Slow Baja - Riding The Baja Divide With Cyclist Herb Bool

Episode Date: February 26, 2021

Today’s podcast guest is life-long cyclist Herb Bool. In 2018, at 55 years old, Bool rode the 1,700 mile Baja Divide in 35 days. Conceived by ultra-endurance bicycle racer Lael Wilcox and Nicholas Carman, the Baja Divide is: “A rugged 1,700-mile off-pavement bikepacking route down the Baja California peninsula, from San Diego to San José del Cabo. This route connects the Pacific Ocean and the Sea of Cortez, historic Spanish mission sites rich with shade and water, remote ranchos and fishing villages, bustling highway towns, and every major mountain range in Baja California on miles and miles of beautiful backcountry desert tracks.” Bool met up with a group of a dozen riders massed to make the trek on New Year’s Eve on the San Diego waterfront. They rode East and spent the first night together camped at a ranch just North of the Border as a group. They crossed into Tecate the next day and stuck together until they cleared the border town. As the group sorted themselves out, Bool settled in with a fast trio to ride the rest of the route. “We were on our bikes when the sun came up every day, and we would ride pretty much until the sun was starting to sink. It was an all-day ride every day.” The group averaged 55 miles a day for just over a month. Enjoy this warm recollection of 35 days in the saddle, pumping out 1700 miles on the Baja Divide -with the affable Herb Bool. Follow Herb Bool on Instagram Follow Herb Bool on Facebook Learn more about the Baja Divide 

Hey, this is Michael Emery. Thanks for tuning into the Slow Baja. This podcast is powered by Tequila Fortaleza, handmade in small batches, and hands down, my favorite tequila. Hey, do you have a four-wheel drive? Did you always want to see Baja racing up close and personal? You need to join Slow Baja in the Nora Mexican-1000,

April 23rd through 30th. The Safari class is your way to get your street legal four-wheel drive vehicle up close and into the action. You've got to check out the safari class at nora.com. That's www. n-O-R-R-A.com. Hey, I'm delighted to be here in sunny Santa Fe, California today with Herb Boole on the Slow Baja podcast, and we are in Herb's backyard, and you'll hear some birds chirping and whatnot. We're sitting apart from each other wearing masks. So I apologize if it gets a little muffled, but I'm delighted to talk to Herb.

He rode the Baja Divide in 2018, and you can see his write-up about it, very extensive write-up and a lot of great photographs on the Baja Divide Facebook page, which is a closed group, but they let me in, so they'll probably let you in. And Herb, thanks for having me over. Let's jump right into it. Yeah. Tell us about your love of cycling. Yeah, people always ask me, like, you know,

You know, how long have you been riding? And I just, I kind of never really stopped riding as a kid. I don't know. I started riding probably, you know, when most kids start, you know, when they're four or five years old. And had a paper route, got on my bike, and, you know, found that a bike was just more than a recreational tool. I found out I could, you know, earn some money, having a paper route. And then I got into the BMX scene as a kid and rode a little BMX. When I was, I think, an early teen, I got a Schwinn Continental, kind of more of a traditional road bike and understood that there was a different level of speed you can get on a bike like that and a different rhythm than a BMX bike could provide.

I just really gravitated to it. Something about the ability to interact with your surroundings and the people and the pace being slower than a motorcycle, which enables you to really engage with the terrain and the environment. So that led to some bicycle tours. I've been around the bike for a long time. I worked for back roads, bicycle touring company as a guide. You know, I've worked as a messenger in San Francisco. I've done a lot of racing, bike packing.

So I really engage with a lot of different aspects of it. And it's just been part of the fabric of my life. And it's really the community, the ability to be outside and the ability to share, have a shared experience has just been really something that's been very important to me. Can we jump into the craziness? You're, I think we talked about it earlier. You're a couple years older than I am, I think you said. Sure, I'm 58.

I'm assuming you were in the bike messengers scene in the 80s in San Francisco. Yes, yeah, yeah. Can you just talk about that kind of nuttiness of that scene and that subculture and what it was all about? because it was a scene. I moved back to the city in 88, and the bike messenger scene was hardcore. They drank and they had places. They took the plunge in the bay every year.

I mean, it was an interesting spot. So I was, I did it full time during the summertime. I was a naturalist working out in the Headlands for the Headlands Institute. And so we worked with the school year. And so I had summers off. So in the summertime, two summers, I, I, worked as a messenger for two and a half months or so. And it was, it was, yeah, you're, you're right. It was, it was, it was quite a scene. And it was, you know, it's just this sort of collaboration

between sort of, sort of punk rock and cycling and heavy metal music and, of, you know, drugs and drinking culture. And, but, but because, because there were bikes involved, there was There was a whole range of messengers. There were some messengers that wore spandex, and they were fast as hell. And there were other messengers that, you know, they didn't do a lot of, they didn't do a lot of deliveries. They were kind of maybe hanging out on the wall next to Sharper Image. There was a place where the tribe would gather. And I was probably more on the side where I was riding all the time.

