Oh man, just checked it once more and according to Matt Dennison's brilliant "
How To Make a Sick Edit" we messed up.
AGAIN. Shame, I promise to follow the rules next time…
So be warned, no "Sail" this time, no super tough shredding combined with Metallica and definitely no Enduro (it's a race format, dammit). Just plain single track riding and some old dudes who dared to bike the mountains 40 years before the mountain bike was even invented.
Horace and the rough stuff fellowship is the story of three guys who follow one and the same dream: To cross Iceland on their bicycles.
Iceland is Europe’s Outpost in the North Atlantic, the last rock to settle on before the infinite ice. And even though volcanoes, darkness, the cold and financial crisis couldn’t defeat the inhabitants it’s the most sparsely populated country in Europe.
20 million years ago the world looked pretty much like today, all continents were neatly in place with one exception. Iceland was born late with an enormous volcanic eruption and keeps on rumbling as of today. Suddenly an elemental force like the volcano Eyjafjallajökull can paralyze global air traffic making it impossible to travel the world and stopping our high tech world from functioning.
1933 | Horace Dall The engineer and astronomer from England loved solitude. When Europe had its roughest times, just in between two world wars, he set out to make the first wheeled crossing of Europe’s greatest desert Sprengisandur, a landscape so rough, raw and remote that it was used by NASA to train their astronauts for the moon landing only a couple of years later.
A piece of paper, not much bigger than his hand, showed the entire island of Iceland and was his only map. Dressed in a suit, with supplies, which would hardly have been sufficient for half of his planned trip, he crossed the river Þjórsá - and stood alone in the desert.
1958 | Dick Phillips Four men set out from England to cross the vast deserts of Iceland on their bicycles. The rough stuff fellowship was a club destined to get off the beaten track and ride where no bicycle ever went before.
Check out Magne from
icebikeadventures.com for some truly epic trips and
summitride.com for some more of Harald's adventures.
There's a fun article about them here, which also has some more info about their Iceland expedition www.cyclorama.net/viewArticle.php?id=275
That is the most toxicaly cynical thing I could write about prostituing every single thing we are doing. "f*ck" Stoke, go out and find your line. If that means dropping mountain biking - be it! Never, ever stop finding your line.
Hidden messages and stuff
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_to_the_Center_of_the_Earth
PS. You have to go, Iceland is amazing.
vimeo.com/35540746
15 minutes full of awesomeness and an epic landscape
really want to ride there one day