time." And then he blew up his raft and he paddled across the river. I have to ask, did the old man win that first year of the Hope to Homer? No, he didn't win. There weren't very many people who started. There were like 10 people who started and only four of us finished. And he came in fourth. The third place person, Dick had caught up with him. And then the third place person was like,"Oh, no, here's the old man," and he had to run. So Ripley was third. Oh, the organizer. Yeah. And he caught me in Manzer. He caught us and he grabbed me by the shoulders and he said, "You better get a move on. Dick Griffith is 20 minutes behind you." And we hadn't run a step up to that point and Manzer says, "Well, I guess we got to run now." And so George ran past us and he was in his underwear and he was barefoot because he had chafing and his boots were giving him blisters. And so I ran after George and then George stopped to put on his boots. So Dick came in fourth, but he changed the race forever. He changed how Alaskan adventures were done. The idea of an inflatable boat that you carry in your pack, he'd used that idea like 30 years before on the first descent of Copper Canyon's Rio Urique with his wife, like in the '50s, like '52. That was quite an image of the competitors racing to the finish there, of that first race. Wow, what a crazy scene. So that was 1982. My eyes just got really wide and I was like 21. And I was like, wow, I want a raft also. So the following year I came back to the race and I had a raft. I had what was called a packraft. It was made out of nylon, not vinyl. Ironically, the second year Dick's raft popped. He had to drop out of the race. I had this pack raft, it was called a Sherpa packraft. And I had a partner who was a really incredible athlete, triathlete and skier and runner. And he and I skied across this big ice field, the Harding Ice Field, which is like the biggest ice field on the Kenai Peninsula. And we skied across it, I guess about in a day, we didn't camp on it, like skied 30 miles or whatever across it. And then we both got into the packraft and rafted out the river and then hiked the beach to the end. So it was kind of a cool experience for me. It really opened my eyes to like, travel. And like, this was 1983. And I got as much punch, you know, out of crossing 150 miles in five days by like bushwhacking, scrambling over rocks, and then skiing over glaciers, and then packrafting out and hiking beaches. It was like a really neat experience to cross this big landscape that way. You know, and I'd gotten a taste of that the year before, but we didn't have a packraft. We were swimming rivers, and we didn't go across an ice field. So this was like a way, you saw everything. White spruce forests and rain forests and hiked through tundra and scrambled over rocks and skied across an ice field and rafted down a river and walked on the beach. It was like a huge landscape trip. And that kind of was what I started getting into. And I did those as races for a year or two, like '82 and'83. And then in '84, I started using that kind of idea to exit from climbs, you know, because we could do the sort of multi-sport thing to get out. It wasn't called multi- sport then. I didn't have a name for it. And then in 1985, I'd won some kind of an award. And so I still had to go climb this other mountain. It wasn't a mountain, it was the rocks, walls. And I went to those and climbed those rocks. What do you mean you won an award? Well, like the American Alpine Club would give an annual award back in the '80s to young climbers who were aspiring. And so I got the award like the year I quit climbing, because I had a lot of promise that I was pretty disappointing after that, you know. Being the young, impressionable kid that I was, I took the idea of the packraft and went farther with it. Combining bicycles and packrafts has become incredibly popular recently. But you were doing this decades ago. Yeah, I started doing these packraft trips with, you know, skiing across glaciers and carrying the packraft to float out and bushwhacking. And just kind of crossing all kinds of landscapes. I started doing those outside of the Wilderness Classic race. And I still raced, you know, I liked the racing because it forced me to go very light. And I would learn so much covering 150 miles in three days. It's almost like you learn more the faster you go. Because there's no trails really. I mean, there are, there's animal trails, but there's no marked human trails. And by animal, I mean like wild animals. And so you have to make decisions fast and you have to be good at reading landscapes. You know, I got my first mountain bike in 1985. I took it across a river in a packraft and I was scouting out an area to go hunting. And I was riding on these bison trails, you know, riding around. And I thought, wow, we could use mountain bikes to kind of do wilderness trips. And I got into the Iditabike, which was the first snowbike race. It was really the foundation of the fat bike. Can you paint the picture of what those early pre-commercial fat bikes looked like, and what it felt like trying to ride them across frozen Alaska? We all had to experiment to get our 26-inch, two-inch tire mountain bikes to float on the snow on these snow machine trails. And so we try all kinds of different things. And people would weld rims together or lace several rims together on one custom hub. We were just experimenting. And all of that eventually led to the invention of the fat bike. But you also needed to modify the frames, obviously, to get the bigger clearance. Yeah, I'm a rider. I don't weld. I'm not very