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1913: The Turning Point

In 1913, Woodrow Wilson was the newly elected president. Wilson and his fellow progressives scorned the Constitution and the Declaration. They moved swiftly to replace the Founders' republic with a new regime.

There is widespread agreement that Wilson did not always show good judgment – for example, in his blunders in international relations – but in the project of overturning the Founding, he and the movement he led selected their targets shrewdly. By the time he left office, the American republic was, as they say, history. The fundamentals of the new regime were in place, and the expansion of government under FDR, LBJ, and Obama was made easy, perhaps even inevitable.

Nineteen-thirteen gave us the 16th and 17th Amendments to the Constitution. That year also saw the creation of the Federal Reserve. This burst of changes marks the effective beginning of the Progressive Era in American politics, the era in which we now live. Wilson was to do much more that would once have been considered out of bounds, but these three changes were enough to change everything. In 1913, the fundamental agreement the Founders made with the American people about the relation of the states and the federal government was broken.

Here is the Founders' original bargain, stated by James Madison in Federalist 45:

The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the State governments are numerous and indefinite. The former will be exercised principally on external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce[.] ... The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State.

It is important to remember that when we speak of the ratification of the Constitution, this is what was ratified. But this is not the government we now have. Today's central government is not the federal government of the original Constitution. For example, thanks to Obamacare, the central government can penalize you if you do not purchase a health insurance policy approved by the central government. Also, bizarrely, Obamacare federalized loans for college students – by actually putting the central government in the student loan business! These are not "external objects, as war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce."

Clearly, the bargain, honorably entered into by the Founders' generation, was broken. It was broken by the 17th Amendment, which instituted the direct election of U.S. senators. That amendment struck directly at the heart of the Founders' design. According to the original Constitution, senators were chosen by the state legislators. Unlike the members of the House, who represent the people of their district, the senators had a special responsibility to represent their states in the deliberations having to do with the those "few and defined" powers the Constitution transferred from the states to the federal government. That is why the states with small populations and the states with larger populations got the same number of senators and the same number of votes in the Senate. It is also why the Constitution gives the Senate power over treaties and over the appointment of the senior officials of the executive, those whose responsibilities include "war, peace, negotiation, and foreign commerce." The 17th Amendment eliminated the fundamental electoral guarantee of the Founders' vision of a federal government with limited powers.

The system we have today bypasses the state legislatures. The consequences have been many and profound. Probably the most obvious has been the inevitable erosion of the independence of the states and of their ability to counterbalance federal power. The Senate was a barrier to the passage of federal laws infringing on the powers reserved to state governments, but senators abandoned that responsibility under the incentives of the new system of election. Because the states no longer have a powerful standing body representing their interests within the central government, the power of the central government has rapidly grown at the expense of the states. The states increasingly are relegated to functioning as administrative units of today's gargantuan central government. The Tenth Amendment has become in our time a dead letter:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

Instead of retaining many of their powers and responsibilities, and surrendering only a limited number of their powers to the federal government, as the Framers intended, the states are today greatly diminished politically. They are increasingly entangled in administering programs and carrying out mandates of the central government. These mandates are often not even funded by the central government; the costs of unfunded mandates falls on the states. The many new departments that have accumulated in Washington during the Progressive Era, such as HUD (Housing and Urban Development) and HHS (Health and Human Services), involve themselves in, and even direct, functions that, according to the Constitution as drafted by the Founders, are outside the scope of the federal government.

The result – a central government that can fine a farmer millions of dollars for plowing on his own land across a "vernal pool" (standing water in the springtime) without its permission – is obvious to us all, although this new regime's origin in the 17th Amendment generally goes unnoticed.

Then there is the 16th Amendment. It introduced the progressive income tax, one of the most prominent jewels in the progressive crown. Changing the federal government's revenue base from tariffs, which are largely self-limiting, removed a fundamental limit to the growth of federal power. In 1910, the government's revenue looked much like how it did in the time of George Washington: about 3 percent of GDP, earned primarily through tariffs. The 16th Amendment overthrew the limited government of the Founders by opening the door to the unlimited revenue needed to finance the central government's unending expansion into every area of American life.

It also corrupted the federal government. The federal government once had a reputation for being fairly free of corruption. In part, this was simply because it was limited government. The bigger it got and the more areas of life and the economy it entered into, the greater were the opportunities for corruption. Today, the fantastic corruption of the Clintons is only the tip of the iceberg. Their brazenness tells you what you already know: Washington is corrupt on a scale undreamed of by the Founders.

