 What's up, my friends? There's my bike and it's all dressed up and ready to go. I am here in Las Cruces, New Mexico to go on a little bikepacking adventure and I'm excited. And unlike a lot of my adventures, I'm not going alone. In fact, I'm going with a lot of people. This is like a big old bikepacking summit. There's like a hundred of us. We're going to ride the monumental loop which is about 250 miles and I'm excited. You know, this guy Matt invited me down like six months ago and I was like, okay, sure, I don't know anything about you or this route, but let's do it. It sounds like an adventure. This is a group start on the monumental loop. We call it the danger bird for some silly reasons that don't really mean anything to anybody else, but we call it the danger bird and everybody's going to go out and just ride together. Not a competitive event. Nobody's trying to race. We're just out there to connect with each other and with the landscape and see what happens. What can we look forward to? You're going to see five different mountain ranges along the way, all sort of tied together with the Rio Grande Valley. My name is George Pearson. I'm vice president of Velo Cruces, which is a Las Cruces bicycle advocacy group. Today, we're here with the Everybody Rides with Grace program. This is Grace and she has a disability needs, so she has an adaptive bicycle. Hi Grace. How are you doing? Good. So you're going to lead the way today? Yes. Wonderful. And this is your bike? Yes. Do you love riding bikes? I do. Very cool. Well, it's an honor to be able to ride with you. Thank you. Yeah. Well, what about green chilies and good Mexican food? There's a ton of that and I recently rerouted the route to put less sand, less difficult hiking and more time in the Rio Grande Valley, eating burritos and chile reinos and all the stuff that makes this place so special. Yeah. And why do you personally, why do you love getting out there and doing long hikes and biking? It's just such a relaxing thing. It's something I've done my whole life. I sort of think people need to be outside. It's a need we've had. I mean, we've done that for 200,000 years and only recently do we live inside and it seems like our reality, but I don't think that's always true. Yeah. So I think we have this deeper, you know, need to be outside and moving on the landscape with other people, especially that's a pretty powerful thing. Absolutely. Right on, brother. I'm so excited. High five. Yeah, me too, man. So good to meet you. Yeah, glad you're here. All right. It's not every day. I get to lean my bike up next to a palm tree. So I have pretty much the same setup as always. I'm bringing my big cans in the back here because we're in the desert and I'm going to need water, but there it is, the priority 600x. Of course, we've got our pinion and gates. We got the Ren fork up here and I love this bike. I'm really excited to get back on it. It's been a little while. What a beautiful sight. I've never been around so many dirty bike packers. Love it. Go, Grace. Go. How are we all doing? There's so many of you. This is going to be so fun. What's up? No flaties. No crashes. No whammies. All right. Everybody bolted off. Now I got to catch up to them. Let's do this. Heading into the desert. Going to have the time of my life. Four days in southern New Mexican paradise with a lot of good people. Just checking out, making sure I don't get hit by any cars here. This is really special. I'm so excited to be part of this. I really am. You know when you get somewhere and you meet people and you just feel good, like you feel like the energy is right? That's how I feel right now. These are some good people here. What'd you say Grace? She's super happy right now. We're all super happy. Thank you. Let's do this for the kids. It's your wonderful. Thank you. Bye. That's a very precarious burrito. You better not hit a big bump, buddy. It's all about strapping things on top of things and then even more strapping. That's kind of a bike packing for you. So we're just going a casual pace making our way out of Las Cruces on some very nice bike paths. And I think pretty soon we're going to hit some dirt. These people are like, who is this weirdo? First big obstacle cleared. So we've got Jimmy from Leadville. What's up man? Going on. You liking this desert? Pretty sick. It's pretty sick. Real fun. We're on dirt now. Life is good. D bird go. I love it. Thanks for coming out here. Thank you for riding by us. What do you think about bike packing? It's hard. It's really hard. Well you love, look at that smile though. See that smile? You can't escape that. Yeah you know it's nothing like spending a couple hundred miles pushing your bike up a hill. Now we're riding on some really nice quiet canal roads that are snaking out of the city. We're heading toward these big beautiful mountains. So I feel kind of bad even telling you this because you can't smell it. But the whole world right now smells like roasted green chilies. This is the season and I think all these houses are roasting chilies in their backyards and it's just this nice smoky flavor with a bit of spice. I love it. What's up ladies? How you doing? So what inspired you to come out here today? Just to get out. Yeah let's get out and have some fun. Yeah I don't like to be bored. Well said. And Estefania, you are Mexican not new Mexican. How did you get into bike packing? I guess like during the pandemic I was living on the Navajo Nation near Gallup because I was doing like COVID stuff there and it was during the time when people had to wait a week for their COVID test to come back. So I had like a week where I couldn't like go home. I couldn't really be around people and I was like I'm just gonna ride my bike from Gallup to Sedona and that's how I started it. So these mountains right in front of me are called the Doña Annas and it's really beautiful. Kind of reminds me of Baja a little bit. So I'm really inspired by you three. You're a family. This is dad and your kids. How's it feel to be out here with your children? Couldn't be better. Yeah how'd you get them into bike packing? Ah you know well there's plenty of trails around here in southern New Mexico and they're in school down here and I love bike packing and they love backpacking and now they love bike packing. Are you loving it? Yeah it's been really fun so far. Yeah what's it like to be able to do this with your family? I guess I just feel really lucky because I know a lot of people don't get the opportunity to come out here and my dad's also a really good planner so it's pretty easy to you know just kind of come along. And by the way the weather is perfect it's like high 70s low 80s much warmer than Boulder. Boulder's getting chilly so I'm happy to be down here in the desert. Yeah buddy! Midday right now and that new Mexican wind that I love so much is kicking up. Luckily it's not really a factor because we change directions constantly so sometimes headwinds sometimes tailwinds sometimes sidewinds but I'm just really I'm enjoying this a lot. It's just fun to hang out with people and ride bikes. 