good at building things. It's a lot easier, it turns out, to like make a frame that'll accommodate wide rims. But what's really challenging is making tires, because you need to have a mold to mold the rubber into a big tire. That was the limiting factor is getting wide tires. The first true fat bike with wide tires was made by a guy in New Mexico named Ray Molina. And what Ray did is he wanted to ride on sand. And so Ray Molina, he had wide rims. It was easy to make wide rims because you could just cut two rims and weld them together. So you'd have a double-wide rim. And then he took two tires and cut them and then sewed them together to make a wider tire. You cut the tires in two, but not in half. You know, you might cut them in two-thirds. You'd sew two thirds together of a tire. Right. That was sort of how that began. And the reason I'm mentioning that it was an exciting time, the middle, the late '80s. I mean, there was a lot going on. And a lot of it was happening in Fairbanks, Alaska, because Fairbanks is sort of at the end of the road. We're even different from the rest of Alaska. And there's a university there and a lot of creative people. And there's a lot of athletes and people in Anchorage are a lot more like people in the Lower 48. Whereas people in Fairbanks are more creative in some sense, because we're isolated. We can kind of do what we want. And we have to cobble things together to kind of solve problems that people don't have other places. What I'm trying to get at, because this is a bicycle show, is that by, you know, 1986, I had this mountain bike and I was putting it on a raft and I was riding it on glaciers, but just kind of dabbling in it, like just crossing the river with the raft to go hunt. Or just, hey, with these mountain bikes, I bet we could ride on a glacier and then just going out for a couple hours and riding on the toe of a glacier on the bare ice. And so I put together these snowbiking races, things that I'd learned doing that with the packrafting that I was doing and my wilderness travel. And so in 1988, this guy, Carl Tobin, who'd healed from the big fall that he'd taken on 9448, he's a true athlete. He's the kind of guy that, he picks up a sport one year, you know, he's clumsy at it, you can go faster than he can. But by the second year, he's mastered it and he's winning races. And even with his broken legs that healed, he ended up being a mountain bike racer. So anyway, he and a Nordic cross- country racer named John Underwood - so Carl Tobin and John and I - I said, "Hey, I think we could do this Nebesna- to-McCarthy route on mountain bikes." I'd hiked it and packrafted it by myself a couple years earlier. So I knew what it looked like. That was the first hellbike trip, was in 1988. And basically, it used a lot of athleticism from Nordic racing and snowbike racing and mountain bike racing. And it used the idea of sort of going fast and light from alpine climbing. And we had one packraft that we used for three of us to cross the rivers. And then it used sort of the skills that you need for wilderness travel in Alaska, like, you know, wading rivers and finding animal trails and reading landscapes. And hellbiking is a name that the three of you coined. Right. So here's how that happens. On that Nebesna- to-McCarthy ride in 1988, our eyes were like, wow, I can't believe we're doing this. Like, we were riding a lot. It wasn't like a stunt. People were doing stunts. Back then, they would carry their mountain bikes, you know, up Aconcagua or up a mountain, but there was no suspension. They weren't riding them down. They were just carrying them up and then going down. And a bunch of Euros were like, riding around Europe on dirt roads thinking they were having the adventure of their lifetime. But this was real adventure. You know what I mean? Yeah. You had to travel so light. We didn't even have tents. We just bivouacked out in the open. You know, I didn't even have a spoon. I ate off of a wrench. Like, if you look at the packs we had for a week, you can go look at some of the pictures on Instagram that I posted and see Underwood with looks like he's got a polo shirt on and a little day pack and like a little duffel bag, a little stuff sack on the rack on his back. And he's out there for a week of wilderness riding, you know, not even like a week riding through towns where you can stop and get groceries every day or not even like a week riding on like dirt trails where you're going to meet people who will give you yogurt or goat milk and cheese. You know what I mean? No, this is the real thing. Yeah. Yeah. And so we're about halfway through and we're like, wow, this is really cool. We're riding a lot and it's super exhilarating and nobody ever done it before. Like, we couldn't even visualize it until we'd done it ourselves. And there was a cabin and back in the old days, all the cabins in Alaska, they'd be unlocked because people needed them. And it was typical that you'd go inside and kind of, you know, scratch your name or there was a pencil and you'd write your name on the wall of the cabin. And so we'd written our names on there. And then John took the pen and he wrote, "Live to ride, ride to die." Because he thought that was cool. And then I thought, oh, yeah, live to ride, ride to die. And then I wrote,"Mountain bikes from hell." So then after we did that trip, in 1988, Carl had seen what John and I had written. And Carl said, "Well, what's that next hellbike going to be?" So Carl was the one who called it a hellbike. And then we just sort of used that phrase for that kind of writing. Wow. You just kept refining your technique, I