My first riding buddy was a woman named Tina. We had shit bikes and boundless enthusiasm. In fact, that was pretty much all we had. We didn’t know how to ride mountain bikes, not really.

Over and over, we pedaled straight up to the edge of disaster and somehow saved ourselves just in time. I guess I’d call it beginners’ luck. It certainly wasn’t skill. Tina took a fearless approach to every descent and laughed off the inevitable bloody knees. I wasn’t any more calculating than she was, and I still have the scars to prove it.

Back then, we had a lot of wild, adventurous friends, but none of them took to bikes the way we did. They had their own ways of earning their scars. They threw backpacks over their shoulders and disappeared into the backcountry, climbed vertiginous rock faces, or rode half-tamed horses way too fast. Tina and I figured there must be other girls out there somewhere, but it was rare for us to cross paths with anyone like us on the trail. Mostly, it felt like we were alone in our weird passion.

We did see plenty of men and they were never hostile, necessarily. They usually just looked confused. After one look at us ripping around a corner while we laughed like maniacs, you’d understand why the average guy out pedaling his mountain bike might have wondered what exactly he’d run into. There and gone, we’d wave and disappear down the trail—dust and our creaking bikes the only signs of our passage.

We never made friends with any of the men we saw out there, which in retrospect seems strange to me. I guess I worried that they would tell me that I was doing it wrong. I didn’t care about the right way to do it so long as I made it home mostly in one piece. It didn’t matter to me that my bike was decrepit or that my helmet was crooked, but I feared that it might matter to the men I saw. So, I smiled and kept riding. Our community numbered two and it was enough.

Then I moved away to graduate school. Tina and I went our separate ways. I didn’t know anyone in my new town or where I might fi nd trails to ride. I stared up at the steep coastal mountains in Santa Barbara with their Cubist arrangement of boulders and canyons and imagined trails winding through it all.  The mountains beckoned with the promise of adventure and bad decisions. I couldn’t wait to explore it all.