I mean, I wouldn't even take lunches. I would just, I had so much fun, you know, just being a part of that culture. I was living in Oakland at the time, and we would take a, we'd take a van that had a trailer that could probably, I think, hold like 12 or 15 bikes, and I'd take it over there at like 6 a.m. in the morning and ride all day, and then come home, you know, come home four or five. and, you know, but there were, there were just a kind of a big warehouse party scene that would go on, you know, pretty much four or five nights a week. A lot of rent parties where, you know, they'd be coming up towards the end of the month and, you know, they'd charge four or five bucks to get in and they'd pay for their rent for quite a large warehouse. And there would be ramps set up in the warehouse where people, you know, be living and cooking on Coleman stoves.

and, you know, there'd be five or six people, like, per room. But it was an interesting time to be in that community. Well, before we lose the whole Baja audience, change gears here and say, you grew up in the desert. We talked about that before I rolled the tape here. And you must have had an affinity for riding in some deserty and hot weather, although you're a Northern California guy now. How did you decide that you're going to ride the Baja divide?

Yeah, well, I think I started following Lale Wilcox. You know, Lail Wilcox and Nicholas Carmen, I think, developed the Baja divide over about two or three years from probably 2016, 17, maybe 15, 16 and 17. Can you give us maybe one minute on Lail and who she is? Because she's somebody impressive. Leo Wilcox is the preeminent endurance racer. And I don't want to put her as like the female racer because she competes with anybody and everybody. And she is just a real phenom on the bike. And she, you know, when I first learned of her, I think I was reading, about her her self-supported race across America. And it starts in Oregon and it finishes up, you know, of course, on the East Coast.

And she ended up catching the leader, who was a gentleman from somewhere in Northern Europe. up and I think they were probably about, oh, I'd say, you know, like 24, 36 hours from finishing the race. And he was sort of bargaining with her, like, hey, we've been chasing each other for this whole trip. What do you say, the two of us finished together? And I think she just shifted down a couple gears and ended up just dropping them and just crushed it and set the record in this sort of self-supported race across America. I'm just like, well, I need to know more about this person. I found out she was working with her boyfriend at the time, Nicholas Carmen, and developing this Baja Divide route.

So I'd been always fascinated with bike touring and off-road touring. So I'm just like, yeah, I'm going to go ahead and do that. So, you know, January 2nd is, I think that's the group start time when they've done that. the past and I think I think the first the first group start was 2016 and it's just like the home depot there's some people hanging around looking for something to start I mean right you can you can be in the right place in San Diego and just jump into this tour on January 2nd excuse my ignorance but that's that's an interesting visual to be yeah well I don't think there were that many people in 16 but in 2017 I think there was something like 80 or 90 people that ended up

ended up sort of starting this this route together you know it's a it's a it's a very long route it's it's 1700 miles of sort of dirt track through through through through Baja and you know 95% of it yes on dirt there's so there's very little bit that's that traverses you know Mexican one which is essentially the the only sort of paved portion of of the highway that goes from the northern end of Baja down to Cabo San Lucas. And, you know, the route officially starts in San Diego. It basically goes down through the center of the spine and the north and then hits the Pacific coast, goes over the spine, over to the Sea of Cortez,

back over to the Pacific, back over to the Sea of Cortez, comes down to La Paz, and then makes the Lepaas, and then makes a loop through Cabo Palmo, Cabo San Lucas, and then comes back up to La Paz, goes through Toto Santos and then back up to La Paz. So 1,700 miles, I'm like, I got to do that. And so I kind of reworked my schedule and got about five weeks off and made my way down to San Diego and spent New Year's Eve there.

2018 and started the ride the next day. And obviously in your regular life, you've got a relationship with riding. You're riding multiple times a week, if not every day anyways, correct? Yes. So you were in somewhat, you were ready. I was ready. I was, you know, I wouldn't say I trained for it, but that's what I was getting to. Yeah, I mean, I, I ride it. I ride a good deal. This, during the pandemic, I ended up riding, you know, 12,500 miles this year. So that's a lot, that's a lot of miles for me. And normally I probably maybe ride like 10,000 miles or so, but, you know, this was a particularly good year. And 2018, I probably wasn't riding quite that much, but I was in good shape. I had contracted unbeknownst to me some bronchitis.

just right around, right around New Year's Eve. So I began the trip and I wasn't really feeling well. And we had, so went down to the harbor in San Diego where the ride starts. And there were 12 of us. There were 11 men and a woman. And we all took off and ended up spending the night at this little. little ranch just on the American side about probably 45 minutes from Takate. And all 12 of us spent the night together.