As it happens, this is precisely the point where the 16th and the 17th Amendments shake hands. You can understand this better if you ask yourself why the federal tax code in 2016 swelled to 75,000 pages. Those pages are filled with favors and special deals. As a result of the 17th Amendment, senators must chase after individual voters just as their colleagues in the House have always done – but in all but the few least populated states, they have to chase millions more voters. That costs money. Instead of watching out for their states' interests, as was originally intended, senators now must keep their focus on raising truly fabulous sums to run for office under the new system. This is where lobbyists come into the picture. They have clients with money who need favors and special deals, and senators need money, and lots of it.

Also in the banner year of 1913, Woodrow Wilson signed the Federal Reserve Act, creating a central bank. The progressives proposed the central bank as a government solution to bank panics. A bank panic occurs when too many depositors want their money at the same time. Banks had always managed bank panics among themselves, sometimes heroically, not always perfectly. The central bank was going to change this by providing a government solution. The Fed failed at the first crisis, and failed spectacularly. What it did then and what it did not do in that crisis seem inexplicable. You or I could have done a better job. In any case, bungling by the Federal Reserve helped to turn an economic downturn into the Great Depression.

The Federal Reserve Act did accomplish something: it opened the door to the complete socialization of America's currency. Instead of providing liquidity to sound banks during a panic as the legislation provided for, the Fed has taken control of the currency, an enormous, essentially unchecked, and unconstitutional power over your wealth. And although it failed spectacularly at the job it was supposed to do, the Federal Reserve did succeed in debauching the American dollar. The value of the dollar has collapsed; one 1910 dollar would be worth $24.89 in 2017. According to my calculations, that means your dollar today is worth about 4 cents compared to the days when people used to say "sound as the dollar."

The Fed has been using excess money creation as a hidden way of collecting taxes for the central government. The total amount of wealth the Fed has confiscated in this way is breathtaking.

John Maynard Keynes did a great deal of harm, but he did say at least one true thing:

By a continuing process of inflation, governments can confiscate, secretly and unobserved, an important part of the wealth of their citizens. By this method they not only confiscate, but they confiscate arbitrarily; and, while the process impoverishes many, it actually enriches some.

The Fed has actually been functioning as a kind of accomplice of the IRS. Today, the Federal Reserve can create money without even having to bother printing it; now the Fed can create any amount by simply entering a number in a computer. Talk about taking the limits off government spending!

It is perfectly obvious that we are far down the path to a new kind of tyranny by way of endless bureaucratic regulation and confiscation. If we are to recover and secure our liberty, much must be done, and much must be undone. We cannot succeed unless we carefully remove these three pillars of the Progressive State.

Robert Curry serves on the Board of Directors of the Claremont Institute and on the Board of Distinguished Advisers of the Ronald Reagan Center for Freedom and Understanding. He is the author of Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea from Encounter Books. You can preview the book here.

Here is the Founders' original bargain, stated by James Madison in Federalist 45:

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.

The Fed has been using excess money creation as a hidden way of collecting taxes for the central government. The total amount of wealth the Fed has confiscated in this way is breathtaking.

John Maynard Keynes did a great deal of harm, but he did say at least one true thing:

How A Computer Bug Dubbed ‘Y2K’ Was Feared to Bring About the End of the World

The fallout shelter was ready. The batteries were in place, candles were prepped, food was stocked and the sauced had been jarred — as my grandma prepped for impending doom.

Fear gripped my then-66-year-old grandmother as she tuned into the news and saw what could bring catastrophe to civilization. She urged her children and grandchildren to shelter in place with her as the minutes to midnight rapidly approached.

"I am-a gonna be ready for the 2-2-K!"

In her Italian-accented English, that was the mantra of my Sicilian grandma in the months, weeks, days and hours leading up to the turn of the 21st century. Though our family got a good laugh out of her mispronunciation of the Y2K moniker, short for Year 2000, the panic for her and so many people around the globe about what could happen when the clock struck midnight on Jan. 1, 2000, was no laughing matter.

In 1999, Y2K was shorthand for a computer bug that many believed would break the world's electronic systems. They were convinced the bug would prevent online clocks from turning forward to 2000, instead turning them back to 1900 — and cause banks, electrical grids, nuclear power stations and anything driven by a computer to fail.

