Winter, briefly

A few more photos...

Built an awesome new work bench,

and then an awesome new bike...

and then we got 20" of snow. Nuts.

Better make the best of it by heading up into the hills

Pristine wind-sculpted snow

Above treeline, 40 mph winds were trying to sculpt my face

Such a gorgeous landscape

Finally I caught a glimpse of my goal, the peak on the left first, then a traverse to the one on the right

But as soon as I got up near the first summit, these clouds blew in, driven by 60+ mph winds. So much for the snowy traverse. No axe or crampons in that wind and zero visibility wasn't to my liking, so I backed down. 3 hours later I was back at the car, dead tired.

Now off to the desert for a big ride tomorrow and some chunky fun on Sunday.

October, come and gone

Well, apparently it's been a month since I posted anything new. I guess that suggests I've been too busy to keep up with this, which is probably a good thing. Indeed, I have been busy. A knee problem stemming from back in June during the Tour Divide is preventing me from training hard and racing 'cross right now, so I've been spending more time doing non-cycling activities: research, fun with hydrofluoric acid in the cosmo lab, running, and pretending to have carpentry skills. Here's the highlights of all that, in photos:

Dan and I had a list of places to ride this fall. Snow has not cooperated.

I love the trails up here...never see anyone except for a few friendly motos

A few weeks ago I drove out to Ft. Lupton and picked up a new frame from Devin Lenz - a Leviathan 29er with 4" travel. Here it is being put through the paces on my favorite trials on its first ride. It was fantastic.

The veiw from these trails is tough to top

Alex about to negotiate some not-so-friendly roots. Alex will fail. I always fail.


And my sister got married! She brought our box turtle
to the wedding. Turtle was excited.

Henry, on the other hand, looked a bit worried.


And I raced a little 'cross. My knee didn't approve. And
too many of the courses around here are incredibly boring.

Photos from this weekend's adventures to come later. Today I found myself on snowshoes in the alpine, getting to the top of the first thing I've climbed in a long time. Now my legs hurt.

Mountain escape

I decided to head to higher ground this weekend. The forecast was great, I had a hankering to ride in one particular area, and there was a 'cross race out that way to boot. So I loaded up before the sun dared to show its face yesterday morning. 1 bike with fat knobbies, two with skinny knobbies, some camping gear, and my groggy self.

3 hours later I unloaded the bike, threw on the pack, and started climbing. The first part of the ride was a long dirt road climb. The 4WD-enabled leaf peepers were out in force already, but before too long I turned off on some singletrack that got me away from them. But not just any singletrack...frozen singletrack! 3" of snow, frozen mud, and frozen puddles made the last 1000' of climbing a bit of a challenge. Before too long I hit my turn and aimed the bikes down a step, rutted, rocky, slippery descent. I found it on a topo map the night before marked as a pack trail. Pack trails are hit or miss for riding, with probably 90% falling into the latter category. Much to my enjoyment, this particular one was splendid, and I enjoyed it's rooty, rocky, pumpy, stream-crossing-laden goodness for the entire 3000' descent. Then I climbed back up, bumping into a few Great Dividians along the way. Two from Holland, one from Washington, and one who didn't want to chat. They were full of stories, enjoying themselves, and put a grin on my face that lasted for a while. At the top of the climb, I turned off onto singletrack once again and spent the last 15 miles snaking my way back down to my car. The sun set toward the end, and the evening glow set the perfect tone for the end of a great ride. 10 hours, 65 miles, 8000' vert. Not bad.










Somewhere in the afternoon, I realized that I was just having too much fun on the mountain bike to want to go do a cross race the next day. When I loaded the bike back on the car, I hopped in and headed south instead of north. Once back in cell tower country, I made a phone call and soon had alternate plans, thanks to Gary. He and his wife Patty are gracious enough to open their home to anyone riding the Great Divide route, give them a bed, shower, great food, and good conversation. They sure helped me out earlier this summer (and today Gary saved my butt with spare set of brake pads!).


Soon my weary body was falling asleep in a field surrounded by cattle and coyotes under a cloudless sky. The stars were brilliant, and the final thing I saw before falling asleep was a meteor. Again, not bad.

