How Far is Too Far: Smoke & Fire 400

Editor’s note: Edyn sent in this writeup of his 2024 Smoke and Fire ride with friend Oliver Smith. Not many photos were supplied with this piece, so we’re including those, but Oliver and Edyn also described some lovely sleep deprived imagery in their own words, so their descriptions were fed into Midjourney to generate some fun and abstract renderings of what bike hallucinations can feel like sometimes. If you’ve never ridden We hope you enjoy!

The Smoke and Fire is a 400ish-mile bike race on the backroads of Idaho deep in the backcountry. I did this race in 2022 as my first ever bikepacking race, and I came back to take it on again in 2024, this time with a friend. Typically this route is a loop but in 2022 the route was an out-and-back on the north side due to fires. With more big fires in the area, it also looked like there would be a reroute this year. The course ended up being an out-and-back on the south side so I have never raced the full loop but I have raced both the north and south sides. I decided I was going to do the Smoke and Fire while I was racing the Tour Divide in June. I texted one of my friends and told him “we’re gonna set a fkn FKT on the Smoke and Fire”. I’m not sure why I decided I wanted to do more bikepack racing while I was on one of the biggest races in the world because typically after pushing your body like that you don’t want anything to do with it for a few weeks after until you forget all the bad parts and how hard it was. But my friend, Oliver, was down so once I got home from the Divide we started getting ready for the Smoke and Fire. 

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To Bloom

Darkness surrounds me. There’s a smell of moisture in the air, and the only noise I hear is the sound of my bike moving slowly up a gravel road toward the edge of the world. I am riding toward the end of an island—Tierra del Fuego—a place touched by few and known by even fewer. And I am inspired. On the horizon, I see traces of the sun rising. The sun brings hope for a new day, a race finished, and a decision made.

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White Rim Micro-Invitational – Feb 22nd

In December I had the most incredible solo ride across Utah’s White Rim Trail, located in Canyonlands National Park. December is not, as far as I know, a particularly popular time to embark on White Rim, probably because the desert’s fickle ability to be quite warm, or utterly freezing, within hours. Thankfully, my trip wasn’t planned, it was entirely impulsive: I looked at the immediate forecast, saw a window with lows in the high 20s F, and highs in the low 50s F, and knew deep down that as long as I was dry, those temperatures would be doable, if not a bit of an unknown to plan for. I’ve ridden White Rim five times, always in a day. Sometimes alone, sometimes with friends. On this outing I wanted and needed to go alone, to get some think time and rekindle the flame that keeps me excited for the wild, unscripted bicycle lifestyle. The trip was a spectacular success. On the first day I started late and rode to camp in the sunset and utter darkness. Magic. On the second day I woke up to a cold morning that warmed quickly, and had the entire place to myself as I completed the loop. Having done the trip, I had an idea: Why not try to invite others to come and do this same trip with me? So that’s what the White Rim Micro-Invitational is: An incredibly limited space invite for people I know and don’t know to come and do that same trip with me again in late February, 2025.

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The Tour Divide, Day by Day

In June 2024, Edyn Teitge became, at 15, the youngest solo rider of the Tour Divide. This is his story via his own words, day by day through the ride. Images throughout by Edyn and Eddie Clark Media.

The Tour Divide is one of the world’s longest and most well-known off-road bikepacking races. Stretching nearly 2,700 miles from Banff, Alberta, Canada to the US-Mexico border at Antelope Wells, New Mexico, it closely follows the Great Divide Mountain Bike route along the spine of the continent. The route gains around 150,000 feet of elevation with conditions ranging from unkept narrow single-track sections of the CDT, to smooth gravel and dirt roads, to death mud, and to long stretches of pavement. And somehow I got it in my mind that it would be a “fun” thing to do. 

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Adrian’s Story

Para leer esta historia en Española, haga click aqui

Hi there. This is Stephen here with an intro to this piece. Back in Covid times, 2021, the bike space was as crazy as it will ever be. Some of the business was good, and a lot of it was, honestly, bad. One thing that cannot be argued, the stress and anxiety of it all left everything a blur. I can’t remember a lot of what happened in those 2-3 years. This story, I had forgotten about this one mostly. I remember there was this guy, Adrian, and he ordered a bike. I was running operations and didn’t talk to most customers at that point, Isaac was customer service and sales, so he did. Despite the chaos during his time at working here, Isaac did a great job taking care of people, and he built out a great bike spec for Adrian. Adrian had ordered this bike, and then because of the trickle down effects of Covid, it turned out that his funds for buying the bike had to be funneled on just staying afloat during that difficult era. So, Adrian got in touch to cancel the order. Once a build is underway, we do charge a restocking fee to cancel it, because we have to order all those parts on a per-bike basis. In Adrian’s case, it seemed like a good idea to waive that fee. But then Isaac said “what if we just give him the bike?”. I really don’t remember much from that moment, but in that moment I think it was strangely obvious to us that the right thing to do was to just give him the bike for free. So we did. Adrian was so awesome and grateful. He never hinted at getting the bike for free, and wasn’t trying to guilt us into giving him a bike. I think all of us, Adrian, Isaac, and myself were all equally surprised this whole thing was happening. We finished the build, we boxed it up, we shipped it, and then, more or less, the bike disappeared.

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Doble Medalla de bronce en el CNBC

El Campeonato Nacional de Bici-mensajería de Colombia (CNBC) es un evento anual de ciclismo urbano que reúne a los mejores mensajeros en bicicleta y ciclistas del país y el continente. Los participantes compiten en una variedad de eventos que ponen a prueba las habilidades, la resistencia y la determinación de los ciclistas. El punto crucial del evento es la Main-Race, donde se simula la rutina diaria de un mensajero en bicicleta en carreras de clasificación y final durante dos días en un área delimitada por un circuito abierto al público. 

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Iceland by Skis. Iceland By Bike.

Cody Cirillo and Matthew Tufts approached us early this year with an inspiring pitch: They wanted to spend a couple of human-powered months riding the outer perimeter of Iceland on Rodeo Labs bikes, all the while carrying their skis, and peeling off to notch seemingly innumerable ski descents along the way. We get plenty of project pitches at Rodeo, but this one stood out because it combined a world that we know a lot about with a world that we know very little about, all in a land that we very much want to explore ourselves someday.

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