Zen On Dirt

I started writing a blog post about a week ago about scrambling the second Flatiron in Boulder and doing Peaks 1 – 5 on the 10-mile Range Traverse, two scrambly adventures that I was pretty stinkin’ proud of. But I really didn’t like the post. The general gist of it was along the lines of…

I was pretty bummed to have to go back to the Front Range for dog sitting after only a week back in the Scamp (after three weeks of house living in Boulder). I grumbled a good bit about it and actually had a piss-poor attitude about it for a while. Given that the week in…

  “This shouldn’t be this hard.” Scott had sat down on the side of the Colorado Trail, bike laying in the trail, at the top of a descent, a descent that was a well-known hike-a-bike in the other direction, one that we’d have to do on our way home. We were headed over to the…

Generally, anyone who has hung out with me for any appreciable length of time will learn that I’m not the hugest of huge fan of Boulder these days. I grew up in the Peoples’ Republic, and I think it’s just one of those cases of ‘You can never go home again.’ It’s changed. I’ve changed.…

We had two more days in Moab before we had to hitch the little Scamp up and head to Boulder to watch some doggies. I was tres, tres, tres sad. I really love Moab. To the point that recently, whenever we play the ‘Gun to your head, you have to choose once place to live…

We spent just about a month in Moab this spring. Compared to the six weeks that we spent last spring, a mere four weeks seemed far too short. But what a four weeks it was! The most interesting part of it was the simple contentedness that I felt while being there. I’d arrived on a…

10 years. It’s been 10 years since Megan invited me on the Annual Girls’ Trip to Fruita. That’s almost a third of my life I’ve spent looking forward to these long weekends in the desert filled with riding bikes, drinking cocktails, and spending time with some of the most amazing women I know. It amazes…

Back in 2013, Semi-Rad.com wrote a blog post called ‘Make plans, not resolutions‘ which basically stated that instead of pulling the ‘Oh, I’d like to do this sometime’ or ‘Let’s get together someday’ BS that is so easy to do, one should make concrete plans, and then stick to them. The post really resonated with…

We pulled up to a kiosk in Kodachrome Basin State Park in the middle of central Utah on our bikes, giddy with the discovery that the state park, which I’d spied on some advertisement in Kanab, opened many of its trails to mountain bikes. Another rider was there, loading up his bike into his truck.…

Megan and I have been adventuring together for over ten years now. Ten years. That’s a decade of life. We’ve skied together, ridden together, run together, and from Day 1, there was no other woman who I’d rather play with in the backcountry. Before she came along, I pretty much only skied and rode with…