There’s not much better after a day of bikepacking in the mountains than sitting around a good campfire. To see more bikepacking images, go here.

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Last year I took my then nine-year-old son, Silas, on a 5-day parents-and-kids bike ride organized by the Adventure Cycling Association on Idaho’s world class rail-trails. These images are from the best trail of all, The Route of the Hiawatha, which uses an old rail line in the mountains along the Idaho/Montana border. There are a bunch of high trestles and long tunnels, including one tunnel that bores under a mountain for almost two miles. Because the tunnel curves, you can’t see either end when you’re in the middle. It’s so dark you literally can’t see your hand in front of your face. But, of course, you actually can because you bring lights. You’d definitely be screwed in the tunnel without them.

You can see more images from the trip, including one of an Idaho teenager hurling himself into a river from an old, 80-foot high railroad bridge, at my personal blog here. The intensely curious can see my story from the trip here.

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It also has really, really big downhills. This afternoon I took a look back at some slides from my time there and decided to throw a few up on the internets. The Andes has some wild riding. This particular descent was the highest I’ve ridden — the top was somewhere around 17,000 feet. Entirely too little air up there. Plus, it was kind of steep. Every time I stopped to take a photo I had to endo into the scree. It was the only way to stop. To get started again you had to clutch your brakes, plant your butt on your rear tire, let go of the brakes, and hang on. Fun stuff. I’m probably too smart (or too old) for that now, but it sure is fun looking back at these pictures…

(for images from a very different kind of ride in Bolivia, check out this post over on my new blog)

Since our new comrade-in-blogging Hurl Eversoft is a stone-cold slacker and hasn’t found the time to post here yet, I thought I would throw up a few pictures of his coffee shop in Minneapolis. I was in the city over last year’s holidays and seeing as how my mother lives in an apartment a few blocks away, I thought I’d drop over to check it out. Sadly, Hurlonious wasn’t around, but I did take these pics. It’s a pretty rad shop — bikes for sale, bike art on the walls, and other assorted velo-paraphernalia everywhere you look. Wish we had a place like this in Missoula. And, yes, Minneapolis is as cold as it looks in this first picture…

We rode through the neighborhood over to a friend’s house for Thanksgiving dinner. Jacqueline hauled the mashed potatoes, casserole, and other food in the trailer, while I carried ice cream and extra chairs on the Big Dummy. Took these snaps from the bike along the way…

I always savor the last few rides of the year, knowing that the end is near and the window could close at any time. Got out for a great 6-hour spin the other day with Skodt the Smokejumper into some of Missoula’s deepest boonies. Rode back until the darkness was complete, made a fire, and watched the moonlight gradually illuminate the surrounding mountains. The pedal out was glorious — all speed, moonglow, and thrillingly inadequate lighting.

I hope it’s not the last big ride of the year, but if it was, it was a hell of a farewell to yet another grand season of riding.

I’d like to kick off my new life as a highly influential and revered blogger (full disclosure: this is my first blog post) by talking about S24Os. For those that don’t know, S24O stands for sub-24-hour overnight. Some people call them bike overnights, but Grant Petersen at Rivendell coined S24O and we like Grant, and the term seems to be sticking, so it’s what we use. Not sure how I turned into a “we” there…

Anyway, the cool thing about S24Os is that you can leave later in the day, camp out for the night, and still be back for whatever you need to be back for the next morning. Or you can wake up, break camp, and go for a big ride. Or you can lay around the campfire and watch the clouds go by. S24Os can be whatever you want them to be. Kind of like life, I guess. Just shorter.

Here a few images from recent S24Os of mine.