25 miles in we're in the Rio Grande Valley nice and flat chili farms everywhere nut farms it's nice and hot and nice and windy. My goal is to get to Hatch by dinnertime because they have the best green chilies in the whole wide world. Check it out I found a real live tumbleweed. Go tumbleweed go! Come on you can do it buddy! What a sad tumbleweed. I'll give you a little boost how's that? Go tumbleweed! I made some new friends all the way from Virginia you just took a bite of cliff bar I'm going to ask you a question. Why'd you come here all the way from Virginia? I wanted to see different ecology in Virginia we've got like beautiful deciduous forests and stuff but I was ready for something a little different I wanted to see some new vegetation and animals. And what do you love most about biking bike pack and sleeping under the stars? Just that whole thing where all you have to do all day is ride your bike no work no nothing just ride your bike eat snacks look at all the beautiful stuff around you. These grasshoppers having a grand old time here in the desert get it buddy. So while I'm out here thinking I'm in the middle of nowhere filming humping grasshoppers this dude rolls up how you doing buddy? Good! Good so you came from where? Spirit Pitch South Dakota. Wow yeah have you ever been here before? Never been to New Mexico biking before. Yeah what do you think? It's good stuff I don't see any trees though there's no shade. Oh there's a nice cool breeze. Oh yeah nice headwind. Yeah man yeah. What inspired you to come out here? Just saw it on bikepacking.com and came on down. We got a big hill here big hill. Yeah that got me going that was hard. I've hit some full on Baja Divide style sand and even though you know it's a pain to ride through it reminds me of good memories in Baja. Nice little slow down. See those guys way up there? That's the hill that I'm heading up. It actually looks okay. The road looks nice and smooth unlike the other road we just did. All right come on buddy. You got this bud. You got it. I came over to this beautiful cow tank and I have new friends now. What's up guys? How's it going? How's it going Ryan? What's your name? My name's Carl Devine. How you doing brother? What's your name? I'm Bobby. Bobby you guys are in the shade but we can see you. You guys are looking good. Why did you guys decide to come out here and do this? Oh you know I met Matt a long while ago on another ride and I've been following him on the Insta and yeah the opportunity to get out and do this monumental loop the danger bird loop it's been I've been lore at this point so to be out here is riding. It's really cool. It's cool to see people like yourself out here obviously adds validity to it you know your Mexico bike packing is coming up and there's a lot of fun things. I'm from Albuquerque. Okay right on man so you're proud of your state. Oh hell yeah of course. Where are you from? Albuquerque also. Albuquerque also right on. What are you thinking so far the route? It's been I'm feeling a little beat up. I expected to get a little further today and yeah you know. It's an honest assessment Carl. I'm having some honest assessments you know gratitude checks as well you know you got to appreciate that you're out here having fun and all these people rode this route a hundred different times and put it together to to make it so that we can come out here and enjoy it and it's all pieced together very nicely you know. All right I'm going to get some water out of this cattle tank. Whoa this is a little precarious. Oh yeah here we go. Look at that. Got it. Look at that water. Look at that water. Water is life. If cows can drink it humans can drink it. All right so I can't just take that water and drink it because you know it's probably really dirty so I'm going to zap it with my UV thing. I put it in there for about 45 seconds. Let it do its thing. Kill all the parasites, giardia whatever might be in there. Who knows. And there's definitely some water bugs in there. I don't think you can see them but little black bugs are swimming around. So this is not vegetarian water. I'm about to murder some insects. Sorry guys. Don't want those in your teeth. We've got a pretty strong headwind as we head into hatch but that's okay. I have these three dudes in front of me blocking the wind. I'm so hungry. I'm so excited to eat some warm food. Hopefully a burrito of some sort with green chili. Look at that guy. What's up buddy? I'm riding by all these restaurants and they're all closed. No. There might not be any burritos but they're certainly an epic sunset. Look at that. Incredible. So I found the only restaurant open. It's kind of a food truck and I went to the menu and the guys are sort of speaking Spanish to me and these guys right here are from Honduras and Guatemala. Amigos, ¿Cómo estamos? Mira la comida que me existe. Wow, así es. Ustedes son mis héroes. Ustedes dos. I don't get to meet Central Americans very often especially not Hondurans. Whenever I meet a Honduran because I lived there for two years I get very excited and I'm so happy that there is food and they say I can camp out back. Out back, right? Yay, thank you. And you know, this is the thing. Something always works out. It always works out. That's how it works. All right, I'm in my tent behind the food truck and I am cozy and I'm happy. I love situations like this. I always feel really comfortable around Mexican people. This place is owned by Mexicans and they've got some Central American chefs in there and it's just fun. I love it. And today was a great day, you know, but I will admit I am tired. It was hard. That wind just kind of wore me out. There were some times with tailwind, but mostly it was headwind. That's how it always goes, right? But yeah, just taking off today with everybody and the emotion and the energy was so exciting. It's just, you know, I've been a part of that energy in running races, but never in a bike event. I've never really done bike races and this isn't a race, but you know what I mean. Made it about 70 miles today and that's right on pace for finishing this in four days, which I have to do because I fly out on the fifth day. So, you know, I got to keep moving, hustling, but you know, enjoy it. And New Mexico will always have a special place in my heart. It is so stunningly beautiful here and the people are really cool. So I'm going to sleep here on the side of the road and be very grateful for that.