I guess the idea of using a bicycle to assist in climbing a mountain first occurred to me back in 1976. Some active logging roads went in pretty close to peaks I wanted to climb in the Statlu area of southwestern British Columbia. The only problem was that a massive locked gate blocked travel beyond a certain point, at least to my old car. Hey, why not use a bike to travel the several miles beyond the gate to approach the peaks? One weekend, when the loggers were home watching football and drinking beer, I parked by the gate, lifted my bike over and rode 5 miles of the excellent road to get in close to my peak. It worked like a charm – I was in and out the same day.

Years passed, and 1987 found me living in Arizona. I had created a list of all of the mountain ranges in the state and set out to climb the highest point in each of them. The first ones I picked off were the closest to Phoenix, my home at the time. One day in early April, I decided to head in to climb the high point of the Maricopa Mountains. I had already done some research and discovered that I could head south into the desert from near the Estrella siding along the Southern Pacific Railroad. On a borrowed 10-speed bike, I covered about 5 miles, then ditched the bike and climbed southwest to the summit. As I sat on top, a couple of jets from Luke Air Force Base roared past, so close I could clearly see the pilots. I retraced my steps back to the bike, then rode out to my waiting pickup back near the tracks.

In October of the same year, I used my own mountain bike to travel some roads past a washout in the Roskruge Mountains just west of Tucson. It saved me a few miles of walking and proved useful once again.

I must have been warming to the idea of using my bike to help me get to climbs, because a month later I found myself standing at an obscure entrance to the Cabeza Prieta Wildlife Refuge. A sign said no civilian vehicles were allowed on the road beyond that point, and I knew that that meant bicycles as well. This was near Camerons Well. What the hell – it looked pretty quiet, so I took the bike out of my pickup and got ready to go. The miles flew by on the excellent road, and I soon found myself near what the map called The Adobe, an old ruin that must have been someone’s home back in the day. There were 3 old wells and a windmill nearby, all along the uppermost part of Daniels Arroyo. I rode another mile, then hid the bike in a wash. This was around 1,800 feet elevation, and the bike had saved me 4.5 miles of walking. I followed a long ridge to the southwest all the way to the summit. There, a register left by the Sierra Club on December 29th of 1982 appeared to be the first climber ascent, which included the names of friends Barbara Lilley and Gordon MacLeod. There was one more entry – a John Wahl of Duncan, OK had come in on February 2nd of 1987 from Temporal Pass to the north, quite an accomplishment. My return to the bike was straightforward, and an easy ride back to my truck capped off the day.

A scant 2 months later. mid-January of 1988, had me really scratching my head – how would I get to the high point of a remote range called the Bryan Mountains? This one would be a real adventure – no climbers had ever been in there, so there was no beta to be had from others. Some map-study showed I could sneak in the back door along a restricted road. I camped for the night at the edge of the Barry M. Goldwater Air Force Range where it met the northern edge of the Cabeza Prieta Refuge. Nobody but nobody ever went to that spot. Signs clearly indicated that no wheeled vehicles, including bikes, were allowed from that point on. A tired old road headed southwest between the Granite Mountains and the Sierra Pinta, and that would be my ticket in.

At first light, I hopped on my mountain bike and headed south. For the most part, it was decent going, but still there were plenty of spots where sand had drifted across the road and I had to get off and walk the bike. I made surprisingly good time, and 13.6 miles later I stashed my trusty steed. Another 6.5 miles on foot got me to the range high point and back out to the bike. Fortunately, the road was dead flat – as my old Dad would say, flatter than piss on a tin plate, rising only 107 feet in those 13.6 miles, so the return ride to my truck was pretty uneventful. A total of 27.2 miles ridden instead of walked – good deal!

