[phone vibrating]
[wind blowing]
[dramatic music]
♪ ♪
- Out here, the first two hours of my day,
I don't have to worry about all the stress
and the hustle and bustle of the city.
I just wake up
[gas hissing]
and I'll go fix myself some breakfast,
and just pack up my gear,
and then wait and see how the day hold.
So I'm not like in a rush.
[uplifting music]
- BIKER 1: Hope, you gonna go. - BIKER 2: Yeah.
- BIKER 1: All right. - BIKER 2: Yeah.
[gravel crackles]
- Bike parking is absolutely the perfect speed
to experience nature,
because you're going slow enough
to where you can enjoy everything around you,
you can look up,
and look at the mountains and the vistas,
but you can look down right in front of your tire
and look at the rocks,
or you can look at the cacti,
and you know, little animals that are scurrying by.
You have the opportunity to like experience all of that.
[mellow music]
- So, I just found a fossil.
Um,
I was just biking along
right back there
and I looked down
and it was right to the left of my tire.
I like really love learning natural history of places.
So this is cool
cause like all of this used to be underwater.
So I get excited when I find stuff like this
cause it's like, you know,
relics of that different time period
when Big Bend looked a lot different than it does now.
[wind howling]
[mellow music]
♪ ♪
- We started off with the blue bonnets
were alongside the highway,
like we saw them before we were even entering
into Big Bend State Park.
And so it's really cool to start,
you know, off the highway,
just like where the blue bonnets did
and we see what they go through.
Like, we follow the river down
and we know where they land.
♪ ♪
- I mean, I can sit down and write about
the copper colored jagged rock
that meets the earth where it crumbles into the runoff
from Madrid falls.
And I mean,
that's been written
and you can over the top,
and nobody really wants to read that at this point.
I'm more interested in how the land affects the people
and the people that love it and what it means to them.
- On Monday, I fell 17 times.
[gravel crackles]
Ow.
And on Tuesday, I felt eight times.
- Oh.
[bicycle smacks ground]
- MAN: Woah!
- And on Wednesday, I fell six times.
Oh, I didn't know that it was there -- blood.
Then today, we got through and I've fallen once.
So, I'm pretty proud of myself.
And it was on gravel so it was a nice soft landing like feathers.
[mellow music]
- A year from now,
I think I definitely will remember
the friendships I've made here.
- It's just crazy like how much fun for this whole group is.
- MAN: Also this is a super hard.
[laughing]
- Third time's a charm.
- It was like here is the trail, here is Cody.
It was like zoom.
[indistinct chatter]
- Yes, the pain of the riding
and the exhaustion of the riding will go
and fade away into memory.
But the thing that'll stick the most is,
I think the people and the stories
and the friends you meet on the way.
[mellow music]
♪ ♪
- This morning, we were all the way over there
on the other side of that mountain, right there.
We've gone a little over 20 of the worst miles
that we've done the whole trip.
- Sick nasty!
- Sick nasty bro.
- But man, it was a lot of fun.
And this view right here is just,
this is the best one that I've had so far.
I'm tearing up right now.
This is just huge and like,
oh, this is awesome.
It's fantastic.
[guitar music]
♪ ♪
- When I look out into this,
that's when I kind of realize like,
this is what we've been given
and this is something that you have to go out and seek,
like you have to work for something like this.
You can't, you can't just walk out your front door
and see this.
[upbeat music]
♪ ♪
[wind blowing]