SP23

Ancient Ice

EXPLORING THE LAST REMNANTS OF A DYING GLACIER

Words and photography by Steve Shannon

 

Glaciers are found in mountain ranges on nearly every continent. They are the largest reservoir of fresh water on earth, one that is especially important for plants, animals and human uses. Sadly, as climates change and the last ice age fades into the past, many glaciers are receding. These majestic chunks of ice encapsulate history spanning centuries. Peering into a crevasse, layers are visible, telling us a story much longer than that of our two wheeled brethren. The blue textures of the icy walls leave us in awe.

This glacier’s days are numbered. Its volume has shrunk dramatically in recent decades. Miners from the previous century talk about crossing the glacier to access nearby deposits, and now there’s a snow and ice free path right to the summit. The access granted by the glacier’s recession is bittersweet. It allows us easier access to explore this alpine wonderland, but questions remain about the health of the environment and the impact on this place we love. As the sun fades behind a nearby peak and a cold north breeze descends upon us, it’s time to head back to the valley below. Rolling off the glacial ice and on to the trail, I pause one last time to take in the icy textures below my wheels. Visiting this place is a privilege, one we don’t take lightly. I hope to return again next summer, but maybe, just maybe, snow and ice will block our passage. Nothing would make me happier.

 

The Hustler

BECKY GOEBEL: MAKE YOUR OWN LUCK

Words by Kirsten Midura | Photography by John Ryan Hebert

 

It was late summer in Vancouver, British Columbia. Throughout the country, Robin Thicke’s chart-topper “Blurred Lines” blasted from car radios, Iron Man 3 was sweeping box offices, and a hot new social media platform, Instagram, had begun bringing slick photography to the masses. 

In the northern part of town, inside a dim lecture hall at Capilano University, sophomore Becky Goebel sat slumped in her chair. She listened to her business professor drone on, but her mind wandered to her clapped-out 1984 Suzuki GS 450 parked outside. She had purchased it only to avoid paying campus parking fees, but still she relished her time spent riding with the guys, popping wheelies and standing on seats as she cruised around town. 

Becky’s daydream was brought to a jarring halt by the crude vibration of the cell phone in her pocket. Again and again it buzzed, drawing unwelcome stares from her classmates and professor alike. Scrambling to silence it, Becky caught a glimpse of the screen. A deluge of Instagram notifications flooded her phone for an instant, then her phone went dead.

 

After class, Becky rode like the wind through the city streets, rushing to charge her device as soon as she threw open her apartment door. “I had a feeling that I got a bunch of followers,” she explains, “or that someone reposted my photo of me.” Indeed, as soon as her phone turned back on, she found that someone had shared photos of her stunt-riding with her friends. As a result, she had thousands more followers than she’d had only an hour before. “Ten thousand followers in a day,” she says. “That doesn’t happen anymore.”

At the time, Becky couldn’t fathom what it meant to be an influencer. “I had no idea what Instagram could bring,” she says, “I didn’t even have an iPhone back then. There weren’t even Instagram stories at the time.” It was 2013, after all. But Becky had been an entrepreneurial dynamo from a young age, and a million thoughts raced through her mind. What did this mean for her? How could she use this newfound visibility? How could she monetize it? 

Little did she know at the time, this viral post of her regular rides would change the course of her life.

A country girl from the flatlands of Saskatchewan, Becky had grown up on a small acreage on the prairies, driving anything she could find in her family’s back yard. “We’d always just have lots of things to drive around the farm,” Becky explains, “tractors and golf carts and little crappy dirt bikes.”

“It wasn’t like my family never had any money,” she continues, “it was always just like, the neighbor guy gives my dad a trike, and they trade it for a fucking goat or some shit.”

Both of Becky’s parents had motorcycles, and while she often rode her mother’s bike, it was her father who inspired her love of classic biker culture. “My dad has tattoos, and a lot of his friends always rode,” she says. “Because of him, I’ve always been very drawn towards the badass biker kind of thing.” Although her personal motif of flames and leopard print developed early on, it would be years before she would purchase her own two-wheeled vehicle. “I always wanted to get into motorcycles, but I couldn’t really afford it,” she admits. Instead, she set her sights on an even more ambitious goal: professional snowboarding.

