Without a Doubt

Photos by Anthony Smith

The view from the top of Gouranga is, by any definition, overwhelming. From the outcropping at the trail’s high point, riders can either look south at the 2,300-vertical-foot cliffs of the Stawamus Chief, a granite monolith rising like a fist above the tiny town of Squamish, British Columbia; or look east, across the aqua waters of Howe Sound, toward the glaciated mass of Mount Tantalus; or follow the Coast Mountains on their march north toward Whistler.

The most pressing view, however, is the trail itself. Even in a place as notoriously difficult as Squamish, the double black-diamond descent is considered steep, technical and high consequence, a gauntlet of back-to-back features that require careful speed control and precision. It’s difficult to stop once you’re in the line, and by the bottom, you’re hauling ass.

That’s Gouranga on the way down. Braydon Bringhurst is here to ride up it.

Over the past two months, the 37-year-old Idahoan has walked the line dozens of times and measured each feature, valuable information he used to build replicas back home in Boise. He’s experimented with tire pressure and suspension settings, taking meticulous notes on what worked best.

Now he sits at the bottom, head down and hands squeezed tightly around his grips.

“Acceleration, smooth power, just get onto the rock,” he whispers to himself. “Acceleration, smooth power, just get onto the rock.”

Then he takes a deep breath, clips into his pedals and charges into the bottom climb.

Braydon is an outlier in the mountain bike world. He doesn’t race and rarely competes (though he did recently start his own mountain bike competition). He’s never been in Rampage or Joyride. But his discipline-defying style, a blend of freeride, trials and XC, looks as natural dialing off-axis 360s and massive slickrock gaps as it does climbing the 8,600-vertical-foot, 27-plus-mile Whole Enchilada trail in Moab, Utah. And those are just a few lines on a résumé that also includes multiple national BMX racing titles; a USASA National Freeski Championship in 2006; an Idaho State Championship in pole-vaulting in 2007; and a collegiate All-American track-and-field title when he graduated from Brigham Young University in 2016.

Nearly as impressive as these achievements, however, are the many, many, many failures that have gone into each. Braydon jokingly calls himself a “professional failer,” and his willingness to get up and try again is borderline superhuman; he’d make 37 attempts on the bottom section of Gouranga before a tweaked quad muscle forced him to pivot to the alternate option. By the end of the three-day project, he’d take a total of 122 attempts across the climb’s four sections.

That’s because, for Braydon, failure isn’t a bad word. Each attempt is just more information on what didn’t work, which—bit by bit—helps him figure out what will. Those sorts of gains may seem minimal, but they’re part of the larger process … and for Braydon, the joy is in the process, not the achievement.

As I watched him charge into the bottom climb for the umpteenth time, I was exhausted, inspired and fascinated. How can one find so much joy in something that involves so much failure?

So, I asked.

You come from a competition-heavy background. What is it about freeride mountain biking that fits you so well?

In many other sports over the course of my life, I have been a “racer” or “competitor” first. That pressure was always hard to navigate, and I wasn’t that good at enjoying the sport for the sake of the sport; how I felt about it was tied to results or how I measured up. I would put so much pressure on myself that even when I won, I’d be so anxious that I wouldn’t be happy. And when I lost, it’d hurt double because I’d failed when I was supposed to be doing something fun.

When I finished my collegiate pole-vaulting career at 26, I was done competing. I wanted to find my thing and do it my way. That’s when I discovered mountain biking. It was this beautiful blend of art, sport and therapy that brought me to the present moment. It allowed me to craft and dissect all these different sides of me: artistic, physical, mental, spiritual. To me, it’s the sport I’ve been building toward my whole life.

Is there a difference between how you approach gravity-oriented projects and climbing-oriented ones?

Mentally, I try to envision them the same way: Keep it fluid, and make it all one motion. When I’m working through a project, I think of it as a song and try to keep a consistent beat and flow. That’s why, when I’m climbing, I try to avoid hopping or making moves where my wheels stop turning. I’m flowing uphill.

Descending, I try to bring in my own flair and flavor. When I was freeskiing in high school, I thought ski racing was zero fun. Not because I didn’t respect or appreciate it, but because to me, skiing was art. It’s not fun to make speed my only focus and just look for straight lines to go as fast as I can. When I see a trail, I want to enjoy it to the max, find every gap, side hit and double, and do it with style and flow.

What do you love most about each? And what are the biggest challenges?

I love them both because they push me in different ways. Climbing is very strategic and nuanced, like how I need to be in a certain gear to put power down on a certain section so I can float over the next one. Some features have taken me hundreds of tries, but every attempt gives me input on what I need to learn to eventually make it. And since crashing on climbs tends to be minimal (at least compared to downhill crashes), I get a lot of satisfaction and progress for relatively low risk.

