How I cycled trees up the UK's toughest climbs.
I was struggling. My cadence was now so low I felt that at any moment I might keel over. Every fiber of my legs was burning. My hands were aching, having been locked in a claw-like grip for so long. The most pain was being held in my back. It felt like something would snap any second, either within me or, worse, on the bike. My vision was blurred, part sweat dripping off my forehead and part exhaustion. I couldn’t be sure if the spectator sheep were real or imagined. I put my head down and continued tacking my way up one of England’s toughest climbs.
It’s impossible to disentangle the mental from the physical with challenges of endurance. One facilitates the other which in turn facilitates the first. I wouldn’t be facing the mental battles if my feet weren’t turning pedals, and I wouldn’t be able to keep them turning if my mind gave up.
With Kirkstone Pass already in my legs and a Who’s Who of Lake District climbs coming up—Hardknott, Newlands, Honister—I was attempting Wrynose Pass. It is beautiful. It is short. But it is brutal: 2.7KM with an average incline of 10% and a maximum around 25%. The wild scenery unfurling around me could do nothing to distract my mind, legs, and lungs from the bruising I was putting them through.
Eventually, I reached the summit as relief and achievement flooded through me. I treated myself to a Lucho jelly, picked out a sapling from the front rack of my cargo bike and rooted an oak seedling into the soil.
Some people ride their bikes to get from A to B, to meet friends in the park, to feel the wind in their hair. But there are others. Mad creatures that appear out of cloudbursts, delirious and bedraggled in the furthest reaches of wilderness. They subject themselves to distances so extreme they appear to take all the frivolity out of cycling. These ultra-distance riders sign themselves up for multiple grueling days of long hours in the saddle, fully exposed to the elements, carrying only what they deem essential, and stopping only when close to exhaustion.
I however cannot churn out 250KM days for the best part of a week. I enjoy the cafe stops too much. I can too easily convince myself that I need a hot pub meal. Racking up over 20 hours of moving time in a 24-hour period is not in my wheelhouse. In 2023, I signed up for the Pan Celtic Race. I had done a few bikepacking trips with mates and loved them. Loved the pace, loved being outside for days on end, and loved feeling the scenery change from within it. I wanted to see what life was like inside the paincave—what would one of these trips be like if I was alone, only on my timings, going as far as I possibly could each day? I loved it. I wanted more. So, this summer, I signed myself up again. This was to be the last instalment of the Pan Celtic Race: 1800 miles from the Isle of Man, through the Lake District, Scottish Isles, and into the Highlands to finish in Inverness. This year, I did it on an Omnium Cargo V2, with tree saplings on the front. I wanted a challenge and one that put nature at its heart.
To exist is to flow. But while the human brain likes linear patterns, predictable and consistent, Nature does not. Nature consists of cyclical rhythms: sunrise, sunset, birth, death, bloom, fade. So, to live is to flow but also to ebb. Our lives vary, as if floating atop an ocean of rolling waves. In our busy distracted lives, these rises and falls can come so gradually, so randomly, that we struggle to find the rhythm. We never learn to interpret the crests and troughs for what they are. And in this mist, we seek to hold the highs as long as possible and avoid the troughs as best we can.
Days of double-digit hours in a saddle compress this experience. Your emotions cannot but be felt. The frequency and intensity of mood change is so high, it can feel like you are living an entire life in a day. The origins of these changes are at once so plain but also feel like they have no cause at all.
This is the liberation that comes with distance. The freedom that comes with toil. Take the highs and the lows as equally as you can, as experiences with comparable beauty in your ability to feel them.
The irony is that to participate in these events, to have the privilege of spending five, seven, twelve days in nature, we rely ever more on technology. Keeping on top of batteries charging is constantly at the forefront of the ultra-rider’s mind—be they for phones, lights, cameras, cycling computers, electric shifters, or wireless headphones. Maps and routes are planned, plotted and shared as digital .gpx files, and when your Garmin starts to play up, you can feel powerless; road signs appear alien and confusing.
This project aimed to take those digital relics and transmute them into tangible markers. I wanted to plot the route through nature, in nature and of nature by creating a living map. A ‘.tree file’ to be found by anyone and everyone, not just those with a RideGPS account. Maybe in the next iteration, the directions will be dictated by the DNA of the plants—turn left for a hazel, right for a Scots Pine, and carry straight on for an oak.
The maps of routes exist in another form: memory. They live in the minds of every rider that has ridden them. Ubiquitous GPS coordinates but completely unique experiences. Weather changes, traffic fluctuates and daylight eventually fades. While I was battling a headwind along the Solway coast, I knew some lucky bastard was loving a tailwind just across the firth. This doesn’t make it easier or harder, better or worse, just different. And that is why sharing stories is important. After the event, sharing experiences—their differences and similarities—gives your own context and depth. On the road, they keep you sane, to hear the struggles of another reflect your own. There comes a point in an ultra-race where you pass through the liminal zone, when paces have been established for long enough to reveal your road compatriots. Those other riders who will leapfrog you and be leapfrogged by you for the duration of the ride. They will miraculously be at every cafe you stop at for breakfast, catch up every time you stop at a corner shop and always be hiding around the last corner of a ferry queue to join you in a slow march with delirious conversation about the ridiculous nature of your chosen ‘holiday’.
