ADVENTURE
Courtesy of Scott Mackenzie-Low
Pedaling A to Standing Rock by Christi Turner
Courtesy of Scott Mackenzie-Low
Top: Scott MackenzieLow has been using his camera on the front lines of the DAPL protest. Below: Mackenzie-Low, with his bike
Boulder Weekly
s resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) in North Dakota has grown throughout the year, Scott Mackenzie-Low felt the personal call to join the protest growing too loud to ignore. An activist, artist and avid cyclist (and seasoned pedicab driver) who once biked from Colorado to Canada, Mackenzie-Low decided to join the DAPL protests by riding his bike from Denver, Colorado, to Cannon Ball, North Dakota. The message he would send out to the world from the anti-DAPL camps on and near the Standing Rock Reservation would be simple: “If I can ride my bike to Standing Rock, you can ride your bike to the grocery store,” he says. This would be no afternoon ride for charity; this is a more than 700mile journey to support a movement. Mackenzie-Low would pedal to the heart of the pipeline resistance, which has grown from just a few tents this past April to an international gathering of thousands, to show that there are alternatives to our fossil-fuel-driven lifestyle — and that it’s worth thinking twice before filling up the gas tank, especially if society’s desire for more and more oil puts tribal lands and indigenous people in serious danger. If completed, the controversial DAPL would weave more than 1,100 total miles through four states, transporting up to 570,000 barrels of crude oil per day from the Bakken oil fields of North Dakota to a storage facility at a river port in Illinois. Where a short section of it winds under the Missouri River north of Cannon Ball, DAPL would threaten the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe perhaps more than anyone else along the pipeline’s path, passing under the tribe’s sole water supply and putting it at risk of contamination. So on Oct. 10 — Indigenous Peoples’ Day, otherwise and less progressively known as Columbus Day — Mackenzie-Low symbolically began his cycling journey, with a wheeled trailer in tow. He started by heading south to Manitou Springs, where he collected mineral water from the sacred springs to offer to the elders at Standing Rock, before pedaling back up north through Denver, Greeley and other Colorado towns. Mackenzie-Low stayed and dined with friends — he only had to sleep on the side of the road once in Colorado, he says. Pushing north into Wyoming, he spent a memorable night at a rest stop, sleeping on the floor in an out-of-service bathroom. A few nights later in Nebraska, one of his trailer tires went flat just as a heavy rain began to fall, and he see PEDALING Page 26
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