On descents and jumps, I’m very risk-averse. I am not a “just gonna send it” type of person. I just don’t work like that. Mountain biking is just so risky, and even little crashes could be life-altering. I’ve always been careful, even with my BMX and skiing, but now I’m even more so because I am responsible for three little kids and want to be present and able to be with them. I want to ride tomorrow and the day after that.

I have very specific cues and a progression that I follow meticulously, so while that big gap or spin or slalom run might look crazy to an outsider, in my head, it’s just another step in my progression, and that comes from a ton of work and deliberate effort and practice. By the time I’m doing it, there are no question marks in my head. There’s no fear. I’m just executing, step by step.

How do you manage that when you’re riding such complicated and high-consequence lines?

That’s one of the reasons I feel so fortunate to have worked with a sports psychologist for the past 14 years. There are so many things I could be focused on, but the conscious mind is literally a space, and if the space is filled, then it’s hard to get other stuff in there. Research shows that the mind is optimized to most effectively focus on two to three things at once. As soon as it crosses the line to four, it’s overfilled, and you might as well try to be thinking about 20 things. By filling your mind with those steps of execution, you leave no room for fear or doubt or anything else.

There’s also something called Hick’s Law, which says the more options you have, the slower you react physically. Your movements get clunky. So, to stay in that flow state with maximum capacity in both the body and mind, you’ve got to stick to those two or three things and trust yourself.

Show us how that looks in real life, using Gouranga as an example.

If I zoom out and look at the whole thing, my initial impression is, “Oh, dude, that looks so gnarly.” But if I ever want to give myself a legitimate shot at making it, I can’t let my mind be filled with doubt that it’s too big or impossible.

You have to be careful you don’t start with the scary or overwhelming stuff because that will just zap confidence. The first part of the climb is wildly aggressive, and if I couldn’t do that, it was going to be really telling as to whether I could do it all. So, I started by climbing all the other stuff on the line, breaking down each move into two or three things I could focus on, which gave me the feedback that told me, “Yes, I think I can do this.” And then I went to the bottom.

Where does that attention to detail come from? It’s something you’d expect in competition, not freeriding.

It definitely comes down to my pole-vaulting in college. It was the same poles, the same standards, the same measurements every single day. You have 130 feet to sprint down the runway and plant a stick in the ground, and the only variable might be a little wind at your back. Nothing was going to give me more speed down that runway other than getting mega into the details. I could measure micro-improvements, which let me see what was helping me progress.

That’s why I love finding my limits, in the most calculated way possible, and then pushing to the edge of what I believe I’m capable of. In racing or competition, it can be really easy to compare yourself to others. In mountain biking, I find my own challenges and go after those with everything I can. It’s just me against me, and that’s just an incredible self-belief experience.

Mountain biking doesn’t happen on a track, field or in a terrain park. How does that affect your approach to progression?

I love riding in all the ways, and appreciate hand-built trails and features completely, but nothing is as special as riding natural terrain—hitting a feature that is millions of years old and making it flow, up or down. It feels like I’m riding Earth itself on this incredible machine called a bicycle, where tech meets the natural world, and I get to bring my interpretation into that equation.

Riding a landscape like that often brings me to tears. It makes me feel very finite. I realize the time I have on Earth is precious and limited, so getting the chance to ride through it—smooth or rugged, up or down—is metaphoric for my existence as a human.

Three days after his first attempt at Gouranga’s bottom climb, Braydon lined up below its top section for the 32nd time. This was the highest-consequence move of the entire project, a 15-foot near-vertical punch that could easily turn into a 15-foot fall. He’d come close to making it on his 31st attempt, but as he powered into the final few pedal strokes on his 32nd, he shouted out in pain and fell backward. His bike tumbled down the face as he dropped to the ground, holding his leg.

Braydon had torn his quad muscle. After three days and 122 total attempts, the Gouranga project was done.

At the bottom, Braydon called his wife, Nicole, to tell her the news. But while Braydon was obviously bummed, he didn’t sound defeated.

“I fail all the time,” he explained when asked how he was feeling. “That has to be part of my reality because with everything I do, there’s a chance of it failing. But I use that to take away from failures, take away from shortcomings, and say, ‘OK, what did I learn from that? Did I give it my all and still fail, or did I leave a little on the table and fail?’”

After thanking the crew for all their help, Braydon decided to give the descent a few more tries before we left. He then proceeded to triple a massive gap at the bottom that, as far as we could tell, hadn’t been done before. No big deal.

A few days later, Braydon sent the crew a voice memo from Boise. He’d thought a lot about it on his drive, he said, and thought he had a new formula to get up the last section. With fresh legs and the new recipe, he had no doubt he could get it. Either way, he wanted to try again.