As the 1990s came to a close and the world prepared to usher in the new millennium, the anticipation of cataclysmic disaster grew to a frenzy.

While everyone's clocks — including my grandma's — obviously continued on without so much as a glitch, it's clear how a completely false but very real sense of impending demise affected the years the 20 years that followed, defined by a culture of outrage and mass hysteria on social media.

It Was the End of the World...

Y2K was introduced into the mainstream lexicon in the late 1990s, as experts weighed in on the potential likelihood of a digital pandemic. The bigger picture was clear, but the details weren't as easy to grasp.

“There wasn't a very clear explanation of what might actually happen," Alexander George, editor-in-chief of Popular Mechanics, told InsideEdition.com. "[It] stemmed from this basic idea that if the date information is incorrect, that's going to have lots of unintended consequences."

The fears evoked by Y2K issue took root in the 1960s, when computing was first introduced to the business and government sectors.

“That [issue] originated in early computing where all [digital] storage was extremely expensive," George explained.

For instance, writing out a numeric calendar date using a two-digit year, like '99,' rather than a four-digit year, such as '1999,' was far cheaper, he said. "You would actually save a meaningful amount of space," and therefore money, he said.

And so many feared that when it came time for the year to change from 1999, or 99, to 2000, or 00, all hell would break loose.

"That is what originated this kind of fear that, ‘Okay, well, what is the computer going to think when it goes to '00? Is it going to think it's 1900? And what is that going to mean for everything?'” George added.

As the calendar inched closer to 2000, the term "Y2K" was batted around with increasing frequency as the world braced for full-on computer failure. President Bill Clinton held press briefings about it, and business leaders from Intel to Deutsche Bank stepped forward to explain how they planned to address the potential issue.

“It made it feel like something that we all have really had to pay attention to," George said.

The United States crafted a specific council to combat the computer bug and spent about $100 billion to prevent the devastation experts believed was coming.

"Other countries that had very little spending were not as reliant on computer infrastructure as we were in the United States," George said. “It was uniquely American for that reason. But it was a concern around the world. And there were conversations between countries to share information that would be able to benefit everybody and make sure that they all had their updates.”

...As We Knew It...

My grandparents, Carl and Cecelia, survived World War II in Sicily and saw all hell break out years before they immigrated to New York. For grandpa, a computer bug was not going to be the end of the world. But my grandma, whose childhood story I chronicled on InsideEdition.com, bought into the panic both literally and figuratively. She wasn't alone.

“You had friends who were building safe spaces for nuclear fallout in their backyards. They were stockpiling rations, they were stockpiling water,” George explained. “You heard about grocery stores ... running out. I never went through that. But you knew other families that did it.

“Building up to it, you heard stories about runs on ATMs,” George continued. “But in general what you saw, it was preparation for this thing you see in the movies, where money doesn't matter anymore, it's all your survival.”

My grandma began buying cases of canned tomatoes to make sauce to store in Mason jars long before they became a hip thing to drink out of. She also stocked up on canned goods, bottled water, batteries, candles, flashlights, first aid kits and blankets. But where would she store all of these items?

Much to his ire, my grandma began converting my grandpa’s garage into a makeshift fallout shelter for the family, installing shelving units to store everything.

By the time New Year’s Eve approached, grandma Cecelia would not allow her family to go anywhere to celebrate the start of a new millennium. All four of her adult children, along with their spouses and her eight grandkids, had to ring in the New Year at her home, just in case.

My father and my three uncles bought champagne, but they were too afraid to keep it in the house in case something did go awry and there was no cause for celebration, proving their mother-in-law right. So the bottles were left outside in the cold as we gathered around the television to watch Dick Clark count down the New Year. Then, as the ball dropped in Times Square, the unthinkable occurred – nothing.

In came the champagne. My grandpa laughed his head off at the whole situation, my family celebrated and my cousins and I danced to No Doubt's cover of R.E.M.’s apocalyptic classic "It’s The End of the World as We Know It (And I Feel Fine)" on MTV.

All the while, grandma Cecelia sulked in the corner, repeating, “I just don’t understand.”

But then, in typical Italian grandma fashion, she bounced back and asked: “Now, what am I gonna do with all of this food?”

And We Were Fine

As cities around the world rang in the New Year, it became evident that all of Earth's computers seemed to be safe.

