Field Report: ACG in Moab
The lonely desert sun crept over the horizon—the red-rimmed, sleep-crusted pupil of a slumbering god waking to gaze upon its favorite creation.
Addie Bracey and Caleb Olson. Two subjects deployed to the middle of nowhere, Utah. The lab techs had sent us out here with the new ACG Zegama Trail. There was a shirt, too; the wild desert wind ripped through it with glee. Radical Air. We were here to seek truth in screaming legs and glycogen depletion, our every heartbeat and footstrike beaming back to some air-conditioned facility where they were probably studying our every move.
Field Report:
ACG in Moab
The lonely desert sun crept over the horizon—the red-rimmed, sleep-crusted pupil of a slumbering god waking to gaze upon its favorite creation.
Addie Bracey and Caleb Olson. Two subjects deployed to the middle of nowhere, Utah. The lab techs had sent us out here with the new ACG Zegama Trail. There was a shirt, too; the wild desert wind ripped through it with glee. Radical Air. We were here to seek truth in screaming legs and glycogen depletion, our every heartbeat and footstrike beaming back to some air-conditioned facility where they were probably studying our every move.
The ancient rock pillars surrounding us beckoned—alien palaces with each whorl, pit, and pass seeming like it could be home to something unseen and unknowable. We wanted to learn their secrets. We needed to. And the only way to do it was to go full throttle, full send over and around and through and into the landscape.
Go time.
Our rubber fangs bit hard rock below us, keeping us steady as we careened through canyons. Running, scrambling, braking, turning. ZoomX foam cushioning each leap, keeping our knees from turning into the primordial sludge these rocks had seen in their far-gone youth.
As we crested buttes and dropped into bowls of layered rock, crisp desert air whistled through our shirts and over our skin. Faster equals cooler. Engines stable at high RPMs. Coolant levels good. All systems nominal.
We knew the whole time we weren’t alone. If we weren’t being watched, measured, quantified by the Lab, we were being intercepted by some kind of other intelligence poised behind crumbling sandstone corridors.
Hurtling through the canyons, we kept our eyes constantly focused on each small nook, cranny, and cave. No signs of life, but every sign of feeling alive ourselves—beaming and bounding and breathing.
Carving our way back to the car, we felt as though we were stepping up out of an ocean and onto land. Millions upon millions of years of evolution in an instant. Merely opening the trunk of our car teleported us back into the year 2026, back to modern society, back to our normal lives.
The Lab had its data. We had our memories. We may not have ran (literally) into any alien life, but the rocks thrummed with something foreign to us. Something old. Something humbling. Something bigger than us, bigger than running, bigger than humanity. We were guests in its home, but we can’t pretend to have mastered it.
Nothing can.