“BIKEPACKING APPEALS TO ME BECAUSE YOU CAN COVER A LOT OF COUNTRY MORE QUICKLY THAN YOU CAN ON FOOT."
JEN REDDY’S NAME IS FAMILIAR to many in the Jackson area. She’s a member of Teton County (Wyoming) Search and Rescue, part of TCSAR’s short-haul team, an avalanche instructor, and a talented freelance illustrator (find her work at jenreddyink.com and on stickers plastered around town). She’s also an endurance athlete who quietly chalks up notable accomplishments on her bike and skis.
Reddy moved to Jackson 20 years ago to pursue ski mountaineering, and much of her early focus was on ticking off challenging lines in the Tetons. A former ski racer from the East Coast, she fell in love with powder and the vastness of the West’s mountains, and sought out objectives that were difficult but also aesthetic and unknown. “I pour over maps and Google Earth looking at the landscape, trying to find projects that are interesting and eyecatching,” Reddy says. “I love exploring.”
About four years ago, Reddy went bikepacking—think backpacking, but you carry all your gear on a bicycle—for the first time. That experience tapped into the same sense of exploration she felt in ski mountaineering. Again, she found herself spending hours looking at Google maps, piecing together dirt roads. “I like to find routes that take me through terrain I wouldn’t see otherwise,” Reddy says. “Bikepacking appeals to me because you can cover a lot of country more quickly than you can on foot. The silver lining of Covid forcing us to stick closer to home is that, after 20 years living in Jackson, I’m going places close by that I’ve never seen before.”
Reddy’s excursions, many of which she does solo, are long and arduous, although you wouldn’t know it from talking to her. She says she does not seek external acknowledgement, rather she looks for a depth of experience a lot of people don’t get in life. “I like to see what I can do,” she says. “There is such richness in being outside working hard. I feel sheer joy when I have finally completed a route. Before that, it’s all about perseverance. Just putting one foot in front of the other.”
Reddy says she used to be driven by competition, but that shifted six years ago after her husband died by suicide. At first, after his death, long bike rides or long hours on skin tracks were terrifying because of the silence she was forced to endure, but that has changed. Now she finds that silence healing. “I used to be super competitive,” Reddy says. “Pushing myself was about aggression, force. Now it comes from a place of compassion. It’s softer. It’s more, ‘Of course you can do this,’ instead of, ‘You have to do this.’”