Outside Magazine. India, RadioShack and New Frontiers

The August 2011 issue of Outside Magazine back cover "Parting Shot" is an image I made of Team RadioShack during their warm-up ride for the Tour de Nasik cyclothon in India.  I'm fascinated by pro-cycling's recent push to expand into new global frontiers and am equally glad that mainstream, non-cycling magazines are willing to publish pictures of the trend.  

Outside Magazine Pacific Coast Cycling Spread

It's nice to see mainstream mags. (i.e., beyond-niche cycling publications) pimpin' travel bike trips and destinations to their readers--so kudos to Outside for featuring this image.

This shot was made two years ago with fellow vagabundos gMack, Hall-Pass Ben, and Sir Scotty M. in the Quinault rainforest, an alternative route option for the popular Pacific Coast Cycling Trail that loops around Olympic National Park and/or the Hood Canal to Astoria, Oregon.  We landed an assignment to test cycling-specific rain gear and decided that it would be appropriate to do the testing in the rainiest place in the Lower 48 at the rainiest time of year.  As luck would have it, nary a rain drop glazed the tarmac during our 4-day shoot and I had to get creative to make it look wet when it was actually sunny and uncharacteristically super-fab November weather.

Regarding the swag test results...for me, bike travel ain't about the gear, it's about traveling differently and experiencing landscapes and people in a more intimate way than possible with a car or plane...but if you just have to know, the article on the topic by Sir Scotty M. is here.

Outside Magazine - August Parting Shot Backstory

Outside Magazine is featuring a photo from my "Portraits of a Indian Bike Company" collection as their back cover "Parting Shot" in the August 2010 issue. The odd thing about this image is that I never consciously knew that I made it until several days after the fact. You see, just minutes after making the photo, I was drugged (long story) with a triple dose of some sort of hallucinogenic. I spent the next 30 hours on a wild, vivid, and sometimes scary trip under the watchful eye of my guest house owner. A recurring theme during my hallucinations (amongst many other things) were flying monkeys who took pleasure in burning me with motorcycle exhaust pipes--so I simply assumed that the monkey running through air in this photo was only part of my imagination. But a week after recovering from my cranial phantasmagoria, I flipped through my photo edit from that day and realized that this image was made prior to being drugged, that the monkey was entirely real, and finally remembered that I circled back to that location several times that week to try to get this cyclist with "monkey runner" picture.
So there he is on the back page of Outside magazine--a seemingly cute little monkey who was actually the sinister inspiration for an incredibly torturous and searing drug-induced head trip.