Riding the Dirt Roads of Mexico's Sierra Madre
GILBERT, MEXICO can’t say riding dirt roads across the Sierra Madre Occidental, northern Mexico’s remote mountain range, had been my original idea. Yet once I’d rode the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, which had guided me all the way from Canada to the Mexican border via a web of forest tracks and desert trails, I Icouldn’t imagine any other way. By the time I arrived, I was firmly hooked on unearthing the most off-the-beaten path to cross a country, even if it was the most challenging. Luckily, I wasn’t alone. Meet the Dirt Bags Because of our tight budgets, our love of roughing it, and our desire to ride off pavement as much as we could, we’d named our band of misfit riders the Dirt Bags. The group consisted of myself, two brothers from Philadelphia, Jeff and Jason, whose endeavors included hiking the Appalachian Trail and riding across Africa, and Anna the Australian, who’d lived in a Brazilian favella for three years and counted circus acrobatics amongst her previous job titles. All four of us shared Alaska as our jour- ney’s start point, the same free spirit and wanderlust that sparks and drives so many bike tours, and the ambition to cycle all the way to the southern tip of Argentina. And as paths often have a habit of doing over long-distance journeys, ours had all crossed in the months it had taken us to reach the Sierra Madre. I’d first met Jeff and Jason in Fairbanks while stocking up on supplies Riding the Dirt Roads of Mexico’s Sierra Madre for the Dalton Highway, also known as the “haul road,” then again months later at a forlorn forest junction just as night had fallen in wintery New Mexico.
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