guess, for the next years leading up to the National Geographic expedition? Sure. Once we did that one, we were like, okay, where next? Yeah. We did the one through the Alaska Range, not the one that you're referring to in the Geographic article, but a portion of that one, which was about 250 miles. Most of it, you know, I'd been across before on skis or on foot. And that was in 1989, it was the same three of us, Underwood and Carl and me. And on that one, we were kind of lackadaisical, we forgot the map. So we didn't have any maps. The maps that you carry are 1 to 250,000 scale, like one inch on the map is like four miles. For that route, you need like two or three, two big full ones and a corner of another one. But we forgot them in my truck. But we were like, "Oh, we don't need a map, we've been here before." And we rode on glaciers on that one. The first couple of days, we're on a mining road and then gravel bars and then tundra. And then we came to the highway again, and we picked up our packrafts. But we only had one packraft across the river with three bikes. And we crossed the river and then rode up the Black Rapids Glacier and down the Susitna Glacier. And when we were on the Black Rapids Glacier, John was peddling. And back then, Suntour, I don't even know if Suntour exists anymore. They do. Yeah, they're still out there. At least the name does. It's probably a different company, but the name is out there. Okay, yeah. So back then, Suntour was bigger than Shimano. And they had a pedal, but it had a spindle that went to the crank arm that was quite long. And those pedals would break right where the platform would hit the spindle, they would break. And we were like 40 miles from the road. And up on the pass between two glaciers, actually coming down, the Susitna Glacier. So on the far side of the pass. And John's pedal broke right there. We didn't carry a spare pedal. I mean, we had a spare derailleur, but we didn't have a spare pedal. We were like, "Oh, crap." You know, we had to get down the glacier and he could still pedal. And this was back in the day when they didn't have clipless yet. We were riding with toe clips on platforms. But he could keep his toe on there. And we rode with lightweight hiking shoes. We weren't using low tops yet. We were still using high top, lightweight hiking shoes, which were real novel. They'd only been out like a few years. So we were riding down the Susitna and it just seemed like there was no way we could go the next 100 miles that we needed to go. It started storming, and we were stuck in the tent. It wasn't really a tent. It's just like a floorless tarp. When we used the paddle for the raft, and that was the pole for the tent. And then we didn't have tent stakes. The bicycles were the anchors, but we only had three bikes. So we'd strap a rock and hold the fourth one. But the weather got bad and the wind's blowing and it's raining. And then we didn't have quite enough food. We got seven days of food, I think is what we thought we'd need. And we were having a discussion and we decided that John would go out by himself with the packraft. And Carl and I would go over the pass to the north side of the Alaska Range and continue on on this trip. Carl was like, "Well, you know, if the weather's staying this bad, we're not going to make it. We're all going to go out with John." So we're all packing up to leave. And we're all going to go down, out to the highway. There's another gravel road that was about 30 miles away that we could get to. You get off the glacier and ride down the gravel bars. And I was like, "Ah, you know, I just can't do this," because I had planned to do the whole Alaska Range. I was going to do the mountain bike for the first 250 miles. And then, you know, the next few hundred miles, walk with a friend of mine who was going to show up. I was a big trip. I didn't want to give up on it. And I said, "Hey, you know what? I'm going over that myself. I'm not quitting. I'm going to head over the pass." And Carl goes, "Well, not without me, you're not." And then John clapped his hands. He goes, "I guess I'm going too." And so we all went over the pass, even in the crappy weather, and continued down these glaciers. The weather never got good, and so we had to get off the glaciers. And that's when we realized that we should have had the map because we really never knew exactly where we were, but we knew how to get back. So we weren't really lost. So anyway, we made it out. And then in 1989, I also did, maybe I shouldn't even say, but we did an outlaw trip in the Grand Canyon, where we rode down the north side of the Grand Canyon to the Colorado River and blew up our packrafts. There were three of us and we each put our mountain bikes on the packrafts and we paddled down the Colorado River for like 70 miles and then took out at Diamond Creek, where everybody takes out and rode up to the south room and back to town. So that was in 1989. And then in 1990, Carl and I did a crossing of the Brooks Range with mountain bikes, another 250-mile trip from the Arctic Ocean to the interior over the Brooks Range. So we did a handful of these things. And then I went to Stanford and I was at Stanford for a bunch of that, working on my PhD. And then there was a portion of time when I wasn't doing any of those trips, because I was doing field research, climbing trees in the Caribbean, in the rainforest there. And so the hellbiking kind of stopped for me for a while. One thing we have in common is that we both got PhDs from Stanford. Oh, really? When did you get yours? Much later. I actually got my master's from Stanford in 1999. And