“You started to see New Zealand and Tokyo all have their celebrations on TV, and then we eventually saw Times Square," George recalled. “The ball dropped, the blackout that we all thought was going to happen didn't happen. We all felt relieved. And I think we didn't think about it for very long after."

Nothing crashed and martial law wasn't declared. The millennium began, and life went on as normal. People were hung over on New Year’s Day, the lights were still on, banks reopened on Jan. 2, grocery stores restocked, and of course, computers stayed online.

Twenty years later, it's easy to dismiss the real panic people felt at the time.

"We can laugh now and say that Y2K was very sensationalist, that it was this overblown thing," George said.

But, George noted, more broadly, the panic and hysteria leading up to Y2K can be seen as precursor for our current age of anxiety, which is fueled in part by social media.

"It was definitely exemplary of something where, if you can have people be afraid and feel like this is very vital knowledge, it will earn clicks or earn views or earn, back then, magazine purchases," George said. "This was on the cover of Time magazine and of popular publications. In retrospect, it's almost a lesson that this is something that will regularly happen.

"I think it was something that is kind of innate to how media works and to how we look at things," he added. "And I think it's definitely an example of something that we see more and more of."

As for my family, we have never eaten so much pasta covered in my grandma's tomato sauce as we did in the months, weeks, days and hours of the year 2000. She donated all of the canned goods, water and blankets to charity. My grandfather was able get his garage back. And grandma has not jarred sauce since.

Rickey Gates Is the Rambling Poet of the Running World

Within minutes of meeting the mountain runner Rickey Gates, I am asked to name my spirit animal. I don’t have a go-to answer for this particular request. Fortunately, it looks like I’ll have a moment or two to peer into my soul to determine where I fall on the spectrum from mynah bird to mastodon.

It’s a Sunday morning in early August, and there are more than 20 of us assembled for a meet and greet session in the common area of San Francisco’s Green Tortoise Hostel. We are about to embark on a weeklong journey on a sleeper bus that will shuttle us to various trail-running destinations across the American West. The itinerary is ambitious: four states, three national parks, 2,000 miles of driving, and over 100 miles of running for those who are up for it. It is not a trip for those who have strong feelings about personal space. The online brochure notes that this is a chance to spend time with “30 of your closest friends.” Most of us are meeting today for the first time. You get the idea.

“This is the first-ever Bus Run Bus trip,” Gates announces to the group, before adding wryly that it might also be the last one. “But that makes it all the more special.”

Gates is 38 years old and has the lean physique one might expect from someone who once ran across the country unsupported, which he did during the spring and summer of 2017. Bus Run Bus is his idea, the most recent addition to a growing number of multi-day running extravaganzas that he organizes throughout the year. Since 2013, he has been putting on Hut Run Hut (HRH), a six-day excursion that links up various mountain outposts from Aspen to Red Cliff, Colorado. In 2019, in addition to three separate iterations of HRH, Gates also cohosted a running trip in Oaxaca, Mexico. The day after our current trip is scheduled to conclude, he will get on a plane to Tokyo, where he will lead another group of runners on an extended excursion through the Japanese Alps.

As a veteran of such communal running experiences, Gates knows that it helps to break the ice on day one. Hence the spirit animals.

Linda Hawke, a 52-year-old artist and dog walker from Philadelphia, says hers is a gazelle. Majell Backhausen, 32, a Salomon-sponsored ultrarunner from Australia, says his is a sloth. Other choices include the lion and platypus. It promises to be an interesting week.

When it’s my turn, I wonder if Minotaur would be an acceptable answer—my role in a fifth-grade musical. I realize, however, that in a few hours we will all be shoulder to shoulder in a bus, riding through the Northern California night en route to Yosemite National Park. I don’t want anyone to think that there might be a raging psycho in their midst, so I decide to go with “some kind of goat.” No one is impressed.

Half an hour later, we are outside the Green Tortoise, ready to run. Today’s 12-miler around the northern tip of the city is the only urban route scheduled. We’ve been outfitted with hydration vests from Salomon, Gates’s main sponsor, and I feel self-conscious about coming off like an overaccessorized jerk.

Gates is wearing shades, a floral-pattern running cap, a green T-shirt bearing the slogan “Double Rainbow: More Than One,” fire-engine-red running shorts, and a fanny pack. He looks like a PE teacher on sabbatical or the world’s fittest cruise-ship tourist.