At 16 years old – grade 10 in Canada – Becky dropped out of high school with the goal of living in a mountain town and becoming a pro snowboarder. To her dismay, her parents gave her an ultimatum. “They told me I couldn’t move out of the house until I graduated grade 12, I had at least $5,000, and I had a car,” Becky recalls, “So I got a car, I worked at Starbucks until I had $5,000, and I did homeschooling on my own. I graduated from grade 12 on the same day I graduated from grade 11. I was just that type of kid.”

With her high school diploma in hand, Becky put her nose to the grindstone in pursuit of her dream. She spent winters in Whistler, British Columbia, working in a local ski shop, competing as a sponsored snowboarder, and building relationships with Canadian brands. In the summers, she worked any job she could find to keep herself afloat. “I was a bartender, I was a bottle service girl, I was a server at a burger joint, I worked in a tiki bar,” Becky recounts. “I had every shitty job known to man.” 

For seven months, she even worked at an underground tungsten mining camp in the Northwest Territories. “I was the only woman up there,” she says. “My dad worked up there, and they needed another person to work the bitch jobs. I served cafeteria food at night, and during the day I would clean the men’s room.” She admits it was a “gnarly job,” but she was inching closer to her dream. 

Until she crashed.

At 18, a snowboarding accident thwarted any hopes of Becky’s turning pro. “I broke my arm in half twice. I broke my ankle. I crushed my spleen. All this shit,” she says. “I was just a little kid sending it, trying my best to be good at this thing. So, after I was, you know, broken, I ended up going to university because I didn’t really have anything else to do.”

At university, Becky studied business while working as a Red Bull girl. “It was the first job that I liked,” she recalls. This opportunity segued into an internship at Red Bull as an athlete marketing manager, and a subsequent gig in visual merchandising for Vans. 

Both jobs gave her a taste for the business side of athletics, so when her Instagram post went viral, she knew precisely what to do. “I realized that posting what I love to do was going to be the best thing for my Instagram page,” Becky says. “So I started just posting more about what I was doing in real life: riding motorcycles, going on trips, buying a new bike and selling the old one. And people just kept following me.”

In these early days of Instagram, accounts of women riding motorcycles were still relatively novel. “There were only maybe eight of us back then,” Becky says. So, her first order of business was to seek out and acquaint herself with her newfound circle of peers. Among her early connections was a fellow Pacific Northwesterner, Lanakila MacNaughton, from Portland, Oregon. Lana was a photographer who had started the Women’s Moto Exhibit, a photo series that showcased the revolutionary concept of actual women riders, rather than the glorified pin-up models that had saturated the internet up to that point. 

Lana was about to embark on a trip to the Alps sponsored by Husqvarna, Levi’s, Converse, and Sena, and she invited Becky to join her. “That trip to this day was probably the coolest trip I’ve ever gone on,” Becky says. “Four of us girls who never really even knew each other rode 5,000 kilometers across the European Alps within the course of a month. I remember just being like, if this is something I could do as a career, I’m going to try and do that.”

Inspired by her adventure and prepared by her life experiences, Becky formulated a plan for turning her Instagram fame into a working business model. While her counterparts had found their niche in photography or modeling, Becky sought to create her own value proposition on these motorcycle trips. “I figured out that I always really liked writing articles, even since I was a kid,” Becky explains. “So I started reaching out to magazines – literally just going to a shop, opening up the first page of a magazine, and emailing the editor saying, ‘Hey, I’m a girl writer, I’m going on all these trips with all these cool girls all over the world, and the girls are already taking photos. Can I write articles about it?’”

Piece by piece, Becky began writing her way into a full-time gig as a motorcycle journalist and influencer. She leveraged the Canadian connections she had forged through snowboarding, Red Bull, and Vans, and worked her way through their distribution companies to U.S. brands within the moto space. “From snowboarding, I really loved the idea of being sponsored and traveling to do what I loved,” Becky explains. “After I lost that snowboarding thing I thought my life was over, but motorcycling really took over that feeling for me. With Instagram, it just felt like it was possible to do pretty much the exact same thing. Instagram kind of started writing a new script of my life.”

Via journalism and riding for shoots, Becky’s work began to take her around the world to Europe, Latin America, and Asia, writing for magazines such as Marie Claire, VICE, and EasyRiders, and appearing in shows such as CW’s “Riverdale” and dozens of movies. “I did that full-time for probably four years, just pitching to magazines, going on trips, and writing articles,” she says.

