Thirteen years of July 27ths and the throughline is obvious: get outside, preferably on two wheels, preferably somewhere hard to reach. In 2012 it was off to the Butte 100, simple as that. By 2016 the philosophy had sharpened into something like a manifesto, choosing bikepacking over the boring stuff everyone else does. Two years later it was just a quiet note about high water, take the bridge at Suce Creek.
Then things get more self-aware. The 2020 post about the Boone Mountain Trail is the hinge point, an honest look back at a life that used to hold skiing, hiking, and backpacking alongside biking, and a worry that the bike was crowding everything else out. That worry didn't go away. By 2022 it's just a video of the dog park, remembering a place once called home, shrooming into Meyers Park, whatever. And in 2023, the question gets asked outright, twice, once earnestly in Is eMTB Ruining My Life, and once through a stuffed bear named Smokey in Lost.
This year's entry, Sculpted Back to Life, trades bikes for verse, a quieter kind of trail maintenance, the mental sort. Maybe that's the real pattern. Not the bike itself, but the constant negotiation between obsession and balance, movement and stillness. Thirteen years in, still figuring it out, still worth the ride.