We all sort of like talk to each other and we're like, hey, let's ride down and at least make it outside of Takate. And right now, Takate is sort of a, it's a little bit of a rough town. And the new notes for the last couple years have actually asked riders to stay on the main road through Takate and don't get off road because it gets you through some neighborhoods so they just want to get you through Takate kind of quickly and it was a little suspect when we did it too so we all say hey let's all stay together so we all crossed the border together and then and then then headed off and spent the spent you know that that afternoon crossing

the border and once we crossed the border there were there were two Canadian kids 20 20 23 and 24 and a gentleman from Colorado who had just come in, I think, second place in the Colorado trail race, which is like a 400-mile, really, really like intense single-track bike-packing race. So I did my best to stay with them, and fortunately I was able to grab their wheels, but I was pretty sick and ended up, you know, being sick for the first, like, like four or five days. But I really, really had to turn myself inside out to stay with these guys. And I remembered in my kit, I had had a Z-Pack, which is like a, you know, like an antibiotic that's good for sort of, you know, if you get sort of. Zithromycin or something.

Is this from myosin? And I didn't know it was really good for respiratory stuff. I ended up reading about it and it was I popped it and I immediately started feeling better. And so, you know, getting back to like being in shape, it was really difficult to ride with that bronchitis for a few days. But once I got better, I was able to keep up with these guys. We ended up riding the entire route together, the four of us. And it was really an unexpected thing. I didn't know I was going to end up riding with people.

I was kind of prepared to go on my own and do it independently. I wasn't planning on riding with people. And we just found out that we had very similar fitness and similar riding goals as far as distance. And that was probably one of the more special things about riding the Baja divide was the shared experience, which was totally caught me off guard. I didn't think that was going to be part of it. So interesting to me, again, I'm completely ignorant about this. Interesting to me that you would have said, hey, I'll do that alone.

It's the hardest thing in finding somebody to do these adventures is getting that person who can take the time that, you know, you need to and get invested and say, yeah, I'm going to do it with you. Good, bad, or otherwise. And then you were prepared to do it yourself and found a group and then the group whittled down to the four that, you know, were sort of on the same pace. And I think there's a lot of similarities in the car world. You know, when we drove the Baja XL in 2019, driving a 50-year-old land cruiser, you kind of find a little slower pace than some of the other people and more modern things. And we ended up hooking up with another group of guys in a similarly vintage vehicle going at the similar pace who also similarly liked tequila. And, you know, it was good fun for the week.

Right. So it's nice you found people at your own pace or you had to push yourself to keep a, their pace, I guess, is the point here. Well, you know, I, I learned this lesson very early on. And, you know, I was, when I was in high school, I was, I was really, really into skiing. It kind of, I spent, I spent all my time in the winter, you know, driving, I have to go ski. And so as soon as I got out of school, as soon as I graduated from high school, it's like, you know, I want to, I want to go, I want to go and spend this time skiing. So you have to go to the southern hemisphere. So it's either, it's going to go to Argentina, to Barilo.

and ski down there. I was going to go to New Zealand. I'm like, oh, New Zealand. I don't need to know the language. So, you know, I couldn't like, who's going to go to New Zealand with me right after they graduate from high school? So I ended up going there alone. And I realized that, that, you know, you were very approachable as a single traveler or somebody

who's an individual. And individuals who are moving through. the environment tend to attract other people that are curious about what you're doing, whether you're hiking or you're skiing or your backpacking or you're cycling. And it's a wonderful way in which just kind of opens up a lot of doors for you. And it's worked out in a lot of my cycling because it's really difficult to find people who A can take the time, who have the motivation who have the equipment and the desire to do some cycling adventures. And so, you know, taking off on your own is, you know, it's a very powerful thing to be able to do

because it allows you to have control over your adventures rather than waiting for, you know, somebody who may or may not be able to come with you. So it's something I learned early on. And It's allowed me to do really what I want to do. And then hopefully, you know, drag other people along with me once I get out there. So let's hop back on the trail. You're on your bike. You've kicked the bronchitis. You're covering how many miles a day typically?

Yeah, so it ended up being about 55 miles a day for the whole route. So we, the entire. route took took us 35 days and we had three rest days so that's 31 days of bike travel and those 31 days we we average about 55 miles a day and that's pretty much an all-day experience so as I said that the the four of us we really we were really had a very similar mindset so we were on our bikes pretty much right as the sun that's coming up every day. Nobody's setting alarm, but, you know, when you're camping and you're camping in the desert, things are quiet. The air is still. You can hear movements. So somebody would rustle,

it would be dark. And, you know, I think I was the only one that really had a stove. Everybody else was going real ultra light. And I had a, I had a little white box. white gas, not white gas. I mean, it can burn denatured alcohol. So it was just no moving parts. So I would fire that up, make a little coffee, and we'd be on the road. And we would ride pretty much until until the sun was starting to sink. We'd kick back for lunch for a couple hours. And we'd take a break in the morning early, and we'd take a break in the afternoon just for just for a little while in the shade. But it was a, that's pretty much, you know, for carrying the gear that we were carrying and, and not looking at it as a race situation, none of us were really trying to set any,

