I don't know about you, but my mind often dreams about riding in beautiful places. I've got a mental bucket list of trips and places I'd like to ride my bicycle. For me, my current grand daddy of dreams is to bikepack the northern part of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route starting in southern Montana and riding north to Banff. This has been a dream of mine for sometime now and that is how I initially became familiar with Adventue Cycling Association. The ACA put this route on the map and in doing so they have been part of inspiring so many people, products, a bicycle race and even a powerful documentary film. The ACA's vision is to inspire people of all ages to travel by bicycle. So when an opportunity to become a board member presented itself, I jumped at the opportunity. I may not have the time to bikepack from Montana to Banff, but I do have the time to be part of a great organization.

While many people may be familiar with the ACA's 40,000-plus miles of routes and maps, others may not know about their work to improve cycling conditions for cyclists or their Adventure Cyclist magazine. The ACA works tirelessly to inspire cyclists and better the cycling opportunities in the USA. In many ways joing the ACA helped me find my way both personally and professionally. If you are not familiar with the Adventure Cycling Association, I encourage you to check out there website and become a member. Click here to go the ACA website. Salsa and our parent company QBP are corporate sponsors of the ACA. It is a great partnership.

I'd also like to share with you a short three minute video where I share some images from a few of my personal adventures and talk about the Adventure Cycling Association. Hope you enjoy it. 

Putting Adventure Cycling on the Map from Quality Bicycle Products on Vimeo.

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Ever found yourself in a brand new playground with a willingness to explore? Tell us about it!

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What about you? Is there an event that has taken hold of you? Tell us about it.

As the years accumulate, I value adventures and companionship more and more. We have elevated our curiosity and boldness to a creed by bushwhacking our way through the backwoods, mountains and deserts of this globe. My work as a photographer and a writer relies on this intellectual and cultural saturation. Exploration is my motivation and, as a distraction from the rat race, it helps me find my wits.

This fall I completed an expedition with my lifelong friend, the architect and conservationist Allan Schmidt, that took us through the heart of an industrialized wilderness in coastal Oregon. We traveled from Portland to the Pacific Ocean through the Tillamook Burn, a forest that was the scene of many man-made forest fires from 1933 to 1951. We relied on a trusty pair of Salsa Mukluks to help us cover 60 miles of logging tracks abandoned by the Port of Tillamook Bay after a freak la nina powered cyclone flooded and gutted the infrastructure of the line in 2007.

Like a musician whose ears have been trained to hear tones and pitches, my awareness of environmental abuse and destruction has become fine-tuned. When we planned this trip a few years ago, we expected the ride of a lifetime. It was not until we peeled back the layers of history that we discovered the Tillamook Burn is a proverbial chorus asking humans to respect the forest and its inhabitants. The Burn is a place where reckless fires, logging, construction and climate change have gathered to wreak havoc on ecosystems and wildlife.

Absorbing the present, and the projected futures of our planet, is a lesson in humility. I want there to be beautiful places to bike, swim, hike and explore all over our world. I also want these areas to be permanent and protected. It’s a little bit too late for many industrialized sites, but, like Allan and I discovered, there are lessons hidden where you may not expect them.

The spirit of adventure in the past was about exploring the unknown geography, culture and topography of the earth. It was informed by the practice of colonialism. Today, we live in an age where satellite pictures of Antarctica are available in our pockets. This is the new age of exploration. It is about appreciation of the land and oceans; it is about connecting with old and new friends in diverse places; and it is about championing awareness for this lovely, chaotic mess of a world so that we can build solutions to maintain it.

We will need more wild places to go and find our sanity in the future, not less.

Herb Belrose
Portland, Oregon

My publisher, Mountain Flyer Magazine, has posted the article “Riding the Burn Cycle” on issuu.com. Click here to read "Riding the Burn Cycle"

Click here to visit the Mountain Flyer website

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What about you? Is there a wild place that has captured your attention? Or perhaps even your heart?

Pete pours some money into the money hole on our way to Salida, Colorado last spring...

Heck, yesterday was the first day of the season for us to go below zero. But 20's and 30's aren't really warm. Sure, they are warmer than zero or ten below...but they still mean you aren't wearing shorts and t-shirts, and that your water will freeze if you don't drink it fast enough.

Hence, the need to be elsewhere has kicked in. In the din of background conversation you hear talk of riding this place and that place, with almost a sense of urgency. "Like, I've got to get out of here man!' type talk. Modern day cabin fever? Or perhaps just modern day cyclists, yearing for a bit of warmth, some fresh dirt or pavement, and a good bike.

Where will I go this year? I'm not quite sure yet.

What about you? Got plans to escape? Share them with us here...

Therefore, when I find time to really reflect on a past season or more importantly an upcoming one, I tend to lose myself in thought during my dark commutes on Minnesota’s wintery roads. Pedaling through the brisk, cool, murky morning is when I feel I can let my mind wander. It’s on those roads where I set goals for the year, and where I dream of winning big races. It’s on those roads, in the dark, where I feel like I can achieve whatever I set my sights on.