I was feeling pretty good after that success in the Bryans, so I decided to push my biking luck even farther. It was still early in the day, so I drove west and then south to park along the road that runs north from Tule Well to Tacna. Near BM 917, another road, restricted of course, ran southeast to the Sierra Pinta. At first light on January 17th, I hopped on my bike and rode the 8 miles to the end of the road. The climb to Pinta BM went without incident. On the way back down, I stopped at Heart Tank, where I found a curious inscription incised deeply into the granite. It read “B.V. Tenori 1895”. Very cool, very mysterious. I waited out a dust storm, then returned to my truck and drove back out to the main road.

The next day, I climbed the high points of the Tule Mountains (the Arizona one) and the Sierra Arida. Easy enough. I then drove back to BM 917, where I had driven in to the Sierra Pinta. Back in 1988 when I visited, there was a road heading off to the northwest (not shown on any of today’s maps, but seen on the old 15′ map) which headed over to my next range. At the crack of dawn on January 19th, I hopped on the old mountain bike and headed in. It looked like this road hadn’t been driven in many years. Near Smoke Tree Wash, the road became vague, but once past it, things improved once again. After a full nine miles in, I reached a junction where a road headed south to Cabeza Prieta Tanks. My branch turned north up Surprise Canyon, and it became very hard to follow. Flooded washes had destroyed it in places. It finally ended at 11.0 miles, at what looked like an old prospector’s camp. That’s where I left the bike, and headed north up the canyon to climb the high point of the Cabeza Prieta Mountains. It all went well, and I returned to my bike and rode back out to my truck, My guess is that it would be difficult to follow that road at all these days, that the desert has taken it back.

Later the same year, on October 7th of 1988 to be exact, I decided to try another peak that seemed it could benefit by a bicycle approach. The Agua Dulce Mountains sat just north of the Mexican border in southwestern Arizona. It seemed a long way in to the high point, farther than I cared to walk anyway, so I thought using a bike would really help. By the time I got to the starting point where I would leave the Camino del Diablo, it was already mid-day. Big mistake – the forecast was for 100-degree heat that afternoon. A road headed south along the fence that separated Organ Pipe from the Cabeza Prieta – that looked like my ticket in. Away I went on my mountain bike – after a few miles, I headed west over to Jose Juan Tank, and then it was uphill all the way to the mountains. Ten miles on the bike, and I finally ditched it just north of Agua Dulce Pass. By the time I had negotiated ridges and gained the summit, I had climbed about 1,500 vertical feet, and the day felt hot. Climbers Barbara Lilley and Gordon MacLeod had been there 4 years earlier, the first to do so. After signing in to their register, I made my way back down to the bike and rode the 10 miles back to my truck in 100-degree heat. I should have known better than to have been out in that heat, and I paid for my foolishness that afternoon with a massive bout of leg cramps. Even so, the bike saved me 20 miles of walking along a road.

Now let me tell you the tale of the Mohon Mountains. The high point, Mohon Peak, was surrounded by a checkerboard of private and state land. I wrote to the owners of the ranch, asking permission to ride a bike in on their roads to reach the peak. It was some big absentee landowner back east, and they flatly refused. Well, that left me only one option, and that was to stealth it. The big day came. Some miles east of Wickiup, I found a road which turned north to the Wagon Bow Ranch. A locked gate was festooned with welcoming signs such as “Private Property” and “No Trespassing”. Yep, that’s the road I needed alright.

I moved the truck and parked it half a mile away, to appear less obvious, then spent a lot of time getting ready. I stuffed everything into an extended day pack and was all set to go. Next, I hauled my trusty mountain bike out of the back of my truck, checked it over thoroughly, then set out. There was no way I could do this without the bike, the distances were just too great. I rode back to the locked gate, looked both ways along Trout Creek Road to make sure nobody was coming, then lifted the bike over the gate and rode like hell. It was 2:30 P.M. and I was as nervous as a cat in a dog pound.