any sort of, you know, speed goals or anything like that because we were carrying a lot of gear. But yeah, it was a, it was an all-day ride every day. And you must have seen some very remote and beautiful locations in camp in them. Tell us a few of those highlights. Yeah. You know, the middle section of the Baja divide, which is from Nuevo, Odessa, down through Katavina, which is sort of kind of on the Sea of Cortez side. And then it traverses all the way over the Pacific coast to a place called Seven Sisters,

which is a pretty famous surfing spot but it's it's also very remote so so from Catavina to seven sisters and then down I'm trying to think of the name of the town it's the end of the end of seven sisters but it's about a hundred and twenty mile stretch that that I think there's only only one spot you can get water in that and spot and there's no food supply. So, you know, that, that that route in particular has a lot of beautiful Sonoran desert and and just these these cactus that look very similar to sorrows. And they are large armed, just beautiful succulents throughout the trail. And in the wintertime, the desert is really green.

through there and flowering and you come over you come over the sort of mountain range the coastal mountain range and then you see what what is the seven sisters which are which are you know these large wind-swept beaches that are really really remote with you know these waves that are just curling and breaking for for hundreds of yards and it's pretty pretty dramatic scenery Don't tell anybody. Pretty dramatic scenery. And yeah, it's just just gorgeous to be out there. And, you know, to camp out, we camped out probably, you know, out of the, out of the 35 days we were gone.

You know, 29 of those days, I think we slept outside. And it's just, it's another world down there in Baja when you get away from any of the urban, suburban lights and the night sky is just phenomenal. So pretty much anywhere along the route is dramatic in the evening with the stars. And so practicalities, you were making a little coffee in the morning. What was your fuel? How did you, how did you keep your body going for that long of a ride and that hard of a ride? Yeah. Well, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of, there's not a lot of diversity in the food that you're able to access resupplying. So you can get you can get bean packets, refried bean packets that are already

already cooked and they're like little little foil packets and tortillas and cheese and tomatoes. You can also get you know oats where you can make oatmeal for breakfast and And some cereals, biscuits, crackers, chips. It's fairly limited, which makes me think about Leo Wilcox because I kind of have her in the back of my mind as I bike to her a lot. And I tell you, that lady can live off, you know, slim jims and slurpees. You know, it's just really, you know, people, particularly, pretty. particularly if you're into bike pack racing or, you know, you eat on your bike and you need to be able to eat out of a gas station or convenience mark.

It's not glamorous. You know, and Mexican food is just a different combinations of things that are made with corn and beans and rice. So, you know, we did our best to mix it up, but we, we only, we only, we only, we only, we, we only, had stuff to eat and I always had a I always had a few a few pro bars tucked away under my my gear in case I in case I needed needed some extra fuel I brought to oh I think I brought like I don't know 10 10 of those bars or so and actually started off with a couple of freeze dried meals that that I held on too longer than I thought I would which is kind of a nice treat to sort of pull out some you know macaroni and cheese or some chili beef chili

It was kind of nice to have those as a treat. I'm assuming you lost some weight on that ride. You know, I didn't lose too much. I think we, you know, it was really hot in the middle and southern section. Up north, you're up kind of high. And, you know, it can get quite cold. But we drank a lot of tecate after our long hot rides. You know, because you're constantly passing through little villages.

I would say probably at least every day and a half. So, you know, you don't have to carry all that much food with you. And we always had pretty good access to it. You know, we can't wait to drive our old land cruiser down to Baja, and when we go, we go with Baja Bound Insurance. Their website's fast and easy to use, Baja Bound Insurance, serving Mexico travelers since 1994. Hey, we're back on the Slow Baja podcast.

I'm in sunny Santerfell, California on a sunny winter's day with Herb Boole and we're talking about riding the Baja divide and Herb's talking through the practicalities of resupplying and keeping enough food into ride 50 plus miles of off-road track a day. So take it up. Herb, your seven sisters and you're talking about the diversity of the beans, the rice, and the lack of diversity, I guess I would say. Did you have opportunities to stop for tacos and such like that? Was there a better midday meal than your start or your finish?

