Snotcicles

Winter arrived to the Front Range yesterday. Now everything is covered in snow, and the mercury struggled to climb out of the single digits. I let most of the air out of my tires and headed out for a few hours to wrap up 2010 with some final chilly miles.


2010 has been a great year, and hopefully I'll find some time in the next few days to compose some sort of summary. But for now, here's to 2011! Let it be even more adventure-filled than the past year.

Easy does it.

Today I took the long, dirty, Plains route to my office. I haven't felt quite right since smashing my helmet the other day, so it's been a rather slow week both physically and mentally.


The cows were munching away like they always do, and the cross were amassing, probably hoping to head out and get ahead of the approaching winter storm.


I left my tread prints on a series of short singletrack trails that stitch together a series of other dirt paths. Not a bad commute.


Keep wearing those helmets!

Coincidental Divide

Below is a neat article writer Scott Sandsberry put together for the Dec. 25 edition of the Yakima Herald. He, like many others, is enthralled by the series of coincidental events that I've found myself a part of over the past couple years. I still haven't fully digested all of it...

Coincidental divide for pair of adventurers

December 25, 2010 by Scott Sandsberry

Kurt Refsnider knew whatever he was seeing wasn’t supposed to be there. It didn’t seem possible.

Because it was red.

In an endless landscape of snow, dirt and rock.

Kurt Refsnider, shown here at the bottom of the Grand Canyon following a long portage while racing the Arizona Trail last May, discovered the Baffin Island expedition’s gear in 2009. (Photo courtesy KURT REFSNIDER)

Refsnider was 180 miles from the nearest village, 300 miles north of the Arctic Circle and 1,700 miles north of Maine, in the middle of Baffin Island, one of the most remote corners of the already far-flung Canadian province of Nunavut.

And there, where he was far more likely to see yet another polar bear than come upon anything remotely human, he was seeing red.

Refsnider didn’t know it, but he was closing the distance between two parallel existences from different times. He was finally about to connect with someone whose adventurous ethic he shared and whose audacious path he had unknowingly followed — for more than 2,500 miles, on a mountain bike, over mountains and deserts, along the Continental Divide.

Someone he had never met.

And never would.

YMIS and those who have it

Emergency room technicians and Grand Teton National Park rangers share an acronym, YMIS, for something they often encounter in their lines of work: young male’s immortality syndrome.

Mike Moe had it.

Mike Moe, left, and his brother Dan Moe: adventurers who never backed away from the challenge of the great outdoors. (Photo courtesy MARK JENKINS)

So did his brother, Dan, younger by one year. So did many of their buddies in Laramie, Wyo., a town nestled between the mountains’ siren call and the howling winds of the prairie.

They were always outdoors, testing themselves against the elements and their own limitations in every way imaginable. By the ninth grade, Mike and Mark were climbing into the Medicine Bow Mountains on winter campouts, often choosing the coldest, stormiest weekends simply to maximize the prospect of adventure.

“We got through a lot of things by the skin of our teeth,” recalls author/adventurer Mark Jenkins, Mike Moe’s best friend since their high school days. “And we loved that.”

During one of their winter excursions the temperature in Laramie plummeted to 56 below zero, worrying their parents back home. The boys? Relatively cozy inside the snow cave they had dug.

And Mike was probably chuckling.

“The worst things got, the more he made jokes about them. That was his signature,” Jenkins says. “The stickier it would get, the more fun he’d be having.”

Seeking out adventure

Kurt Refsnider wasn’t born to adventure, but he was weaned on it.

His dad, Ron, would go cross-country skiing near their Minnesota home with little Kurt, then too young to walk, nestled into the pack on his back. As soon as Kurt could stand, he was on skis, and not long after that he was backpacking, canoeing and skiing.

When he began riding bicycles, it was only when he left the pavement — heading out on mountain-bike trails or even places where trails didn’t exist — that he was hooked. At 12, he told his mother he thought he was addicted to bicycling.