Her Instagram persona made this work look seamless, yet Becky worked herself to the bone to engineer these opportunities. Behind the scenes, she persisted through both anxiety and a sense of impostor syndrome, even as she graced the covers of numerous magazines. “My anxiety is something I’ve always kind of had,” Becky shares, “and I think I make it work for me. I was hustling to just get trips paid for and make a little money, but only in the last two years has it actually been a real thing that’s not just kind of a joke.”

As Becky’s motorcycle career blossomed, so too did the segment as a whole. Female ridership grew to account for a fifth of the market, and women-focused brands, groups, and events sprang into life. Seeing these events pop up in California and on the East Coast, Becky noted the glaring lack of attention to her own corner of the continent. “Babes Ride Out was already around,” she says, “but there wasn’t really anything like it in the Northwest. So Lana and I decided to do something like it, but do it our own way.”

Becky and Lana wanted to take advantage of the region’s stunning riding and cater to the salt-of-the-earth community that the PNW fostered. “We wanted the event to be something you had to ride really far to get to,” Becky explains. “It wasn’t an event that was all about Instagram; it was really for those who wanted to ride and sleep in the cold.” 

In 2015, the two women launched the Dream Roll: a weekend-long, 300-person party at the base of Mount Adams in Washington. The first year’s campout was filled with choppers, cafe racers, sport bikes, and enduros, with riders hailing from as far as Australia. Despite the weekend’s rain, the women partied hard at night and spent the days exploring nearby volcanoes, waterfalls, and ice caves. “It’s gotten a lot more cush since then,” Becky admits, “but it was gnarly at the start.”

The Dream Roll would continue for years to come, with attendance reaching 1,000 in 2022. “It took up such a big chunk of my life,” Becky says, “but I loved putting on that event.” In 2015 and 2017, Becky also branched out into running her own event in Vancouver: Loserpalooza. “I wanted to do something in Vancouver because there was nothing there,” she says. “No motorcycle shows, no get-togethers. So that was my version of putting on real events for the community in Vancouver.” 

Admission sales never filled Becky’s pockets, but the Dream Roll has since become an annual staple on the women’s moto event calendar, and Loserpalooza became what Becky describes as “pretty much the biggest chopper show that’s ever happened in Canada.” 

With each new feather in Becky’s cap, she quickly became a bigger fish in an ever-shrinking pond. Soon enough, Becky had outgrown the Canadian market, and it was time to look to broader horizons. “I just change things when I start feeling like I don’t really want to do them anymore,” Becky explains. “In Canada, I was really maxed out, and I wanted to see how far I could take things. So, I got an immigration lawyer.”

In 2018, with the nominal cash that she had earned from her most recent event, Becky embarked on her most arduous adventure to date: moving to Los Angeles. “When I moved to another country,” she says, “I basically restarted my entire life. I didn’t have a social security number, I didn’t have credit, I had to sell all of my bikes and all my cars, and I had to live in a van for an undetermined amount of time because I didn’t have any of the things you need in order to rent an apartment.” 

It took nearly half a year for Becky to receive her visa and open a bank account. Until then, she was virtually homeless, doing her laundry at a friend’s house and storing things at her new boyfriend’s place. She also had recently lost her brother, something that she did not speak publicly about for years afterward. “You know, it’s weird when you’re doing all this social media stuff,” Becky says. “I make it look like my life is this happy-go-lucky jumping around, doing whatever I want kind of thing. But there’s a lot of things that go on behind the scenes. I’m not a citizen of America, I have to pay a lot more taxes, and setting up a business is super scary for me. I came here, and I didn’t have anything.”

Yet again, Becky’s relentlessness won out over the precariousness of her situation. As soon as she touched down on U.S. soil, she began doing what she had always done: hustle. “I did some jobs on music videos, I wrote a couple articles, did a couple jobs for brands where I rode their bikes,” Becky says. “So I was doing stuff, it’s just that no one really knew I lived in a van.” 

Over those first five months, she reached out to companies about articles, shoots, and other gigs. Only now she wasn’t just talking to the Canadian version of those companies, she was talking to the heads of the brands. Incidentally, one of her most high-profile gigs came at a time when she was most vulnerable.“Well, I was homeless living in my van, and I got a DM on Instagram from the producer of Ride with Norman Reedus. She just said, ‘Hey, Norman wants you for an episode on his show, can I call you?’” Becky says. “And within five minutes, she called me and said, ‘Would you be down to go to Uruguay in the next couple of days?’ I was like, ‘Where’s Uruguay? Is that in Africa? What the fuck?’”