then I was in industry and I went back and I got my PhD in 2015. Oh, cool. While I was at Stanford, I met this young guy named Paul Adkins at the time. And he'd be a great person for you to talk to. He's way more interesting than me. He's a great kid. He's not really a kid. I guess he's in his fifties now, so he's not a kid. Okay. But he seemed like a kid when I met him. So Paul, it's an interesting story. I was at Stanford and my wife and son, I didn't have a daughter yet. They were still in Fairbanks, so I was alone in Palo Alto. And then I saw at the library this really cool bike that was locked up. It didn't have any label on it. And all the paint was stripped off. It was like a aluminum bike. And I was like, whoa, I wonder whose bike this is. Whoever owns it, I want to ride with him. So I left a note. I wrote a note and left it on his bike. And I don't remember exactly what it said. I'm like, "Hey, cool bike, let's ride together sometime." And then a few days later, I don't know how long ago, that's why Paul has, you know, he goes by Livin now. He doesn't call himself Paul, but at the time he was Paul. So Livin's recollection is that Paul was parked outside of Palo Alto Bikes and I went by and I saw his bike on top of his truck. You know, I was like, whoa, there's the bike. I kind of hung around and they walked out of Palo Alto Bikes. I'm like, "Hey, I'm the guy who wrote the note." And he was a mechanic at Palo Alto Bikes. I had pictures of that mountain bike ride that we had done and I showed them to him and he was like, "Wow, this is really cool." It was the first hellbike trip, because it was the year I'd done that first Nebesna-to-McCarthy trip, is when I started at Stanford. And I showed him the pictures and then I told him that I was looking for a sponsor for the Iditabike. He helped me get a sponsorship from Palo Alto Bikes. Oh, wow. Cool. There was a guy named Charlie Kelly and he's the one who came up with the name "mountain bike" and he was part of that Marin Mount Tam group. Right. He introduced me to the guys at Wilderness Trail bikes, WTB, and they became a sponsor of mine for a while. But then once I went and started my field work, I came back and I was really wrapped up in writing my PhD and analyzing the data. I got to ask a little bit about this fieldwork. You said you were climbing trees in the Caribbean. I know that Arctic Alchemy said you were a big tree climber. Was that during this time? No, the big tree climbing happened later. So what happened is my PhD is in biology and I was working on this experiment to see how predators affect their prey and how predators can actually affect plants. Like a wolf eats a moose and a moose eats a willow. What happens if you don't have any wolves around? Well, maybe the moose population gets bigger and the willow population gets smaller. So instead of doing the experiment with wolves and moose and willows, I did it with lizards and bugs and leaves. I thought, I'd like to do it in the rainforest canopy because I could do these experiments on the whole canopy of a tree. And so a hurricane had come through and all the crowns of the tree in the canopy were isolated from each other. There's lizards that live in the tops of the trees and I could build a collar around the trunk of the tree, because the lizards live in the trees but they lay eggs in the dirt on the ground. And so if I put collars on the tree and I remove the lizards from the tree, no lizards could come up. And so I had a bunch of experimental trees that had no lizards. And then I had trees that did have lizards. And I ran the experiment for six months and every month I'd climb trees and count bugs and look at the leaf damage. There's actually some nice mathematics that describe how the populations of different species are interacting with each other as one goes up, the other goes down. I mean, were you trying to validate some kind of mathematical model? Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, it's a very simple mathematical model. You know, it's basically exactly as you described. You could use a system of three differential equations to model it in simplest form, where you have one for the predator, one for the prey, and then one for the plant that the prey eats. And you can get that kind of, they call it a trophic cascade because you remove one thing and then it affects the other things. Most of the experiments that have been done on trophic cascades that showed it were in aquatic systems with fish. For example, they would tether a bass, which is a predatory fish in a pond. And then the fish that nibble on the algae would stay away from the bass, you know, because the bass would eat them and they could see them. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like having a tiger with a chain. We're all going to stay away from the tiger with the chain. So these little fish, minnows, they eat algae. And so right around where the bass was tethered, there'd be luxurious algae growth. But outside of the range of the tether of the bass, it would be like an algae desert because the minnows ate all the algae. And that would be called a trophic cascade example. Yeah. While I was hanging around in the trees, you know, I thought, wow, it'd be really cool to kind of go from tree to tree and go as far as you could go. I'd learned how to climb trees from an arborist. And he'd showed me how you could do a transfer from one tree to the other. Be in one tree and throw your ropes into the other tree and get to the other tree without using anybody on the ground or going to the ground. And I thought, wow, I'd really like to go from tree to