SELF-INFLICTED EXILE
IT’S POSSIBLE THAT I’VE BEEN IN THE SUN TOO LONG BECAUSE THE DEAD OCTOPUS ON THE DESERT FLOOR JUST MOVED.
WE’RE RIDING A DUSTY LOOP OF singletrack inside Lajitas Resort, an upscale golf community deep in West Texas close to the Big Bend of the Rio Grande and Mexico. It’s the kind of tucked-away resort that has its own air strip and shooting range, but also thousands of acres of vast, desert landscape where the local bike club has scratched out 30 miles of meandering loops. The trails are skinny, white veins in the khaki landscape, rolling over hills toward a horizon lined by buttes, cliffs and tall, purple ridges framing Big Bend National Park. This is a rugged and strange corner of Texas, 500 miles from the nearest city, and nothing like the rest of the state. It’s classic, desert landscape—the setting for Wild West movies and Looney Toons episodes—but an odd place to ride your bike.
There are no trees, just tall bushes with long, spindly branches topped with orange flowers. Imagine an octopus with its head stuck in the sand. Now imagine thousands of them in this valley, some standing tall and still flowering, others lying dead and gray in the sand, skinny with disease. If you ride long enough in the sun, and don’t drink enough water, you might even see one of these dead octopuses wiggle from the corner of your eye.
“They’re called ocotillo,” says Andrew Whiteford, a talented rider and professional skier sporting a blonde beard that gives him the air of a Viking. Whiteford lives in Jackson, Wyoming,