Kurt Refsnider was an undergraduate at the University of Minnesota-Morris when he discovered rock climbing, first on an indoor rock wall and then on trips into the Black Hills, where he found the climbing “pretty phenomenal.” (Photo courtesy RON REFSNIDER)

Kurt began, as his father says, to “seek out adventure that probably goes beyond the edge of danger.” Extreme mountain biking. Elite-level competitive cyclocross racing. And, later, rock climbing.

One afternoon early in his freshman year of high school, he stumbled into the family home pushing his mountain bike, having no idea how or why he was in so much pain.

“He said, ‘I can’t remember, but I think I crashed,’” Ron Refsnider says. “He had no short-term memory. We took him to the emergency room right away, and for two hours we were wondering if he was going to get his memory back.”

Kurt got most of it back, but much of that day remains a blank page. He doesn’t remember crashing, or pushing the bike home, or even having that conversation with his parents.

“What I remember about that day was being wheeled around on a gurney going in to have a CAT scan,” he says. “It was one of those weird accidents. Nothing else was really messed up.”

Oh, except for his bike helmet. That was smashed.

Moes cross the Divide

In 1982 the Moes and a couple of friends traveled the Continental Divide, on foot and only occasionally on an established route. “Less than 100 miles was actually signed as the Continental Divide trail,” recalls trek participant Bill Kuestner. “For most of it, we just made up the trail as we went.”

Two years later, Mike and Dan Moe completed that rugged route again, this time on mountain bikes.

Brad Humphrey and Mike Moe hustle a bike-and-sled get-up across an icy stream while crossing Baffin Island during the 1995 expedition. (Photo courtesy TIM BANKS)

They were two guys on fat-tired bikes that were no doubt heavier and less trail-worthy as those of today, doing something no one else had done, well, just because. Mike Moe recounted the trip the following year in two articles, accompanied by Dan’s photographs, in now-defunct Bike Rider magazine.

Like Pacific Crest Trail through-hikers to their west, the Moes were in a race against time, needing to complete their journey before the early-winter snows covered their route.

In the desert, they hit the trail by 6:30 a.m. to beat the brain-baking heat. They bathed in windmill holding tanks in the desert, avoided elk thundering past, marveled at a strolling family of peccaries and removed a tarantula from one of Mike’s sidebags after a rest break in New Mexico’s Gila National Forest.

Once in the mountains, they pioneered trails that didn’t exist over long miles of seemingly impassable terrain. “Some people might view this as a real headache. We prefer to see it,” Mike Moe wrote wryly, “as ‘the charm of the Divide.’ ”

With the mountain-biking boom not yet born, this seemingly aberrant behavior was not lost on people they met along the way. When they asked a Montana storekeeper about a route they wanted to follow, he laughed and retorted, “Well, ya sure as hell can’t go there!”

Well, they sure did.

Mike and Dan Moe didn’t know it at the time, but they were blazing the route of what two decades later would become the Tour Divide — a 2,700-mile mountain-bike race that annually attracts a few dozen hardy, adventurous souls.

In 2009, one of them was Kurt Refsnider.

Refsnider crosses it, too

After moving to Colorado to pursue his doctorate in geology, Refsnider discovered endurance mountain-bike racing.

He heard about and became fascinated with a race called the Grand Loop, a circuit in western Colorado and eastern Utah that was “360 miles, one little town with a general store along the route, and that’s pretty much it. Route-finding is a huge challenge on that. Supposedly there’s posts every mile marking the route, but most of them are missing.”

This was 2008. The Grand Loop drew a grand total of four entrants that year, including Refsnider, and there was so much snow at the higher reaches of the route that two of the other three dropped out before the end of the first day.

Kurt Refsnider honed his taste for longer bicycle adventures in mountain-bike races like this one — that’s Kurt out in front of the pack — and competitive cyclocross racing. (Photo courtesy RON REFSNIDER)

Still, Refsnider pushed on, despite riding into “snow drifts (that) were up into the trees. I didn’t even see how you could follow the single-track up there, much less navigate it.” His body began to betray him the next day, no longer willing to survive on Clif Bars.

