Margus Riga: Pure Feral Happiness

There are three truths that Margus Riga keeps close to his chest: Company doesn’t like misery. It doesn’t have to be fun to be fun. And if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. But they’re not, and most don’t. 

“To chase real happiness, you have to immerse yourself in discomfort. Misery even. Frozen fingers, sh***y food, weather and terrain that want to kill you. And yet, in the middle of all that suffering, I find happiness. Pure, feral happiness. That’s why I do this.”

Riga has been a mountain bike adventure photographer for eighteen years, but it’s been a lifetime lit up by a drive for adventure and finding the most alive-feeling core experiences possible. Don’t think he’s too serious though. To get where he has, you also have to have a keen sense of humor at the ridiculousness of where you might end up when you push into the unknown with just enough planning to point in the right direction, more or less, and a hunger and excitement to face the absurdity of ending up exactly where you never could have planned. The joys of leaving room for life to fill in the details for you. Might take you places you didn’t realize were possible, and push you to do things you didn’t know you could. And that’s the whole point. 

This tenacious and mythical figure is a legend in the Sea to Sky among the types who like to set a challenge, vaguely, knowing it will be uncomfortable, and set out to see what will come of it. This group of people is pushing the definition of what adventure mountain biking can be—and discovering truth out on the ridgelines and scree slopes of some of the most awe-inspiring terrain in British Columbia—and the world.  

The simple answer to what mountain bike adventuring looks like today, and why it matters, in Riga’s opinion, is that, “For me, no ‘real’ human satisfaction or happiness can be had without first enduring hardship, or suffering, or whatever you want to call unwanted human conditions. Without the difficult, there is no chance of satisfaction.”

As the bikes get better—lighter, stronger, more capable than anything we could’ve dreamed of decades ago—the goalposts shift. You go deeper. Higher. Further. Until you’re not even “mountain biking” anymore. You’re doing this new, hybrid form of adventure that gets you further than any one thing could. 

“There is no riding up. The terrain we go into doesn’t allow it. You carry your bike like a crucifix. The payoff only comes when gravity takes over and lets you point the thing downhill.”

Riga and his friends started doing these kinds of trips over thirty years ago. It has taken approximately that long to get dialled at them. The one thing he’s learned about these trips that rings true through all of them is that it won’t go down as planned, so plan for that. And the weather is the boss. It could care less about you or your objectives. 

“If I were to contribute something to this form of mountain bike adventuring, it would be the fact that it’s possible. If you can dream it, you can do it, and it likely won’t go as planned.”

As Riga says, dreaming is cheap. You crack a beer, open Google Earth, and suddenly you’re planning an epic route in South America. The hard part comes when you lock into a location. The deeper you go into the logistics, the more the trip fights back. Take his trip to Navarino Island in Chile — the southernmost trekking zone in the world:

“Just committing to it was easy. Making it happen took over a year. It was wildly expensive and nightmarishly complex to coordinate. But it was worth it. It didn’t go as planned—of course it didn’t—and it was one of the best experiences of my life. Hard = Happy. That formula hasn’t failed me yet.”

Adventure photographers are a special breed of tough and tenacious. Shooting these trips is sometimes harder than the actual trip. Try pulling your camera out in a horizontal snowstorm on a 9,000-foot ridgeline while your hands are too numb to unzip or unroll your pack. Try asking the barely functioning humans you’re with to, “Hold on while I set up the shot” when their only concern is getting down alive before nightfall. And the camera adds twenty pounds to your pack. Twenty pounds of slower climbs, shorter tempers, and constant anxiety about whether you’re getting the right shots to justify the trip someone else helped fund. 

“It's so much harder ‘working’ on these trips than it is just trying to get through them without dying or injuring yourself in the process. Personally, I’d rather do these trips with the bare minimum of gear and supplies. Travel ultra-light style, and cover as much ground as we can. Most times this is not possible, because of the costs and time it takes to organize these trips. That’s where the sponsors come in.” 

We designed our new Guardian collection around people just like Margus Riga and supporting his style of adventure. He opens the door to new ways of exploring and seeing what’s out there. It’s more of a partnership really, where we support his “Hogs” (what he calls his own personal brand of adventure) and he helps show us how to never stop pushing and validates our products in some of the most extreme environments. 

The point of life is a slippery fish, a shadow you can’t look at head on. But if you’re led by adventure and the unknown, to go boldly where no other person would reasonably take a bike, and maybe come back with a story worth telling, well, you just might come around the next corner and startle it as it drinks water from a stream. Or in the god rays that break through the storm clouds rolling in. It’s enough to build a life around. All this, for the chance to stare into the void and say, “Yeah, I think we can ride that."