The Climb By Which All Others Will Be Judged

Whenever my son comes to Oaxaca, we’ll invariably head out on a two-wheeled adventure at some point during the visit. Often, it will take the form of a local, exploratory ramble, one that’s as much about spending time together as it is about biking.

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We’ll have grander ambitions at other times, craning our necks skyward towards the Sierra Norte, the mountain range that soars above the city, so often lost in swirls of mist and bromeliads. We both love to camp in the cool, wooded climes of the high country, where magueys, ferns, and wildflowers are our closest neighbours. In the past, I’ve hired a driver and their pickup truck to edit out the enormous climb required to get there, jumping into the cargo bed with our bikes and holding them tight around the hairpins that corkscrew ever upwards. With over 1,500 meters of elevation difference between the city and the upper reaches of the Sierra Norte, I figured we were better off spending our time hiking and riding its paths and trails than toiling away just to reach them before ending each trip with a blazing descent back down into the valley.

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Initially, we both assumed we’d repeat this successful formula for our end-of-year campout, except we’d visit Benito Juarez, a settlement named after Mexico’s first Indigenous president and one of the last of the mountainous Pueblo Mancomunados to reopen after the pandemic. Then, the conversation turned to the notion of taking the e-bike and shuttling Sage up with the elasticated assistance of our Tow Whee – aka our Magic Bungee. But, a few days later, I broached the idea of riding all the way there ourselves, unassisted. I suggested splitting the ascent and camping along the way, with a further two nights spent communing with the mountain spirits once we’d made it, before soaring victoriously back out of the mountains via a swooping, vista-filled descent. A fully self-supported, no-holds-barred mountain tour.

I felt we were ready for it. Our week prior had provided some base fitness. Whenever we’re together in Oaxaca, Sage and I use our bikes for transportation, often climbing into a network of dirt roads and foothills at the far end of town, where we walk the dog and race our remote control cars – hotly contested championships that include hauling out ramps for jumps, strapped to the dog trailer and packing old tyres to chicane through. This motivated us to ride our bikes each day and I’d seen Sage become a stronger and more confident cyclist with every outing.

Still, if climbing alone is the metric that measures a trip’s stature, this would be his biggest self-supported endeavour by far. It wasn’t just that there was significant elevation gain over the course of our four-day ride, it was that the majority of it came in one big multi-hour lump, lending a mental component that he hadn’t experienced before. Long climbs are hard enough at the best of times, let alone when they’re your first. Plus, the younger you are, the more the notion of time is open to interpretation – I remember this elongated world well as a child, especially the never-ending tree tunnel I walked through on my way home from school. Minutes and miles become open to flux, yet to be moulded into the measured reality of an adult’s mind.

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Yes, no matter how it was approached, this one was nothing less than a monster. From my door to Teotitlan del Valle, there were just a few hundred metres of elevation gain. But strike north of the town’s plaza – just a block away from where Sage had tucked into an ice cream to temper the afternoon heat – and a climb begins that can easily slip into the astral realm of the unending, no matter your age. Certainly, it’s not the kind of hill whose top you can point to and say: “Keep pedalling, there’s not much to go!” Rather, it’s a Zen State of Mind Ascent, where there’s almost no beginning and no end, just the climb itself.

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Such undertakings are hard enough for adults, let alone a child with no past experiences to lean upon. To make it more manageable, we’d already planned to camp at its midpoint. Then we deconstructed it further, breaking it down into increments of 150 metres in elevation gain – small enough to digest, yet sizeable enough that we felt tangible progress with every break. Our first 150 metres were soon down and we stopped for a snack and water; already Teotitlan had shrunk down to toy size below us. We climbed another 150 and entered the Bromeliad Zone, imagining the army of air plants and epiphytes now clinging to every branch of scrub oak were cheering us on. We were almost halfway there.

Distracted by conversation (Sage was sharing some of his favourite jokes and word plays), we were soon three quarters of the way done and ready for a longer break by the roadside; a pickup truck passed us with three mountain bikes hanging off the tailgate, and in the dust that it kicked up, I wondered if they saw Sage and his bicycle. Then there were 50 metres to go. Then 40, 30, 20, 10, until we were there, dropping down on a rocky trail to a clearing where I’d camped before. As the sun dipped below the horizon, I took charge of pitching the tent and prepping our gear so Sage could climb a tree and read his Kindle. Fussing over him as if he was an Olympic athlete prepping for the finals the next day, I rustled up a feel-good dinner – Mac and Cheese – which we rounded off with homemade choc chip banana bread, enjoyed indulgently from our sleeping bags.