“If you can’t eat, you can’t ride,” Refsnider says, looking back. “It’s just this downward spiral. And I wore the wrong shoes, so my feet were hurting so much after all that hike-a-bike.” He finished the race at 1 a.m., the broken portions of his bike now held together with duct tape, and swore to himself he would never do anything like that again.

Instead, the next year he did something far more physically and emotionally daunting: He took on the Tour Divide and finished in 18 days, 11 hours and 13 minutes — making him the second fastest rider in the history of the race.

Making one’s life count

Refsnider’s refusal to drop out of the Grand Loop and his subsequent willingness — fervor, even — to take on the Tour Divide would have brought an approving nod from Mike Moe.

“Mike was very hard-core, and just never wanted to turn around unnecessarily,” says Diana Kocornik, who married Mike in 1988.

But where she and Mike were living when they fell in love speaks volumes about them both: They were in the African country of Swaziland, Kocornik teaching high school and Moe working for CARE, a humanitarian organization fighting global poverty.

For people who knew Moe, that was nothing new. His 1986 trip to Mount Aconcagua in the Andes was a fundraiser for Save The Children, and he organized numerous hunger-awareness projects in Laramie. By the mid-1990s, he was executive director of the non-profit Wyoming P.A.R.E.N.T., dedicated to improving the well-being of the state’s children and families.

“That was all rooted in faith. He was a Christian,” Kocornik says. “He didn’t want his life to be all about experiencing the outdoors. He wanted it to count in other ways as well.”

Still, the Moe brothers were most at home when immersed in outdoor adventure, whether together or with other friends. In 1987, while Mike was in Swaziland, Dan Moe mountain-biked the Continental Divide of Australia. And in 1991, Mike and three friends — including Jenkins — traveled to the headwaters of Africa’s Niger River in order to kayak the river from its source to the ocean.

A passage in “To Timbuktu,” Jenkins’ remarkable book about the Niger expedition, perhaps best describes Mike Moe’s spirit.

A harrowing descent through a particularly dangerous stretch of whitewater had left two of the men questioning whether the end was worth the extraordinary risk. One of them — his voice “quivering with rage,” Jenkins wrote — objected, “This isn’t boating!”

Jenkins’ next paragraph:

Mike can’t stop grinning. He turns to me and says quietly, “Nope. This is exploring.”

Bears, scares and something red

Though he rode through hundreds of miles of prime grizzly bear territory on the Tour Divide, Kurt Refsnider never saw one. Ironically, his biggest scares along the route came from the three porcupines he nearly ran over — “these harmless little animals that just kind of came out of nowhere,” he chuckles.

Graduate assistant Chance Anderson and Kurt Refsnider’s doctoral advisor, Gifford Miller ponder the strange collection of bikes and sleds the geology researchers found in summer 2009, stashed near the Barnes Ice Cap. (Photo courtesy KURT REFSNIDER)

Three weeks after completing that race spanning the full length of the Continental Divide, he was back on Baffin Island, where he had already spent parts of the previous two summers doing doctoral research on ice-sheet erosion.

And this time, bears were the ones creating those heart-pounding moments.

Numerous daily polar bear sightings convinced Refsnider, his advisor and a graduate student to switch from camping outdoors — which they did for the first few nights — and retreat to a small hunting cabin. Their first night there, a bear spent five minutes trying to break in, clawing and pounding on the wall of what Refsnider described as a “weak little structure.”

“We stomped and yelled, trying to scare the bear away,” Refsnider wrote later. “But we must have smelled pretty dang good.”

But that wasn’t what Refsnider, then 27, will recall most vividly about that 2009 summer on Baffin Island.

That moment would come further inland, while Refsnider was crossing a boulder field next to the Barnes Ice Cap, a 90-mile-long hunk of ancient ice that spanned the horizon. “As far as you can see to the north,” he recalls, “and as far as you can see to the south.”