tree as far as I could go. And when I came back to Stanford, I told some of the other graduate students about that idea. And then one of the guys was working with a tree ecologist who worked in big trees, like redwoods. And he told him that I had this idea of going from tree to tree. So we ended up getting together. And this guy, his name was Steve Sillett. And he was a big-tree climber. Like, you know, that's all he liked were big trees. I hung out with him in the '90s for a while. I got money from National Geographic and we went to Borneo and to Australia. And we came up with this idea. He called it canopy trekking. And we started out with redwoods, where we'd camp out in the tree and go from tree to tree. And we had this sort of contraption that we made with another guy, where you'd have a crossbow. And you'd have these arrows that we made that had recurved tines. And the idea was you'd throw a throw bag from one tree over a horizontal branch in another tree. And that throw bag had a thin line dangling from it. And you'd shoot the crossbow arrow that was specially designed to snag that line. This crossbow arrow was attached to a fishing line and a fishing reel. And you could reel in that black line, we called it, and tie a climbing rope that would go around the branch and you pull it the climbing line around and tie it off and then slide across the rope to the next tree. Wow. We started doing that. But it was hard, you know, living in Alaska to do a lot of that because I'd have to fly, you know, all over the world or just to the Lower 48 to climb big trees. It seems then possible that with this canopy trekking, you could spend days without ever going to ground level. You could go on the treetops and at night you could just camp up on the trees. Well, we did that in Australia. And we tried to go for a week, but we were up there for five days and a big windstorm came. And so we got afraid and we repelled down. And these trees were so tall that there was like fog and you repelled out of the fog and you'd look up and you couldn't see everybody else up in the tree until they repelled out of the fog. And the winds were whipping around and then we went back and finished it. But we didn't go very far. It's a lot of work and it was kind of sketchy too. If it's a really tall tree, it tends to be a fast- growing tree. And if it's a fast-growing tree, it tends to break more easily. A lot of these times we'd be throwing our lines and then putting the Tyrolian traverse ropes around branches that we hadn't tested until we'd be like dangling out there. So anyway, yeah, it was kind of sketchy, but it was exciting and it was a neat way to experience a new kind of a new habitat or a new ecosystem. A wild idea, one of many coming in today's episode. Yeah. After I graduated from Stanford, I got a job up here in Alaska. And then I would go back to Stanford in the summers and do research on a different topic with my former advisor. And Paul was still living in California. And I had another friend named Mark, and Andrew, who is Paul's best friend. And they wanted to come to Alaska and do a bike trip. So in 1994, we did one that was kind of sponsored by, I don't know if it was Bicycling magazine or Mountain Bike magazine, I forget which one. And we went up and I wrote an article. And then in 1995, Paul came up and we did some more. We went across the Harding Icefield with our mountain bikes and floated down the Copper River with packrafts. And I wrote a magazine article. And then as part of my canopy stuff, I met a photographer and he wanted to do a National Geographic story. And I did too. And I said, Hey, we should get together. He was a wildlife photographer. We should get together and go up to Alaska's Arctic. I'll take my kids and my wife and we'll ski from the top of the highest mountain there and then raft down and hike through the immense caribou herds. So we'll go from summit to sea through America's Serengeti and you can take the pictures. And I pitched it to National Geographic and they said, "No, we don't want a family story. What about a mountain bike story?" And I'm like, "Whoa, you know, like, how do they know I'm into mountain bikes?" And they said, "What about like a traverse of the Brooks Range with mountain bikes?" And I was like, "No, that wouldn't really work out so well. But the Alaska Range would and nobody's ever traversed the Alaska Range." They said, "Okay. Well, why don't you write up a proposal and send a budget?" And I had thought that National Geographic, because I was really good at doing trips for cheap. Like when you live in Fairbanks, you know, all you really want to do is be an adventurer and you don't want to work or work as little as possible. So you learn to do everything on the shoestring. And I had a friend who'd done stuff for National Geographic. And I told him, I said, "Hey, I can do a trip for National Geographic cheaper than anybody." He goes. "Oh, no, they don't want that. They want to think that it's top shelf. And so they want to pay a lot of money, they think they're going to get what they're paying for." So I made up a budget. And then I doubled it and sent it to Geographic and like, "Oh, wow, this is a lot of money." But in the end, they did it. And the budget included paying Paul, who I'd done a bunch of mountain bike trips, hellbike trips in the early '90s. And then Carl, who I'd done all those trips in the late '80s with. They were the two people I wanted to have on this trip. And so I wanted to make sure that they got compensated because we were going to spend the whole summer out there. The other thing is they didn't really want