RIDE THROUGH TIME

One long ride, 92 km, from the edge of the ice to a lake in the green Sahara. Eighteen real places at their real dates, 21,000 to 9,000 years ago, and you pedal between them.

Ride it. OPEN THE STAGE
Chrome, Edge or Safari on a laptop or desktop. No download, no account. Your trainer, or the arrow keys.

WHY

Trainer rides are long and the world outside the window is small. We wanted a ride where the distance means something: where every border you cross is a different continent and a different millennium, and the ground, the plants, the animals and the people change with it. Not a slideshow between intervals. A road, and the world around it.

The last ice age is the setting because it is the last time the whole planet looked different and people were already there to see it. Mammoths in Ukraine and the Yukon, a river where the Java Sea is now, a lake 140 metres deep where the Bolivian salt flats are, the first pots in Japan, the Sahara green. All of it is real, dated, and in the research files behind the stage.

WHAT IT FEELS LIKE

You start on the ice in northern Germany, 21,000 years ago, with the sheet a kilometre thick behind you and reindeer on the outwash.
A card slides up at every border: the place, the year, and two lines on what is living there. Then it gets out of the way.
The road changes with the land. Long fast straights across the Channel floor and the Sunda plain; switchbacks down the Vezere and up to the Klondike dome; meanders along a Chilean creek; dune rollers into the Sahara. Two real climbs, two real descents, about 1,300 m in all.
The animals are there. Mammoth and mastodon, steppe bison and Yukon horse, giant deer, ground sloths, glyptodonts, kangaroos, hippos, giraffes. Herds graze, walk and drink; the cats watch you pass.
So are the people. Skin tents under a painted rock, houses built of mammoth bone, the first potters, a Clovis camp at a kill, fishers with harpoons on a Saharan lake. Hearths smoke by day and burn by night.
No music. Wind, water, insects, birds, herds calling, fire, voices at the camps, the ice calving, and once, a flood coming down the coulee beside you.
Night is dark. Press N. Your own lamps light the road, the stars and the campfires do the rest, and an aurora hangs over the north.

HOW IT PLAYS

Three hours at an indoor pace, so it saves your place at every border. Come back and resume at the last card you crossed, or start from any place you have already reached. No laps, no bots, no weapons. Press I to see the card again.

km	Place	When
0	Scandinavian ice margin, northern Germany	21,000 years ago
5	Vezere valley at Lascaux, France	21,000
11	Wadi Kubbaniya, Egypt	21,000
15	Willandra Lakes, Australia	20,500
20	Loess Plateau, Shanxi, China	20,000
25	Molengraaff river, Sunda shelf	19,500
31	Mezhyrich on the Dnieper, Ukraine	18,000
36	Klondike, Yukon	18,000
41	The dry English Channel	17,500
45	Odai Yamamoto, Aomori, Japan	16,500
50	Lake Tauca, Bolivian Altiplano	15,500
57	Dry Falls, Grand Coulee, Washington	14,500
62	Monte Verde, southern Chile	14,500
67	Appleman Lake, Indiana	14,000
72	Rancho La Brea, California	13,200
77	Murray Springs, Arizona	13,000
82	Berelekh on the Indigirka, Siberia	12,500
86	Paleolake Gobero, Tenere, Niger	9,000

It is not a documentary. The dates are the best current ones, and where the colour of an extinct animal is a guess, it is a guess. The stage is free, like the rest of Gumwall GP.

RIDE THROUGH TIME GUMWALL GP

Keep going: The 16 courses · Sky visitors Ride Through Time · Freedom Mode · Controller setup