Gates and fellow Bus Run Bus travelers explore the beaches of San Francisco. (Photo: Majell Backhausen)

“You done much running around here, Rickey?” someone asks.

This is meant as a joke. In the fall of 2018, over the course of 46 days, Gates ran every single street in San Francisco in what was conceived as a condensed version of his cross-country journey the year before. According to Strava, he covered 1,303 miles and 147,000 feet of elevation change for the project, which he documented on Instagram using the hashtag #everysinglestreet. The idea has inspired other runners to engage in similar efforts around the world, much to Gates’s delight. One such disciple has even signed up for Bus Run Bus.

“I’d lived in my zip code for 14 years, and I hadn’t seen the majority of it,” 45-year-old Chris Malette told me. He is in the process of covering the entirety of his hometown of Tampa, Florida, on foot—along with another local #everysinglestreet enthusiast who lives on the opposite end of town. “Most of the time in your life, you go from point A to point B and you don’t see the side streets,” says Malette, who works as a team leader at a local Target.

That won’t be an issue today. As we set out from the hostel, Gates takes his first right on Kearny Street, and immediately we are on one of those ludicrous San Francisco hills. I’m wondering whether it would be a wise idea to hike this initial ascent, but then I see Gates flitting along effortlessly up ahead, and I decide to stop being such a baby.

Before long we have summited Telegraph Hill and are gazing at 1930s murals in the art deco edifice known as Coit Tower. One thing to know about the Rickey Gates Weltanschauung: if you’re going to be running for hours, you might as well give yourself ten seconds to take in Maxine Albro’s famous depiction of the California orange harvest.

“There. We’ve done culture,” Gates says once we’re back outside. I notice that one of my fellow runners is using the front pocket of her hydration vest to provide easy access to a bottle of Fireball whiskey. The hooch will be passed around freely during the course of today’s run, as we wrap our way around the Presidio and down onto Baker Beach, where visual highlights include views of the Golden Gate Bridge and a local nudist.

Before he became an evangelist for what one might call the experiential side of the sport, Rickey Gates was an accomplished endurance athlete—at least by the hardcore hobbyist standards of the mountain-running scene in the mid-2000s. Among other things, he is a two-time winner of the prestigious Mount Washington Road Race in New Hampshire and multiple podium finisher at Alaska’s Mount Marathon and the Pikes Peak Ascent in Colorado. In 2007, he was named USA Track and Field’s Mountain Runner of the Year.

Gates’s relationship to running has since evolved. Although he is careful not to dismiss the value of racing and its singular, adrenaline-soaked rush, he says that these days he views running more as a form of meditation or prayer than as a competitive pursuit. In the same vein, Gates told me that he is interested in figuring out ways to use running to better understand “our culture, our country, and our planet.”

That might sound like the kind of insight you’d have after eating a peyote sandwich, but Gates is nothing if not sincere. He has been compared to Jack Kerouac on several occasions—a comparison that Gates certainly hasn’t tried to discourage—and like the doomed idol of the Beat generation, Gates is not afraid to romanticize his rambling lifestyle. (When he ran all of San Francisco, Gates told me that he made a point of greeting every homeless person he met and looking them in the eyes.) And it’s hard not to be seduced. Gates emanates the conviction of a person who, when they come up with a slightly loony idea, actually goes out and does it.

The third of five children, Gates grew up in Aspen, Colorado. Despite what that might suggest, his family didn’t have a lot of money. They did have easy access to the Rockies, however, and Gates had the kind of mountain-kid childhood that sounds like the aspirational fantasy of Forester-driving suburbanites: camping, skiing, alpine club. One of his first jobs, as a high schooler in the late nineties, was working as a caretaker for the Tenth Mountain Division backcountry huts—the same huts that are now used for his annual trips.

William Gates, Rickey’s father, owned a small computer business, specializing in Macintosh sales and repair. One time he made his son read The Fountainhead as a punishment for skipping curfew and staying out all night. While it is difficult to assess the extent to which Ayn Rand might secretly be responsible for his brand of individualism, Gates is unequivocal about the fact that he inherited his wanderlust from his mother, Patricia, who spent most of her early twenties hitchhiking around the country.