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The following morning the ascent continued, as expected, except there was none of the small talk that had eased us into yesterday’s topographic debate. Instead, the road dived straight into the crux of the discussion, and it was a steep and protracted one. Again, we partitioned it up into segments, stopping to rest and chat in between. Sometimes we used the Magic Bungee for a stint, and sometimes Sage challenged himself to clean a particular steep section without any help. By now, his dextrous little fingers would dance across my phone’s mapping app, which allowed him to place points along the route, prophesizing the elevation gain that remained.

For further motivation, I’d strapped my speaker to his handlebars, and he was also working his way through a Spotify playlist he’d made for the trip. I smiled as his head bobbed from one side to the other with the music and he sang the words like an incantation of strength. At the compilation’s core were a number of stirring songs by Imagine Dragon, a band that I’ll admit to being unaware of before he introduced them to me. Fun fact: we’ve now listened to these same tracks so much that I once received a notification from Spotify, congratulating me on being in the top 98 percentile of all Imagine Dragon listeners. The band even sent me a video message from their studio, thanking me for being one of their number one fans!

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And then, all of a sudden (and yet not so suddenly), with Thunder playing for at least the third time, the end was in sight. Or at least, it was only a few tantalising curves away, and we could now talk about it excitedly, with the certainty of a ship that has finally sighted long-lost land. Despite the conflicted emotions that he may have felt at the foot of the climb, when nothing but climbing remained, Sage had made it, on two wheels, himself. His sense of excitement rubbed off on me and I may have even welled up a bit. As I stopped to take a celebratory photo beside the village’s placard, he lifted his fist into the air. “That was a real mountain!” He said this in reference to the big hills he’s tackled in the past, that he used to call mountains too. This time, there were no two ways about it.

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Technically, there was still a final bump to go through the village itself, which would lead us all the way up to almost 3,000 metres in elevation. To buoy his spirits for the last push, I told him about Miscellanea Wendy, a store where we could buy a bag of chips to fuel him up the final concrete switchback to the village basketball court, at which point the road finally levelled off and a comedor awaited us for our ‘second breakfast’: enfrijoladas for Sage and chilaquiles for me, washed down with a bowl of hot chocolate and a glass fresh orange juice. All the cooks clucked around us and we were served by a lady called Edith, who told us in English that she’d spent a number of years working in the US before returning to Benito Juarez to be with her family in the mountains again. Sage demolished his breakfast and Edith collected the empty plate approvingly. “Where’s Huesos?” asked someone I’d met at the centro ecoturistico a couple of weeks before. “No Huesos, I’m afraid. But I have my son with me instead, and he rode all the way up from the valley,” I beamed.

Later that morning, we continued a short distance to Cuajimaloyas, another of the Sierra Norte’s Pueblo Mancomunuados that run the same eco-tourism program – one that’s proved successful in helping to preserve the area’s natural resources. Cresting a ridge up at 3,200 metres – so dense in wildflowers, succulents, and agaves that they looked surreal – we followed a trail down to our campsite, set in a clearing that was shared with a small trout farm. It was overseen by family who ran the restaurant there, all of whom squeezed into their mototaxi and put-puttied home at the end of each day. In the late afternoon, we raced our radio control cars (I did mention I’d squeezed them into one of my panniers, didn’t I?), until the batteries ran out and forced a premature end to our championships. And at dusk, we built a twig fire, roasting our way through a bag of marshmallows as darkness fell.

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I’d planned a mellow day three, allowing us time to linger around camp for as long we wanted and to eat scrambled eggs, tortillas, and hot chocolate for breakfast once the mototaxi bounced into sight once more. Our bellies full and batteries charged, we resumed our RC car championship before chasing each other up to a rocky outcrop for giggles and views.

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To begin our journey homewards, we first needed to backtrack to Cuajimaloyas, which meant climbing out from our campsite along an alleyway of larger-than-life giant blue agaves – or at least, larger-than-Sage. Breaking up the climb, we stopped to chat to a man repairing a fenceline, whilst his magnificent bull watched us passively from the other side. Congratulating Sage on his ride, Tokyo, as he called himself for foreigners, told us he’d been a part of the Pueblo Mancomunados eco-tourism project for over 20 years and loved nothing more than meeting folks from different countries.

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Later, we stopped off for a resupply of coconut snacks – in the colours of the Mexican flag – and to buy a spikey succulent to bring home, a trophy of sorts that Sage nested in his stem bag like a little pet.

