In this Adventure Series entry, artist and cyclist Krysten Koehn rides north from Steamboat Springs into Wyoming with a small crew, and finds the best trips are the ones that stop trying to live up to the last.

There’s nothing wrong with setting intentions or laying the best plans for a bikepacking trip. In my experience, though, plans have a way of coming back to laugh in your face. That's part of what I love about bikepacking — the unpredictability, which always leads to adventures (or misadventures), which turn into stories either way.

The three of us—a bike builder (Thomas), a photographer (Sean) and an artist
(myself)—had one previous trip together already banked. The upside: we knew the vibes were impeccable. The downside: that first trip was so good it set an impossible bar for round Two.

Friday afternoon, Thomas and I wagon-trained north of Steamboat while Sean wrapped his workday in Summit County and pointed his truck toward us. We turned off pavement onto a dust-choked jeep track scattered with dispersed campsites and found our spot. One luxurious night of car camping meant a hammock strung between aspens, chicken fajitas smoking on the camp stove, and sprawling out in my rooftop tent for the night. Over dinner, looking out at the forested hills going gold in the evening light, we agreed — wheels rolling
by 7:30.

7:30. Sure. By the time oats were eaten and the AeroPress had done its slow, ceremonial
thing, it was 9:30 and we were only just pointed north toward Wyoming. Rolling out of the site, I heard a loud “OH F*CK” up ahead in the aspen grove. Thomas’s back brake cable had popped out of its seat and would not stay in place without extensive work. He looked at Sean and me, smiled, and said “I’ll be fine.”

It had been a brutal summer everywhere, and Colorado’s stretch of it had turned the
celebrated “champagne gravel” of Northern Colorado to powder. After months without rain it was less champagne and more chalk. We rode with grit between our teeth, distracting ourselves with the golden meadows that coursed by, willows and streams trailing through them like poems set to a backdrop of endless pine forests.

Fields of wildflowers were intermittently interrupted by the occasional side-by-side gunning past in a wall of dust that took a solid minute to settle. We climbed north at the pace altitude demands. Thomas stopped a lot. He builds bikes at sea level for a living and seems to forget, in the months between rides, that riding one involves lungs, particularly in the Rocky Mountains. The climb was gradual, nothing brutal, but altitude doesn't care how sick your bike is. As Thomas recuperated by the side of the road, I fed him dried mango while Sean documented his near-death and found fossils in the comfy rock pile on which he lay.

We hit the state line mid-descent, switchbacks stacking up under us, Thomas’s back brake now a formality. Our 55mm tires shrugged off the baby heads—those round, head-sized loose rocks—scattered across the jeep track, and we railed down into Wyoming with more speed than felt strictly reasonable. One last climb, and the campground opened up — a little colony beside a reservoir, ringed with outhouses, water spigots, and trailers full of people who waved like they meant it. We found a spot in the back corner of the maze and didn’t bother unpacking before heading straight for the water.

The dust came off our legs and clouded the reservoir’s clear blue, and for a minute the whole sky was floating there with us. Nobody said much. Nobody needed to.

That night, after dinner and the kind of unhurried talk that only happens once everyone’s too tired to perform, I discovered my bivy had never made it into my packs. So I built a nest on the picnic table instead and spent the night finding out exactly how cold a Wyoming reservoir gets after dark.

We announced our departure time the next morning with total confidence and total sincerity. But nobody even pretended to be surprised when pedals started turning over an hour later than planned. It had stopped being a plan and started being tradition. Deer led us in bounds around the reservoir and into the day’s climb, and somewhere up the switchbacks we turned to look back at the water we’d slept beside.

The day had the kind of uneventfulness that lets you actually feel each pedal stroke instead of just enduring it. Morning slid into afternoon; thunderheads built over the ridgelines like they were trying to out-climb the mountains themselves. We watched them, half-hoping, half-dreading.

They never delivered. No rain — just more heat, more dust, and a ride back into camp the same way we’d left it, just grittier. We packed up faster than any morning all trip and pointed straight for the river.

Whatever expectations that first trip together had set, this one didn’t try to live up to them. It just found its own wild, dusty, good time — which, it turns out, might be the only kind worth chasing twice.



Words: Krysten Koehn @koko_ehn
Photographer: Sean Green @sean__greene