After his freshman year of college, Gates took two years off to travel, ski, and work in the Aspen service industry, where during the busy season he could take home $300 to $400 a day. At 19, Gates spent five months traveling in South America. A few years later, as a sociology and photography major at the University of Colorado Boulder, he signed up for a study-abroad program in Chile. Since he’d already spent a fair amount of time in the Southern Hemisphere, Gates figured the best way to expand his boundaries was to buy a 1979 Honda CX 500 motorcycle ($500) and ride from Aspen to Santiago beforehand. The trip took him two months.

Despite the cramped conditions, spirits were high on the Green Tortoise bus. (Photo: Majell Backhausen)

“I arrived as the other people from my study-abroad group were getting off the bus from the airport in their pressed shirts and nice loafers,” Gates says. “Meanwhile, I’d just gone through 12 different countries on this 25-year-old motorcycle. I was covered in grease and wearing a leather jacket. With full immersion like that, I was already speaking Spanish fluently.” The journey proved formative in more ways than one.

“That was by far the biggest thing I’d ever done in my life,” Gates says. “And it just kind of occurred to me that there’s so many of these things that we think that we may or may not be able to do, but they’re really just about doing it day after day after day.”

Not that Gates’s consistency was always rewarded. He repeatedly tried and failed to make the University of Colorado’s cross-country team as a walk-on. He’d been a decent runner in high school, but the Buffaloes had one of the top Division I programs in the country. At the time, there was an early-season five-mile race that was open to the public. Any Colorado student who could run the cross-country course (which sat at around 5,000 feet elevation) in under 27 minutes could stay on and train with the team. For three years in a row, Gates ran just under 28 minutes. No dice.

As a senior in 2005, after once again missing the cut, Gates changed tack. That September he entered a 17.1-mile mountain race known as the Imogene Pass Run. The course blasts ten miles uphill from Ouray, Colorado, to the 13,114-foot pass and then seven miles down to Telluride. It was a topographical challenge that Gates proved well suited for; he won the race on his first try, effectively launching his career as a mountain runner.

Things got off to an auspicious start. In 2006, Gates finished third at Mount Washington, which qualified him for the USA Track and Field national mountain-running team. That September he finished 25th in the World Mountain Running Championships in Bursa, Turkey. Two years later, he signed a sponsorship deal with Salomon U.S. and spent three summers bumming around the European mountain-race circuit.

Since mountain running doesn’t exactly reward its heroes with Formula One levels of wealth, Gates would return to Colorado in the winter for seasonal work. Over the years, he has been employed as a waiter, barista, and bartender. He has also delivered pizza on his motorcycle and been a product rep for Sombra mezcal. (A buddy of his used to own the distillery in Mexico.) However, according to Gates, the most competitive job he ever successfully applied for was to be a dishwasher at the South Pole Station.

He wanted the gig because it would enable him to participate in an annual event called the Race Around the World—a two-mile run which passes through every line of longitude and in which only South Pole Station employees are allowed to take part. On Christmas Day, 2010, Gates won the race. Officially, his prize was automatic entry into the Antarctica Marathon about three weeks later on Ross Island, but poor weather conditions prevented him from making the trip. Figuring he wouldn’t get another chance to do a marathon in Antarctica, he solicited the help of two station surveyors to map out 26.2 miles and wound up mostly running up and down the South Pole Station runway. It was, he says, simultaneously the most unique and most boring marathon he’d ever run.

By Wednesday, the bus has visited Yosemite, Zion, and Grand Canyon National Parks. I have run from Yosemite Valley to Tuolumne Meadows, hiked the sandstone ridge of Angels Landing at daybreak, and soaked my bones in mountain streams. I’ve also had a few wipeouts, once narrowly avoiding smashing my face against a granite boulder.

One night while camping on the North Rim, we are ambushed by a rainstorm. After the deluge passes, everyone congregates around an ersatz campfire scene: a few candles, some half-eaten muffins, PBR, and two bottles of Sombra. This is meant as an ad hoc birthday celebration for Evgeni Peryshkin (spirit animal: manatee), a 37-year-old software engineer from San Francisco.

We are also joined by Patricia Gates, Rickey’s mother, who has driven down from Aspen to join us for the Zion/Grand Canyon portion of the trip. At 72, she appears to have retained her enthusiasm for the road and generally comes off as a total mensch. Earlier in the evening, as we were getting hammered by the rain, she spearheaded efforts to help several campers relocate their tents to higher ground, while the weak-kneed among us retreated to the sanctuary of the camp store. Her freewheeling energy notwithstanding, there are moments where she betrays glimmers of maternal concern.

