My outdoor bicycling season began this weekend along County Road P54 from the town of Perry to Rippey and back again.

Twenty-four miles—chilly but not unbearable beneath overcast skies, with temps in the 30s and a steady southeast breeze.

I pause on the road from Rippey back to Perry—across from a batch of bikers clustered at a random farmhouse.

Cue the Led Zeppelin that blared during the first 30 minutes of the ride from a Bluetooth speaker on a bike 20 yards ahead of me:

Ah-ah, ah!
Ah-ah, ah!
We come from the land of the ice and snow,
From the midnight sun where the hot springs flow.

Saturday’s 47^th annual Bike Ride to Rippey (BRR) thankfully bore only traces of the ice and two feet of snow that blanketed central Iowa throughout a frigid January, before a merciful thaw ushered in February.

There were no hot springs to speak of—just the occasional roadside barrel fire, bonfire, or mobile beer trailer.

BRR was founded in 1978 and famously is cancel-proof no matter the weather. A defiant attitude and questionable sanity are ingrained into its ethos.

At least 1,632 riders turned out this year, according to volunteer emergency radio operators from Dallas County who helped safeguard the route—nearly 500 more riders compared to last year’s tally.

Unseasonably warm weather arguably wasn’t the biggest factor in the attendance surge: Saturday’s BRR began on the boulevard in the front of the Hotel Pattee with a moment of silence for the Perry school shooting victims, or anybody else riders wanted to honor in their thoughts.

A month after the Jan. 4 tragedy, BRR felt like an opportune moment to help Perry celebrate what we love about a true and deep sense of community, without ignoring the hard work of healing that remains.

Fellow Iowa Writers’ Collaborative member Doug Burns of The Iowa Mercury has filed a couple of posts from Perry:

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For the more banal and routine concern of the cold, I wrapped my torso in no fewer than six layers:

1. The Raygun T-shirt printed in honor of the Register’s Annual Great Bicycle Ride Across Iowa (RAGBRAI) co-founder John Karras, a quote taken from my final full interview with him: “When you drive around Iowa, it’s not very impressive in a car. … When you bicycle through Iowa, it’s stunning.”

2. A thermal turtleneck.

3. A bicycle jersey.

4. A full-zip RAGBRAI sweatshirt.

5. An insulated Carhartt vest.

6. A lined jacket.

That sartorial list sounds a little silly as I document my upper-body cocoon, but I swear I felt like I maintained full range of motion with my arms. Bicycling isn’t supposed to be as complicated as a NASA spacewalk, but apparently this is how we entertain ourselves in Iowa in the off-season. I met a rider Saturday who rode his first BRR in 1980 and has endured subzero windchill when he was forced to cower behind a farmhouse just to regain the feeling in his feet. I can’t imagine it; I assume I would’ve needed to wear a dozen or more layers and carry a blowtorch.

On this temperate BRR day I also sported a Central College stocking hat beneath my bike helmet; it’s my typical winter biking headgear but on this occasion also served as a nod to late Perry High School Principal Dan Marburger, a fellow Central alum who’s credited with saving students’ lives because he bravely confronted the shooter.

Ready to roll at the start of BRR in downtown Perry with me, left, and Michael Morain.

Part of the joy of these goofball events on the rural tundra is reconnecting with the broader bicycling community. This was just the second time I’ve joined BRR, and once again I did so with my friend and fellow RAGBRAI stalwart Michael Morain. We also shared the road with Leo and Nancy Landis, Roger Munns, Jerry Perkins and others.

I pedaled for awhile alongside fellow Register and RAGBRAI alum (and current Des Moines City Councilman) Carl Voss, a staunch advocate of our state’s trail network. Some of the day’s conversation among riders—including over a hearty potato-bar-plus-pie lunch at the Rippey United Methodist Church—involved excitement over our expanding trails.

The upcoming Karras-Kaul Connector Trail on the southeast side of the Des Moines metro and a nine-mile link connecting the Raccoon River Valley Trail in Perry to the High Trestle Trail in Woodward are giddy topics for the Spandex scene. These are key pieces of trail that will enable bicyclists to pedal on continuous loops that surpass 100 miles. I think the diehard BRR-RAGBRAI-bicycling-trails crowd understands the significance of completing this circuit in central Iowa. But I don’t think anybody—whether bike partisans or the public at large—will truly appreciate the full impact on tourism and the trailside economy until it arrives.

When residents or tourists can bike for days on paved trails without having to backtrack through the same community or risk mixing with too much car traffic, we may be pleasantly surprised by some of the unforeseen organic growth to help us enter a next phase in our biking culture.

I’m not claiming this Iowa bike tourism will be as common in February as in May, but you get my drift.

We’ll still have the BRR faithful in the winter months.

A century ago, British mountaineer George Mallory, when asked why he was attempting to climb Mount Everest, apparently answered, “Because it’s there.” (He disappeared in June 1924 during what became his final attempt to scale Everest.)

I guess “because it’s there” suffices as a partial answer for why defiant Iowa bicyclists join BRR, but I still say supporting each other is more than half the reason we pedal in the land of the ice and snow, to keep our community hearth aglow.

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