We’ve ruminated. We’ve considered. And just when it seemed like nobody needed one more year-end list, we’ve curated a rundown of twenty-four highlights that sparked joy throughout the year. These are twenty-four unsolicited opinions on twenty-four new-to-us experiences we found genuinely compelling. Some are rides, some are books, some are bike-related technologies and concepts, some are films and some are Steely Dan songs from 1973-1980. Why Steely Dan songs – I say why not?
Films
perfect days
Perfect Days follows introspective janitor Hirayama (Köji Yakusho) through the rhythmic minutiae of his daily routine cleaning toilets in Tokyo’s upscale Shibuya district. Arguably Wim Wenders’ most resonant work since 1987’s Wings of Desire, Perfect Days is a wonderfully restrained slow burn, leaning into nuanced repetition as a window into Hirayama’s rich interior life, employing almost no dialog throughout the first half. This is perhaps one of the best examples of show – don’t tell that I’ve seen this year, sidestepping conventional narrative in favor of impressionistic observation of Hirayama’s daily rituals. Perfect Days is an affecting meditation on extracting profundity from ordinariness and finding joy in the everyday. Directed by Wim Wenders. Written by Wim Wenders & Takuma Takasaki.
THE BIKERIDERS
I have had the same large black and white poster of Danny Lyon’s photo Crossing the Ohio River, Louisville, 1966 in every place that I’ve lived in since 1995, the image burned into my subconscious for 29 years. So when I came across the trailer for The Bikeriders last year, Director Jeff Nichols’ cinematic recreation of that very photo had me completely disoriented. Once I figured out what I was looking at, I was skeptical. A new movie starring Hollywood hearthrob Austin Butler that mines the most iconic work of one of my longtime photographic heroes? What could possibly go wrong? With such a wide margin for error, I was relieved to discover it’s good – actually very good.
The Bikeriders is an exquisitely-rendered window into 1960’s Midwest biker subculture, its rituals, gritty freedom and often violent politics. Nichols’ high-contrast aesthetic study acts as a snapshot of a counterculture and faithful adaptation of Danny Lyon’s legendary photography book and exhibition of the same name. The film effectively sets up a love triangle between club founder Johnny (Tom Hardy), rising youngblood Benny (Austin Butler) and Benny’s outsider girlfriend and our narrator, Kathy (Jodie Comer). The Bikeriders chronicles the arc of the club, here cast as the Vandals, from the early days of biker culture through the 1970’s where the vibe inevitably shifts from escapist camaraderie to full-blown criminal enterprise, accelerated by veterans returning from Vietnam traumatized by extreme violence and hard drugs. RIYL motorcycles, fistfights, cigarettes, booze and wanderlust.
yacht rock: a dockumentary (HBO)
I tend to bristle at the term Yacht Rock as a pejorative, retroactive catch-all for smooth, jazz-inflected soft rock from a certain era. I’m from Los Angeles after all – from a certain era, so I instinctively jumped to my own conclusion. I was prepared to be annoyed and went in expecting an elevation of low-hanging kitsch and questionable taste. I was wrong. This is very much not that. While they do acknowledge the genre’s resurgence in popularity, Yacht Rock primarily focuses an academic lens on the insular microcosm of working studio musicians and producers in LA from the late 1970’s through the early 80’s. At the heart of it all is Steely Dan, whom the filmmakers expressly cast as not-Yacht – yet trace their clear responsibility for assembling the formal language and personnel from which the sound would develop. The lineage follows Donald Fagen and Walter Becker’s meticulous studio perfectionism as expressed through the members of Toto (specifically the Porcaro brothers) as their backing band of choice. This same assemblage of players would then go on to track records by Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, the Doobie Brothers, Boz Scaggs, 10cc, George Benson, Al Jarreau, Don Henley and as unlikely as it seems, Michael Jackson’s Thriller. All in all, a highly compelling examination of the often-maligned smooth, satiny, shimmery Southern California sound.
