The Trap of Trying to Purchase Peak Experiences

North Fork, Bend, Oregon

How do you rate or rank the quality of an experience?

Let your mind begin ruminating on that question—we’ll get back to it in a minute.

* * *

I was camping in the heart of the Oil Well Flats trail system near Canon City, CO. My thirst for freedom, to break free from the confines of my comfortable home office, drove me to pack up some bikes and beer and head down to the desert for a week of dirt bagging it. Hell, I’m 100% mobile—why not go somewhere else, ride some different trails, and get a change of scenery for a week?

In an effort to save money, I tried to dirtbag as much as possible. I chose to skip the developed campgrounds in favor of free dispersed camping. I resolved to cook almost all of my own food, aside from coffee at the coffee shop while working, and the occasional burger from Wendy’s. And with just an hour and a half drive, even gas money wasn’t going to be much.

Early one morning after a few days of camping, drifting through the mists of sleep as I slowly came to with the rising of the sun, I thought I heard the pounding of drums. It seemed strange, as I was dispersed camping and had had the entire area to myself for days. I stumbled out of the camper, let the dog relieve herself alongside me, and then bundled into the vehicle for the drive to the coffee shop and a day of staring at a screen.

As I rounded a corner in the road a couple hundred yards from my camp, I realized that the pounding of drums hadn’t just been my pulse in my ears. Sitting on a rise, with an incredible view of the valley and the sun rising over the arid mountains, a van was parked with a couple of long-haired hippies sitting on the roof pounding their bongo drums. 

This wasn’t the classic VW Westfalia that you might normally associate with hippies. Instead, it was an early 1990s conversion van that looked like it had seen much better days. I was impressed it had made it this far up a rocky dirt road to catch the sun.

This, I realized, was the true hippy van of 2018. If you drive an overpriced retro VW, you’re missing the entire point of being a hippy—but these people didn’t need a specific van model to verify their identity. They had bongo drums and a sunrise to enjoy.

* * *

Here I thought I had been dirt bagging it all week: cooking on a $15 stove I had bought used at an REI scratch and dent sale, driving an SUV with 240,000 miles (and counting). 

But on the flip side, how much of a dirtbag am I, really? I was sleeping in an $8,000 camper tent contraption (granted, one that I won in a contest). I had a carbon bicycle locked up next to it… along with a backup bike in case something happened to break on the main whip. And I was driving down to the coffee shop to type words into a computer worth almost $3,000. 

Back to the question at hand: how do you quantify or rate the quality of an experience? I had a most excellent time camping in the desert. But was my experience better than that of the hippies with the bongo drums? How did it compare to the folks in the $180,000 lifted Sprinter van I saw roll past?

In reality, it’s impossible to say that the person in the tricked-out Sprinter had a better camping experience than I did because their setup is nicer, or that I had a better experience than them because I was a little bit closer to nature. Quantifying our experiences, ranking them against other peoples', or ranking our own experiences against each other, is an act of sheer folly. 

Nevertheless, this doesn’t stop mountain bikers from thinking that if they can just buy the perfect bike, the perfect upgrade, or the perfect piece of gear, that their bike riding experience will improve dramatically. Because that’s what we’re all looking for, right? Better experiences?

People reach out to me all the time, asking not only for bike buying advice, but advice on components, apparel, gear, and so much more. And I think I’ve realized the reason that they—actually, “we”... who am I kidding? I do the same thing—seek input and advice and do research on gear purchasing decisions is that we want our mountain bike experiences—those precious moments in the mountains away from the office—to be as sweet, as truly excellent, as they possibly can be. 

We like to say that it’s the rider, not the bike. I subscribe to that wholeheartedly, but at the same time, I recognize that a nice bike can make for a much better experience when compared to a truly shitty bike. 

But will that upgrade from 11-speed XTR to 12-speed XX1 make your mountain bike experience that much better? Probably not.

Instead of constantly seeking to optimize our experiences by purchasing the latest-and-greatest bike component or camping setup, what if we instead strived to soak in each moment and savor it for the beauty that it offers? What if instead of wishing we had the newest gear, we instead trained ourselves to revel in the beauty of sheer existence, each and every day, simply because every day is precious?

I'm still not always great at embodying this philosophy, but hopefully I keep getting a little bit better every single day.