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Outside Magazine March 2002

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A Modest Proposal (Cont.)

OVER THE PAST DECADES, the word "adventure" has mistakenly become synonymous with "expedition." Thus it has become common wisdom that any real adventure requires extensive planning and preparation. Plane reservations months in advance, pages of lists, stacks of guidebooks, duffel bags of new gear and cash. We all need to reread Huckleberry Finn and find two friends like Reed and Buzz.

"No tent, no stove, no panniers, no sleeping bag," Reed decreed.

"No itinerary," Buzz averred.

Sticking as much as possible to trails and dirt roads, we would pedal a four-day lariat loop through the mountains and plains of Wyoming and Colorado.

Ten hours later I crammed a rainjacket, a sweater, two 1:100,000 maps, a patch kit, a few micro bike tools, and a wallet into my front bag and met up with the brothers Zars at the end of the block. We took the first gravel road going west, gliding out across the prairie with the sun at our backs.

There are few things in life more joyous than lighting out on an adventure. To do so in good company on a bicycle—the most elegant and elemental of conveyances—with little more than the clothes on your back and a couple of fat, warm brownies in your pocket is heaven.

There were antelope everywhere. Frantic and fleet-footed, they raced beside the barbed wire as if they'd been shot at, which they had. It was hunting season in Wyoming. We chased our own telephone-pole shadows through the undulating plains until the road hooked south. On the spur of the moment we decided our first stop would be Albany, a settlement consisting of little more than a saloon at the base of the Medicine Bow Mountains. We cut west and began following a straight-shot trail that parallels a buried water pipe.

Pretty soon we had to start jumping fences.

"We should get permission," Reed, the lawyer, said nervously.

I shrugged.

"From who?" said Buzz.

We topped a bluff and spotted a tiny ranch house out in the ocean of brown. "Them," said Reed.

"We'll be off their property and onto someone else's before they even know it," said Buzz.

But Reed was already gone.

Buzz and I kept riding along the pipeline, lifting our light bikes over one fence after another. The ranch house was a long way off. When Reed finally reached it, Buzz and I stopped and waited. After a few minutes we saw Reed on his bike tearing across the horizon, hell-bent-for-leather in the wrong direction. Moments later a blue pickup spun away from the ranch and went ripping after him down the same dirt road. It didn't look so good.

"Best if we just keep going, I'd say," said Buzz, raising his eyebrows. We'd meet up with Reed in Albany. Hopefully. Buzz and I hopped back onto our mountain bikes and continued onward across the new frontier.

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