PROJ Y Casting 
PROJ Y WOF 
Lunar Bikepacking 
Prospectus 
The Dead Reckoning Book 
starter pack 
Bikepacking 101 
Dead Reck is Dead 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Day 04 
Day 05 
Day 06 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Day 04 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Introduction 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Introduction 
Day 00 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Day 04 
Instagram Symposium 
Introduction 
Day 00 
Day 01 
Day 02 
Day 03 
Day 04 
Day 05 
Day 06 
Day 07 
Introduction 
Day 00 
Days 01-02 
Day 03 
Day 04 
Day 05 
Day 06 
Days 07-08 
Day 09 
Lord Nerd Beta 
Base Camp: Motel on Carroll, Dunedin 
Day 01: Dunedin to Danseys Inn 
Day 02: Danseys Pass to Ida Railway Hut 
Day 03: Ida Railway Hut to Omarama Pass 
Day 04: Omarama to Huxley Forks 
Day 05: Huxely Forks to Brodrick Pass 
Day 06: Brodrick Pass to Wanaka 
Lord Nerd Beta 
Preface 
Day 01: Charazani to Hichocollo 
Day 02: Hichocollo to Pelechuco 
Day 03: Pelechuco to Mountainside Bivouac #1 
Day 04: Mountainside Bivouac #1 to Hilo Hilo 
Day 05: Hilo Hilo to Mountainside Bivouac #2 
Day 06: Mountainside Bivouac #2 to Curva 
Outro 
Lord Nerd Beta 
Day 01: Oasis to Bishop 
Day 02: Bishop to North Lake 
Day 03: North Lake to Piute Pass and Back to Piute Lake 
Day 04: Piute Lake to Bishop 
Day 05: Mono Hot Springs 
Lord Nerd Beta 
Day 00: The Approach 
Day 01: Tyax Lodge to Iron Pass 
Day 02: Iron Pass to Graveyard Valley 
Day 03: Graveyard Valley to Trigger Lake 
Day 04: Trigger Lake to Tyax Lodge 
Flooded with Feeling 
Wilderness 
Mike Cherney on Black Bears 
Rope Swing 
Slash Piles 
Nylon 
Conversations with a Black Bear 
US Route 93 
Turnagain Mud Flats 
Bushwhacking in British Columbia 
Men’s Penury 
Bob Dittler et. al. 
Bushwhacking in the MSOJ 
Mike Cherney’s Knife 
Hideout, UT 
Hoover Dam 
Shoe Tree 
Destruction 
The Siskiyou Mountain Club 
Coral Pink Sand Dunes State Park 
EN 417 – Normes Européennes 417 – The Lindal Valve 
Wolf Satellite 
Itchy and Scratchy 
Tanoak Dust 
Lake Havasu 
Knife Fighting 
The Comfort Inn Covenant 
The Wrong/Right Way To Experience Montauk 
Ohiopyle Falls 
Allosaurus via Lean-to 
Lyle Ruterbories, Glacier National Park Ranger 
Water Interface Experimentation (WIE) 
OSOs & UOSOs e.g., Mt. Oberlin 
Louisiana Custom Cars 
Archaeologizing, Pt. II 
Archaeologizing, Pt. I 
Mather Point 
Sarah Plummer Lemmon & Matt Hall 
Kangaroo Lake and Fran 
Minor Religions of the Mt. Shasta Region 
The Fist Bump 
The Ideal Shelter 
Headwaters of the Sacramento River 
Buckle Bunnies 
DFKWA: Baldface Creek - Part I 
Mule Deer Radio Collaring 
The Disappearance of Everett Ruess 
Dall Sheep Kebabs 
The Ideal Woodsman Knife 
DFKWA: Rough and Ready Creek - Part I 
Rowdy Water 
Killing a Mountain Caribou 
Boredom, Slingshots, and Prairie Dogs 
We Would Like to Visit 
Black Bear Ranch 
Origins 
The Heart of the Klamath 
Skid Town Bicycles 
Low Stress Management 
CLUB MACHO 
Club Macho Ep. 01 
Club Macho Ep. 02 
Club Macho Ep. 03 
Cumberland Permanent 
Iron Goat Permanent 
Natchez Trace Permanent 
Trail of Tears Permanent 
(Dis)Enchanted Rock Permanent 
MSOJ Permanent 
Shorty Peak Lookout 
Deer Ridge Lookout 
Arid Peak Lookout 
Flag Point Lookout 
Umpqua Hot Springs 
Cougar Hot Springs 
Bagby Hot Springs 
Goldbug Hot Springs 
Ft. Bridger Rendezvous 
Corndoggin’ Castle Lake 
Kangaroo Lake 
The Narrows 
Matthews Creek 
Introduction 
Brodrick Pass: Day 06
SECTION No1 A Hard Out
So there was a problem with our Raft Guy. Paul had brought along a sat phone (aka “satellite phone” for those unfamiliar with expedition parlance) and our raft guy wasn’t picking up. This was a big deal, like a major deal, because if we were going to go over the pass the raft guy needed to be there to meet us. It wasn’t like it would simply be inconvenient if he wasn’t there, a nicety that we could do without. As rudimentary as the trail was going up to Brodrick Hut, and it was rudimentary, all of our research showed that it was a freeway when compared to the non-trail on the other side of Brodrick Pass. Google, paper maps, and lore said that the trail stopped on the other side of the mountain, that there was no trail on the Landsborough River. This meant that if our guide didn’t show up, we would have to come back over the pass and out the way we came in.