And then I awoke to this view:


Today I met a small group of guys in the heart of one of my favorite parts of the state. They took me out on some trails (and some "trails") that I never would have found on my own, weaving our way through a deserted volcanic landscape of brown cliffs, yellow grass, and golden aspen under bright blue skies. We couldn't have asked for anything better.







That's the kind of weekend I could get used to...

Fall has arrived.

Too much going on to devote any time to blogging as of late. Snuck in some good rides the past couple weekends. Train for 'cross during the week and take the fat knobbies out on weekends? Sounds like fun to me, but soon it'll be time to get down to serious business and do some racing on skinny knobbies.

Some photos from recent endeavors.

Dan and I headed up high for some alpine riding, or as he puts it, to shred some gnar:

Gnarly descents

Gnarly climbs

Dan talks tire tread design

Finally over the top

The calm before the storm. Some rolling alpine singletrack before the 3000' descent.

A week later, it was time to head out to the desert playground for some desert fun.

This ride started early. Photo taken an hour in, still in the dark.

Desert sunrises are splendid

I hate scrub oak. But the singletrack was great, as long as you don't mind shitty singletrack.

Uh, this wasn't where we were supposed to be.

After climbing all day, the 5000' descent began. Back down with just a bit of daylight to spare. Awesome descent, but a little rough when your fork's rebound damping fails.


The day's ride. ~14 hours. Oof.

Quick spin on some slickrock the next day. Well, not really a spin.

This little steep pitch got the better of Alex.

That's all for now. More mountain riding this weekend . . .

Finally, Rollins goes

Yesterday I finally made it to Rollins Pass. It was attempt #5 for me, after previously being turned around last year because of (1) very deep snow in June, (2) thunderstorms less than 2 miles from the pass in July, (3) realized it was 4 pm in November, I was 0.5 mile from the pass, and didn't bring lights, and (4) a Christmas day attempt without a snow bike (but at least with snowshoes). Those first 3 attempts were all from Boulder. Starting from Ned, Alex and I headed up the Jenny Creek trail and made it to the pass by shortly after noon. What an easy ride when you start way up there late in the summer!

\And strangely, my knee felt almost fine. The IT band problem seems to only really be aggravated when I ride my Dos Niner, what I rode in the Divide. Something is subtly different about the fit, and my knee just can't deal with it. Perhaps Q-factor differences are to blame? Hopefully I'll know more soon, but in the mean time, it was great to get out for a decent ride on a beautiful late summer day.

Cross season looms

Great article on Fort Frames on Velonews.com today!

The chassis I'll be racing on this fall

Summer adventure #2: Baffin Island

I just returned from 5 weeks of field work on Baffin Island. As always, there were many things that didn't go as planned, so we just had to roll with the punches and make the best of it. In the end, we accomplished quite a bit in two different regions and have more than enough to keep us busy with analyses and theorizing for the next year.

We were up there with a few different goals. One was to study the numerous tiny ice caps on the interior plateaux of the island and determine how long ago they formed. They're disappearing rapidly, with some that were studied in the 1970s already completely gone. Another goal was to study the regional patterns of bedrock erosion by past ice sheets. At another location, we planned to collect mats of vegetation preserved in frozen sands. This vegetation is from the last interglacial (roughly 100,000 years ago) and will give us some perspective on how the plant community differed from what that of 50 years ago and that of today. Then farther south, I'm working on understanding changes in ice sheet behavior and erosion over the past 2.5 million years by studying glacial sediments preserved in coastal cliffs. It was an ambitions field season.

First was a few weeks working between Pond Inlet and the Barnes Ice Cap:

Our transportation for the first few weeks: ice cap to ice cap, fiord to fiord, hilltop to hilltop. Too bad helicopters are useless when it's foggy.

Flying over Royal Society Fiord.

Giff, my advisor, collecting dead moss from an area exposed by the melting of a small ice cap sometime in the past couple years. Radiocarbon dating of this moss will tell us when this particular ice cap formed, likely 500-800 years ago.

Looking south along the margin of the Barnes Ice Cap. This dirty ice is the last remnant of the massive Laurentide Ice Sheet that once stretched from the Arctic Ocean to Iowa.