Mountain Bike Rides
CHUCKANUT RIDGE. BELLINGHAM, WA
The first thing you hear about Bellingham usually has to do with the Galbraith network. Which is fine, but for my sensibilities, the Chuckanut-Larrabee-Blanchard continuum tends to be a much richer cut. It’s ripe with natural terrain, dynamic rocks n’ roots, pristine forest bathing and no shortage of mossy, chocolatey loamers. Chuckanut Ridge presents a mix of steep n’ deep natural tread, plant-based feature-sets, long sustained climbs and gritty, rooty, rocky tech – the absolute epitome of dank coastal Pacific Northwestiness. This is where the mountains meet the sea. Expect moss, fungi, siltstone, old growth, new growth, supernaturally glowing understory, complex roots, chutes, drops, slabs and every tint, shade and gradient of green in the entire catalog. It’s the total package and does not disappoint.
Goat Mountain to Vanson Ridge. Green River Valley, WA
Less of a conventional bike ride and more of a holistic backcountry examination of a richly-layered ecosystem, Goat Mountain sits within the Green River adventure nexus of superlative singletrack on the north side of Mt St Helens. The Green River drainage and ridges of Goat, Vanson and Tumwater Mountains survived the 1980 St Helens eruption more or less intact because they were shielded from immediate impact by the peaks and prominences of the Mount Margaret Backcountry, which bore the brunt of the lateral blast of ash and debris. Shaped by cataclysm and regeneration, the Green River micro-region presents a dynamic blend of exposed rocky ridgelines, pristine mountain lakes and impossibly lush lowland river valleys.
Xanadu-Tres Hombres. Peshastin, WA
The Xanadu – Tres Hombres trail complex is an anomalous treasure nestled in the east Cascadian foothills above Peshastin, WA. This fantastic double loop is part of a broader continuum of trail systems and backcountry corridors between Wenatchee and Leavenworth. Simply put, Xanadu – Tres Hombres feels like local labor of love with destination-worthy appeal, a prime example of quality over quantity. The Xanadu circuit clocks in at a modest 13 miles with 3380 feet all in, but with terrain this engaging, the numbers tell only part of the story.
steely dan songs
any major dude with tell you
The Squonk, a mythical Fearsome Creature of the Lumberwood, was said to possess the ability to elude corner and capture by dissolving itself into a pool of its own tears. ‘Have you ever seen a Squonk’s tears, well look at mine’ sings one Major Dude to another, Donald Fagen extending a bit of knowing advice to an unnamed friend. Just one of the Dan’s many deeply enigmatic touchpoints, in this case set against a backdrop of breezy SoCal canyon-rock, whose easygoing character masks the complexity of the performance itself. Such is the Dan’s central contradiction; difficult internal mechanics obscured by effortless cool and a glossy smooth veneer.
SIGN IN STRANGER
The second to last song on Side One of the Dan’s fifth studio album The Royal Scam, released in 1976, Sign In Stranger is one of two deep cuts on the record that flirts with – yet sidesteps full-blown reggae (the other being Haitian Divorce). If you’re still with me by this point, kudos, you’ve passed the test. The loping rubber-band groove is about as loose as the Dan could manage. The verse carves out plenty of breathing room for a playful call-and-response between Donald Fagen’s stacked vocal leads and the band’s prodigious instrumental flourishes – tasteful piano trills, syncopated bass runs (1:57) and cheeky guitar phrasing that all feels like part of an inside joke. Everything seems loaded with a cynical wink and a nod, as does so much of the band’s catalog. If I had to nominate one track as Peak Mid-Period Deep Cut Dan, this would be it.
Pearl of the Quarter
This sly, country-tinged charmer could be considered a thematic precursor to Roxanne by The Police – which is to say it’s about falling in love with a prostitute. The capstone of the chorus is her repeated refrain ‘Voulez-voulez-voulez-vous’. Translation: Do you want? This is of course, is all intertwined with lyrical layers of Jeff ‘Skunk’ Baxter’s weepy pedal steel, adding playful glimmers to a melancholy sort of love song – something Donald Fagen famously went to great lengths to avoid. Pearl of the Quarter is the second to last song on their second album, 1973’s Countdown to Ecstasy, and trots out an organic, almost earnestly straightforward classic rock sound, revealing a ‘human, not just brainy’ side of the band.