No one was interested in doing that. NO ONE.”- KVH;We really tried to get at our raft guy, we really truly did. He never picked up. We would only find out a week or so later that he had actually scheduled our trip for the following month and at the time of our expedition was enjoying a nice vacation to the States with his wife to familiarize himself with normalized orientation driving, white picket fences, and all-day parties. I hope he found them.
As we were in a pretty tight bind, Paul (#maybeacyborg) called his wife (read: tap into his server system) to find a list of Helicopter services out of Wanka. It turns out that helicopter service on the southern part of New Zealand’s South Island is a really easy thing, like ordering pizza easy. The call went like this:
- Paul, “Hey I need a helicopter pick up.”
- Lady, “Where are you?”
- Paul, “Middle of nowhere.”
- Lady, “Uh huh. Does a 3 PM pick up work for you? You can catch a little sun in the meantime.”
- Paul, “Suuuuure, yeah that works fine.”
- Lady, “Sweet as.”
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT FOR THIS PROJECT WAS PROVIDED BYPorcelain Rocket
So at 3 PM sharp a whirly bird swooped down out of the sky. We had spent the majority of the day tanning our bodies and our gear while a certain amount of excitement built for our upcoming extraction. What a difference a day makes you know; one day you are up to your tits in glacial runoff carrying a bike over your head as you hike up a sliding, shifting, rushing river while buckets of water dump down on you, and the next you’re milling around in the alpine sun waiting for one of Leonardo Da Vinci’s futurist visions to come and swoop you back to civilization. So maybe you shoot a lookbook or go skinny dipping, maybe you just hang out in the forest, who knows, the point is you have the time, the leeway, and the luxury, which luxury isn’t something that you planned for, which makes it even more luxurious.
We take off and the helicopter climbs quickly, gaining altitude to escape the vertical gendarmes of the Southern Alps. From the cabin we can see the top of Brodrick Pass11See the big photo at the top of this page? That’s Brodrick Pass, up on the right. This is as close as we would get. arching away from us into the next valley. On this trip we will not see over the other side. Given a little more time there is no doubt that we would have made it over the pass, but that isn’t really saying anything is it?
A challenge is working within a given set of constraints, that’s what makes a problem interesting, however contrived, and this expedition like so many events in our modern world had a time limit, a hard out, and absolutely no give.”- KVH;Pulled way back, in retrospect and annotated for brevity, the story of our ride would read: we came, we tried, we did not succeed. But that’s the problem with generalizations, with synopsis; all the nuance, the insight, the subtlety of the experience is lost. If you shift your focus, read the subtext, you might recognize that ultimately the point is making moments into memories, and if that is the point, we more than met our goals.
SECTION No2
Day 06 Playlist: Helicopter Taxi (Giddy for Flight) Please enjoy while viewing the following photographs.
Playlist by Raf Spielman22Raf Spielman plays drums in the Woodsist Records band Woolen Men, who rarely get mentioned without a nod to their New Zealand influences. He also runs the Eggy Records label, which has been documenting the Portland music scene on vinyl and cassette tape since 2008. If you like the sound of Raf’s sounds the Woolen Men have a new EP out on Loglady Records, you can order it here.