And in that vast, desolate landscape of white and brown and gray, Refsnider saw something else.

Something red.

On their way to Baffin

Mike Moe had the heart to take on any challenge, any mountain. But his lungs were another matter. As far back as 1980, when he and Mark Jenkins set out to climb Mount McKinley (Denali) in Alaska, Moe had been susceptible to pulmonary edema at high altitudes.

He got only as high as 14,200 feet on McKinley — still 6,000 feet below the summit — before fluid buildup in his lungs forced him to turn back. It happened again six years later at Aconcagua, and again seven years after that, on a 1993 expedition to ascend unclimbed peaks in Tibet.

“He really wanted to do big mountains, and I think it was a major disappointment to him that he was susceptible to pulmonary edema,” says Tim Banks, another Laramie friend and climbing buddy. “He was the man of boundless enthusiasm — the kind of guy who thought, ‘You can push this, you can adapt, you can make it happen.’

“When he came home from Tibet, he was really bummed.”

But unbowed. It wasn’t long before he, his brother and his friends were planning another adventure. Navigating a major whitewater river on Asia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, perhaps. Finding something challenging in the northernmost parts of Alaska at the coldest time of the year, maybe.

The destination they eventually came up with? Baffin Island.

The mysterious find

Kurt Refsnider pointed for the others at what he was seeing.

“My advisor is red-green color-blind. He couldn’t see it,” Refsnider recalls.

It wasn’t on the route they were headed, but the mystery was intriguing enough to make it worth the detour. So they made their way toward it.

It was very slow going. “It takes a long time to get anywhere,” Refsnider says, “because you’re hopping from boulder to boulder.”

The red object, whatever it was, was atop a steep, little hill, perhaps only 20 meters tall. Refsnider and his two companions scrambled to the top and were very surprised by what they found.

The red that had caught his eyes was a fuel canister. Next to it were four bicycles he recognized as being mid-1990s-era vintage, and three sleds rigged up with aluminum conduit to be towed behind the bicycles.

Also in the neat pile — which clearly had sat unseen and untouched for many seasons — were two ice axes.

Painted on the handle of one, in what looked like silver nail polish, was something Refsnider decided must be initials:

M O E

The boats that never came

Upon reaching that small rise in August 1995, Mike Moe, Dan Moe, Sharon Kava and Brad Humphrey had just completed history’s first bicycle crossing of the Barnes Ice Cap.

Facing the same boulder fields that would make such slow going for Kurt Refsnider’s team a quarter-century later, the quartet decided to leave behind the bikes and sleds. Carrying shotguns to ward off the polar bears, the foursome hiked the rest of the way to a fiord on Baffin Island’s east coast.

Mike Moe had made arrangements for two Hobie Cats — small, twin-hulled sailboats — to be shipped to the town of Clyde River. An Inuit outfitter was to deliver them to the fiord and the group would then sail back, two per boat, to Clyde River and their long flights back to the United States.

But when they radioed the outfitter, the boats had not been delivered.

They waited. For days. Something was holding up the boats’ delivery to Clyde River. Their food ran out, and they resorted to picking berries for sustenance. Finally, with no telling when or even if the Hobie Cats would arrive, the group radioed the outfitter to pick them up for the final leg of the trip.

They never made it to Clyde River.

The singular coincidence

Back at camp, Kurt Refsnider used the research team’s satellite phone to make a few calls, hoping to find what bike-riding Baffin Island explorer might have the initials M.O.E. One of his calls was to his father.

Some online searching led Ron Refsnider to an Outside Magazine article written by Mark Jenkins, which explained in poignant detail what had happened to Mike and Dan Moe and their friends.

This past summer, he found the same article reprinted in “Cordillera,” a Tour Divide literary journal edited by Eric Bruntjen of Yakima.

This time, though, Jenkins’ story was prefaced by an editor’s note that explained the Moes’ unbreakable connection to the Tour Divide.

Upon reading that, Ron Refsnider understood the singular nature of the coincidence. “The hair on the back of my neck,” he recalls, “was standing up pretty high at that point.”

