That one time we ended up inadvertently mountain biking Nepal’s Ruby Valley Trek…

Perhaps all warning signs of reason had been abandoned in favor of optimism. Perhaps the planning hadn’t been as thorough as we told ourselves. Perhaps we just looked at a satellite image of a remote ridge stretching south from the Himalaya and decided to give it a go…

Waking at 4:30 in the dark and cold, we let ourselves out of the still sleeping guesthouse and began pedaling to the rendezvous point. Soon we could see headlights snaking down the abruptly steep outline of a mountain before us. When the goods carrier truck we had hired reached us, we lashed the mountain bikes to the truck bed and joined our bikes in the back for an incredibly violent ride up the serpentine track[…]

One small idea can make a big difference! Right after the big earthquake rocked Nepal on April 25th, I shared plans for a corrugated metal roofed shelter design that I had worked with in Pakistan in 2010. The design and “how-to-build-it” pictures that I posted on Facebook got shared widely, and soon several groups in […]