As I pedaled, I scanned my surroundings constantly, even looking behind me to see if anyone were following. A mile and a half in, I thought I saw someone at a corral, but may have been mistaken, as nobody give chase. Talk about paranoid! Just under the 4-mile mark, I crossed another fence into the Oro Ranch, owned by the JJJ Corp. Still no sign of anyone. The old dirt ranch roads I traveled went up hill and down dale, some of the hills being long, steep and rocky – poor fare indeed for a mountain bike, or at least for a rider in my shape. On the north side of Dividing Canyon, I had to push the bike up the mother of all hills for 1.8 miles.

This was beautiful country – wide expanses, long unobstructed views, with little brush and plenty of wildlife. On the ride in, I saw deer, javelina, coyotes, antelope and about a gazillion cattle, but thankfully no humans. At long last, I arrived at Goldwater Tank. It had taken me 2 hours 35 minutes to cover the 12.8 miles. Man, I hadn’t even started up the mountain yet, and I was feeling pretty tired. Looking around, I found a really good spot to hide my bike, at around 5,300′. The long west ridge was my route to the top – I did an overnight bivi along the way, reached the summit the next morning, returned to my bike and made good time on the way back out. The entire trip was done in just under 24 hours, and if I hadn’t used the bike to cover those 25.6 miles, it would have taken much longer.

Over the years, there were plenty of other climbs where I used the bike for short distances, often ten miles or less. Some of the most memorable and enjoyable were in the Sauceda Mountains, all of which involved stealthing into areas of the bombing range closed to the public. There’s nothing quite like riding along an old road out in the remote desert with nothing but quiet solitude around you, pedaling your way through miles of land where no-one is allowed to go.

In 2015, two of us rode bikes down to Eagle Tank in the Aguila Mountains, which was about 22 miles. We stashed the bikes and went on foot from there, climbing every peak in the range over a period of several days. All of it was strictly off-limits, of course, in a closed area of the bombing range. We repeated the 22-mile ride to get back out to our waiting vehicles on New Year’s Eve. That was an amazing trip, very satisfying on every level.

What could we do next? Was there a mountain range that was so off-limits, so crawling with military activity, that we’d be like a couple of adrenaline junkies every day we were out there, dodging soldiers, bombs, lasers and bullets? Actually, there was one that ticked off all the boxes. An obscure range that sat ignored by climbers for any number of reasons. It was remote, hard to reach, had no water supplies and was bristling with military activity. Arizona’s version of Area 51, it was the Crater Range. We spent a lot of time planning for this one.

In late November of 2016, we used bikes to head in for 3 days to nibble away at a few peaks in the eastern edge of the range. These were in the hot zone where no civilians were ever allowed to go. This was kind of a dry run for the major climbing to be done a bit later in the main part of the range. We used the bikes to cover 34 miles and get us in close to 3 nice peaks, and it worked out well.

One month later, on Christmas day, we made our move. It was a 23-mile ride in on bikes to get to a hidden spot deep inside the hot zone in the remote desert. There, we set ourselves up for a week of climbing. We’d use the bikes every day to get to our peaks. In fact, they were scattered over such a wide area that without the bikes we couldn’t possibly get to them all in the week we had allotted. We’d make use of a network of well-maintained roads used by the Air Force on a daily basis. Our main concern was to avoid all of the military activity. Once we were spotted but got away by melting into the desert. On 3 other days we saw military but they didn’t see us. The Border Patrol did track us down once, but when they learned that we were just climbers out there breaking the law and having fun, they wished us well and left us to our own devices. They weren’t there to enforce the military’s rules, they plainly told us. The trip was a huge success. We used the bikes on 7 consecutive days, riding for 87 miles to get us to 14 peaks. Probably the best stealth climbing ever done in Arizona, made even more interesting by the way we used bicycles.

In retrospect, the bicycle served me well a number of times over the years, allowing me to get in close to climbs that I otherwise may not have completed. Some of the rides were grueling, others were easy. It was a good experiment.