What makes you beautiful sortie

Read more. Close full details. Provenance The media used are mixed. The major part of the painting is brushed with acrylic. Then Patricia Simsa adds some collages with well chosen and original wallpapers. For this painting, the texture of the wallpaper is soft. On top of this, she has uses oil pastel to draw the contours of the figures and to sign.

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At one point, it resulted in a new word: cyclomountaineering. It was bad slash good slash terrible slash amazing. Writing that out, it sounds a little funny, but again, it makes sense when you realize that it was the only off-road capable machine I had, so of course, I took it mountain biking - and I will continue to.

I love my gravel bike. I feel good on it, at home, ready for anything. And why not? Most of us are roadies after all, and at this point, I've spent easily 10, hours in a road-like position - is it all that difficult to imagine that I feel better on a road bike type thing over bars that are twice as wide and a position that's very nearly straight up and down and bounces?

In long, I'm a fierce defender of the gravel bike and its utility. I love it. That said, the chorus of my friends singing over and over again: why don't you just get a mountain bike - eventually hit home. So I eventually did - and we went to Crested Butte this August as a sort of family vacation of sorts. Each year, we get together with a piece of our chosen family, and we play. This time, we were there to ride mountain bikes - in other words, scare the hell out of this poor roadie turned dirt lover.

That's an entirely different stream of consciousness filled with much falling down, bruises, bleeding, terror - and a LOT of fun.

We'll save that for the hopefully not next one, the umpteenth piece on roadie meets mountain bike. Tale as old as time… Yawn. I'm almost ashamed to admit it, but even in this Mecca for mountain biking, we still had gravel bikes in tow. We had this idea that we'd ride Pearl Pass - the crowning obstacle in the oldest mountain bike race in the world. The first running was in the middle of September - it started in Crested Butte and finished in Aspen. Fifteen part bad ass, part crazy humans aboard klunkers pointed their bikes up toward the distant Pearl Pass on a quest to make it up, over, and down to Aspen.

They rode what amounted to the most primitive of bikes - these klunkers - resembling far more the gravel bikes of today than mountain bikes. The bikes were the bare essentials: one gear, fat-ish tires, handlebars, pedals, and a chain.

Also, lots of alcohol. This was a race in only the word. Fast forward about 43 years: we started up the long, long road to Pearl Pass, working our way past the trails that had been our joy the last few days - past Strand Hill, Teocalli, and on to a destroyed, rotten dirt road. We had heard there were avalanches up ahead after a particularly severe winter, but we thought we'd push onward, but it didn't feel right.

I had never felt like I was forcing it on these types of rides before. I knew going in that there would be a solid chunk of cyclomountaineering. I knew there was a distinct chance we'd be turned around by the remnants of a monster avalanche. I knew there'd be a supreme dearth of useable oxygen. I knew I'd get a little whoozy and wonder why in the world I was doing this. I understood all of these things - but for some reason, the echo of the why's started bouncing around in my head - across to Ryan - to Jonathan - to Ashley - and then back and forth like some malevolent ping pong ball, until it became impossible to pretend that it wasn't throwing a party in our thoughts.

At that point, we did something funny - we called it and turned around. We were nowhere near the top, but it just wasn't happening. Instead, we went back down, rode mountain bikes, and had an amazing day. Like I said, this isn't a story about pushing limits. It's certainly not about walking.

This is pretty firmly the exact opposite. This is a story about riding a bike on the terrain it was designed for. Two days later, we tried our gravel bikes again - this time to a climb that sounds actually as good as it is: Paradise Divide.

The modern, perfect adventure tool for moderate off-road fun with a huge asterisk: also fun for outrageous off-road adventures that make zero logical sense but are still fun - just not on THIS day.

It's an amazing feeling to use the proper tool for the job. A road bike is wonderful on a road. A full suspension mountain bike is an incredible machine on some wild Crested Butte singletrack. A gravel bike is an ideal piece of possibility on a dirt road or some lighter side trails, and for once, we did just that. We took our gravel bikes on a series of beautiful, tough but not too tough, dirt roads.

We laughed at how silly it all was - can you imagine such a ridiculous thing as a gravel bike on…just a normal dirt road? We climbed through the cold morning shadows in the still shaded valley, until we broke into the light about halfway up as it peeked over Snodgrass Mountain.

To our left, the mountains of the Ruby Range glowed in that hyper real way the mountains always do at sunrise something I've been resolving to see more of in the future for a long time, but always, always failing.

We passed through a sea of wildflowers - Fireweed, Fleabane, Aspen Sunflowers, Indian Paintbrush…and so many more that I don't know the name of, but I wish I did, because if you're not into flowers after a high country Colorado experience in the summer - you're missing out.

As with most everything in the big mountains of Colorado, we were traipsing through the work space of the miners of yesteryear. In this case, we ran smack into it as we made our way up the hardest part of the day by way of a venomous wall of dirt road into a mostly abandoned collection of houses known as Elkton thanks be to that 38x50 easy gear!

Quick history note: Elkton was established in the s to service the silver mine just outside of town. There were boarding houses, cabins, a store, even a post office - but only for one year. Like many ghost towns in Colorado, Elkton more or less died in with the demonetization of silver. Just above Elkton, there's an immense switchback - the only of the ride so far - with huge views.