His son, one of only 65 people in the world to have completed the 2,700-mile Tour Divide mountain-bike race, had come upon the belongings of the two men who had pioneered it.

And those men are gone.

Tragedy on the icy seas

The Inuit guide’s small aluminum motorboat was two miles from shore in calm water when the group came upon a pod of a 10 to 15 bowhead whales. One surfaced directly under the boat, flipping it and tossing the guide and his four American passengers into the icy water.

While the guide had a well-insulated survival suit, the others had only life jackets. Their survival suits were to have been delivered with the Hobie Cats, which had never arrived.

The guide survived the ordeal, and his wife related his version of the Americans’ final hours in some detail to Jenkins.

In water only a degree or two above freezing, most people succumb to hypothermia and die within 90 minutes. Dan and Mike Moe survived the longest, holding onto each other — “hands clasped over the hull,” Jenkins wrote — for a seemingly impossible six hours. When Dan finally slipped away, Mike couldn’t hold onto his younger brother.

Two hours later, he joined him.

The final connection

In 1996, Mark Jenkins, Tim Banks and another friend of the Moes climbed a rock face in the Medicine Bow Mountains to mount a plaque commemorating the four adventurers who died in the waters off Baffin Island.

Last September, Kurt Refsnider and the woman he’s dating went into the Medicine Bows in hopes of seeing the plaque, but couldn’t find it.

He’s OK with that.

“I don’t think (the Moes’ friends) left it there for other people to find,” he says. “Maybe it was just for themselves.”

He and his friend camped two nights there, experiencing the once-upon-a-time stomping grounds of Mike and Dan Moe, where they had stoked their passion for adventure. He felt drawn there, “which is strange. I normally don’t have compulsions like that.”

Going where the Moes had gone, he says, “just felt like something I needed to do.”

Of course, Kurt Refsnider had been doing that for most of his life. He just hadn’t known it at the time.

• Outdoors editor Scott Sandsberry can be reached at 509-577-7689 or ssandsberry@yakimaherald.com

Three days, three photos

After working for more or less two weeks straight, I finished up a few big things on Thursday. Feeling like I deserved a break, I spent the past three days riding all day and creating interesting new gear with my recently-purchased sewing machine in the evenings.

Three days, three photos:

Friday: I rode up to say hello to Old Man Winter (as opposed to Old Man River?). He was cold, but it was a beautiful day to ride around in the snow. I even discovered the illusive second ski area in the foothills high above Boulder. The snow is a little thin, but I have a feeling they'll be opening soon.


Saturday: Caroline and I rode one of my favorite winter loops, heading back up into the land of snow before dropping down to the east as the sun settled to the west. I don't think my legs had ever felt as strong at the end of this climbing-intensive ride as they did on this particular day.


Sunday: After spending the past few weeks riding my Salsa Dos Niner, I took the Lenz to my favorite trails after deciding they are likely mostly snow-free. In reality, they are almost entirely dry (a rare treat in winter!), so I spent the afternoon wondering why my technical skills were so much better today than on almost any other day. I was cleaning sections I had never before ridden, descending more cleanly than ever, and loving every minute of it. Then I clipped my bar on a tree and shot off the trail and down an alarmingly steep slope. In the split second I had to react, I decided to execute a front hand spring over some rocks as I left the bike behind, followed by a flip for some added flair. But the tree directly in front of me thought I was showing off just a bit too much, and instead I found myself upside down, helmet in the dirt, back against the tree, wondering where my acrobatics had gone wrong. Or perhaps I had really just plowed through the rocks and straight into the tree? Either way, I'm very glad that a new helmet is coincidentally on its way over from the UK.

West to the coast

The annual pilgrimage of geophysical scientists to San Francisco for the fall AGU Meeting is once again upon us. This year the travel is been a bit of a unique experience for me, though. My friend Chris opted to drive out and then spend a few weeks at home in California following the meeting, so I hopped in his car and joined him for the trip across a huge swath of the West that I've only previously seen from 30,000 feet above. And what a swath of country it was!

