FOLLOWING THE HORSEMEN
“Let’s fly over Baboons Pass, and we’ll let you see the peril that awaits”, our pilot, Justin Honaker, says. The word ‘peril’ is usually avoided during inflight announcements, but he’s just being brutally honest. He’s ridden the boulder-strewn Baboons Pass descent and admits that he’s in no hurry to go back. I peer from the window of our little Cessna plane at a tumble of rocky outcrops and cascading waterfalls slipping by two hundred metres below us. Winding between them is a tiny ribbon of singletrack: the trail we’ll be riding for the next six days, and I have to be honest, it does look perilous.
In the plane with me are my two fellow adventurers, Scott pro riders Kevin Landry and Claudio Caluori. Behind them, Justin has removed two of the plane’s six seats to accommodate our bikes, and he needed little persuasion to do so. Justin works for the Mission Aviation Fellowship charity, and his flying hours are mostly spent shuttling doctors and medical supplies to remote villages. This time, Justin is flying three mountain bikers to the start of a pioneering ride,
