Twenty-four years of May 13ths, and this date has a habit of delivering the full spectrum. Scams, crashes, sunburns, new bikes, stress, inspiration, and the occasional mushroom beside the trail. Quite a resume for a single calendar date.
It started badly enough, back in 2002, when an impostor domain registrar made off with forty-five dollars and apparently zero shame. Two years later, the mood had lifted considerably, with a camera pointed at the painted canyon landscape of the North Dakota Badlands. Then came 2006, a new job, a new bike, and a beloved Aunt Paula who was more important to more people than she probably ever fully knew. That stressful stretch in Missoula still carries weight.
By 2008, May 13th meant recovering from a bike accident, a house full of friends showing up anyway, and the particular uncertainty of not knowing when the riding would start again. A few years of lighter entries followed: watching a World Cup race instead of training, getting a sunburn while convinced the wind was handling it, launching the Wednesday Night Adventure series in Bozeman, and a quiet note about waiting to ride to work again.
Then 2016 offered something more philosophical. A ridge climb, quartzite, and the thought that a person can be metamorphic, shaped by pressure and transformed by the people around them. There was a move-in day in 2021, quiet and undocumented. And then 2023 brought Mo and a new bike along the Clark Fork River trails, where a mushroom beside the path stopped everything for a moment. Most recently, 2025 sent things out to the Fish Creek area, tracked and mapped and gone.
What May 13th keeps proving is that the thread running through all of it is motion, literal and otherwise. Even the hard days were pointed somewhere.