El Sifón: it’s for Riders of all Levels

That’s me, at the summit of El Sifon. This picture captures one of my proudest, happiest moments, proximate to getting married and having kids. How did I get there? How do I describe the experience? Would I do it again? And what advice can I offer you, who is reading this, about adventuring up El Sifon?

The Decision to Travel to Colombia

Let’s start with some facts: I ain’t no “escarabajo,” one of the diminuitive Colombian climbers in the professional peloton. Today, I stand 189cm and weigh 102kg, but I haven’t always been this “svelte.” I played football in college and, from there, added on average a kilogram of weight every year for 40 years until I weighed over 150kg, or around 340lbs. I suffered from awful habits exacerbated by continuous business travel.

I live in Palo Alto, California, the heart of Silicon Valley. In my 40s, I did a fair amount of mountain biking in my local hills, but I had to stop. My watts were falling almost as fast as my kilograms were rising. Also, the neck-and-shoulders toll I paid to play football was compounding because of the pounding I took on my mountain bike.

I tried road cycling for a while. A local climb, up Page Mill Road, became a goal. It’s a challenging climb: about 14km long and 700m of elevation. The gradient averages about 4.4% for the climb, but Page Mill features 3km at over 9%. And that 3km proved too much for me every single time. So, in 2007 I stopped riding. I loved being on a bicycle, but I just couldn’t do it anymore.

Then the pandemic hit. We had acquired a Peloton machine in 2019, which I jumped on occasionally and enjoyed. But once I stopped traveling, I got serious about my Peloton workouts. The Peloton’s relaxed position, combined with regular sleep and eating at home, helped immeasurably. The weight started peeling off. I started dreaming of riding a real bike again, but most of the bikes I looked at had weight limits on their warranties. I vowed that if I could get below those limits, I’d buy a new bike, start riding again for real, and finally climb Page Mill Road.

And on my 62nd birthday, in 2022, I stood at the intersection of Page Mill Road and Skyline Boulevard with a bike. My first time climbing Page Mill Road.

I set new goals for myself, like riding to the Pacific Ocean and back. I tried mountain biking again, but my neck and shoulders, while stronger, didn’t approve. However, I loved off-road riding, so I got myself a gravel bike and started bikepacking. Twice a year, I embarked on a 450km-750km bikepacking trip. I kept getting stronger and lost more weight. My wife approved wholeheartedly: I was transforming from a likely old-age liability to a senior partner for life.

At some point, I picked up Wade Davis’ book, “Magdalena, River of Dreams: A Story of Colombia.” It’s a beautifully written book that narrates the history of humans in Colombia by reliving moments experienced over the length of the Rio Magdalena, the central artery of Colombia, from the Paramo de las Papas near San Agustin to the city of Barranquilla on the Caribbean coast.

 I thought a lot about biking in Europe, but I had enough experience with business traveling to know how long it would take me to functionally acclimate to 9 hours of time difference. I honestly couldn’t budget that much time away from home. What about Colombia? 2-3 hours time difference, depending on the time of year? I could do that.

I began scouring the internet to learn about options for riding in Colombia, where and who with. At some point, I came across Scarab Cycle’s summary video on YouTube about their October, 2024 tour up El Sifon. It looked awful! Which is to say, it looked like an awesome, monumental challenge. I visited the Scarab Cycles website and requested information about the El Sifon tour.

And that’s how I came in contact with Santiago Toro. Now, in my professional life, I’ve encountered hundreds of entrepreneurs. The successful ones share a few things in common: they have a great idea, they’re passionate about realizing that idea, and they’re skilled at communicating that passion. Scarab Cycles is a great idea: Infuse a light, steel bike with the cycling spirit of Colombia. Santiago’s passion for Scarab drew me into the climb. It was more than selling: He clearly expressed a love for Colombia in general and the El Sifon climb in particular. He wanted me to experience El Sifon; the transaction for the tour was just the means, the real end was me having the experience. I was hooked. In December, 2024, I booked a trip to Medellin. I was going to attempt the longest, continuously paved climb in the world.

