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HT550 kit: post-match analysis
The promised kit geek-out is here: what I took, why, whether it worked and what I’ll do differently next time. My tour of the Colorado Trail last year was a good opportunity to put last year’s would-be Highland Trail setup to the test, give or take some modifications. I detailed the CT setup here. The…
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Personal mountains: a ride on the Highland Trail
If approached in friendship, the unknown, the anonymous, the negative and the threatening gradually yield their secret affinity with us. – John O’Donohue The cloud was in, barely stirred by a breeze too soft to keep the midges down. This wouldn’t have mattered if I was moving, but I wasn’t, and I didn’t quite know…
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The longest day
It was a little before midnight that I realised something was wrong. I’d felt good when it got dark after the long, warm midsummer dusk, descending Culardoch at break-nothing speed and cruising through a Braemar where the regimented tourism of daytime had already given way to syncopated drunken straggles, turning Mar Road into a crazy…
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Slow and light: the Colorado Trail
Having whittled my bikepacking kit down to manageable weight for the Highland Trail 550 (which I then missed due to a broken pelvis and collarbone high-siding off a road bike in late April) I decided to take a similar approach to biking the Colorado Trail. Yes, it wasn’t a race – quite the opposite in…