Twenty-five years of July 13ths and the throughline is stubbornly simple: get on something with wheels, or feet, and go. In 2001 it was 200 miles on the bug and quiet grumbling about taxes and Suzy's car making the trip. A year later, Sikorsky shipped me to the desert against my better judgment and my body's. By 2004 the words had given way to a gallery of Blodgett Canyon, because sometimes pictures do the talking.
Then the bikes really took over. 2006 found me nursing an infection with oatmeal packs, still scheming about race points. 2009 was pure taper talk, 200 miles down, worlds ahead. 2010 brought pizza, pain lab, and old EAL friends in a story about breakfast sandwiches vanishing into the matrix. 2011 was just a move-in day spin through hay fields, and 2012 turned into a full bit with Bill narrating a bikepacking rendezvous at Homestake Pass.
The later years get quieter, more textured. 2016's Hillgard Basin hike came with heavy packs and horse-trampled trails. 2020 slowed down entirely for coffee and sunrise on Lulu Pass Road. 2021's Sphinx left no words, which feels honest too. 2022 distilled everything into three lines about climbing, smelling flowers, turning around. And in 2025, a ferry crossing to Orcas Island with Snuggles proved the wandering never really stopped, it just found a van.
Same restlessness, different decades. Turns out the bug and the bike were never really the point.