me to write it. They wanted a real writer, but they asked some real writers, because I had a couple stories in these mountain bike magazines or bicycling magazines, the writers are like, Hey, we think Roman can do it. And Geographic isn't really about the writing, it's about the photography. And they wanted a real photographer along. And thankfully, they wanted this photographer who is a friend of mine and Carl's. In fact, his name is Bill Hatcher. And Bill had helped me with my research in Puerto Rico, where I did my PhD work and the tree canopies. And he came. He's a rock climber and he really got into tree climbing after that. And Carl Tobin had helped me establish my experiments at the beginning of that field trip. And Bill came later and Bill wanted to do a hellbike trip. So we did one with these other bike riders called Team Mutant from Flagstaff, Arizona. Flagstaff. Yeah. That's my town. Oh, really? Yeah. My family moved to Flagstaff from Spain when I was 10. So I grew up in Flagstaff. Wow. Flagstaff is a very cool place to live. You were a lucky young boy to have lived there. Yeah, we'd go mountain biking up in the Snow Bowl ski area, in the San Francisco Peaks. Ah. It's not Alaska, but it was pretty cool. It's close. Yeah. Well, and there's a lot of people doing really crazy adventures there, especially with mountain bikes and out in the desert. When I was growing up mountain biking in Flagstaff in the late 1980s and early 1990s, there was only one bicycle shop in town, Cosmic Cycles. I was curious about Team Mutant and found out that it was led by Steve Garro, a mechanic at Cosmic Cycles. Another amazing employee at the time was Raymond Brutti, known as Cosmic Ray, which is an unbeatable name. He wrote, illustrated, and printed a series of small green mountain bike guides for the Flagstaff area. Cosmic Ray introduced me to a bunch of exciting new trails, and his cartoon maps were super easy to get lost with. Ah, the days before GPS. So Bill Hatcher and a couple of guys from Team Mutant and I did a trip out in the Canyonlands, where we had one packraft and crossed the Colorado River and rode through the Needles and the Maze and then did that White Rim Trail at the end. So anyway, Bill and I knew each other, and Bill had had a cover shot in the National Geographic, so National Geographic liked him and wanted him to come along, and I wanted him to come along. So he came along for three stretches, like the beginning, and then a week up on the glaciers, and then at the end. So he was a part-time participant, but did he also bicycle? Yep, he did. He was a good biker. So with that, let's go to the 1997 National Geographic map of the trip that you took. Basically, you started at the border with Canada, the Yukon, and you followed the range for these 775 miles. I don't know if you were the one who wrote the little captions, but I have to read these to kind of jog your memory. These little things are so funny. Week One, Week Two, Week Three... Did you write those, that ended up going on the map? Yep. Okay. Yeah, well, here's how National Geographic works. Well, I would write the captions, and I wrote the story, but the Geographic is mostly about the photos, and they want all the writing to sound like it's the same person almost. And so whatever you write for Geographic kind of gets rewritten, and there's many writers who don't want to write for Geographic because Geographic is going to take their stuff and rewrite it. It didn't bother me. I only write stuff that I want to write, and I'm not a very good writer on demand. I have to feel moved to write. On this map, which is the classic National Geographic map, it says, "Week One. A bush plane dropped off the men and their bikes in early July. Without camping gear at first, they slept fully clothed and ate raw bacon and bagels." That's the caption. Yeah, I know. Well, that's true. I imagine it was true. It's such a funny thing. It does beg the question, though, why raw bacon without cooking gear? Well, it was canned bacon, so it's kind of cooked. We were just trying to go as fast as we could, and to go fast, you got to go light. So we just went light, and bacon's good, and bagels were good, so we just ate it like that. Then you have, "Week Two. After picking up a cache of food and equipment, the bikers rode on sheep trails and old mining roads through the Mentasta and Delta Mountains. They used the inflatable pack rafts to cross the swollen Nabesna River." So there the packrafts come into play, which you've talked a lot about. And then it changes again, because in week three,"The bikers unpacked crampons and ice axes to help them across the perilous Hayes Range glaciers. When able to ride, they used studded tires to grip the ice." I'll talk about the glacier one first, if you want. And so with John Underwood and Carl in 1989, we'd ridden those same glaciers, and so we knew what we needed, because what happens is the ice has a lot of traction when it's sunny, but when it rains, which it does in the summer on these glaciers, the ice gets a real slippery sheen, and so studded tires keep you from falling down. And then there's a pass to go from the south side of the Alaska Range over to the north side. We didn't have many crampons. You know, like we had maybe four individual crampons, so everybody got one crampon. And then we had like one ice axe. And we just had a minimum amount of climbing gear that we needed. We had a skinny rope to deal with the hazards that we knew were there. And so like Carl Tobin, he'd climbed on Kanchenjunga and Mount Everest, which are the third and first highest mountains in the world. And