The slow road to the Pacific

The view from my sleeping bag upon awakening

Ibex crags on a cool morning

Why not slip on my climbing shoes for the first time in 15 months and try (and fail upon) a V5 bouldering problem? Here's Chris displaying a bit more finesse.

Welcome to basin and range country. It's deserted.

One of the many mountain ranges we crossed basking in the last glow of the day

The "Lonliest Highway" (US 50) across Nevada was a spectacular experience, and I'm going to have to get back there for some more lengthy leg-powered adventures soon. But in the mean time, I've got a week of talks and meetings to get through, the last little bit of lab work required for my dissertation to wrap up, and a short trip north to the land of winter to deal with.

A favorite escape

An enormous list of work-related items requiring my attention by Friday has overwhelmed life for the better part of the past week. I snuck off this afternoon for a quick lap of my favorite local dirt: 45 minutes to the top, 5 at the top to soak in the view and put on pads, and then 10 arm-burning, suspension-pounding, judgment-questioning minutes down the 2000' plunge back into Lefthand Canyon.


As is often the case, I created the only mountain bike tracks left there at the end of the day. Despite these trails being on every map around, the steep, loose, techy nature of things seems to keep nearly everyone away. That's fine by me, but man, people are missing out.

A day in the forest

On Saturday I struck off with a few places in mind where I wanted to leave tracks. In the spirit of concocting loops of ever-increasing difficulty, I strung together a series of overgrown mine roads, amazing singletrack, and a bit of pavement into something that made me suffer more than I have in a while. 70 miles, 11k of climbing (all in the first 45 miles), and more ridiculous descending than you could shake a stick at. And that twisted part of my brain that wants to go bigger has a few additions to tack on next time.

Hoar frost sparkling in the morning sun

I only have a few photos to share. The entire day was spent pushing hard to make it to the final singletrack descent before dark. It's one of the only descents I ride regularly that I would be frightened to tackle in the dark. As a result, stops for photos were few and far between.

The fords are a little more interesting when half-frozen. The 1000' hike-a-bike climb out of this canyon didn't seem so bad now that I have the Grand Canyon to compare it to...

After descending a 1000' of seldom-ridden singletrack into the depths of a remote canyon high in the foothills, a river crossing and big hike back out of the canyon awaited. After delicately crossing an bridge of ice, I threw my bike across my back and tried to find the faint trail. A few cairns up higher guided me, and I moved as quickly as possible as the daylight began to wane. As I neared the top, my arms and back burned from the extra 30 pounds I carried, but my mind was already on the long jeep road descent and the narrow switchbacks on the climb beyond that would lead me to the last challenge (or so I thought) of the day. I figured I had 40 minutes of daylight remaining, so I pushed a bit harder.

The sun may have set, but there were still plenty of miles left to cover

I criss-crossed across the rocky jeep trail as I descended, swooping across rock knobs and sailing over what I could. A familiar grin spread across my face, and I was laughing as I careened down the last steep section before my route tilted upward. Turning onto one of the gems of the local secret trail network, I pushed with whatever energy my legs had left. They apparently had just enough, bringing me to the top of the aforementioned descent with just a glimmer of light remaining in the thick woods. I dropped my saddle, opened the valving on my rear shock, and pointed down, recalling how I could barely ride half of this trail a year ago. My eyes strained to see a line through the rocks, find a bit of firm dirt for traction, an peer over the steep drops. My tires skidded and slid on gravel as I muscled my handlebars to force a line that my bike didn't want to follow. Farther down, the trail develops a bit of flow, allowing a sense of rhythm to develop. Lift bike over rock, pump down the backside, shift weight and corner hard, and repeat.

By the bottom, the last light was gone, but my ride was complete. My breathing slowed down as I finally paused for a moment to extract a smashed pile of brownies from a bag. Struggling to chew the tasty mess, I clicked on my headlamp and began the 25 miles back home.