Well, whenever we'd come into town, we'd always find a talkeria. And, you know, the, you know, Mexican food is basically, you know, really comfort food. I mean, it's hot, it's savory. They cook it up on a griddle. they season their beef well so we would always grab grab some tacos you know I was looking at something the other day you know thinking about thinking about doing this interview I looked at a one of my Instagram posts and it's like started off with three carneasado tacos had two octopus tacos and then finish it up with four fish tacos just to round it out you know so so

so when you're talking about losing weight I mean maybe maybe it's certain certain you know like I lost weight for 10 hours but then I you know I gained all that that weight right back so and then you know something else you mentioned about you know just what we were eating we would often get a bunch of food to go so one of the things I carried was a you know a Tupperware container which I thought was a was a really good item to have because you know a lot of this food's greasy so you can stuff that with uh you know several burritos or tacos, seal that type of wear up, put it inside your frame bag, and then, you know, you have a couple meals right there. So that was, that was really, I think, a key thing that I didn't really

forecast I would be doing that. But once you realized like, oh, this food actually keeps pretty well, and, you know, if you're eating it within, within, you know, 15, 20 hours, it's not necessarily going to go bad, particularly if it's, you know, doesn't have meat. in it and stuff. So food was good. You know, I had a chance to talk with Professor Paul Ganster, who rode much 600 miles on the El Camino Real in 1967 by Mule. And he was talking about the Vicaros that guided them would just have slabs of fresh meat, obviously with no refrigeration. And he said, the meat just got tenderer and tenderer and tenderer. And he said, you know, by about, you know, week into it is almost like a super supermarket cut of meat, not the hard, hard, tough piece it started

out as. Well, we would pull into some of these. 15, 20 hours is probably no problem for a cooked burrito or cassidia. They dry their meat. Like the machaca meat is, you know, cuts of sirloin, and, you know, they would just make these cuts of sirloin, and then they would hang it on clotheslines. And that's how they would, they'd dry the meat. So it cures it cures pretty pretty nicely.

It's so, it's so, the air is so dry, it's not humid there that it doesn't really spoil so much. So you had warm beer, started off cold, and then you had no capacity to keep it cold, right? You don't have a little coolers. Well, we would, you know, all of us, all of us like to have a little nightcap. So I think we all had a flask of some sort or another. Sometimes you just have a little bottle of something and you could buy these. these little drink packets. And if you get a lime drink packet and fresh limes, you could get them all over the place.

So we always had fresh limes. We would always, you know, sit around the fire at night. We'd have a little, a little margarita, so to speak, you know. I'm smiling underneath my mask here. I don't know if you can see it in my eyes. I love it, a little camp margarita made on the trail. I was the only one really that had a stove. And I had a lot of equipment.

I probably would have maybe, maybe, you know, curtailed, bring in a couple things, but not much of the stuff. But the other three guys I was with, they were traveling super light. So they cooked over an open fire mostly. You can, you know, so many different ways that you can do it. But in general, we'd have a nice fire and get some hot rocks. And then you just cook right on the hot rock. And it's a great way to, you know, you put a tortilla down. there and melt a little cheese on it and then you put lots of different

ingredients that we would have available so that was that was often the dinner that we had and it's it's always such a wonderful way to to end the day is sitting around a fire I mean it's it's the best thing to stare into and just just think about think about the what you saw during the day the experiences you had and you know as I said a to the gentleman for for from Canada, another gentleman from Colorado. We all had, we had really great stories about childhood and cycling, and it was a good way to end the day.

And when it gets dark there, it gets dark. Oh, yeah. So you're probably not staying up a long time after that happens, right? No, you know, when you're traveling, when you're traveling in the wild like that, you know, you tend to, tend to wake up right before sunrise and tend to go to bed shortly after sunrise. I mean, never had any trouble falling asleep. I had a full-size air mattress that never popped. It stayed inflated every time I blew it up.

And it was very comfortable. I even brought a little pillow, little air mattress pillow. I really wanted to have my sleeping system dialed in. I even brought a freestanding solo tent that really gave me a certain little. level of comfort. There were a lot of crawling things out there, snakes and spiders and, you know, there are coyotes all the time. We were never really too nervous about coyotes, but they would come into our camp every night, and they would yelp and they would catch, you know, they'd catch a rabbit

or something, and they would just scream for, you know, three or four minutes, let all the other coyotes know that there was a catch. And it was just nice being sort of, um, it was just nice being sort of, in my tent sometimes and just not have to think about sort of like. Yeah, in your tent and out like a light. So were the other riders going just under the stars? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The two Canadian guys had a tent, but I didn't use, I used my tent probably 50% of the time, and they probably used their tent maybe 25% of the time.

We had only a couple, only a couple days where we had much moisture. And, you know, with the type of substrate, the dirt in Baja, it's, when you get water on it, the top layers soaks it, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's soaked it in immediately just like a sponge. And if it's soft, it'll, it'll peel up like a carpet on your tire. And you, you'll, you'll, you'll ride like 15 or 20 feet and you'll literally have like a, a inch, layer of this like carpet mud on your tires and it immediately it immediately chokes up your your your your your your um your stuts or your um or your stanchions on your forks and makes it pretty pretty much you can't even push your bike um and luckily we only had a we only had a couple times we had to deal with that but uh so we didn't really set our tents up very much uh generally slept out under the stars but occasionally it was really nice to have a tent and just kind of kind of feel that little shelter and a little safe space.