Becky recounts that a few days later, a limousine picked her up from her van and brought her to the airport. The following week was a whirlwind of opulence: first-class flights, personal bodyguards, bulletproof cars, luxury hotels, gourmet meals and, of course, long conversations with Norman Reedus while riding side by side through the South American countryside, on the way to play with baby seals and the like. Memories were already swimming through Becky’s head as the limo dropped her back off at her van, which she immediately drove to Subway to eat in her vehicle.

Soon enough Becky’s hard work once again began to pay off. She finally received her visa to work as a writer; she moved into an apartment, and her work began to pick up. She had re-stocked her garage with motorcycles and was renting them out to shoots for side cash. “I started working for bigger movies, bigger companies, bigger magazines,” she explains, “and it all kind of just turned into something bigger.” 

But the momentum only lasted so long, as 2020 brought with it the hammer that was COVID-19. “March 2020, I didn’t have any writing work,” Becky says. “My whole job had been traveling and trying to work on shoots, trying to hustle jobs, but you couldn’t do any of that during COVID. For all those brands, I was the last person they cared about during that time.”

Becky had some money saved from her various gigs, and she took this opportunity to print a T-shirt that she had always wanted to make. The shirt read: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, THE DUDE FELL OFF. “I always kind of wanted to make that shirt,” Becky explains. “I had seen the version that says, ‘If you can read this, the bitch fell off,’ and I’ve always wanted to throw it back in their faces.” 

To Becky’s surprise, the message resonated with many of her Instagram followers. Printing only small batches due to financial constraints, Becky watched as her inventory flew off the shelves time and time again. “I’d be sold out for a month or two at a time,” she says, “but it didn’t really matter because it wasn’t a brand. I was just selling them on my personal Instagram for fun.” However, when her sales hit 500 shirts in one day, Becky knew she was on to something. “I was just like, oh my god, I have so many other things I could make into merchandise,” she says. “So through all of COVID, I just kept coming out with another new saying that twisted around the other sex’s sayings, and everybody was loving it. I was just having fun with it.”

In 2022, Becky finally took the leap and formalized her own merchandise brand, Axel Co. The name Axel – Becky’s moniker and Instagram handle – originated on a trip to Mexico that she took 12 years ago with a couple of friends. “We all made up a fake name to tell dudes at the bar when we met them,” Becky reveals, “and then when Instagram came around, we all made our Instagram names @actuallyitsaxel, @actuallyitscoco, and @actuallyitstikka. Fucking fakest names ever, but all of us got pineapples tattooed on our arms on that trip, and we all still have those same Instagram names.”

Naturally, Becky’s brand is replete with tongue-in-cheek homages to classic biker culture, brimming with flames, leopard print, and dick references. The latter, of course, is in overt defiance of the chauvinism that historically accompanies chopper culture. “If you ever meet me, you’ll know I’m not a sexual person,” she says. “The dick references have nothing to do with anything other than a ‘fuck you’ to the men that have been shitty over the years.”

Today, Becky’s apparel line has expanded beyond T-shirts to include hoodies, socks, stickers, and most recently, fingerless gloves. “Nobody buys fingerless motorcycle gloves anymore,” she says, “but I like that cheesiness of old school motorcycle stuff, and I’m not doing this just because it’s a trend.”

Becky also channeled her classic biker vibes into two custom builds that she completed in the last few years. The first was a flame-clad Royal Enfield Continental GT 650 that she built for the Build Train Race (BTR) program and raced at MotoAmerica. This bike was recently hung from the rafters as a centerpiece in her new Axel Co. brick-and-mortar within the Roland Sands building in Long Beach, California. 

The second build was a 1948 Harley-Davidson Panhead clad in flames and leopard print that landed her the title of first woman to ever have a bike in the Born Free show. This chopper was a dream build for Becky, who designed it in the style of “those biker mamas that rode motorcycles long before me. Those are the women that I really respect in the culture: They couldn’t give two fucks, and they probably actually think I’m a dork. But that’s the shit I love.”