Subglacially-precipitated carbonate deposits just melting out from beneath the Barnes Ice Cap. These have not previously been documented anywhere in the Canadian Arctic. They will provide a very unique means of exploring past subglacial processes beneath the Laurentide Ice Sheet.

A very unexpected find. They were left by an expedition in the early 1990s led by Mike Moe that completed a ski and bike traverse of central Baffin Island. Tragically, all four members of the party was killed when a surfacing Bowhead whale overturned the boat that picked them up at the end of their journey.

Giff was feeling a little lazy one afternoon and made me pull him up onto the ice cap.

Enjoying the late evening sun.

Then fog stranded us at one of our camps for 4 days longer than planned. Without any more work to do, we found other uses for the rocks. I think we had 60 sculptures by the time the helicopter finally was able to get in.

At our next camp, we were again stranded for 4 days longer than planned by foul weather. The cook tent saw a lot of sitting and reading.

Finally the helicopter picked us up, only to have mechanical issues on the way out. Chance to the pilot: "Are you trained to do these sorts of repairs?" Pilot: "Yeah, we get training on this sort of thing every year. Can you hold your thumb over this hole as soon as I pull out this bolt? I only have one extra quart of oil, so try not to let too much leak out, eh?"

Then I flew south to Iqaluit, met my friend Keith from the University of Minnesota, Morris, and flew back north to Qikiqtarjuaq to spend a few weeks working along the sea cliffs 60 km north on the Qivitu Peninsula.

Heading to Qivitu. Keith and our transportation for getting around on the land, an ATV.

Digging on the cliffs. These sediments were deposited 2 million years ago as ice advanced to the coast. From these deposits, we are learning about how the behavior of these early ice sheets compared to more recently-formed ice sheets. Glacial deposits spanning this time interval are only known to exist at two localities in the entire eastern Canadian Arctic.

Tasty lunch in the field.

Can anyone identify this little flower?

Soon after we arrived we started seeing polar bears. Not just one or two, but 4-5 per day. A few rudely awakened us one night by setting off the trip wire alarm we had around our camp. Soon after we retreated to the cabins hidden in the fog at the end of this point. There are two bears sneaking about in that fog; they are the white spot just left of the center of the photo). That night, another bear decided there was something tasty in our cabin and went one of the walls, tearing off the plywood and leaving a gaping hole. Fortunately, he only got into the entryway and not the main room.

After that night, we retreated back to town. There were too many bears for us to safely work just as a pair, so we took a few shorter trips back up with a couple Inuit guides.

This guy was finishing up a long, long swim from ice that was at least 50 miles out in the bay.

A nice section of the cliffs. The sands in the middle of the exposure were deposited in a shallow marine environment ~500 thousand years ago. The bouldery layer at the top was deposited as ice advanced into this shallow marine environment.

Allen, one of our guides.

This is Allen's cabin. A bear had broken into the entryway, smashing the door in half and tearing up everything inside. It's not a good sign when your very experienced guide is visibly shaken by the bears.

Keith and I ended up heading home a few days early because of logistical challenges and big waves that prevented us from getting to the cliffs. The day after we left, the town decided to start having two polar bear monitors on patrol 24 hours a day. As far as I know, they've never had to do this before. Things are definitely changing on Baffin. Ice caps are losing 1-2 m of ice per year, a pretty astounding rate of melt. There were all-time record high temperatures in Pond Inlet while we were there, and kids were swimming in the fiord. Convective thunderstorms are becoming more and more frequent. 40 years ago, the Inuit in this region thought that there was one thunder that slowly circled the world because thunderstorms were so rare. We had thunderstorms on at least six days. And the sea ice is melting out astoundingly early. 30 years ago, getting around by boat was often very challenging due to sea and pack ice until mid-July at the earliest. This year, the ice was completely gone by early June, and because of this, bears were coming back on land much earlier than normal.

Working in the Arctic is always an eye-opening experience, whether it's the geology, culture, or environmental changes. And as always, I think we came back with more questions than answers, so we'll continue working on trying to understand more about the glacial and climatic history of the region, which will help put contemporary changes into a broader context.