Right. For the bike nerds out there, Herb's done a magnificent thorough write-up about all of his gear that he took and all that. But we're going to go through it. It's all on the Baja Divide page on Facebook, and as I said, they let me in, so I'm sure if you're not a member of that site already,

you can appeal and they'll let you in. But Herb, take us through your gear quickly. What did you bring, and what would you've not brought or left, home and what would you take if you're going to ever do this again? Right. Well, I think probably one of my most valuable piece of gear looking at my clothing. It's probably just a puffy jacket and wore my puffy jacket every night.

You know, the deserts, deserts, they cool off very quickly and they heat up very quickly. So, you know, we'd be worm as heck during the day, but the sun would drop and it was really pretty cold, particularly in the northern section. So, you know, having a puffy jacket was awesome. You know, I've ridden clipless shoes for 20 years or so, however long they've been out, I kind of immediately adopted them. And I know that probably most people in Baja that are doing the Baja divide or wearing flat shoes. There's definitely times when the sand is really, really deep.

or there's you know the only only real paved sections of a lot of these desert trails are actually the steep uphills so it's kind of funny it's like you know you're riding through all these trails and then you know the trail goes over over kind of a steep rise and it will be paved and I think that's just to allow vehicles and you know the ability to sort of navigate these steeper hills so some of those are steep enough that that you have to walk even if you're super strong. It's just they're just that steep. So I knew there would be some walking, but I was very, very comfortable and never regretted wearing sort of, you know, clippless shoes. I was the, I was the only one. The other other three guys all had had flat pedals. And, you know, just a couple

pair of cycling shorts, cycling vest, rain jacket, you know, that was the, the clothing was pretty, pretty basic. So I would I would wear I just had an external pair of shorts, jorts if you will, that I wore over my over my bib shorts. That just kept them clean. It allowed me to sort of you know, if you're cooking and doing all sorts of stuff, your shorts are going to get really dirty. So it was nice to have that sort of external barrier against the two pair of cycling bibs that I had. I just rotated them. I forgot to bring some shammie. I picked it up at a, at this single, single bike shop down there, the Foss bike shop,

which ended up being a godsend for me. I'll tell you that story in a little bit. But so the bags I used, I used a porcelain rocket, rocket design seat bag, which has a metal, a metal frame that really keeps it from moving around. and that's basically where I kept all my clothes. So all my clothes, my outerwear, everything, that fit under my seat. And then I had a handlebar bag. And in that handlebar bag, I was able to fit a Z-pack sleeping bag. He has a 900 downfill, really warm, warm down to 20 degrees.

And it's just a little over a pound. I mean, it's a pound and something. and it's super duper light. And then I have a really small, really small single person freestanding tent. I had a ground cloth. And then I also had an air mattress and a pillow. So that all, and that all lived in my handlebar bag.

And I had a couple of, a couple of water bottle bags. I'm trying to think what you call those little water bottle bags that hang on your handlebars and then I had a large frame bag and my frame bag I carried moat you know some I had definitely all my sort of like fix it supplies tool kits extra tube some tubeless tire sealant you know spare links spare cleats and you know just a bunch of miscellaneous equipment then I also was able to carry you know all my food in there as well. So, so yeah, that's kind of, kind of what, you know,

what the, what the, what my bike look like on the outside. And I wrote a Jones bike. And Jones, Jones is a gentleman that lives in Southern Oregon. And he's, he's designed all steel rigid bikes. So this has a, it's a 29 or plus, meaning that it's, the tires that you can use on this can be up to three inches. So I had WTV 29 by 3 inch tires. So quite large and it's, you know, it was a full rigid bike.

So, yeah. So practicalities, what did you have to fix? Did you have to replace a lot of tire tubes or any of that stuff? So, yeah, that's the interesting story that there. there were you know four of us um three of us were riding w tv tires and two of us had maxis tires nobody had a flat the entire time wow 1700 miles times four of us no flats we all had we all had tubeless tires and i certainly had um had some some some leakage going out and you're running over thorns and cactus some of the time so um but rarely did i ever have to put air in my tires um

You know, we would, I would lower the tire pressure when we get into some pretty deep sand. And the advantage of having sort of a three inch tires, I'd, you know, I could lower the tire pressure down to like 9 PSI. You know, and in general, if I'm riding on like hard terrain, maybe I'm running like 18 PSI, but they're big tires that offered you some level of suspension. So when we were, we were in a quite, quite remote section in, in the, in, in the middle about. halfway down the peninsula and just just riding and we weren't usually riding real close to each other and I was you know I think I was riding in the middle somewhere but anyways my seat post broke. Wow what do with that it it broke in such a position that that if I if I if I took my my seat bag off and I put the post

back in the frame and put it down far enough so that it would have some stability that it was very difficult to pedal sitting down. I mean, it was pretty stubby. And, you know, we were probably, you know, not even halfway done with the trip. And we were probably kind of right smack in the middle. So I was just like, okay, well, let's, you know, is it, we were actually not far outside St. San Tomas. And so I think it was probably about another four-hour ride. So it wasn't that difficult. It kind of stood.