From the day her original post had gone viral, Becky’s high-profile experiences have often been met with envy from onlookers who do not realize the effort that Becky has put into curating her career. “It’s difficult when people are like, damn, you’re so lucky that you got that opportunity,” she says. “Luck is not a thing. I work really fucking hard for every single thing I’ve ever had. So, I think the best thing to answer that remark with is that when you work really hard, you get a lot luckier.”

For those who do see through the veneer, Becky hopes that they find inspiration in the path she has laid, particularly for the women following in her footsteps. “I want there to be this thing where girls come up to me and are like, ‘Yo, I’m riding because of you.’ When that happens I can just die happy,” Becky explains. “It doesn’t have to be riding motorcycles; I just want them to have that power and confidence and independence to do something that they thought they couldn’t do.”

And Becky has learned that the best way to encourage this is simply by being herself, pushing forward, and doing what she loves. “I know my life is very motorcycles, and it’s crazy to say, but I really love everything that I do and I want to keep working on it,” she says. “Everything, every year, it just gets better and better. And I feel like the best is yet to come.”

Metanoia in Morocco

OVERCOMING LOSS AND FINDING SPIRITUAL TRANSFORMATION

Forward by Joel Fuller  | With journal entries & photography by Tyler Ravelle

 

Five days of riding in Morocco: 800-plus miles, 98% off-road, lungs full of dust, boots full of sand, cracked lips, best friends, poorly filtered gas, tagines, mint tea, cafe au laits, 6th gear pinned across the Western Sahara. Nerves, pain and sorrow overcome from the recent unforeseen passing of a father bonded by life on two wheels. 

Two weeks before Tyler Ravelle’s trip to Morocco, I received a phone call from him asking, “Would you like to go to Morocco and ride dirt bikes?” A friend of his was originally supposed to join him, but had to cancel at the last minute, so a spot opened up. Despite the need for a difficult conversation with my then-significant other about canceling a trip to Hawaii … I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to join Ty on this adventure.

Ty and I have a close bond, forged by our shared love of riding, photography and storytelling. It was an honor for me to join him on this trip, especially given the very recent loss of his father in a motorcycle accident. I was glad to be there to support him during this difficult time and help document our journey together. It would be the first time he set off on a motorcycle since his father’s passing.

In the following pages, you will find Ty’s journal entries from our trip. We hope that through his words, you will get not only a sense of our adventures in this beautiful country, but also a deeper understanding of the close and personal relationship between Ty and his father.

 
 
 
 
 

The Lion Wanted To Hunt

POL TARRÉS ON BECOMING HIMSELF

Words by Tina Torelli | Photography by Javi Echevarri

 

This is the intimate portrait of Pol Tarrés, bike whisperer and insanely skilled visionary on the motorcycle scene. Like any artist, as he defines himself, the 29-year-old official Yamaha rider from Spain is here to disturb the peace. His heavy-duty art is like a roaring lion perched on a rock – loud, free and self-confident. 

It’s a Friday morning, and Tarrés has just finished his first workout of the day. Too disciplined for this world (his own words), he wakes up at dawn, puts his sneakers on no matter what and goes out on his artistic hunt.

“It’s this need to create and to express myself. Instead of paint and a brush, I use my body and my bike. It’s who I am, and this gift is what I was born with,” says Tarrés, fresh and radiant after his morning run. 

 

He likes to find inspiration in nature, tapping into its whispers, textures and shapes. “When I go for a run, I intentionally take new trails, because it’s like opening a portal to let new ideas flow in. I have the ability to see jumps and tricks where there are rocks, trees, rivers and walls. I am obviously inspired by BMX, only I’m dancing over the terrain on a 450-pound motorcycle. I’m basically mapping the world of adventure bikes through the lens of a BMX rider, and that’s what makes me happy.”

Besides redefining what is possible in riding, physics and human potential, Tarrés is simply living his life. “Who am I? I am a simple guy. Most of the time I am just training, riding and playing princesses with my daughter,” he explains … almost seriously. 

Tarrés doesn’t mind opening up about all things good and bad. The story about how he became himself and his classical hero’s journey with all the bestselling ingredients. It’s a story about freedom, beauty, perseverance, patience, hard work and sacrifice.

So, let’s go back to 1993. On September 29, a boy with his fate already carved in stone was born. His father, Francesc Tarrés, competed in trials riding, and so did his uncle Jordi Tarrés, seven-time world champion. Pol successfully toed the family line until 2016, when he quit trials.  He was hungry for greater challenges, and his soul called him to extreme enduro and super enduro, where he would create his own universe. 