My Journey to Armero, Colombia, at the Base of the El Sifon Climb

I’ve learned from business travel that giving yourself a bit of time to acclimate at the front end of a trip dramatically improves the productivity of the trip overall. The trip to Colombia didn’t involve huge time zone differences, but it did involve over a mile of elevation change. I met with my doctor who told me that it took one-to-two weeks to train your body to perform at elevation. Thus, with Atovaquone (an anti-malaria drug) packed, I arrived in El Retiro, Colombia, 3 days before the start of the tour, and 10 days before El Sifon climb.

El Retiro is a lovely town. It nestles into the Cordillera Central. From the top of a surrounding hill, it looks like a multicolored wave breaking gently on a deep green shore. Like all Colombia towns I visited, it has a central square with, as Santiago tells it, “Church on one side, State on the other.” It’s a great place to walk, with lots of distinctive shops and energetic groups of smiling faces everywhere. I imagine this is what life might look like in more places if folks put down their screens and took more joy from their family and neighbors.

 Hiking was on the agenda for my first full day in El Retiro. Santiago set me up with a local mountain biking friend, Carlos, who lived to traverse the mountains around El Retiro on either two legs or two wheels. He spoke great English (which was good, because I speak no Spanish). The hike was magnificent. About 9.5 kilometers and 900 meters of climbing in a leisurely 3 hours. I tested my fitness by talking the whole way up to the 2,600 meter summit of the climb, boring the hell out of Carlos, but giving me great confidence that I actually could ride at altitude. On the way down, heavy rain drenched us, but only after we returned to a logging road; no slipping and sliding, just a warm, refreshing shower.

That afternoon, I visited Scarab Cycles for the first time. It’s located north of the center of El Retiro in a small mall that also features a great cafe and a first-rate brewery, Torrealta Cervecería. Armed with a pastry and a Belgian Tripel, and after a quick tour of the manufacturing area, I first gazed upon the bike I was going to ride that week: A Scarab Paramo painted in the Magdalena scheme. Absolute love at first site. Oh, and I gotta mention that I picked up my Berts: The best post-ride shoes I’ve ever worn and now a permanent component of my bikepacking kit

Over the next five days I did four magnificent rides and one hike (in Parque Arvi, with a birder guide who pointed out every mushroom, every orchid, and whistled or wooted with every bird). Now joined by other tour patrons, we rode from Scarab to Concepcion and Scarab to La Union, before piling into the Safetti biking van and driving to Honda, the city at the southern end of the navigable part of the Rio Magdalena. From there, we rode to Victoria. None of these rides were light; each featured between 60-75km and 900-1500m of climbing. They also were very different: the Concepcion ride was a punchy, up-and-down, one-way jaunt through the gorgeous mountains and valleys east of Medallin; the Saturday ride to La Union was a popular loop on which we probably were joined by 3,000 other bicyclists; the Honda-to-Victoria ride was a hot and humid jungle excursion at lower altitude.

But while the rides were hard, recovery was easy in the first-rate accommodations and food stops provided by Scarab: the Safetti biking ranch in El Retiro, and Posada Los Trampas in Honda. In particular, the pool at Posada Las Trampas was absolutely invigorating after the hard ride to Victoria. I ended that day — the day before the El Sifon climb — with a massage from a local cycling masseuse. I felt confident about attempting El Sifon. In the previous week, I had ridden just over a hundred kilometers horizontally and 4-5 kilometers vertically, most at altitude. I was eating and sleeping well. I trusted all the folks I was riding with. My Scarab Paramo was perfect. All systems were “go.”

Then, that night, at dinner, we found out that rice farmers were planning a protest at the base of the climb and were going to shut down all motor vehicle traffic on the road to El Sifon. Either we got to Armero before the planned 6:00AM start of the protest, or we conducted the climb with little or no support. Santiago rescheduled our hotel departure to 5:00AM, which would put us at the base of the climb at 5:45AM, fingers crossed.

The El Sifon Climb

Our planning was rewarded. On the road to Armero we passed a number of enormous farm vehicles. When we got to the new road to Libano, we saw a few dozen folk milling around, but no heavy equipment blocking our way. Our driver, Archimedes, parked the Safetti van a ways up the road and we rode our bikes a few hundred meters back down the hill to the official start of the El Sifon Strava segment. 

