If happiness is contagious, then it’s moving even quicker on two wheels in the Navajo Nation thanks to advocates in the Southwest. One ride can change a life and that life can change countless other lives. Tom Riggenbach, Claudia Jackson, and Nigel James — amongst other riders on the rez — are proving this.

By Single Tracks

A faded yellow tag hangs from a small juniper tree alongside an empty dirt road, a solitary directional marker in a vast desert. A sandy wash to the right leads to the top of a hill, where a horse corral shows the first sign of life since the turnoff onto “Indian Route 4,” some 23 miles back in Second Mesa, Arizona. Just beyond the corral is a house with a canopy stretching several feet out from the roof.

By Freehub Magazine

Rodeo is a common passion on the Navajo Nation—a reservation the size of West Virginia that stretches across New Mexico, Utah, and Arizona—and a couple of years ago, when he was thirteen, Nigel James was an up-and-coming calf roper. But then his horse got pregnant and he couldn’t ride her, so he turned to his bike and started building downhill trails and ramps around his parents’ place. Soon he was riding his bike the way a roper rides a horse: in brief bursts of speed that give way to daredevil maneuvers. This school of cycling is called enduro, and Nigel had a gift for it.

By The New Yorker