Saying goodbye to trials was unexpected, and it would take another six years to show everybody exactly why he did it. Today he’s a famous and well-respected rider, but nobody on the outside knows the battle for freedom he fought behind the scenes. Not against an outside enemy, but worse – he had to endure doubts, judgments, accusations and persuasion from his own circle. 

“Imagine a lion raised as a circus animal, trained to perform tricks. The lion might be the king of the circus, yet what he really wanted to be the king of the jungle,” Tarrés says.  “A lion wants to hunt, to attack, to rest and sleep. A lion wants to be FREE.”

He continues, “It sounds harsh, but I felt like a circus lion in a cage. Of course, I was making good money. Many people wanted my life, but not me, I didn’t want it, because the tag on my cage said how much money I should win, and how I should do it. I did win a lot, but when you are a circus animal, winning doesn’t make you happy.”

He adds that when he was in this situation, there was no feeling of fulfillment, because he wasn’t achieving his goals.  “My uncle is a legend of the sport with all he did for trials, and all his titles, and it was all on me to carry the torch,” Tarrés says. “At one point, I had no choice but to stand up against 95 percent of the trials world. I was lucky enough to have fellow rider Toni Bou on my side. Toni understood immediately that I had to leave so I could pursue what I am doing today.”

Tarrés’ evolution started as all evolutions do: in the muddy waters of a revolution. Rewriting your own story is a dirty job, but he had to do it anyway. “There’s one important thing I’d like to add,” he shares. “I left trial with immense gratitude. This difficult discipline formed my character, honed my technique, taught me sacrifice and gave me the tools for my art. Trials was the university I attended for many years, but then I chose a different career. It happens to a lot of people, after all.” 

The master of badass riding with the body proportions of a Spartan warrior is surely not meant to follow anyone else’s path but his own, and blazing his own trail brought him satisfaction beyond his wildest imagination. Tarrés was now ready to express the unimaginable. To make the impossible, possible. 

The visionary team he cofounded, Trece Racing Society, came together in the name of this possibility. Trece Racing Society is a gang of doers and free-spirited individuals who like to be challenged while serving beauty to the world. It’s the creative force behind all the wild projects that Tarrés is in evolved in, from traveling the globe to creating inspiring films, setting world records or competing in ground-breaking events. 

It’s not easy to explain how this family lives and breathes, but Tarrés gives it a try. “When I’m with the guys, it’s like entering into our own little world and it gives me a whole new level of confidence. In the end, I am able to do these extraordinary things because I trust completely in myself and my team. If the idea sounds too crazy, we do it anyway. If we want to set a new world record, the only question is how.”

Tarrés is a hunter of crazy new ideas, but it’s also true that these crazy ideas are hunting him. “If I can see it with my mind, a trick, a jump or a mission, I know it can be done. If something pops into my head and won’t let me go, I intuitively know it’s possible. It feels like the idea belongs to me. Everything you see on my YouTube or Instagram is something I felt beforehand, and it was this undeniable feeling that made me overcome people’s comments. ‘What do you want to prove?’ Nothing, calm down, nothing. ‘You’ll kill yourself!’ People think I’m crazy and it’s simply not true. I am mentally balanced,” he smiles. 

Life flows when you move according to its energy. “If something gives me good vibes, it’s a green light for me,” says Tarrés, making a gesture of touching the throttle impatiently. It’s easy to imagine him standing at the traffic lights with his eyes closed, centered and perfectly present. Red, yellow, green … and he launches the mission, unconditionally backed up by his team. But what is really behind all these gigantic achievements, on the mental side of the game? 

“Sacrifice, patience and willingness to feel pain,” he offers. “People see me traveling the world to do some tricks. Surprise, surprise – that’s the same Pol who gets up at six every day and goes for a run. Still the same Pol that works an entire month on one ten-second trick. But the moment I can finally jump, it’s just glorious!”

Only a great team with the same dedication and values can create great things. Tarrés  explains: “This is how Trece Racing Society began. On a sunny day, a guy named Javi Echevarría called me and proposed a commercial spot for Mango, where I would be wearing a suit and riding a motorcycle. I’ve done many commercials but never actually had fun while doing them. There was an unusual chemistry, so we decide to meet again and share ideas. Echevarría eventually became the team manager and creative director of Trece Racing Society, and eventually more people joined, and we become a family.”

