I’m Johanne, ½ of the Firefly bike team, Best Friend Bike Team. I am also a PhD student in Hydrology at the University of Nevada, Reno. I used to view my science and biking sides separately. Depending on the context, when I introduce myself to new people and they ask what I do, I choose one of the two to share. I’m an adventure cyclist. I’m a PhD student. Usually paired with an underlying feeling like I’m sliding under the radar by doing both, hoping no one questions how one might actually detract from the other. This summer I got to integrate those two sides. For my PhD, I conduct field research in the remote backcountry of Alaska, in Denali National Park. I am studying how climate change is related to large-scale changes in plant communities in the arctic. To do this I measure an abundance of soil, plant, and water characteristics. However, it turns out that climate change isn’t only impacting plant communities but also essential infrastructure. In the fall of 2019, a massive landslide took out the access road into my site, closing the road for the foreseeable future as the Park Service attempts to build a bridge on actively melting permafrost (challenge those engineers!). This is the only road leading into Denali National Park, surrounded by designated wilderness. With no re-route options, I had to figure out how to get myself, my field assistant (i.e. my brother), and about 200 pounds of science and backpacking gear 73 miles down the closed road. oof. I could either hike around the landslide and then walk far longer than I ever want to walk to get to my site, or!, utilize a bit of a loophole in wilderness designations that allows bike travel on non-vegetated surfaces. As it goes, my cycling skills ended up being an asset to my research. Access to my field research site would have been nearly impossible without the sweet machine that is the bicycle and my slightly unhinged love for unreasonable bikepacking routes. Cue the dream machine! Earlier this year Firefly built me this beautiful ripper of a hardtail. Perfect for singletrack swooping, bikepacking, and, it turns out, scientific field expeditions. Thankful to not have to abandon my summer field research (and my hopes of being a Dr. of Hydrology) I flew up to Alaska and loaded the Firefly up. Boy howdy did this bike rise to the occasion -- unmaintained gravel roads, waist deep river crossings, baby head boulders, rutted stream channels -- the lil bike ate it up. Two weeks in the Alaskan backcountry was the perfect field test of this bike's magic, and the sweetest of opportunities to weld two sides of myself that I thought were too far away from each other to bind. I’ll leave y’all with this - maybe things aren’t as far apart as we think. What if we tried replacing ‘or’ with ‘and’ every once and awhile.
All photos by Tobias Albrigtsen.
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September 2022
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