Glamour Profession
This one has it all. Like a pulpy, drugged-out LA fever dream finished in immaculate, high-gloss, Glamour Profession is a rich rogue’s gallery of shady, fame-adjacent characters, midnight meetups and clandestine deals plucked straight from Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. Hoops McCann, Jungle Jim and Jive Miguel (just in from Bogota) remain the stuff of cryptic LA mystique, but are classic late-period Dan, ripe with conceptual worldbuilding and arcane 1970’s hipster slang lost to the mists of time. This peak slice of glossy Dan closes as a cautionary tale that living hard will indeed take its toll.
Katy Lied, In Its Entirety (minus Black Friday)
Steely Dan’s fourth album, released in 1975, was the first completed after the band stopped touring altogether to focus solely on studio recording. Katy Lied was also the first to include Michael McDonald as a singer in the band’s lineup. The record was initially disowned by Fagen and Becker who refused to listen to the finished product because they were dissatisfied by technical errors caused by the then-new dbx noise reduction system employed during the mixing and mastering processes.
Guitarist Denny Dias explains:
“In 1975 we had great expectations and lots of enthusiasm. We had excellent musicians ready to perform in a state-of-the-art recording studio. We had our radical super hi-fi monitor system that consisted of electromagnetic flat panel Magneplanar speakers with three amplifiers and two subwoofers and active crossover tuned to the room with a real-time analyzer. They sounded great. The songs were great. The musicians were grateful. What could go wrong? Well, things happened. Some could be attributed to human error. Others could be blamed on mechanical failure. The rest will never be explained.“
In retrospect, the soft, dampened production – downright lo-fi by Dan standards – gives Katy Lied a much more intimate, organic songwriterly feel. With Bad Sneakers as our hypothetical opener (remember, we nixed Black Friday in this scenario), Katy Lied is stacked with some of the best songs in the band’s catalog. Rose Darling, Doctor Wu, Everyone’s Gone to the Movies and Throw Back the Little Ones are absolutely some of the Dan’s heaviest hitters. Anyone who has ever made records can attest, final mix and mastering can be a precarious and highly subjective process – a dark art which can easily make or break an artist’s impression of their own work. But in the long view, the mix character is just one of many elements that make this a nearly perfect Steely Dan record.
ADVENTURE RIDES
Canyon Creek. GIFFORD PINCHOT NATIONAL FOREST, WA
Canyon Creek is a deep summer classic in the Gifford Pinchot whose character changes enough from year to year to feel like a different ride every time. This season we had friends in town from the East Coast eager to do a big day, so a team was assembled and up we went. We called an early audible and made a beeline for the iconic Cougar Rock, a prominent landmark in the Gifford Pinchot backcountry. This allowed us to get up into the goods quickly. Once up top we were treated to a healthy serving of high country magic, meandering ridgetops, volcanic outcroppings, rocky basins and several of the region’s most photogenic lines. Eventually we dropped deep into the Canyon Creek drainage through a 15-mile patchwork of densely forested, moderately overgrown doubletrack and crumbling pavement. Never a dull day, the descent was beset with mechanicals and the uncertainty of waiting versus pushing ahead to reconnect with spread out members of our ride group.
Once back together, the long gradual climb out of the canyon was a stunning highlight of the day, gaining 2900 feet over 12 miles. This primitive stretch of rugged roadbed is impassible to cars. Washouts and substantial overgrowth filter out any motorized traffic, rendering the experience fantastically wild. Dense clusters of vine maple and salal crowd the roadway, forming narrow, sundappled tunnels of green. Rocky grades twist and turn along the valley upward though open sections of volcanic scree. And just like that, our long backcountry climb tees right into a smooth paved road, NF54, another highlight of the loop. Quite possibly the best paved descent in the region, 54 drops 2700 feet like a ten mile roller-coaster of buttery, perfectly banked tarmac. It’s always a joy to bring guests on deep dive adventures like this. It presents the opportunity to get fresh eyes on familiar terrain as they experience everything for the first time.
Lost Weekend: Methow Valley. Winthrop, WA
This was an almost entirely new-to-me loop in a region where I have ridden extensively, so it felt like a win to get a new perspective on a familiar zone. Turns out there is always more to discover. This particular route variation out of Winthrop, WA was part of this past fall’s Lost Weekend Methow Valley lineup, added at the last minute, the frontcountry flow of scenic valley roads and drop-bar singletrack were just too good to leave out. Once everything was scouted and verified, we couldn’t wait to share it with folks.
