One of our favorite “not too far” places to ride… and a welcome break from the Phoenix temps.
There are two kinds of rides that keep me sane. Neither one is optional.
The first is the solo ride. No plan, no pace to match, no voice but the one in your own head — and on a good day, even that one shuts up eventually. Solo riding is therapy without the co-pay. You climb, you breathe, you let the switchbacks pull the noise out of you one rock garden at a time. There’s no one to perform for. No one to impress with how fast you took that drop. Just you, the bike, and whatever you’re dragging up the mountain that day — grief, stress, a bad week, a bad decade. The trail doesn’t ask questions. It just makes you earn the quiet.
The second kind is Bean Peaks with the misfits.
That’s a different animal entirely. Bean Peaks is one of our go-to spots — close enough to hit after work, far enough from the Phoenix heat to feel like an escape. And when the crew shows up, solitude is the last thing on the menu. Someone’s Bluetooth speaker is blasting something you’d never admit to liking. Somebody’s dropping a line they have no business dropping, and everyone’s yelling about it — half encouragement, half warning. There’s trash talk on the climbs and worse jokes at the overlook. It’s chaos. It’s loud. It’s the opposite of the quiet ascent.
And somehow, it heals the same wound.
Here’s the thing nobody tells you about mental health: it isn’t one-size-fits-all, and it definitely isn’t one-mode-fits-all. Some days you need the silence. You need to be alone with your own thoughts long enough to actually hear them, sort through them, leave a few of them on the trail where they belong. Other days, silence is the enemy — it just gives the bad thoughts more room to echo. On those days, you need noise. You need idiots you love hollering your name as you clear a drop you weren’t sure you’d clear. You need to laugh at something dumb at the top of a climb instead of sitting with your own head.
Solo rides teach you how to sit with yourself. Misfit rides remind you that you don’t have to sit with yourself alone all the time — that connection, stupid jokes, and shared suffering on a climb are their own kind of medicine. One builds the engine. The other reminds you why you built it in the first place.
I used to think I had to pick a lane — that “real” mental toughness meant always choosing the solitary grind, and that riding with a crew was somehow the easy way out. That’s nonsense. The stoics didn’t avoid people; they just refused to let people control them. There’s no weakness in wanting company on a climb, same as there’s no weakness in needing to disappear into the desert by yourself for a few hours.
The trick is knowing which one you need on a given day — and being honest enough with yourself to admit it.
So some days I’ll take Bean Peaks alone, chase the silence, and let the granite sort me out. Other days, I’ll show up, hear that terrible speaker before I even see the trailhead, and know exactly what kind of therapy I’m getting instead.
Both get you up the mountain. Both get you home better than you left.
