Pushing your boundaries takes you to the edges of your familiar reality. It’s in these moments that you feel both invincible yet incredibly fragile. These boundary-pushing experiences are often the quickest route to escape from your comfort zone to a place you’ve always longed for. With any luck, they’ll begin and end with a good coffee.
Tucson, Le Buzz Bakery, 50 kilometres to Mount Lemmon
For a mountain to become a legend, it has to transcend itself. To do so, it needs a place where those who conquer it can tell its stories. In these tales, a ribbon of asphalt becomes a ramp, which becomes a wall, which in turn transforms into a place of longing. The mountain ahead of us is Mount Lemmon, and those who wish to tell its stories gather at Café Le Buzz.
Le Buzz nestles modestly in the colonnades of a shopping plaza in eastern Tucson. To the right, a supermarket; to the left, a hair salon; in front, a car park. I’m sitting with Eric and a cappuccino. Artificial mist from a water sprayer calms our nerves. It’s 34 degrees celsius. The radius of the falling droplets marks the boundary of our comfort zone.
The mountains here are called Sky Islands. Rising up to 2,000 metres above the cactus-studded desert, these peaks allow you to traverse multiple climate and vegetation zones. In winter, you can even ski here. Today, however, it is not winter.
Mount Lemmon is also a Sky Island, but it’s more than that. When the stories are told at Le Buzz, Mount Lemmon transforms into the American Stelvio, Arizona’s Alpe d’Huez, the Mont Ventoux of the desert. Some claim it’s the most popular road climb in the USA. With an average gradient of just 5%, it’s not particularly steep, but with 50 kilometres of climbing it is painfully long. The ascent begins at 800 metres, amidst towering saguaro cacti, and ends at 2,800 metres near an observatory – a true place of longing.
Le Buzz serves as the starting point for the dreamers, the basecamp for thrill-seekers chasing their next boundary-pushing experience. Tucson’s road cycling community gathers here, setting off early in the morning to tackle the ascent. Start too late, and the desert will punish you.
We start too late. Without a road bike. The Mondraker Arid is a gravel bike. But at this point, that hardly matters. It’s 13:15 pm, and the thermometer reads 35 degrees celsius. Time to leave the comfort zone behind.
Rio Rico, Petrol Station, 20 kilometres to the Mexican Border.
Another day. Another boundary.Here, there’s no mist sprayer, no cappuccino. The comfort zone is the air-conditioned shop of a gleaming Chevron petrol station. Water, Gatorade, and peanut butter chocolate fudge cookie crisp bars. It’s just me out here — me and the Arid.
Rio Rico sounds like turquoise waters, lush vegetation, and leaping fish. Unfortunately, there’s no river, no lushness. No fish, either. Just a scattering of houses and fences that carve arbitrary boundaries between private property and wilderness. The gulf between the promise of the name and the petrol station’s stark reality is vast.
Rio Rico isn’t Le Buzz. Rio Rico isn’t a place of longing. Or is it?
When talking to other cyclists about boundary-pushing experiences, the conversation almost inevitably turns to maximum gradients, elevation gains, and power outputs. But not every boundary experience is physical. There are psychological, social, and perhaps even spiritual boundaries to be explored. In Rio Rico, you encounter the concept of boundaries in a very different way.
Just past the petrol station, a gravel track branches off from the main road. A cattle grid marks the entrance to a farm, where skinny cows huddle in the shade of equally skinny trees. The sun has baked the sand into dust. Naturally, it’s hot. Nearly every bush has thorns, and nearly every creature is venomous – rattlesnakes, scorpions, tarantulas… I watch my front wheel, careful not to stray off the trail.
Not everyone out here wants to stay on the main trail. Beyond the sandy track, narrow paths snake through the semi-desert. They follow dry creek beds, cross steep slopes, and wind their way through the thorny underbrush. These trails head north – towards Rio Rico and beyond. I’m heading south.
Tucson, Windy Point, 15 kilometres to Mount Lemmon
Riding up a mountain and back down again feels like the most natural thing in the world to me. More than that, it’s one of the rare moments when I feel completely at peace with myself. At the same time, I can understand those who think it’s utterly ridiculous. It’s far too hot, far too far, and far too exhausting – a wasteful squandering of energy and bodily resources. But it’s certainly not down to the Arid. The gravel bike holds its own brilliantly on the tarmac, and it’s far too light to blame for weary legs.
A sea of sweat pours over the sleek top tube, precious minerals trickle onto the cracked asphalt and seep into the ground. Perhaps a cactus will grow there, I think, because what else is there to do but pedal and think? Why do we do this? Eric says cycling is ultimately about freedom.