An email from an old friend recently contained the phrase, “stay hungry” and it resonated with me. I’ll admit it gets hard to keep the fire lit year after year. I find that I need to spend some time roaming around that fire, figuring out ways to keep it stoked. Changing the training regime is a trick I employ often as it not only keeps the body guessing, but keeps the mind sharp as well.

This year I’m stepping into a much different mode of preparation for the coming season. I’ve followed suit with my teammate Gerry Pflug and converted my commuting 'cross bike to a singlespeed in an effort to build power and keep my riding fresh. I’ve also changed my routes to work a bit, bringing in new climbs, as well as new descents. And, the Mukluk…well you all know about the Mukluk. This monster truck of bikes has brought an element to my training that contains adventure, discovery, and pure joy. Let me tell you, eight hours of winter trail exploration in the northern woods of Minnesota sure beats eight hours of 'cross bike riding on windy, icy roads. These changes in training help to keep the passion alive. At times these changes are hard to implement, much like getting up in the middle of the night to throw another log on the coals isn’t what you want to do...but pays off in the end.

Like training, racing can get stale. Spinning through the dark I spend time dreaming about the races I’ve done as well as the ones I hope to do. Long ago I made a promise to myself that I would always look to the future when it came to racing. I would keep my eye to the horizon for the next challenge. I think I’ve done that, and in many cases I’ve surprised myself while learning something along the way. To stop growing is to become stagnant and when it comes to doing what you love, I say looking to the horizon is an important thing to do.

Now, some races are just too difficult to say goodbye to, so I keep coming back, but others have a way of letting me go. It’s almost as if they communicate with me and encourage me to go find something bigger. Or maybe something that even frightens me a bit.

I believe that pushing outside my comfort zone brings me good things. I’ve been able to ride for Salsa and blessed to share my path with others. This year I’ve spent time looking forward to races that I know will be difficult, one of which will push me to my limits to be sure. This race has given me that nervous feeling every time I think about it, the same feeling I had when I first started dreaming about the TransIowa.

Put a plan together for yourself. Let your mind wander, and if you can, do it from the saddle of your bike. Don’t be afraid to scare yourself a little. And, remember the best thoughts come when you’re roaming around in the dark. Plan for 2012 to be your best year on a bike yet. It’s all out there, now go get it!

The sun started to peek up over the trees. I pointed my bike back in the general direction of home and pushed my way through the tall grass. It is always a bonus when you can find an animal trail to help guide your way. The deer and the coyotes know the best way to maneuver through the contours of the land...most of the time.

The inspiration for this project came from numerous people within our team (in a strangely timely convergence actually) and from the fact that fatbikes are being ridden all year long as opposed to being strictly thought of as snow or winter bikes. There is such tremendous capability within these machines that we wanted to have some full-suspension prototypes built to explore the concept further.

Pete did what Pete does, and took the plans with him on his last trip to Taiwan. Now the frames are here and we can't get our pulses to drop.

We know there will be questions about these frames so we're heading off a couple of them right from the start.

1) We have assembled and are cobbling together a small selection of suspension forks that will allow us to build, ride, and test these prototype frames. We hope that a fat-friendly suspension fork will be available someday.

2) These are prototypes. We expect to learn a lot from them. They may or may not eventually become an actual product. That is undecided at this time.

We are quite confident that this probably has some of you fatbike riders pretty fired up, so we'll start by throwing a couple hypothetical questions out at you:

1) How much front and rear travel would you prefer in a full-suspension fatbike?

2) What tire and rim width would you prefer?

What's next? Well...we've got a bunch of wheels to build and a handful of bikes to assemble. And then...we ride. Stay tuned for some ride reports in the coming months.

We rode and camped our way to and from Vegas, hitting up numerous popular trails in Colorado and Utah. Highlights included charging down Hazard County into Porcupine Rim with rep Tyler Anderson, like four actual horse thieves running from the Moab sheriff, exploring the Gooseberry Mesa moonscape, and enjoying three days of lift-access downhill on our sorely underutilized DH bikes at Keystone and Winter Park resorts. There were, of course, a whole host of other trails and towns and experiences along the way, and somewhere in there, Dirt Demo and Interbike happened too!

Aside from all the riding, having three engineers stuck in a vehicle together for two weeks is an interesting experiment. Free from cube walls, email, meeting reminders, and product managers, with hours of pavement in front of us, our conversations were free to wander. Lots of crazy ideas were dreamed up. Some might stick, while others the world is not quite ready for. Keeps your eyes and ears peeled. I can say with confidence, that there is even more new and exciting stuff coming down the pipeline.

Road trip dreaming and scheming isn't a bad way to get through winter either. Hopefully you're doing some of the same. Who knows, perhaps I'll run into you on the trail, somewhere out there, later this year.

The snow cover was complete and a soft, cold crunch accompanied me along the way. There were few tracks in the snow: a meandering mountain tire, a person walking their dog, but mostly unbroken trail. A few geese circled overhead and landed in the nearby lake, undaunted by the snow or icy water. Two young deer, a doe followed closely by a buck, crossed the trail in front of me, more curious than afraid. All along the way I listened to the sounds of tires rolling over snow, ice and leaves.