The Radavist

Nick McIntyre takes us on a mosey through Ireland’s southernmost county on some choice cuts from the Golden Age of 26-inch MTBs. Sharing company with a small group of friends, Nick writes about rolling past stashed-off coves, winding back roads, and an unexpected day making petty bets at the Ballabuidhe Horse Fair after one of the wettest Irish summers on record. It was a given that there would be some downpours to deal with along the way, but these only made the odd break in the clouds all the sweeter. Read on for Nick’s retelling of bike touring in Cork and don’t miss his 35 mm gallery. 

It’s easy to let the 24-hour news cycle negatively color your perspective on the goings-on in the United States’ capital. But, as a Washington, D.C. resident, Andy Karr has gotten a bit tired of the doom-and-gloom rhetoric, and Hollywood’s skewed portrayals of the city he calls home. As a way to open his own aperture, Andy spent the last two summers intentionally documenting the district’s thriving cycling community. As we roll into what will surely be a chaotic election year, take a moment to pause and consider the other side of D.C. in Andy’s wonderful gallery…

It is hard to avoid the bodies of water that surround Seattle. I have always loved the water, from childhood summers spent swimming in Greenlake, to building illicit rope swings in high school, to having a first date on a small strip of sand my family long ago dubbed “Secret Beach.” As I grew up, I learned my friends had their own secret beaches, small access points bordered by tall trees and houses, strips of pebbles off Lake Washington Boulevard with a view of Mount Rainier, and rare sandy beaches touching the icy waters of Puget Sound.

Continue reading below for Conor Courtney‘s two-wheeled explorations of Seattle’s secret beaches…

The Northern New Mexico Continental Divide Trail, or CDT for short, is a popular route for bicycle touring. Singletrack and overgrown double-track compose most of this true-to-form high-country route, where beautiful campsites and natural water sources abound. Yet, it can be a challenge to pick up the route’s thread season after season, as deadfall and weather-related changes obstruct wayfinding. John and a group of six friends recently rode the 93-mile section, and he documented the scenery with his 35mm rangefinder camera and a 35mm focal length lens.

Find the most current, mostly singletrack route of the Northern NM CDT below, along with route notes and a wonderful gallery that captures the vibe of this stunning section of bike-legal trail below.

What do you picture when you hear “African bikes”? There’s a good chance you’re not thinking of a luxury, world-class bike. And you’re not alone. We need to change the way people think about goods made in Namibia – and from Africa as a whole. Name a luxury brand from the African continent…? Yeah, we have our work cut out for us. Onguza is making handbuilt steel frames in Omaruru and helping to put Namibia on the map of international frame builders.  Continue reading below as Dan Craven gives us a look into starting the brand and his motivations.

With my camera bag loaded with several boxes of 120 film and a brick of Ilford HP5, I pulled out of the driveway bound for Hartford, CT; I paused, wondering how I arrived at this moment. All of the little moves and influences resulted in me lugging two cameras with a combined age of some 75 years to shoot the season’s most crucial cyclocross race. There is a “Butterfly Effect” moment in our lives that leads us to our current state, and somewhere amongst the mud, dust, and thousands of shutter actuation is mine.

Radical Atavism is about sharing stories from the road, knocking the dust off your bike, and reflecting on an experience. These thoughtful reflections, penned by autodidactic raconteurs, are just one of the feathers we’ll proudly peacock in our caps. Looking back at the past twelve months, we’ve got a list of ten articles that stood out from the rest. Included are stories from the birthplace of mountain biking in the US, of FKTs, CKTs, events, and more. Don’t miss out on this nostalgic trip through The Radavist’s Top Ten Stories of 2022!

Created by Ernesto Pastor, the Montañas Vacias offers interested bike tourists route options ranging from 100 miles to 430 miles through the Spanish Lapland. Photographer Carlos Blanchard Nerin recently made a second voyage to the country’s southeastern region, remote in nature and characterized by countless miles of forest roads on a high plateau. In the photo essay below, he reflects on connecting to a place you thought you knew more deeply and sharing moments of beauty on the bike with friends.