I actually had a backpack that it was a real, real small backpack, and I was able to fit everything in my seat bag in the backpack itself, got the bike all set up. So you weren't wearing a backpack every day? No, I didn't. I didn't really want to wear a backpack. I didn't wear a backpack at all. But I just had it just in case, you know, we, you know, we, you know, you know, you you know, needed to do something.

I actually had the capacity to carry a lot of extra water and different things, but I didn't really want to ride with a pack. So we get to this town, and Brian, the gentleman from Colorado, he was kind of our leader in a way. You know, he really taught me, he had a lot of experience. And so, like, I'm like, hey, I'm going to catch the bus here in San Tomas, and I'm going to meet you three. In three days, I'm going to meet you in Mulehe.

Okay, because I'll just take the bus, take you guys three days to meet there, I'll contact the Foss bike shop, and they will send, they'll send a seat post by courier through the bus system to Mulehe. And then I'll just pick up that and it's not going to be a big deal. And Brian was like, we'll have nothing to do with that, man. We're going to get your seat post fixed. I'm like, what? How are we going to do that? He's like, let's figure it out. Let's just start asking people.

So we go to a couple like car mechanic fixed places and they're like, no, no, you want to go down this area where there's more, you know, there's more sort of fix-it shops. And these guys are, you need to go to the carney, the carny people, the guys who run carnivals. So we're like, right down the road. It's kind of late, you know. We've been riding all day. I'm like, hey, I was like kind of psyched. I'm like, I'm just going to take the bus, okay? You guys, I'll meet you a couple days.

So I was like, I wasn't in a hurry to get it fixed. And Brian's like, we're going to get this thing fixed. So we pull in, there's all these rides all stacked up. We're like, hello, and the guy comes out. And we're kind of speaking very broken Spanish. And I take the seatpost off. And it's a Thompson seatpost. And it's, you know, it's some hybrid.

I don't know if it was titanium or some, some, you know, hybrid aluminum. But it's ovilized in the middle. So it's not necessarily round. easy. It's not a it's not something you just sort of slip in some you know some some smaller steel bar and and put it together. So the guy's like, ah, we can fix it. So he's he's wandering around his shop and he's like looking looking all over at these little posts and these bars and we are we are sitting underneath a little a little awning that's held up by again like a metal bar. And he comes and grabs the metal bar.

Like, he's so excited he didn't even realize it's like, it almost like smacks this in the head. So he gets his bar and gets his well, he cuts it and then gets his welder out and he's heating it. And he's hitting this thing on an anvil. And he's looking at the seatpost hitting it on anvil. And he's basically making this perfect insert. So he inserts one and two.

a perfect oval insert perfect oval insert amazing and because he's been hitting on it it's no it's and it was not a solid bar it was a you know hollow but all the work he'd done to it it basically became like a solid a solid metal bar

inserted it into the bottom piece and then um put the top on and and literally had to work it pretty hard to get the two pieces to join and they joined and and And we had had two of us in one in, two of us in the other, and tried to pull it apart.

Couldn't pull it apart. Slipped it in, slipped it in my bike frame. And I rode to Mulejah with these guys. You're back in business. We made it in three days. And it was actually one of the more difficult transitions from really the West Coast to the East Coast over towards the Sea of Cortez, which we ended up on. and it was amazing. I didn't ride with my seat bag connected to the seatpost.

I rode to the backpack for those three days, but I sat on it pretty hard and was super happy with it. So we get to Muleahay, and sure enough, I had a titanium seatpost there that was delivered the next day. Put that in my bike frame, and I gave my seat post to, So some of the BMX kids that were in the neighborhood. So there is a great bike shop in Baja that helps people on this. Yeah, yeah.

It's the Foss bike shop. And it's... In Mule Ha. No, it's just outside of Mule Ha. It's F-A-S-S. That's all right. We'll look it up. Hey, well, take us home.

So what were your lasting impressions? What were your highlights? Now we're three years down the road from that trip. Just three years down the road. So tell us, you know, what you remember about it. Well, you tell you, the highlight of the trip happened just from Muleh. So from Mulehay, there's a couple options of the route. And the main option that most people choose to do is that you can get a panga.