We set off into a crisp 37 degrees, kicking up plumes of traildust in the morning light, strung out along the hillsides above Pearrygin Lake. Small groups came together, split apart and came back together again as they do, spread out over the inner valley’s rolling foothills, rocky canyons and bunchgrass prairie. After an unscripted lunch detour in Twisp with a handful of new friends, our hearty band of adventure hounds enjoyed a spirited mix of singletrack over the backside of Thompson Ridge. We dipped and dodged through forest and field, skirting lakes and creeks back into town to share snacks, stories and many large pizzas.
Day two was gloriously frontloaded with sinewy singletrack and sagebrush meadows, riders coalesced as impromptu gatherings materialized on high ridges. Up and over Banker Pass, the hairpin descent through Vanderpool Crossing was a harrowing exercise in handling bicycles at speed. There was dust. There were washboards. There were cattle guards. There were giddy expressions of unbridled joy as riders blasted down 2600 feet of backcountry forest road into Mazama. This was the point where hard decisions had to be made. To continue on to Slate Peak would require another 5300 feet of climbing whereas the trails back to Winthrop were fast, flowy and best of all – flat. Most hit the escape hatch. Post-lunch meanderance spontaneously escalated into a spirited 17-mile trail romp back to town for an aprés gravel happy hour and snacks! Huzzah!
The Lone Butte. Gifford Pinchot National Forest, WA
There is something inherently comforting about returning to known quantities year after year. After the passing of a dear friend and longtime ride mate Sukho Viboolsittiseri this fall, a group of us wanted to revisit one of his favorite backcountry routes, the Lone Butte as somewhat of a celebratory memorial ride. Our crew of seven kicked off to a brisk 34 degrees, skirting a long forested ridge southeast of the Lewis River valley past minor features with names like Crazy Hills, Surprise Meadow, Hungry Peak and a flurry of other places on maps where no one goes. To us it felt like a dirt road through a blurry tunnel of trees deep in the forest. We dove down into the valley beneath high ceilings of red alder, hopping ruts, puddles and storm debris. It went on like this for thirty miles. A maze of backcountry forest track, unmarked junctures made familiar through repetition. Right through the gate. Left up the spur. Right at the Y. Navigation by muscle memory.
The Lewis River Trail is the heart of the loop with thirteen miles of impossibly lush riverside singletrack. We traced the river’s northeast edge through towering old growth and a progression of stunning waterfalls. As often goes with river trails, the line is high, steep and rocky. And that is exactly the draw. Ride as much as you can. Hike the rest. In October the forest glows a crisp, almost supernaturally radiant gold in the low-angled sun. The trail felt like a blur. Mossy rock walls dripping with water, fallen logs forming bridges and tunnels through fields of fern and glittering understory. We dipped in and out of oaky, grassy bogs and creekside meadows, punching up dizzying switchbacks to meander gentle forested lines which never seemed to end. Until they did. The 2100 foot climb out of the valley felt more manageable than it has in years past. Again, a subtle comfort of returning to known quantities. This time it felt much less like a thankless slog and more just part of a familiar process. This was one of those extremely well-ridden days where everyone finished on a high note, wholly satisfied, legs empty but cups full.
books
Septology by Jon Fosse
Norwegian author Jon Fosse’s Septology is a profoundly immersive seven-part novel, presented in three volumes: The Other Name, I is Another, and A New Name. Fosse’s signature style – a deeply hypnotic, elliptical and recursive prose that sidesteps conventional literary classification – unfolds as one continuous incantation, mirroring the lyrical flow of thought within the narrator’s consciousness. This stylized interior repetition is seductively simple but does take some getting used to. Once attuned to Fosse’s peculiar cadence, something unlocks and the work begins to feel strangely natural.
Septology loosely follows Asle, an aging Norwegian painter, after the death of his wife, alternating between two realities: Asle’s sober, solitary life and that of his terminally alcoholic, despair-ridden doppelgänger, also named Asle. The narrative employs a dreamlike merging of timelines, past, present and hypothetical in a fluid interplay of multiple braided realities. Fosse’s volumes explore the complicated relationships between identity, art, aging, memory, faith and mortality – insisting that the immensities of death and Eternity defy simple answers and retain all the wonder and contradiction of the Absolute.
