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Day 1 · Banff to Mount Engadine Lodge
Everybody warns you about the mud in New Mexico. Nobody warns you about the mud on the very first afternoon.
We rolled out of Banff at ten in the morning, and if you had taken a picture of us right then — and somebody did — you'd have seen two grown men on heavy blue e-bikes grinning like we'd gotten away with something. Which, in a way, we had. Three years of planning, a wall of maps, a garage full of gear, a knee that was still deciding whether it forgave me, and here we finally were, front wheels pointed south out of Canada with nothing between us and Mexico but a couple thousand miles of mountains.
I already had a sunburn. First morning. That tells you something about how the whole trip was going to go.
Before we left town we did the only responsible thing a man can do at the start of a long journey. We got coffee. Analog Coffee in Banff became the first coffee stop of the whole ride, and I take my coffee stops seriously — you'll learn that about me over the next thirty-some days. We parked the two bikes out front, loaded down like a couple of pack mules, and sat there letting the caffeine and the nerves do their work. The bikes looked almost ridiculous standing there against that pretty little mountain town. Too much gear. Too much everything. Turns out that's exactly what you need for a trip like this, and also exactly what tries to kill you on every climb. More on that later.
If you want to understand the kind of man I am, you have to understand the tents.
Somewhere in those three years of planning I became obsessed with finding the perfect shelter. I bought a tent, set it up in the yard, decided it wasn't quite right, and returned it. Bought a second one. Set that up. Returned it too. Then, on the drive up to Banff, I got to thinking about rain and convinced myself I really needed a hammock system as a backup — so I bought that as well. A backup to what, exactly, I could not have told you. I just knew, deep in my soul, that I needed it.
And then there was the evening before we started riding. While my wife, Tiffany, wasn't looking, I wandered into the outfitter in Banff. Just to look. Of course I found another tent — lighter by a couple of pounds, smaller in the pack, easier to set up — and standing right there in the aisle I became absolutely convinced that THIS, at long last, was the perfect tent. So I bought it. Tiffany has been married to me long enough to know that "just looking" out of my mouth comes with a price tag, which is precisely why I waited until she'd turned her back. She also married me knowing full well who I was, which is maybe the more impressive part of the story.
So that's the man who rolled out of Banff: two tents too many, a hammock he'd never need, and a wife back at the lodge who could have told you exactly how this would go.
Then we actually started riding.
The way out of Banff is gentle and green, the kind of scenery that makes you forget you signed up for something hard. Gravel forest roads. The Spray River running along beside us, that strange glacier-fed turquoise you only get up in the Rockies. There's a plaque out on the Commonwealth Walkway, set into a rock, and bridges — wooden footbridges and steel spans — crossing that turquoise water with snow still sitting on the peaks above us. We stopped on one of them and took a picture. I won't tell you who stuck his tongue out. It was Jimmy. It's always Jimmy.
Now, this whole stretch is grizzly country, and everybody who knows the area tells you the same thing: make noise. Don't rely on the little bells. A bear knows what a human voice is, and the last thing you want is to come around a blind corner and surprise one that didn't hear you coming. So you talk. You sing. You make a fool of yourself into the trees.
I don't know exactly when it started, but somewhere in there I caught myself singing Amazing Grace. Out loud. Just me and my bike and a couple thousand miles of wilderness, rolling that old hymn out into the pines. And I'll be honest with you about my motives, because they weren't all that holy. Part of me was genuinely hoping every bear within a mile could hear me coming. And part of me just found some real comfort in praising God while I rode. It wasn't planned. It sure wasn't a sermon. It was just an honest moment between me and the Lord.
But somewhere between the mountains and those old words, something settled in me that I hadn't quite put into words before I left home. I wasn't just starting a bike ride. I was starting an adventure with God. He'd been out here long before me, and He was going to be out here the whole way down.
Then, being human, I stopped singing, and we reached Goat Creek around 1:30 and stopped for lunch, feeling pretty good about ourselves.
We should not have felt so good about ourselves.
Around three o'clock the road ran straight into about a mile of swamp. And I don't mean a puddle you tiptoe around. I mean the trail simply went underwater — one to two feet of it in places — and turned into a churning stew of mud and slop with a road somewhere underneath it, allegedly.
Here's where riding an e-bike for years finally earned its keep. I know throttles. I know that in deep water and muck the worst thing you can do is hesitate, plant a foot, and go down. So I picked my line, got my feet up on the frame, rolled on the throttle nice and steady, and let that heavy blue machine carry me through like a barge. Kept my boots dry. Kept my dignity. For about eight seconds I felt like the smartest man in Canada.
Then I heard Jimmy scream.
Find out what happened to Jimmy in the book.