Half a litre of sweat later, a quiet contradiction begins to form in my overheated mind. How free am I, really, if I have to prove to myself, pedal stroke by pedal stroke, that I can follow a predetermined route to a defined endpoint? Because without that brief moment at the summit, the mountain isn’t conquered, and all the effort seems pointless.
Freedom right now would mean stopping, falling asleep in the shade of one of the rock formations, and then coasting downhill in the evening light, to the nearest fast food joint. There, I’d bring my core body temperature back down below 40 degrees with an XXL milkshake. Wouldn’t it be an even greater achievement to prove to myself that I have nothing to prove?
A squelching noise from my bidon snaps me out of my mental escape plan. The last lukewarm drop of water evaporates in my dehydrated body, highlighting one of the unique challenges of Mount Lemmon: water. Between Le Buzz and the next refill point at the Visitor Center lie 35 kilometres and roughly 1,700 metres of climbing. Experienced Lemmonistas have a solution for this – they stash secret water depots along the route.
Somewhere, 10 kilometres to the Mexican border
Here, too, people set up water depots – but not in secret. Blue flags over the desert mark the way to life-saving barrels. Those searching for water here aren’t on some hedonistic journey of self-discovery; they won’t be uploading their activity to Strava later. The mountains here hold no mythical allure. They simply exist, standing in the way of those heading north.
An estimated 500,000 people cross the border between Mexico and the United States illegally each year. Many of them do so just south of Rio Rico, near Nogales. Here, the border fence ends – a flawed yet imposing barrier slicing hundreds of kilometres in a straight line through the desert, before abruptly stopping. The end of the fence isn’t a bad place to cross a border.
The border doesn’t begin at the fence though – it starts long before. Border Patrol combs the desert north of Nogales with quads, helicopters, thermal imaging cameras, and trucks, searching for refugees, drugs, and cartel members. Those who don’t want to be seen travel by night and avoid the paths.
On a ridge, a Border Patrol truck comes into view.
“You need water?” “No, thanks.” “Warm day to be riding out here?” “Absolutely.”
As a gravel biker, I seem unsuspicious – not entirely sane, perhaps, but not suspicious. The track continues climbing toward the border. The trail becomes a ramp, the ramp a wall.
I stand at the border. Not my place of longing, but a place of longing nonetheless.
Tucson, Whitetail Campground, 11 kilometres to Mount Lemmon
The rock formations cast long shadows, other cyclists emerge from the last beams of sunlight, and nearly 2,000 metres below, the desert is turning red. It’s getting late. Too late?
In my mind, I have a picture: two bikes, the observatory, and the red circle of the setting sun. Unfortunately, the sunset is closer than the observatory. I glance at Eric. He seems to have a different picture in his head: a thrilling descent, and margaritas.
Continuing now would mean pedalling the final 10 kilometres in the dark, with rapidly dropping temperatures, only to end up shivering in the middle of nowhere. The line between epic and idiotic is sometimes a fine one. We choose not to chase the epic, but to embrace the magical. The sunset at Windy Point is worth every grain of salt stinging our eyes.
Twilight is brief. Headlights and street lamps sketch Tucson’s silhouette into the darkness. The light fades. Somewhere in the indeterminate blue lies the border. We climb into the van, drive to the hotel, shower, eat, and sip margaritas.
At the Mexican border
When people climb into vehicles here, they are often undocumented immigrants, and the vehicles are Border Patrol pick-up trucks. The people approach the fence from one side, the trucks from the other – the former on narrow footpaths, the latter on a steep gravel road.
That road is currently being paved. A construction worker sweeps dust off the fresh grey surface. At the end of a border fence stretching hundreds of kilometres, in a place where people disappear in the desert, a man is sweeping a piece of road that turns to dust just five metres later. Normality in a state of exception.
He sees me and pauses.
“You need water?” “No, thanks.”“Warm day to be riding out here?” “Absolutely.”
I follow the fence eastward. Large construction machines deliver more concrete. The path is bizarre: 30% gradients, forging straight ahead regardless of the terrain. Even Komoot seems surprised. I push my bike uphill, slide back down, dazzled by the psychedelic interplay of lights and shadows from the steel bars. Occasionally, there’s a gap in the fence.
The roadside is scattered with trash. Empty water bottles, jackets, an umbrella. An umbrella? Yes, an umbrella. The sun flickers through the steel slats as I brace myself for the final climb. A child’s pink backpack lies abandoned in the grass.
Pushing your boundaries takes you to the edges of your familiar reality. It’s in these moments that you feel both invincible and incredibly fragile.
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Words: Nils Hofmeister Photos: Nils Hofmeister / Josh Becker / Ivan Marruecos