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
Rachel Cusk’s specialty is everything that happens between the words. Her spare, razor-sharp observational critiques remain in my head for weeks after reading, my own interior monologue sifted through a sort of a Cusk-ified filter. It’s hard to avoid. Second Place is Rachel Cusk’s first novel since her acclaimed Outline trilogy, and again, generally falls into a space I like to call writers writing about writers writing. A structural homage to Mabel Dodge Luhan’s 1932 memoir entitled Lorenzo In Taos, detailing D.H. Lawerence’s stay at her New Mexico artists’ retreat, Second Place builds on this precedent to construct Cusk’s own layered exploration of artist and muse, host and guest in a sometimes-painful pursuit of creative recognition. Like Luhan’s memoir, Second Place takes shape as a series of letters from our character-narrator, a Cusk-like writer referred to simply as M, to someone named Jeffers in which M describes the intricacies of her conflicted relationship with renowned painter L, whom she has invited for a residency at her guesthouse property.
Hoping his presence will somehow validate her struggle for creative recognition amid the doldrums of middle age, M instead grows resentful of L’s aloof detachment and unsettling influence. M’s claustrophobically confessional mode feels like an internal conversation grappling with the shifting identities and power dynamics between men and women, artists and admirers, parents and children, the second place itself looming large as the embodied tension between life and art – creative fulfillment versus the compromises of domestic convention.
On Trails: An Exploration by Robert Moor
Robert Moor’s On Trails is a fascinating examination of the pathways that shape our natural and human landscapes. Philosophical and deeply personal, Moor weaves history, ecology, anthropology, and through-hiking memoir into rich layers that meander like backcountry singletrack, but never lose the through-line. His prose – deliberate, inquisitive, and quietly poetic – moves at a walking pace, inviting readers into a human-scaled journey through physical and metaphysical worlds. Central to all of this is the question of why trails exist in the first place.
“As hundreds – and then thousands – of miles of trails passed beneath my eyes, I began to ponder the meaning of this endless scrawl. Who created it? Why does it exist? Why, moreover does any trail?”
From the fossilized trails of ancient creatures to the networked complexities of human infrastructure, Moor examines how paths emerge, evolve, and guide us. Anchored by his own treks, notably along the Appalachian Trail, Moor parses out deep connections – between place and purpose, between the past and the present, between instinct and choice.
six THINGS THAT ELEVATED THE RIDE this year
Canyon GRIZL:ON E-Gravel Bike
For me, E-bikes were always less a question of if – and more a matter of when. The utility and obvious benefit kind of sell themselves. But I guess up to this point I hadn’t found E-bikes particularly exciting to ride. So when my pal Dustin Klein facilitated a loaner Canyon GRIZL:ON E-gravel bike for me to try, it felt like a good opportunity to challenge that notion.
My favorite riding tends to be underbiking XC singletrack on drop bars, so wanted to put that to the test on some of my favorite trails. In the conventional gravel department the GRIZL:ON seemed fine, more or less capable, but as soon as we hit the trails, things started to click and I was sold. Buff singletrack is precisely where the GRIZL:ON comes alive! This model (CF7 GRX mechanical build) weighs in around 34 lbs with a nimble, intuitive ridefeel thanks to Bosch’s new Performance Line SX Sprint motor, the lightest and most compact in its lineup. It helps that the lowest two (of four) power modes never feel overly boosted, just tastefully responsive, inspiring out-of-the-saddle efforts and way more sendy moments than I expected. Seriously, this thing just wants to go! In my experience, one downside of drop bar E-bikes is that the added weight invariably creates a jarring, boneshaking effect in chunky terrain. The GRIZL:ON mitigates this surprisingly well with a slackish 69.5° head tube angle and a RockShox Rudy 40mm gravel suspension fork. All you notice is smooth, fluid handling and a locked-in ridefeel through the rough stuff.