he'd climbed, you know, all over Alaska, and he worked on glaciers as a glaciologist. I'd been doing these wilderness races across all these Alaskan ranges, and I would include going over glaciated ice fields and ranges. And so we knew the absolute minimum amount of stuff that we needed, you know, and how to kind of get away with just minimum. And so we only had one packraft, for example, at this leg, or the leg before it, when we crossed the Nebesna River with a packraft, we had the packraft, we had one, but we didn't even really have a whole paddle, we just had the blades. And we took sticks - firm, sturdy sticks - and strapped the blades on so we could paddle across. And we would make multiple trips across the river to make sure that we had the light enough system that was still functional. Wow, you were really saving every ounce at that point. Yeah, every ounce, yeah. I'm cursed with an analytic mind, which isn't a great analytic mind, but I can do some things. When I was a master's student in mathematics, I didn't really want to work on my master's thesis. So I would work on things like, you know, how far can you go carrying all your own food without resupply? Kind of like an airplane. You're like, if you have too much fuel on the airplane, it can't take off. If you have too little, you can't take off. There's sort of some optimum amount of fuel. And so I thought the same with traveling. I thought about the physics behind it. The physics of it are basically Newtonian physics that, you know, work equals force times distance, right? And work is the energy that we expend. We're not Superman or Superwoman. There's some maximum amount of work that we can do. So it's a constant. You can't do any more than this sort of top max level. So that is a constant. And then that's equal to the force - and the force is the weight that you're carrying, you know, and the weight that you're carrying is the work that you're doing against gravity with each step or each motion forward - and then the distance that you travel is a horizontal distance. But with each step in that horizontal distance, you're actually lifting up a little bit to do a little bit of work. You know, this is for walking. So basically, you have this simple equation, the constant is equal to these two variables multiplied by each other. One is how far you go and one is how much you carry. And then you can just solve for how far you can go as a function of how much you carry. And that's a rectangular hyperbola, you know, so it falls down really steeply. And so when you're traveling really light, that's when every ounce counts. A little tiny increase in weight causes a big decrease in distance. Whereas when you're really heavy, you're way out there on the tail of this rectangular hyperbola, a little increment in weight, even a big increment in weight, doesn't have a big impact in distance. So like when I moose hunt, I got a 90-pound load on my back. Well, I'll carry my rifle too, because that additional weight doesn't matter. Right. "Week Four. A curious blonde grizzly bear follows the trio for a half an hour, causing them to double their pace along Healy Creek. It was one of nine grizzlies encountered." Yeah. There were bears out there, grizzly bears. "Week Five. Because heavy bike traffic can damage land, the Denali wilderness - like all US wilderness areas - prohibits any 'mechanized' travel. The trio hiked 60 miles to the western border, where their bikes had been airlifted." Yeah, that's how it is. "Week Seven. The bikers sped to the finish on caribou and bear trails in Lake Clark National Park. After weeks of surviving on freeze-dried meals and high-energy bars, they celebrated with a meal of pasta and garden fresh peas and tomatoes." I forgot about that. Yeah. I know when you bicycle toured, one of the really neat things about bicycling is people tend to be friendly with cyclists. With a bicycle, you know, you're not very threatening. You're a little vulnerable yourself, then people aren't threatened by you, and they tend to be more friendly and open. You know, like if I'm driving my car and I want to camp and I pull over to a farmer's house and I say, "Hey, can I camp in your yard?" They're going to be like, "No, you can drive into town. You don't get a hotel or whatever." But if you're on a bike, you know, you pull over and you can kind of talk to them and, you know, they can evaluate you and look at your stuff and you can say, "Well, you got a beautiful farm, blah, blah, blah. Can I sleep on your farm?" And a lot of times when you're in the wilderness riding your bike where people have never seen a bicycle, they're like, "What are you doing here? How'd you get here on a bike?" You know, they can hardly believe that you'd even walk there. And then they invite you in and they want to hear your stories, and then they want to share with you. And so that they provide the pasta and the veggies? Yep. This was a young woman whose father had been the governor of Alaska. Hammond. Jay Hammond had been the governor, and he had not a farm and not a ranch and not a lodge, but like he had a big cabin. They had gardens with vegetables near Lake Clark, and that's where our trip ended. And so they invited us in to kind of hear what we'd done and fed us. Amazing. I like the National Geographic trip, don't get me wrong, but the 1989 trip is sort of the one we were like, whoa, you know, because '88 was like mind- blowing. But then 1989, like we're up on the glaciers. And then, you know, the 1996 trip, which came out in the 1997 National Geographic, that was just sort of like, okay, well, now we're recognized. You know what