Oversized white t-shirts flapping listlessly between a great white softbox Welsh sky and endless hordes of casual, sunbathing daisies. Jersey pockets bulging with hard boiled eggs and gummy bears. Hushed whispers of chain ring print, oil tattooed cyclists entering a bird hide and unzipping Leica binocular cases. Nature’s comfortable chatter pauses incrementally to listen to the doppler shifting cacophony of a freewheeling Hope RS4 flying down a caution signed gradient. The Fforest Gran Ffondo must be, objectively, the finest road cycling event around right now.

When I first started gathering the necessary gear to give bike touring (or “bikepacking” in the parlance of our times) a go, the concept struck me as an opportunity to escape from the predictable, mundane, “rinse-and-repeat” order of everyday life. An opportunity to embrace a new kind of freedom of aimless wandering through paths and tracks out in the near-endless natural landscape. After a couple of trips, though, I found the reality of touring isn’t the carefree meander I had envisioned. It can involve weeks or months of planning, trail markers, GPS tracks, resupply points… Which is not to say that escaping on a multi-day trip isn’t freeing, it is – very much so – but maybe not in the conventional sense of the word. I think author Robert Moor says it best in his written exploration of travel, On Trails:

“But complete freedom, it turned out, is not what the trail offers. Quite the opposite – a trail is a tactful reduction of options. The freedom of the trail is riverine, not oceanic. To put it as simply as possible, a path is a way of making sense of the world. There are infinite ways to cross a landscape; but the options are overwhelming, and pitfalls abound. The function of the path is to reduce this teeming chaos into an intelligible line.”

As a kid, I wanted to fly. Like Superman. The recurring dream never materialized but the fantasy took flight when I met the mountain bike. The history of the early mountain bike is often seen through the lens of a handful of guys who modified their old Schwinns back in the mid-1970s. However, as the lone woman participating in those early riding adventures, I snapped a few photographs along the way, capturing the age of innocence often associated with those seminal days. A small group of trailblazers, pioneering a new course of action riding these old relics, would soon change the future of cycling.

Mega drought. It’s no secret that the southwest US, with its ever-increasing population straining what little resources are available, has found itself in the midst of a great reckoning with a lack of consistent rainfall and snowpack which traditionally sustained its communities for thousands of years. As I began typing this, I could count on one hand the days which have had precipitation this spring, including a brief, but much-celebrated storm the prior afternoon. A combination of normal, historical shifts in climate, anthropogenic climate change, and a booming population have put an increased strain on our delicate ecosystems. This strain is evidenced by a longer, more intense fire season and a rapidly increasing aridification, once mostly evident at lower elevations and now climbing its way into Ponderosa stands; amongst many other examples.

You might recall seeing the half-frame bag from Vernacular Sewn Storage (VRNCLR) on the prototype Super Something gravel bike Adam Sklar had at Ruta del Jefe. VRNCLR is the Oakland, CA – based bag company of maker Tom Gilpatrick. Tom has been working in sew business for some time now, currently focusing on bags for bikes and also Go Fast Campers (GFC). Earlier this summer I was in the Bay Area with filmmaker Justin Balog and we had a slice of time before heading to the airport to catch flights home, so stopped in to visit with Tom and check out his space in the eclectic O2 Artisans Aggregate.

There’s this truly magical culture of bike touring in Europe. You can go town to town and point to point on B roads and double tracks, stopping in at the local pub for a cold beer and a place to lay your head. The same culture doesn’t exist in the same way in the US — towns are too far apart, lots of paved roads, busy traffic thanks to decades of car-centric infrastructure and culture, among other reasons.

But there’s a little-known exception to that rule — northern New England. I moved here from New York in early 2020, along with the rest of Brooklyn, and was instantly taken by what locals call Vermont pavé, or miles and miles of dirt roads and unmaintained town highways that dot the state. It didn’t take long before I was plotting long-distance routes and multi-day bikepacking trips that captured as many of these roads as possible and adding them to the bucket list.

Perhaps you remember Beau? That crazy fella who rode his bike from Boulder, Colorado to Mexico City in the middle of the summer that we profiled last year? Well, John reconnected with Beau after his tour and asked if he had any stories he’d like to share. Little did we know we’d get a tale like this… Also, Beau is doing another postcard project, so read on below for those details as well!