Queer Cyclist’s Great Redemption on the Huracan

Words, photos, and video by Hannah Griggs

It was five years ago this month that I packed up my car in Atlanta and drove the six hours to the Orlando airport to pick up my childhood friend Allegra, who’d flown in all the way from Denver to bikepack the Huracan 300. The air was hot when I greeted her at the curbside pickup, hotter than it should have been, even for central Florida. We drove back up Interstate 75, passing the billboards for Disney and the Villages and numerous strip clubs, to our hotel in Ocala, where we would rest before starting the route the following day. I had just finished PT for an IT band injury, and Allegra had never been bikepacking before, but we were excited and confident despite our lack of preparation.

Needless to say, our enthusiasm did not compensate for proper preparation and training: we scratched about 70 miles into the course after a fatal wrong turn in the Ocala National Forest, which resulted in a grueling hike-a-bike up a road more akin to a sand dune than a pathway. We ended the day with heat exhaustion and left the state of Florida, vowing we would never ride her swamps again.

That is, until the summer of 2025, when Allegra texted me and asked if I’d be willing to try the Huracan once more. It was the one that got away, we decided, a nagging goal of our long friendship that we needed to complete together, lest we live in shame the rest of our days. I, of course, immediately said yes.

This new foray into the Florida wilds, however, felt wholly opposite to our first. We’d spent months preparing and studying the route, its quirks, and resupply stops. We began at the Grand Depart rather than venturing on our own, which gave the whole experience a welcome, energy-boosting camaraderie. And it was cold this time, unseasonably so, as the entire eastern coast of the United States has experienced all winter. My hands froze each morning as I stuffed my wet tent in its stuff sack. When we first came in 2021, I had recently finished my doctoral exams, for which I had read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1873 memoir, Palmetto Leaves, an odd little book she wrote about Florida when she moved there after the Civil War. In it, Stowe writes:

“One great cause of disgust and provocation of tourists in Florida is the occurrence of these ‘cold snaps.’ It is really amusing to see how people accustomed to the tight freezes, the drifting snow wreaths, the stinging rain, hail, and snow, of the Northern winter, will take on when the thermometer goes down to 30 or 32, and a white frost is seen out of doors. They are perfectly outraged.”

And I felt every bit of that outrage when we woke up several mornings in a row to nearly freezing temperatures, well below the yearly average. But my anger didn’t last long, as the frosty mornings gave way to clear skies and mild temperatures when the sun was at its highest in the afternoon.

As I write this nary a month after we completed the course in a whopping 3 days, 10 hours, and 57 minutes (and I say whopping because it certainly felt like a whopping), I find myself longing to be out there again, to have nothing to do but pedal though the cacophony of singletrack and sandy roads lined with palms and palmettos and oak trees. I filmed much of the route with my GoPro, and I also brought a disposable camera, from which you can see the stills here. Though nothing can quite capture the feeling of this route in situ, I am so grateful to have these mementos to sustain me until next February, when I plan on riding the Huracán once again.

Watch Hannah’s entire series on her YouTube Channel.

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