I mean? Yeah. As a final question, I will ask the question that our listener, Leif, would ask of you, which is, how would your Alaska Range expedition have been different if you went today? Would you choose to use full suspension bike with 29-inch tires and all the other fancy accessories? Yeah, that is really a great question. Here's how I'm going to answer that. Today, fat bike trips, that's the way that most of these modern sort of, it's hard for me to call them hell- bike trips, but people have repeated some of our routes and they take fat bikes. They're not taking suspended bikes. They're taking fat bikes because, you know, the suspension is vulnerable to river crossings. A suspended bike is heavy. We only had front suspension for that National Geographic trip. You know, we had front suspension on our Merlins, but they only had like an inch or an inch and a half. Here's the thing is like, sometimes you just cannot ride. You know, you have to cross a boulder field or you got a bushwhack or you got a river to cross and it's too fast and rocky to use a packraft. You just got to carry your bike across. And a fat bike, and I've done a bunch of fat bike trips, like I've done three of these things that are big with some of the people who do the hardest-core bike trips in Alaska today, you know, they were there, you know, and I'm just the old man, like, you know, "Oh, let's hear some stories, Roman." And the only reason I'm riding the fat bike is it's good on the sand. And a 29-inch bike is just too big and cumbersome. I like the 26- inch bike because it's low to the ground, it's nimble, it's light, and it's just a lot easier to maneuver when you need it. And so my answer would be no, I would go back and I would use a bike I can jump off easily, a bike I can throw on my back easily, and a bike that's lighter. And I would go with these guys and they would never even carry their bikes. They would have like that triangle bag that fills in the space in the triangle and back in the day, sometimes we'd have to carry our bikes and we would just pick the bikes up, we'd grab the down tube and the top tube and lift the bike up and put the seat tube across the pack, the day pack, but it was just a little day pack, but it had stuff in it, right on our back. And then you could actually move without your hand. I mean, you didn't have to hold your bike, the bike was balanced right there because it had a rack on it. And I got all the bikepacking crap, but I still would prefer to have just a rack and a little lightweight pack instead of all that fucking junk on your bike. And I've ridden with all the junk. It's all clever and good, but it's all heavy. You know, it's got tabs on it and it's got zippers and the weight isn't really doing anything. And it's just slowing you down and making you do harder work when you have to bushwhack or cross a river or push uphill. Sometimes the hills were so steep, you know, we needed our hands to balance. Everybody who's ridden that Nebesna-to- McCarthy ride that we did in 1988, and I think there's been like three repeats of it and they've all been on fat bikes and they all kind of complain about the trip. When we rode it, our goal was to ride as much as possible. These were my friends and I love these guys. But because of what they had, sometimes they would just have to give up on riding and just pack their bike up. And one guy had like a frame pack that he put it on, you know, he just hiked a whole bunch of it. And I'm like, nah, what we would do because the bikes were so light and nimble, we were trying to ride every bit. And if you couldn't ride it, you just get off and push until... and then you jump back on. And like a 29 or you're up, it's kind of high. I feel like I'm a little kid on a big bike, you know, I have a 29er, of course, I got two fat bikes, of course, I got road bikes, I got them all. But my 26-inch bike is still my favorite bike. And Paul, or Livin, and Carl and I, we still have those Merlins from that National Geographic ride. And I know Carl rides his a lot. And I ride mine a lot. But Livin, he's a real cyclist. I'm not a real anything. I just do whatever it is that I'm interested in at the time. But Livin, he's moved to plus bikes, you know, which are a lot of fun. And if I was to do the ride again, I think a plus bike would be good, because they're relatively light, they've got pretty fat tires. I wouldn't go with hydraulic brakes, I would use cables. I like the idea of a dropper post, but a lot of this stuff is pretty rugged in the sense that it's abusive to your gear. I'd hate it if something broke on that dropper post and it was stuck in a position I didn't want it to be. I still am kind of of the opinion that less is more and simple is better. The transcript for this episode is available on The Accidental Bicycle Tourist website. I welcome feedback and suggestions for this and other episodes. You'll find a link to all contact information in the show notes. If you would like to rate or review the show, you can do that on your favorite podcast platform. You can also follow the podcast on Instagram. Thank you to Anna Lindenmeier for the cover artwork and to Timothy Shortell for the original music. This podcast would not be possible without continuous support from my wife, Sandra. And thank you so much for listening. I hope the episode will inspire you to get out and see where the road leads you. He was working at Palo Alto Bikes. I know Palo Alto Bikes, yeah. Yeah. That's funny. Right. I wasn't a big fan of Palo Alto Bikes. No? how come? They're kind of snobbish. Oh, well, of course. When I was there, they were snobbish too.