The Cardiac Kids occasionally like to get off the pavement.

After all, gravel riding offers everything a cyclist could want: quiet roads, beautiful scenery, almost no traffic, and the opportunity to discover exactly how many different ways a bicycle tire can lose air.

So when someone suggested a ride across the Central Oregon high desert, the group enthusiastically agreed.

It looked perfect.

Miles of empty gravel road. Endless blue sky. Warm sunshine. Not another human being in sight.

Perhaps too perfect.

A few miles into the ride, they passed a cattle skull lying beside the road.

Nobody said anything.

Then they noticed the buzzard.

He wasn't circling.

He was sitting beside the skull wearing a dinner bib and holding a knife and fork.

That seemed unnecessarily confident.

Two of his associates were already circling overhead, apparently checking the progress of the ride.

The Cardiac Kids continued pedaling.

A little faster.

The Gravel-Ride Risk Assessment

Every cycling group develops its own system for evaluating danger.

Road cyclists worry about traffic.

Mountain bikers worry about rocks, roots and trees.

Gravel cyclists worry about washboard, deep sand, sharp rocks, cattle guards, rattlesnakes, running out of water and discovering that the innocent-looking dotted line on the route map hasn't actually been a road since 1973.

The Cardiac Kids have one additional consideration:

Buzzards.

It's difficult to enjoy a leisurely Zone 2 ride when something overhead appears to be doing a Zone 2 ride of its own.

Especially when it keeps looking at you.

Still, nobody turned around.

The heart led the way. The lungs kept breathing. The kidneys kept filtering. Whatever that little white fellow represents kept pedaling.

And the buzzard waited patiently beside the road.

After all, he had a reservation.

Fortunately, the Cardiac Kids eventually disappeared over the horizon, still upright, still laughing and still pedaling.

The buzzard lowered his knife and fork.

Another disappointing day in the high desert.

Perhaps tomorrow a group of e-bikers would come through.

Life is better when we keep moving.

On some gravel rides, apparently, it's also a very good survival strategy.