“Well of course I wonder,” she told me at breakfast one morning when I asked her about her son’s roving lifestyle. “What is he going to do when the running runs out?”

Gates navigates the snow-coated terrain of Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks National Monument, near Santa Fe, where he currently lives. (Photo: Brad Trone)

In his own way, it’s a question that Gates has been grappling with for years. His competitive sweet spot was always in shorter distance events like Mount Washington, which is “only” 7.6 miles—albeit with a vertical gain of 4,650 feet. But as trail running has become increasingly mainstream over the last decade, it’s the hundred-milers, like the Ultra-Trail du Mont-Blanc and Western States, that dominate the spotlight.

“The whole sport shifted to ultras,” says Buzz Burrell, who managed La Sportiva’s trail-running team for years and who first told Gates about the U.S. mountain-running team in 2005. “That really isn’t Rickey’s forte. He’s a real mountain runner. He can charge up and run down real fast. It’s too bad that the sport went so ultra-centric.”

For his part, Gates remembers making a conscious decision to move out of his competitive comfort zone as ultras became the order of the day. “It occurred to me at a certain point, maybe eight years ago, that if I wanted to keep making a name for myself in this sport, and keep doing it and keep getting people interested in what I’m doing, I had to start going with longer distances,” Gates told me.

So he did. In 2011, Gates ran his first ultra, a 125-kilometer event in Alberta, invitingly called the Canadian Death Race. He won in a record-setting time (12:15:54), in what Gates claims is still his best performance in an ultra to date. Gates began entering some of the better-known U.S. ultras, like the Speedgoat 50K, and 50-milers, like Lake Sonoma and the North Face Endurance Challenge. His results were respectable, but he was ultimately not in the same league as fellow Salomon-sponsored athlete Kilian Jornet and the other titans of the ultrarunning world. No shame there, but, unfortunately, the fringe scene of mountain-ultra-trail running has little room for also-rans—at least as far as publicity and sponsorship money is concerned. If Gates wanted to continue making a living in the sport, he would have to redefine what it means to be a professional athlete.

“The bottom line is, after trying many, many times, I’m not going to beat Kilian in a race,” Gates told me. “I still enjoy racing, but I just knew that it wasn’t sustainable for my lifestyle and for my love of the sport. So I knew that I sort of needed to step back a little bit from the racing scene and kind of figure out what else I could contribute.”

Gates has long been a proponent of what he calls the “beyond the bib” approach to running—a belief that the sport’s most compelling narratives usually have little to do with who finishes where on the podium. And while it’s one thing for him to feel that way, what is perhaps most impressive about the trajectory of Gates’s career is that he has convinced Salomon to buy into his creative vision.

“With somebody like Rickey, it’s very difficult to put a label on what he does, but the way I would describe it is that he’s a modern journey runner,” says Scott Jurek, a good friend of Gates’s who won Western States seven consecutive times from 1999 to 2005. “In the seventies and eighties, people would refer to journey running—maybe some people would call it adventure running—where you just go for a run and see where you end up. You didn’t have this purpose or this goal.”

In 2014, after a sixth-place finish in the Run the Rut 50K in Montana, Gates went to recuperate in a natural hot spring not far from Yellowstone National Park. He was joined by Greg Vollet, the global sports and marketing manager for Salomon Running. It was in this tranquil environment that Gates first told Vollet that he was becoming disillusioned by the competitive, racing-oriented side of the sport.

Vollet was not entirely surprised. “Years ago I saw in him a big potential as a storyteller,” Vollet told me. “He had the perfect profile to create amazing stories outside of competition and the ability to reach more people than just those who are interested in competition.”

The following year, Gates was the driving force behind a gorgeous, Salomon-produced short called Of Fells and Hills about the history of fell running in northwest England’s Lake District. The film feels like the trail-running equivalent of ski porn: evocative, aerial shots of the Cumbrian landscape, old guys staring out the window, and slow-motion close-ups of Salomon-shod feet striding through the heath and flicking up beads of water and mud. It’s enough to make you want to you bust out the Wordsworth—you almost forget that you’re watching an ad.

In an era of globalized professional running, Of Fells and Hills also speaks to the way the sport can still have deep roots at the hyper-local level; the film’s main subjects are the old-timers whose fastest known times have stood for decades and who appear phlegmatic, almost bashful, about their contributions to the lore.