The El Sifon climb is a monster. My Strava entry from that day reads 90km and 4250 meters of climbing. The road snakes through two larger towns, Libano and Murillo, before crossing the shoulder of Nevado del Ruiz, an active stratovolcano that reaches over 5300 meters into the sky. At the summit of the climb, the atmospheric pressure is about 58% that at sea level. In other words, there’s 42% less oxygen available to breathe at the summit. At any age, at any skill level, El Sifon is a major cycling challenge.

The ride traverses multiple ecosystems, each differentiated by elevation. From Armero to Libano, you ride 43 kilometers through Colombian jungle, climbing 1280 meters to 1565 meters. It’s the gentlest of the sections, averaging about a 3% gradient. From Libano to Murillo, the gradient kicks up to about 6%, but that negates multiple alpine sections carved into steep pitches that top out at 8-9%. In total, the Libano-to-Murillo section is 23 kilometers long and involves about 1,385 meters of altitude change, to an elevation of 2950 meters. While many regard this section as the hardest, I found the Murillo-to-summit stretch most difficult for two reasons. First, the elevation maps I looked at suggested it was the easiest and I wasn’t mentally prepared for what I encountered. Second, I really started to feel the elevation at around 3500 meters, about 15 kilometers after Murillo. Thus, while the gradient averages only 3.5% over 34 kilometers, I had to stop a few times to catch my breath.

But when I stopped to rest — what beauty! We were lucky. We got rain at the bottom, but only clouds at the top. While this cut down our visibility (I never actually saw the top of the Nevado del Ruiz), we had no problems seeing all the way down valleys that were kilometers long or flank vents hundreds of meters high. Colombia is mindbogglingly beautiful and it’s all on display during the El Sifon climb. I was particularly excited when we started riding in the paramo ecosystem, surrounded by iconic frailejones. Indeed, the paramo showed up just as the altitude started biting, which gave me a huge emotional boost.

I was never freezing. Nor did I ever feel loopy. I was tired, but never despondent; I never thought of quitting. I was the slowest rider in our group, so I worried about making a “time cut,” but Santiago and my fellow riders remained encouraging the whole way. The guys on the two motorcycles that supported us, one handing out water, electrolyte mixes and gels, helped enormously. In truth, I was elated the entire climb. About the time I hit the paramo, I started thinking, “Holy crap. I’m going to make it to the summit!” After 9 hours in the saddle, me and my Scarab Paramo with the Magdalena paint scheme summited. What an absolutely magnificent, unforgettable feeling.

Lessons Learned

Now that I’ve had a bit of time to reflect on the climb, what would I do the same? What might I do differently?

Arriving early and hiking for a few days was a great idea. It bolstered my system and confidence. And the scenery around El Retiro is spectacular. Also, I brought a Scrubba camping wash bag for cleaning my biking clothes, which meant that I always had clean kit. I remained very disciplined about my on-bike hydration and eating. Santiago’s advice was small sips of water or electrolytes every five minutes; great advice. As for nourishment, every 30 minutes or so I reached for a gel or some real food, like the Bocadillo de Guayaba favored by local cyclists. Finally, I did not care one bit about being “slow”; I rode a comfortable pace and took in the beauty of the place. The El Sifon KOM for my weight and age is plenty safe.

When I do it again — and I think I will — I’ll do a few things differently. The GoPro? I’ve got a few mediocre videos, but unless you really know what you’re doing, it’s a complete distraction. Mosquito repellent and clothing and nets? I got a few bites, but it’s a hell-of-a-lot worse in Maine. Expect everyone to speak English? While our Scarab hosts spoke masterful English and I never felt disconnected, I’m going to learn at least conversational Spanish. Very importantly, I brought about 10 pounds of gels and chews and hydration mix. The stuff provided by Scarab was more than adequate. I returned home with about 8.5 pounds of gels and whatnot.

The Route Back to Palo Alto, California

 Lots could be said about my last few days in Colombia, after the El Sifon climb. Again, great accommodations each night. The tour of the coffee plantation was super interesting. Our drive to Medellin, along the banks of the Rio Cauca, was one postcard after another. The afternoon meal and walk in Medellin were lovely. And the pizza and brews at Torrealta Cervecería the night before we left were excellent.

But honestly, amid all the topological beauty and wonderful hospitality of those last few days, I remained in a euphoric bliss: I was 66 years old and successfully climbed El Sifon. A week later, as I write this, I still am.

Written by Peter Burris.