At times like these, I pine to have a third-person perspective, to view from the outside our small group of bib-shorted, sleep-deprived travelers. To hear us laughing more and more manically about how much we hate flapjacks, how jelly babies have lost their edge and how desperately we crave the simplest of things after we cross the finish line. If we cross the finish line.
There’s no doubt that the trees slowed me down. Stop. Kick the stand. Free my high-speed planting spear (kindly donated by Plantem) from its straps. Open the crate. Select a sapling. The routine of planting was honed and whittled over the first couple of days. But even at its slickest, it was four minutes per stop. Minimum.
The real disruption though was the break in momentum this would cause. I’d painstakingly searched for appropriate planting spots before the race. What wasn’t clear from the grainy, sometimes ten-years out of date Google Street View images was the road gradient, or my level of exhaustion, or headspace when passing them. Lots of these spots were halfway up long climbs or appeared just as my legs were feeling powerful for the first time in four hours—or when I needed to be 10KM further down the road than I was. I was quickly forced into adopting a two-trees-every-40KM or three-trees-every-60KM planting method. The same number of trees but in small groves. Planted with each other for company. This brought the average time down to around two and a half minutes per tree.
Though they slowed my progress, the trees refreshed me. They made me engage with my surroundings in a different way and constantly returned me to the moment. Planting a tree is a rebellious and active exercise in hope. Hope that it will survive. Hope that it will grow. Hope that something will sit in its shade. Hope there will be anything to sit in its shade.
The story of trees and the climate crisis has had multiple arcs. First (and sadly still) as victims. Images of once virgin rainforest reduced to clear-cut wastelands have been the images perhaps most associated with climate change in the public consciousness.
Secondly, as harbingers of hope. “Offset your carbon”—the ‘holy grail’ of emissions reductions. Continue your lifestyle as it is and for a low price you can wipe away your emissions (and guilt) by having someone somewhere plant a tree. And you can rest assured that this tree will definitely, absolutely suck up an exactly equal amount of CO2 to that promised.
And thirdly, as cover-up tools that simultaneously hide and reveal the problems and oversights of “green capitalism”. Though sold as a cheap afterthought, consumers are becoming aware that the type of tree planting facilitated and paid for by these offsets are flawed in a variety of ways: the “offset” amount calculated from averages when no tree is truly an average tree. Trees are not guaranteed to grow to maturity; the fate of the tree dictates whether the carbon will remain “locked up” once sequestered.
The most common “reforestation” is in the form of vast conifer plantations. These are dense monocultural plantings of largely Sitka Spruce—a non-native pine prized for its speed of growth. The lack of diversity in planting and density of canopy mean that within these forests, very little life is supported beyond the trees themselves and ferns on the floor. Compare this to the rich abundance of a native mixed broadleaf woodland and the differences are stark: birdlife, shrubbery, insects, and fungi are woven through mixed woodland—individual threads making up a symbiotic tapestry of life.
One climb through Galloway Forest Park illustrated this perfectly. As I inched my way up the hill, I had time to absorb the surroundings in detail. Uphill on my right was a Sitka plantation. Dense and dark. On my left stood a line of native broadleaf trees, proudly tracing the path of bubbling burn. To my right I could see no movement, hear nothing. My left was abuzz with life. More birds than I could count created a layered cacophony of sound as they flitted from branch to branch and tree to tree.
Trees are not a silver bullet to fix the climate crisis. But they are powerful, natural tools for restoring our planet in so many other ways. Their shade cools our surroundings, vital for a planet steaming towards 2℃ warming. Trees provide bases for ecosystems. A single oak can support 2,300 other species. Thus, they can act as pioneer species—their arrival and establishment can pave the way for many other species to return to a previously depleted area.
They support mycorrhizal networks—vast webs of fungal mycelium that interact with plant roots throughout healthy, living soil—which, together with complex tree root networks, help reduce soil erosion. They absorb large amounts of rainwater and help create soil that can hold even more, mitigating flood risk from high rainfall. When planted near water courses, trees can minimise runoff from farmland, preventing eutrophication in rivers and streams.
The ultimate outcome of this project was never set in stone. But that is precisely the point. To have nature, in its true Dionysian form, at the heart of an experiment you can only define a method, set the parameters, and leave a blank space in between where nature can paint its reality. When and where the trees were planted was predetermined by the route, itself prescribed by Celtic history, town planning and council infrastructure. The time of year had to be aligned with the start of the race, July, so the saplings were cell-grown. And the planting locations were spread across hundreds of kilometres, so had to be unsanctioned and uncontrolled.
The goal was not, could not be, to plant trees with 100% survival rate. The ‘goal’ was to attempt one of the longest road ultra-races in the UK on a cargo bike and plant trees every 20KM. To see if it’s possible; what works, what doesn’t and how it can be improved. To see in what ways nature would find a way.
The full scope of what Ultra-Distance Bike Planting is or could be hasn’t grown to maturity yet. If one person wants to check on one of the trees, or plot a ride to take in a few, or ride the whole thing, or ride their own thing and plant one tree (or a hundred) as they go—if one person goes down a nature restoration rabbit hole, if ten trees survive, or even just one—then a goal of some kind will have been reached.
I know for sure that I’ll be back in five years to check in on them. To find the empty spots where a sapling was planted but hasn’t made it and see in what other ways nature has found a way. And to find the places, however many they are, where one of these saplings has taken hold and grown. Hopefully I’ll find one on a sunny day and contort myself to sit in any shade they can provide.
Words by Dylan Smythe • Ultra Distance Bike Planting