Does it come with Touring and Turbo modes to blast through sustained stretches? Sure. Is the Bosch SX motor almost completely silent? Absolutely. Does it have integrated front and rear running lights? That’s an affirmative. Was I down to 20% power after only 20 miles? Yes, I was. So here’s the catch – I’m not going to lie, range anxiety will continue to be a thing for the foreseeable future. The GRIZL:ON comes equipped with a small 400 Wh battery, (remember that lightweight, nimble ridefeel?) that does noticeably limit the range. Until battery life is able to reach the 100-200 mile range, I can’t really see E-bikes being the best fit for deep backcountry or multi-day touring. That said, for moderate gravel efforts, mixed-terrain rips, commuting and short-range frontcountry singletrack, the Canyon GRIZL:ON totally amplifies the all-road game and genuinely changed my perception of how playful, responsive and honestly, fun an E-bike can be.
Fillo’s Walking Tamales
Precious few things in this world seal the deal like a well-timed tamale in the bottom of the second of a three-act ride. TLDR: these things are amazing. These savory, vegan, nutritionally-dense, infinitely packable ride snacks have become an indispensable go-to trail standard for me. Walking Tamales are made in Mexico, weigh only 122g, are conveniently flat-packed and deliver between 190 and 250 calories per 4oz serving. They come in a variety of really great flavors from habañero to salsa verde to elote corn tamales. Pro-tip: Fillo’s also has a stellar lineup of whole grain, legume and bean-based ready-to-eat sofrito packets if you’re looking to take your adventure palette to the next level.
Specialized S-Works 3D Printed Saddles w/ Mirror
There is a reason these saddles are on a lot of year-end lists. They are exceptionally light, strong, look pretty nice and are exceedingly comfortable to ride. They also come with a sizeable asterisk. Is $450 too much for a saddle? It depends on where you are in your respective journey. I rationalize the price tag like this: in prioritizing touchpoints on the bike that I use the most, saddles, being highly personal, are near the top of the list, so it feels like they are worth getting right.
Specialized does offer their signature models – Romin, Phenom, Power saddle and more in a full range from Comp to Expert to Pro and so on up to S-Works 3D Printed w/ Mirror as the tippy-top of the line. Mirror technology’s variable-density matrix claims to allow the 3D printed honeycomb material to be tuned for a hammock effect to support an even distribution of your entire seated weight, alleviating pressure on the tissue surrounding the sit bones. What tuned means in a standardized production saddle is anybody’s guess, but I will say, in my full season of riding both the 3D printed Romin (road bike) and Power (130/120 trail bike) saddles, hotspots, friction and saddle fatigue are notably absent and I simply feel fresher longer. My awareness of the saddle as a point of contact effectively disappears over long days. And on that point alone, I am completely sold.
Ride w/ GPS Advanced Map Layers
This year, Ride w/ GPS added an entirely new menu of advanced map layers to their web platform. These allow you to toggle visual data overlays like AQI, snow levels, wind speed, wind direction, cell coverage and something named Unpaved Cycling, which I’ll explain in a minute. But first – and by far the most relevant to the riding we do in the Intermountain West – are the NOAA Snow Depth and AQI layers. The utility of quickly referencing reliable data without jumping between external apps cannot be overstated. And because they are pulling from NOAA and EPA hydrologic modeling data, they are going to be remarkably accurate. Trust me, these things work – and they’re awesome. At least for now, they’re only available on the web but are tentatively slated for release in the mobile app early in 2025.
Now about that Unpaved Cycling layer. This one stands out from the others in that it is not so much an overlay of external data as it is an oblique rendering of what’s already there. The idea was to effectively create a gravel map. As is, route surface types are already reflected as solid versus dashed tracklines – but that only offers insight along existing route lines. Where this shines is that it universally aggregates both unpaved AND bike-legal terrain to display all the trails, gravel and forest track open for riding, which adds another layer of inspiration to your planning toolkit.
Chain Waxing
My long-held perception was that chain waxing was unnecessarily complicated with a daunting learning curve, gate-kept as an exclusive domain for premium cyclists, engineers and internet experts. Then I tried it. Facepalm. It’s so absurdly simple and makes things SO. MUCH. EASIER in the long run that I feel silly to admit that I held out for so long. If you can turn on a Crock Pot, you can wax a chain. And the rest of your drivetrain will thank you for it.
