March Update
Long Canyon, ID, Wilderness, and Other Musings
You can no longer ride a mountain bike in Long Canyon, Idaho. It’s now part of a larger proposed wilderness area. There are old growth cedars there. Grizzlies roam. Until recently, it was the only place in the lower 48 where caribou wandered. Riding a bike, and carrying it over/through seven water crossings, in unlogged terrain of the Selkirk Mountains was worth the journey to the Idaho/Canada border. A group of us were fortunate to ride it back in 2014, remaining on my list as one of the best rides I’ve ever been on in my 25+ years of mountain biking.
The next installment of Fully Rigid, my monthly column on things we mountain bikers debate with and among ourselves, will be about wilderness. I will share a perspective little talked about, and of course, not without controversy, when thinking about wilderness in the year 2021.
Recently, I rode the Palm Canyon Epic that ends in the Palm Springs, CA area. It’s a 28 mile ride, more or less, that starts up in the cool mountain pines and ends in the warm desert palms, all of it sitting in the Santa Rosa and San Jacinto Mountains National Monument, which is jointly managed by the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service. A “How-to” guide for that ride is coming up later this month.
Stickers are here, sort of. I have the classic ones below and the blue chain ring ones. The Irie ones they sent were botched, not good, didn’t match the color scheme that I sent them. They are reprinting a new batch. Details to come on getting stickers.
Our local mountains here in San Diego are to get more snow this week, which is great! We need rain/snow. What it also means is that cool/cold weather is moving in, setting things up for great riding conditions out in the Anza-Borrego desert, which will soon be popping with wildflowers. Sheep Canyon should have water flowing after this storm, making for a perfect bikepacking getaway.
On the writing front, besides MTBeer, I’ve a new essay coming out in the next issue of Cranked. If you’re not familiar with it, where have you been?! Cranked is out of the UK, but available in some Barnes and Nobles stores here in the USA. Think of it kind of like The Surfer’s Journal for mountain bikers. Speaking of, I have a profile piece that will be published in TSJ this spring. All of this is to say, the process continues. Hopefully, along the way, readers gain new understandings that get the internal wheels of the mind churning. Why else write?
https://www.surfersjournal.com/
That’ll do it for the update this month. Remember, if you’re wanting more MTBeer in your inbox, and you’re not yet signed up for the paid subscription, you could always sign up for more!
P.S. — If you’re ever in Bonner’s Ferry, ID, stop in at Kootenai River Brewing Company. I can attest, it’ll satiate your food needs and quench your thirst.
Take care, be safe, ride on!
—James/Jim/Jimmy
Long Canyon.....Epic and Beautiful! Glad you put that on the ride list for our trip that year. Will be hard to beat that one.