On that penultimate day, we also backtracked to Benito Juarez and rode up to its mirador – a stout climb by anyone’s definition. Sage pulled out my iPhone to study its credentials. “150 metres? Pfff. That’s nothing! A big tope,” he joked, referring to all the speedbumps found throughout Mexico, that he loves to launch off. It was as if his perception of climbs had been reset, in both what he was personally capable of, and what a bike could do too. As if This Was The Climb By Which All Others Would Be Judged.

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When we arrived, we made our way up the ladder of its rickety fire lookout, which afforded a sweeping panorama of the Mitla valley that lay far, far below, all the way to the very point we’d started our monster climb. Then, we dared cross a somewhat precarious metal swing bridge that was bolted between two towering and jagged bluffs. Back on terra firma, we talked about the nature of bike touring and what makes Sage’s ideal trip. “Time spent riding and time spent not riding. Some climbs and lots of some descents. Marshmallows. And some RC car racing!” Despite its undoubted challenges, I felt like we’d struck the right balance for us on this trip, and he agreed.

That night, I pitched our tent and Sage arranged our sleeping quarters, blowing up air mattresses and pillows and laying out our quilts like he was making his bed in the comfort of his home. Another twig fire meant more marshmellows were on the menu – we’d now eaten 32, by Sage’s count – before we huddled together for our evening entertainment, a documentary we’d downloaded on the Apollo 11 mission.

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And then, it was our last morning and only the long-awaited and much-anticipated descent remained – just an encounter with a friendly Bassett hound lay between us and the better part of an hour’s freewheeling. Preciosa belonged to Edith but was roaming the village in search of attention. She’d come to the right place, as dog-loving Sage kneaded her floppy coat and ears with delight. “It’s like she has the body of small dog, but in skin of a big dog!” as he explained it.

The plummet felt, in some ways, like the documentary we’d watched the night before. In our mind’s eye, we were re-entering the earth’s atmosphere. We may even have matched Apollo 11’s 25,000 miles per hour, or at least enough that our brake rotors would have been glowing if we’d dared looked down. As a parent, I did yell pointlessly into the wind on a few occasions (“Watch out for pea gravel!” or “Be careful a truck isn’t coming around the bend!”) But he was gone, and who was I to stop him from reaping the reward he’d worked so hard for for these last few days. As we descended out of the Sierra Norte, we stopped to peel off layers, allowing us the chance to rekindle memories of the climb, until we were down on the valley floor once again.

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From the outskirts of Teotitlan, I routed us onto a gently descending, bumpy dirt road and some trails rather than retracing our exact outward journey, to help keep us motivated for the final push back to Oaxaca. We converged in Tlacochahuaya, where we stopped for half a kilo of dog food, bought from the same store that had supplied our equally big bag of marshmallows. As a Befriender of Feral Animals, Sage requested we feed all the street dogs we saw on the ride home, and who was I to deny him such a noble wish. Between this and breaks for cold drinks, our victory lap home through the valley was drawn out and triumphant.

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Outside Tule, we paused one last time in the shade of a bougainvillea and stared up into the massive wall of the Sierra Norte that flanked us. It felt important to acknowledge the efforts of our last few days and the experience we’d shared, before we returned to the city and its distractions. “I can’t believe you rode all the way up to the very highest of those mountains, and back down again,” I said, as much to myself as to Sage. I still vividly remember my first Climb By Which Others Will Be Judged. I was fifteen years his senior at the time, and I wondered if this trip will be a formative time for him, too. Back in town, we stopped to express the glory of our achievements in ice cream form, and as hot and sweaty as we were, I made sure I didn’t hurry him through his three massive scoops that we ordered from our favourite paleteria. This was his moment.

We live in a goal-orientated society, and whilst I see the value in stoicism, it also feels important to be open to change, and be able to adjust one’s expectations without a sense of disappointment or disquiet; concentrating on what is achieved and not what isn’t. And yet still, there’s a special sense of satisfaction from the resolve of seeing a challenging plan through to the very end. It’s one that’s hard to match and is good reason for celebration.

After all, my brain knows that the ice cream is exactly the same, no matter what. But somehow, the taste is always sweeter after a ride well done.

Want to hear Sage’s motivational Spotify playlist? Here it is! I sometimes use it to channel my Inner Sage.

We accrued 2,500m metres in total over our ride, 1,500 metres of which were in the initial climb to Benito Juarez. We started at 1,500 metres and our highest point was 3,200 metres. For a map of our route, see here.

You can find out more about a longer bikepacking route in the area, and the Pueblo Mancomunados eco-tourism network, in the grid below.

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