The mixes so far have focused largely on music from the 1980’s, but many of the artists remained active after that initial heyday, recombining into new groups, going solo, going abroad or simply keeping on.”- Raf; Spielman
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Helicopter Taxi (Giddy for Flight)
- 1 Carsick Cars Mogu Mogu
- 2 Twerps Back to You
- 3 Parquet Courts Black and White
- 4 The Mantles Raspberry Thighs
- 5 Eat Skull Oregon Dreaming
SECTION No3 Stranded
Hey remember in Day 02 of this adventure when we met those two hunters, Tahei and Jeremy? So they were wearing these ill camo gaiters. Turns out those weren’t just for style. Turns out these ill gaiters keep bidi-bidis out of your socks, and boy do they love to get in your socks. They love, LOVE, getting in your socks. Its like your socks are the Beatles and bidi-bidi’s are adolescent girls. They will smother your socks to get a piece of your socks, and just like a Beatles groupie they mean well. Like most everything else in New Zealand the bidi-bidi isn’t out to hurt you. It’s not sharp or scratchy, it’s just irritating, it piles up and you look down at your poor socks, the nice wool guys that have done you soooo right, keeping your feet warm throughout snowstorms, New Zealand tailwinds, biblical rains, glacial floods, etc. and they are just getting mobbed. So you take your knife out and scrape them off, and ten minutes later you do it again. Or you just bring gaiters. Because they look so right, and they serve a purpose.
SECTION No4 Dead Reckoning S/S 15 Lookbook
SECTION No5 Tire Repair in the Bush
SECTION No6 M*A*S*H* Theme Song
SECTION No7
For the Haast Eagles (New Zealand's Extinct Alpha Predator)
SECTION No8 Check Please!
SECTION No9
Brodrick Pass Brief Histories
Rosara Joseph has both law and history degrees from the University of Canterbury, NZ, she then went on to gain her masters and PhD in constitutional law and history at Oxford university as a Rhodes Scholar. Her erudition applies to the physical arts as well. She raced Cross-Country mountain bikes professionally for eight years, representing New Zealand at the World Championships and the Beijing Olympics before “seeing the light and taking up Enduro” where she competed and podiumed in the Enduro World Series (EWS). She aslo introduced us to Paul Smith, our spirit/physical guide while we were in New Zealand, and when we asked her to help us put together some brief histories related to our trip her response was simply, “I love this shit!” by Dr. Rosara Joseph
For much of the populated history of Aotearoa/New Zealand, access to the remote West Coast of the South Island was by sea. Overland was difficult, the chain of the Southern Alps forming a barrier crossed at only a few points by lofty passes. Before 1865 only a smattering of European explorers and surveyors had investigated the interior passages to the West Coast, rediscovering the routes used in former days by adventurous Maori who knew the mountain passes and rivers from their trips to collect pounamu (also known as greenstone or jade). Like Maori, they found that the only practicable highways into the interior were the shingly beds of the rivers which flow through the dense bush.
The Brodrick Pass between the Huxley and Landsborough valleys was named after a British nineteenth century surveyor; it was first crossed many centuries prior, however, by the legendary Maori explorer named Tamatea-Pokai-Whenua. Tamatea is said to have extensively explored the South Island in the fourteenth century, and on one of his trips he travelled from Lake Ohau to the West Coast via the pass now known as Brodrick Pass. The Maori name for the pass is “te Tarahaka”, an expression meaning ‘thief who steals without qualms or care for thoughts of others’.
It was many centuries later, in the summer of 1857, that a government surveyor named Thomson set out from Dunedin to explore and map the headwaters of the Waitaki and Clutha rivers and the peaks of the Southern Alps. He drew sketches in his notebook of Lake Ohau, which he observed was surrounded by high mountains on all sides except for a pass to the south. He noted then that the pass appeared to be “the most practical route to the west” (although it later turned out that he underestimated the distance from it to the western coastline).
It was not until 1890 that Thomas Noel Brodrick crossed the pass over the main divide between Lake Ohau and Lake Paringa and claimed both its first European crossing and its name. Mr Brodrick was the District Surveyor for the South Canterbury Crown Lands Department. Born in London in 1855, he travelled to Auckland with his parents in 1860 by the ship “Nimrod” and spent much of his time conducting triangulation and topographical surveying in the mountainous districts of Canterbury and Otago. Gold fever was the impetus for Brodrick’s exploratory passage. The gold rush was hitting the West Coast, and all of Canterbury was anxious to find a direct route across the Alps between South Canterbury and the West Coast so they too could get in on the action.
The 24 September 1890 edition of the Ashburton Guardian reported that Mr Brodrick described the scenery on the Huxley valley side of the Brodick pass as “very pleasing and in endless variety”. He commented however that the descent on the other side of the pass was “steep and rather difficult”, and ruled out the pass as suitable for anything but a “passable footpath”.
That’s it, that’s the end of the Brodrick Pass expedition. This is being published at 10:40 AM Pacific on Wednesday, 8 April 2015. At this current point in time, Daniel Wakefield Pasley, Kyle Von Hoetzendorff and James Crowe are in La Paz, Bolivia, acclimating before embarking on a bicycle ride/push/portage over Sunchuli Pass in the Andes Mountains. It’s probably going to be worse/better than this trip was.
