July 1st and I have a complicated history. Looking back across more than two decades, this date keeps showing up like an old riding buddy who always talked you into something harder than planned.
It started simply enough. Back in 2002, the entry was one line, basically a shrug and a request for someone to fire up a grill. Then things escalated. By 2004, July 1st found me grinding up Gold Creek Peak in the dark, breaking spokes on the way up and the way down, arriving at the car at 10 PM with a busted bike and a topo map that only helped a little. The year after that, 2005, it was a VW Beetle packed for Thompson Lake, sixty miles of dirt road, and a genuine cowboy-style "yahoo" attitude about finding family somewhere out in the backcountry.
The pattern held. 2007 brought coffee shop recollections of getting lapped and DQ'd, and how that embarrassment quietly lit a fire. 2010 left just a map click as a monument. Then came 2011, the biggest July 1st of them all, a sprawling honest accounting of what riding and people and Missoula actually meant, written on the eve of leaving town. That one still lands.
2012 gave us a coffee-shop bird named Mary with a complicated relationship with fat tire bikes, which honestly tracks. 2013 was raw and honest, a kidney-swelling, brake-squealing account of a race where everything went sideways and the only redemption was a few quiet pre-dawn laps ridden exactly the right way. 2016 added a flat tire, a mile-long walk through the woods, a sand-bag Surly tube, and Mo nearly catching up, which is its own kind of July 1st drama.
2022 paused for a quiet morning on Lake Wolcott. And then 2025 pressed a hand to aquarium glass in Seattle and found something unexpected there, gratitude blooming small and steady, a hermit crab and a starfish doing their thing without explaining themselves to anyone.
That might be the whole arc, right there. From broken spokes to watching a starfish flex a thousand invisible feet and deciding that is enough. July 1st keeps asking the same question in different costumes, and the answer keeps getting a little quieter, a little truer each time.