Simon Bosman Over Drive

Pushes the boundaries between peril and potential

- Devon O’neil

THE CATHEDRAL ROCK TRAIL IN SEDONA, ARIZONA, IS SEVEN-TENTHS OF A mile of ugly, trenched, exposed red rock and dirt, some of it so steep and slick you can barely hike up it, let alone ride a bike down it.

On an overcast day in early January, Simon Bosman is giving me a tour of the route’s hardest points if one were to attempt it on two wheels, self-preservation be damned. He stops at a 6-foot drop below a 100-foot-long cleft in the rock. “Even people who can do the rest,” Bosman says with a smirk, “this is what gets ’em.”

Understandably so: To nail the move, as Bosman has done roughly a dozen times, you must pull your front wheel off the ground, then pedal forward just enough to jump while turning 90 degrees to the right, down to a pizza-size landing pad, which today amounts to a 2-inch-deep muddy hole. After landing on your rear wheel, surrounded by so many sharp rocks that a fall almost certainly would break multiple bones, you must keep turning, trials-style, until you’ve rotated 120 degrees from takeoff. Then you can continue the descent down a series of boulder steps.

Cathedral is not meant to be a mountain biking route, of course. But as the only bike-legal trail in this bike-crazed town that had yet to be ridden, it attracted the interest of a uniquely qualified demographic. Members of the local ‘Gnarly Crew,’ Bosman included, scouted it for more than a decade. A handful tried to ride it. Bosman is still the only one who has.