It is effectively a three-stage process by which you strip, dip and maintain. Stripping entails removing a new chain’s factory lube to prime it for the wax treatment. Just drop the chain into a jar w/ solvent, agitate then hang the chain to dry. Now comes the dip. Silca sells an all-inclusive kit with a heating element, dipping pot, chain rack and a handy array of additional items, but really all you need is a (smallish) Crock Pot and a wire coat hanger. I will defer to Silca’s deep vault of video tutorials to cover specifics, but will simply add that it is more or less heating the wax, dipping the chain, and air-drying – all in all about as complicated as making instant oatmeal.
After drying, you will want to flex the chain a bit to break up and remove excess wax, then it’s ready to ride. Word of warning: it’s going to run like shit for the first 1/2 mile or so as the rest of the wax breaks up and the chain makes nice with the cassette. Once properly seated, it should start humming along smoothly and basically stay that way for a long time. Maintenance will depend on riding conditions of course, but Silca also makes a convenient liquid wax for touching up between rides.
The first thing you’ll notice is well … nothing. No noise. No grit. No grime. No muss. No fuss. Just super clean, super quiet, buttery smooth shifting. Aside from spotless operation, another major plus is a much longer drivetrain lifespan, which is no small thing when you’re looking at $483 cassettes. Full transparentcy: waxing does seem to work best with road and fair weather gravel bikes. Too much wet, too much grit, too much muck and the wax breaks down too quickly to be efficient and will require more upkeep than makes sense, so, certainly something to consider.
Kuat Piston Pro X Hitch Mount Rack w/ Pivot V2
As someone who often has to drive to the ride, my racks see a lot of miles. This year I swapped out my basic-but-trusty Yakima Dr. Tray for a Kuat Piston Pro X. Admittedly, this model is a bit more premium-grade than some folks will need, but a few key details sealed the deal for me. For starters, it felt like a revelation to simply use a rack as designed rather than resorting to improvised hacks and aux straps to secure bikes at highway speeds. The Pivot Pro line’s smooth, one-handed ease of operation is worth the price of admission alone. Then there are the integrated LED taillights, cleverly designed at a 45-degree angle to be visible in both active (in use) and passive (folded up) configurations. These sync seamlessly with your vehicle’s taillights via standard wiring harness to enhance rear brake light visibility.
Another smart consideration, particularly for those in the PNW, is that the Piston Pro X is designed to easily accommodate full fenders. In addition to standard 29, 27.5 and 26 sliding bracket settings, this design employs a dedicated fender position, which cradles the rear tire just below the trailing edge of most rear fenders. Again, easy, secure and thoughtfully considered. I will also add that I opted to mount the rack on Kuat’s Pivot V2 swingarm, which as you might guess, allows the rack to swing 90 degrees out of the way. This is incredibly useful when camping, staging or simply loading up for rides. The Pivot also incidentally provides juuuust enough distance for my tailgate to fully open with the rack folded away, a minor victory with major day-to-day benefits.
Following Joy
This year, moreso than other years, I have tried to be intentional about where, how and with whom I spent my ride-time. It seems a bit on-the-nose to say find what makes you happy and do the things you love. But how do you define those things, specifically? As cyclists, we spend years dabbling in various disciplines that may or may not suit us, or differently-put, pumping considerable energy into things that don’t give us what we’re looking for. It is certainly easier to pinpoint what doesn’t resonate – I have never been much of a racer, nor a traditional mountain biker. The exploratory aspect of gravel seemed to have been devoured by Big Racing culture, which has always been a turn off. Adventure cycling always felt like the closest fit until one day it seemed none of my adventures were big, bold or audacious enough. The value of my own experiences seemed to evaporate against the impossible standard set by FKT’s on the Silk Road Mountain Race or Tour Divide.
Right or wrong, it was how I felt.
So what do I even want from cycling? Is it validation? A challenge? Creative fulfillment? Recognition? Is it purely social? Making eye contact with this is like wading into a murky pool of my own insecurities, but in doing so, some common through-lines emerged. I began to realize I’m primarily drawn to the open-endedness and internalized nature of solo riding, but also the puzzle-like aspect and connectivity of creative route development. But ultimately, above all, what I find continually satisfying is sharing awe-inspiring backcountry experiences with likeminded people. So here’s to figuring out whatever it is that brings you joy, and following that very thing to see where it leads.