Hello and happy new year from the Bikes or Death podcast. My name is Patrick and I'm your host.

This is the podcast that talks about bikepacking, adventuring, and the cool people that make up the sport.

On this episode, I sat down with Jared Foster. He's a travel and conservation photographer.

We got a chance to meet up at Pace Bend Park just outside of Austin,

Texas. We rode mountain bikes in the morning, and then in the afternoon, we sat down at a picnic

table right there on the banks of the Colorado River and had a great talk, and I really enjoyed it.

He is a professor of practice there at Texas Tech University and he takes

his students bike packing on one or two trips every single year, which is great. We talk about

that on the show. And then he also is working on developing a route that he calls the Great

Plains Project and you can follow that hashtag on Instagram and that's going to be a route that he calls the Great Plains Project, and you can follow that hashtag on Instagram.

And that's going to be a route that travels all the way from Lubbock, Texas to Banff, Canada,

and it's like 3,500 miles off road and just full of bike packing goodness.

So we have a lot of great things that we talked about this episode and

I'm excited for you to hear it so let's get to it

Jared Foster thank you so much for meeting with me today. Man, thanks for having me. It's a beautiful day here in Texas. We are at Pace Bend Park, just west of Austin, and we're sitting on the side of Colorado River that goes into Lake Travis. It's the biggest part of the Colorado River, I think.

Is it?

The widest.

I don't know, it may be the deepest too.

Yeah, it's beautiful out here.

Well, thank you so much again.

Let's get into it.

So tell me a little bit first about how you got into biking, bike packing. So for anyone listening, Jared is a professor

...