“I’m still scratching my head at how they achieved what they achieved, why they chose to pursue these monumental feats that really don’t mean anything beyond the valleys where they’re living right now,” Gates says in the film’s narration. “I think perhaps the most amazing part about those feats is that they don’t really seem to care if people understand what they’ve accomplished.”

Gates has continued to collaborate with Salomon on other projects that foreground running’s spiritual and cultural relevance—whether that’s a film of him traveling in the Japanese Alps with Kiwi ultrarunner Anna Frost or one about the carnival-style spectacle of the Mount Marathon race in Seward, Alaska. A feature-length movie about Gates’s run across the country is currently in the final stages of production. His book about the journey will be published in April.

“For me, he is kind of a poet of trail running,” says Vollet.

Of course, being a poet doesn’t usually pay the rent. (Gates would not disclose how much he is paid by Salomon.) Any impulse to emulate the Gatesian lifestyle might be tempered by the fact that he was on Medicaid until last year, and for most of the past 15 years, he didn’t have any health insurance at all. When I asked him if he ever worried about the future, Gates, who got married in October and now lives in Santa Fe, confessed that there were moments when he just wished he had a “real job” with a 401(k). For now, however, he is enjoying the ride.

“I still love it a lot,” Gates says. “If I ever do get kind of down about it, it’s almost inevitable that I’ll get a little note from someone who says, ‘Hey. I just want to let you know that your lifestyle is really inspiring. I just quit my job and I’m gonna go travel for four or five months.’ And that’s where it’s like, Fuck yeah. I’m psyched. Ninety-five percent of the time, my lifestyle is gratifying. It’s just that 5 percent of the time where I feel like, you know, I should probably go to the dentist.”

It’s around 7 A.M. on the final morning of our trip as the bus pulls into a turnout near Jade Cove, on the California coast. We need to be back in San Francisco by midafternoon, so the agenda for the day is relatively low-key—a quick breakfast, followed by a few quad-busting miles up and down a nearby fire road.

As we disembark, we are confronted by the driver of what appears to be the only other vehicle parked in this lonely patch of concrete overlooking the Pacific. He is wearing a star-spangled hat and matching T-shirt, and he is not thrilled about sharing the moment with a bunch of groggy weirdos.

Gates flashes the Green Tortoise bus as evening descends on Las Vegas. (Photo: Majell Backhausen)

“Is this one of those acid buses?” the man asks disapprovingly, noticing, perhaps, that several of us are decked out in groovy, tie-dyed Bus Run Bus tank tops that we made while camping in Zion. Gates tries to placate him with a cup of coffee, but he is having none of it. For a moment, it feels like things might be headed for an Easy Rider–style clash of ideologies on the great American roadway, but then our friend gets into his pickup and drives off.

Later that afternoon as we are rolling north on Highway 1, Gates announces that he has a few Grateful Dead T-shirts to give away. There aren’t enough to go around, so anybody who wants one has to earn it by taking part in an impromptu dance-off. Soon, Michael Kearns, 43, a construction project manager from Massachusetts and father of three, is gyrating in the aisle to “Sexy and I Know It.” Over the past seven days, I have glimpsed the immortal splendor of Half Dome and seen the sun rise over the Grand Canyon. But it is the image of a middle-aged man gleefully thrusting his pelvis in front of a busful of erstwhile strangers that prompts a pseudo epiphany. It’s a beautiful thing, I think, to create an excuse for others to push back against the staidness that can creep into life when one isn’t careful.

“Where the hell did he come up with a ‘bus run’ trip?” Rickey’s father, William, asked me when we spoke on the phone a few weeks afterward. “The whole idea of it sounds dumb to me. But it’s absolutely perfect. It’s wonderful.”

Maybe it’s dumb and wonderful at the same time—kind of like attempting to run down every single street of a major American city. Either way, in the era of social-media-fueled turbo narcissism, there’s a certain appeal to running initiatives that prioritize communal journeys over personal ones.

“There’s a very high possibility that I’m not only not going to make money on this trip but actually lose money—which is OK with me. The excitement of putting something together like this overrides that,” Gates told me at one point during the week. “I wouldn’t want to do it year after year and not make money on it, but sharing an experience with other people, that part is really important to me.”

Correction: (Jan 9, 2020) This story has been updated to correct the description of the Race Around the World—the race passes through every line of longitude, not latitude. Outside regrets the error.

Lead Photo: Brad Trone

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