Frank Bures

From Outside:

Not far out of the gates of the “Central Iowa Rock Road Endurance Metric” (or CIRREM as it’s known in gravel circles), riders started going down on the dirt road in the middle of Iowa. A big guy on my left spilled hard and almost took me out. Another one up front went over and slammed his helmet into the ground. I slipped on the ice a few times, but managed to stay upright. In the lead pack, a rider broke away and the others started to chase him. Nearly all of them went over, too.

We were just a few miles into the late-February, 63.5-mile bike race that brings out the hardest of the hardcore groadies (gravel roadies). Gravel riding, or “gravel grinding” as it’s known, is a different sort of race than the ones that came before. These are epic rides on forgotten, unpaved roads covered in crushed rock. They’re more relaxed, more low-brow, and more hardcore than you average road crit.

Not only that, but they open up a vast new territory for cycling. At last count, there were 1.3 million miles of unpaved roads throughout the United States. Cyclists are just beginning to discover these as a new frontier where there are no rules, no governing bodies, and where you can just announce a race and people will show up to ride 60, 100, 200 miles or more.

Read the rest here.

…In his clas­sic travel book Blue High­ways: A Jour­ney Into Amer­ica, William Least Heat Moon noted some­thing sim­i­lar after trav­el­ing through the area in the late 1970s. “When I walked the North towns,” he wrote, “peo­ple, won­der­ing who the out­sider was, would look at me; but as soon as I nod­ded, they looked down, up, left, right, or turned around as if sum­moned by an invis­i­ble caller.… The effect on me was that I felt more alone than I ever had in the desert. I wished for the South where any topic is worth at least a brief exchange. And so I went across the cen­tral North, see­ing many peo­ple, but not often learn­ing where our lives crossed com­mon ground.”

Recently, I was talk­ing to a friend from Ten­nessee. I asked him, if you walked into a bar full of strangers down there, would it be easy to find some­one to talk to? He seemed to think it was a silly ques­tion and said, “Of course!” Another friend, from Ore­gon, told me about a con­ver­sa­tion he struck up with a stranger in a bar—who turned out to be from Texas. “Yep,” the Texan said, “Min­nesotans are the nicest peo­ple in the world. They’ll give you direc­tions any­where except their house.”

This Min­nesota Ice is the flip side to Min­nesota Nice. When pho­tog­ra­pher Alec Soth was asked for two words to describe Min­nesotans, the ones he chose seemed almost to be oppo­sites: friendly and remote.

Read the rest here.

There are 1.3 million miles of gravel roads that run across America, and over the last few years thousands of cyclists have found in them a new frontier for riding. In the September issue of Men’s Journal is a piece I did about that scene, which is gritty, down to earth and open to all comers. Gravel, after all, is the everyman pavement, the unsung surface that makes America work. Likewise gravel rides are the everyman’s race. You don’t need special equipment, or training. All you need is a bike, the right attitude, and a bunch of crushed rocks.