By the time you read this story, it’ll be fall. You’ll be riding through the last golden aspen leaves in the high mountains, dreaming of powder runs, or preparing for winter escapes to the desert.

I’ll be here in coastal California, watching storms form in the North Pacific and imagining perfect winter swells. We all have our dreams to chase. As I sit here in my favorite coffee shop, watching the ceiling fans spin, it’s still peak summer—the season for rides that are too long on days that are far too hot. It’s the time of popsicles and swimming holes and that long, lingering twilight that seems to last forever. If you don’t go skinny dipping at least once, did summer happen at all?

Of course, it’s also now the season of heat waves and forest fires whose smoke turns the mid-day sun an unsettling orange and makes the air burn in our throats like the cheapest whiskey. Climate change is making life feel more precarious with every passing season. That’s all the more true out West, here on the edge of it all. Our favorite trails are here today but might not be for too much longer. Get it before it’s gone.

And so, we ride. It was high noon during a heat wave when I slid an almond butter sandwich—its bread perfectly aligned—a full bag of gummy bears, and a half-eaten, shareable- size package of M&M’s into my pack alongside the stray gels, probably expired, that have taken up residence in there. I added a frozen water bladder and snapped a bottle into the bike’s cage. I felt prepared for anything. I met my four friends in a nearby parking lot and together we began the steady road climb toward the trailhead. We’d counted on the blistering sun to keep the hordes at home. We’d hoped to have the trail to ourselves. Survive the climb and rip the descent, that was the plan. Parked cars lined the roadside and we soon realized that we might have made a tiny miscalculation.