The southbound trip began on Oct. 19, 2023, lasted 490 days, and covered 18,364 miles. Elani then turned around and headed back north toward Missoula, with an anticipated arrival of July 16. She stopped in Steamboat in June after cycling over Rabbit Ears on her way to Dinosaur.

Elani is transgender. She started her transition in 2022, and uses they/she pronouns. Throughout the trip, she described being gendered as both a man and a woman depending on the country, or even the state, she was traveling through.

Elani is deaf but has cochlear implants that allow speech and hearing without sign language – so long as the batteries hold up. 

She speaks and writes English, Spanish and Portuguese fluently and is writing a memoir of the journey, tentatively titled “Up South & Down North.” She challenges the accepted practice of orienting maps toward the north, contending that “we have much to learn from the south.” 

Along her entire journey, in every single country where she traveled, Elani encountered grim, dramatic, inarguable evidence of climate change.

But despite everything she documented along her journey, she found that there is more good in the world than it may seem. “We can do great things when we put our minds towards a common cause and see the humanity in one another,” she says.

The trip didn’t start out easily. Elani faced brutal winds along the Pacific Coast, extreme heat in Death Valley and dust bowl conditions in Central Mexico. “There’s so much soil erosion, sun-baked earth and dust devils. The muddy rivers were filled with reddish-brown dirt. I kept wondering how people could survive in such an arid place,” she says. 

In Panama, Elani encountered communities along the canal that were wrestling with a toxic legacy dating back for decades. Despite that, Panama City was one of the highlights of her trip because she attended a sold-out Maná concert in November 2024, an open-air show with a high-energy festival atmosphere. 

Colombia presented Elani with a vivid case study of climate change: deforestation, shrinking glaciers, drought and flooding threaten the entire country, from the lowlands to the Andes. 

In Bolivia, Elani saw salt lakes growing more saline, making it harder for nearby communities to irrigate crops and sustain agriculture. Fragile lagoons and other water systems also appeared increasingly at risk.

In La Paz, Bolivia, a city built into the mountains, Elani noticed erosion in the surrounding rock and a persistent dryness in the urban landscape. In Potosí, the historic silver-mining center sometimes called the mountain that swallows men, she was struck by the human cost of extraction, including reports of children entering the mines at very young ages. In some ways, the scene reminded her of Butte, Montana.

In Chile and Patagonia, Elani found a landscape shaped by extremes. There was less snow than expected, while rain and wind arrived with striking force. She also saw immense ice fields – as vast as U.S. states – losing mass as surrounding waters changed.

In Bahía Blanca, Argentina, Elani witnessed the aftermath of flash flooding in 2025, an event described as a once-in-a-century disaster. Canals and damaged urban infrastructure revealed the scale of the flooding.

In northeastern Brazil, Elani biked through the Caatinga, a distinctive shrubland ecosystem known for both its harsh beauty and its resilience.

The ride through the Caatinga was one of the most physically demanding stretches of the journey. Elani described it as beautiful but brutally hot, with dry terrain and relentless sun. Her clothes were soaked with sweat, and she carried a salt shaker to replace what she was losing in the heat. “The scariest part was worrying that my body would fail and I would fall over,” she said.

At the mouth of the Amazon, Elani followed debates over proposed oil exploration, an issue that also surfaced at the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP30) in Belém, Brazil, last November, which she attended as an official observer. Despite proposals that did not achieve resolution, COP made significant strides, she says. “COP led to the Santa Marta conference,” she notes. Held last April, the landmark conference focusing on transitioning away from fossil fuels. 

Like the overall journey itself, Elani recognized that good can come when people speak to each other face to face. “In Belém, I saw with my own eyes that all of the solutions that are needed to address climate change already exist – along with the human power needed to carry them out,” she says. “As with my trip, I think we’re all more capable as individuals and as a collective than we give ourselves credit for. Solving global issues is a constant struggle, but when humanity works together, great change occurs.”

Follow the final leg of Elani’s journey on Instagram @Elan_biker.