Trece Racing Society went from “Hello, let’s fund a team and do some fun shit together” to a full-on brand in no time. But where is the road taking him? “I have no idea. I just know there’s no end. I will continue pushing my bike’s limits and mine. There are race results to improve, new tricks to invent, and many more exciting stories to tell.”

What could be better than doing what you love most in the world while collecting all these extreme adventures with your friends? “Nothing,” Tarrés says. “Every time we achieve something, I look back seven years and give myself a high-five. On a flight back home from a race or an expedition, I say to myself: ‘I’m doing what I felt I had to do. Isn’t that amazing?’ I know who I am, I set my own goals and I work harder than ever before.”

He adds, “In most of our projects, I get to the point where I’ve reached all sorts of my limits. Let’s say I am pushing up the wall of a mountain with no tire left; it’s freaking cold and there’s no oxygen. Or I am sinking into the sea of dunes at 120 degrees, watching other riders passing by. The moment of despair could easily break me, but instead I surrender to it, I don’t fight it.

“I think the human body is very intelligent and practically limitless, but it’s the mind who’s in control. It’s only when you connect everything – the mind, body and soul – that you can win. Being whole, that’s my biggest secret. I am not ashamed to say that I worked for years with psychologists, and that changed my life. You have to leave your pride at home sometimes. You get stronger physically, stronger technically, and you have to become stronger mentally to balance this out. We’re all just human.”

Tarrés knows how to prevent those frequent trips to the hospital: He sweats more in training and bleeds less in battle. “I owe it to myself and to the people who believe in me to work hard. I need to be super fit. Wake me up at midnight, I am ready to ride.”

Freedom doesn’t always mean lying on the beach with a cocktail in your hard. It’s hard work. “I know why I do it,” he says.  “I appreciate every second I can enjoy my freedom and doing what I love.”

Roaring on his rock, wild and free. 

Behind the Scenes of Enso

GOING ALL IN ON A PASSION PROJECT

Words by Dylan Wineland

 
 
For Aaron and me, there is nothing more enjoyable than riding dirt bikes and making films. Motocross is how we grew up, and riding has become our primary tool for self-expression. But that’s what the motorcycle is to us: a tool. We have gone on to use this tool to deepen our understanding of the world, life, and most importantly, ourselves.
 
 
 
 

There has always been this defining moment while making our films where we learn to let go. Sometimes it’s not by choice. And oftentimes it comes to us as the illusion of defeat, while in reality it is the very thing we needed to guide us where we needed to go. 

I am not a “woo-woo” sort of guy, but the pattern became undeniable. It became our philosophical treatise. The irony behind making a film that represents this philosophy is that it was something we had to practice every day while making it. Every obstacle we encountered was a reminder that we can only do our best, but the rest is up to things out of our control, and we just had to be okay with that. 

 
 

I’m always afraid of becoming stagnant, so with this film I really wanted to do something different. I wanted to push myself as a cinematographer and try things that I had only ever dreamed of. Rather than just watching from a distance, I wanted to take the audience on the journey with Aaron. That’s when I decided that the majority of the shots would be tracking alongside, down below, or up above him while he rides. 

Along with tracking Aaron, I wanted to mount cameras to the bike so that the audience could experience the feeling of being on the bike with him. This led to ambitious camera-mounting techniques that would not have been possible without an amazing team behind us.

 
 

Enso

A FILM ABOUT LETTING GO

By Dylan Wineland & Aaron McClintock

 

At some point there seems to be a defining moment in life where you learn to let go. Sometimes, not by choice. And often times it comes to us as the illusion of defeat, while in reality, it was the very thing we needed to guide us to where we had to go.

About a year ago, Aaron and I came across the Buddhist word, Ensō. This single word described everything that we had been talking about for the last year or so. By definition, it represents and suggests cutting the desire for perfection and allowing things to be just as they are.

Understanding that perfection doesn’t exist allows you to move through life gracefully, free of unnecessary pressure. It opens the door to allow situations to unfold naturally, and invites intuition and creativity to move through. For Aaron, riding is a great place to practice this concept. It’s a place that he can go where the universe can reveal these sort of secrets.

In this film, we ride along with Aaron as he takes a journey into the idea letting go and simply being.

 
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