And a panga is an open, an open wooden, small fishing vessel that locals set out fishing nets with and you can take a panga go down to the harbor and negotiate some stuff and you can take a panga across the bahia de los angeles to a peninsula and it's uh it's about a it's about a two-hour journey um in these pangas and you you really get out you really get out feel like you're out in the open seas so we set off there were there were more just the four of us there were some other bike packers that we connected with the moula hay and we took took two pangas across there were four of us and each panga and were right out in about about the middle and the engine and one of the pangas brakes and so it's

rudderless yeah it's super windy and super heavily loaded that's the only time that's the only time they break. There's about four inches between the top of the, the top of the middle of the panga and the water. And literally like waves are kind of lapping in. And these guys can't steer into the waves because they have no, they have no way to control the boat. So we throw them some ropes.

The ropes break. We finally ended up, you know, lashing some ropes back and forth enough to pull them. But because we're pulling them, we're sinking lower in the water. And I literally thought that, I was going to say goodbye to my bike. I'd actually taken, you couldn't really move around to the boat much because you don't want to rock it.

But I got in just a couple things. I think I got my passport or something. I put it on my purse. We had no life jackets, of course. There are no, I don't know if there's any life jackets in the boat. Anyways, we made it out to, we made it over to the peninsula. And we had purchased some fresh fish from these fishermen. Because we were just coming from Muley.

we had tons of supplies. So we had jalapinos and cheese and tortillas. And of course we had tequila and beers. And there was another group that came after us. So I think we ended up being 10 people. We found a metal grate that was part of some fishing apparatus. And we put it on this bonfire, cleaned it up, got rid of all the rest. And we cooked fish over the open fire.

and we just had had the most amazing night. And this is like a really, really remote peninsula that nobody gets to. There's no roads. There's no roads to it. The only way you can get there. Well, I mean, you could hike there or walk there. I mean, there's, but there's no vehicle tracks around there. And it was just a really special opportunity to be there.

One of the gentlemen that came over was from Belgium and he had a drone and took some beautiful footage of us in the morning as we're running. along this peninsula and I've since met up with him I met up with them in Belgium last year and we talked about our experience there on the Bay de Los Angeles and it was that was pretty much the most magical night there and and you know the rest is just I think the camaraderie the sense of of being in this unspoiled wilderness and having such an appreciation for for the life in the desert, which is kind of unique organisms, both the botanical side and the

flora side, the animals there are very hardy. So I don't know. It's hard to put a finger on on anything overall, but that was certainly probably our best evening that I had on the trip. And can you talk a little bit about the people of Baja and the people that you met and what some of those experiences were like? You know, the people of Baja remind me of the people who I've had an opportunity to be with and some of the travels I've had. And the people of Baja are not material rich at all. Most of them live a fairly subsistence life.

The people I'm talking about are not the people in some of these towns, like maybe Mulejahey or Cava, obviously Cabo St. Lucas or La Paz, but these are the people who live out on the ranches. And they live with the land, they live with the seasons. They are part of the fabric and part of the fabric of nature there. And they will give you anything they have because that's, that's, the way they live with their community and that's the way they live with people who pass through. And they don't expect anything in return. They're very, very gracious, very humble people. And we were just offered, offered so much along the journey and really treated with open arms. So,

you know, the people are super duper friendly. I was a little worried about some of the dogs. I actually had had a little, a little, a little, a little, think of sort of, you know, dog pepper spray that I had kind of on the quick draw near, near my, near my handlebar bag. I never, never used it, but there were, there were, there were some dogs that kind of made us a little worried, but, you know, you don't have to be the fastest, you just don't have to be the slowest when the dogs are chasing you. Well, I think we're going to leave it right there, Herbool, that's words to live by. Hey, thank you so much for talking to me about the Baja divide and your trip there three years ago right now this month. And if people wanted to find you on the internet, you were findable.

I found you. It's Herb Boole on the Baja divide. And do you communicate with people in any other way? Do you want me to throw that out? Yeah, I have an Instagram account. It's Herb Bull, too. And that's Herb B-O-O-L. That's correct.

Like wool, but with a B. Yeah. All right, Herb, it's been a delight. Thanks for making some time for Slow Baja. A lot of fun, Michael. Cheers. Slow Baja's wardrobe is provided by Taylor Stitch. I was lucky enough to wear test some items on my 3,000-mile Baja XL trip.

The vertical jacket, the California shirt, which is a beautiful flannel shirt. I call it the Baja California shirt and some white oak, beautiful salvaged denim jeans. Put all that stuff on to make me look good in Baja, and I never took it all. off. I was wearing that stuff for 10 days straight. That vertical jacket is a handsome, handsome jacket. In the truck, under the truck, at dinner. Taylor Stitch, clothes that are meant to wear in, not out. Folks, you made it this far. I got to ask you, please help us out. Rate it, review it if you're on iTunes. Share it with a friend. Go to Slowbaha.com or Slowbaha on Instagram or Facebook and get some stickers, hats, t-shirts, every little bit helps me put a gallon of gas in the old FJ 40 or a taco in my belly.

So please do what you can to help out. I really appreciate it.