kurt's going nuts . . .

The crossing of paths

2012-02-07T23:19:00.003-07:00

The sliver of shade cast by the outhouse was just largeenough for me to stretch out, my back comfortably supported by the wall. Myfilthy legs protruded into the sun, but I was so exhausted that I didn’t care.I stared off at the remarkable sandstone swales on the opposite side of thecanyon, alternating between thoughts of how blatantly clear it was that I hadreached the remote Utah border and what would be the best way to get into thewatermelon sitting in front of me. My two options seemed to be the 1-inch bladeon my tiny multi-tool or smashing the fruit open with a rock. After perhaps tenminutes of exceedingly slow thought, I settled on the knife and startedcarefully carving away.

I had spent the previous seven days pedaling the length ofthe Arizona Trail from the Mexican border at the foot of the Huachuca Mountains,through the yellow grass of the Canelo Hills, over MountLemmon, across a remote corner ofthe Senoran Desert filled with the sharpest plants imaginable,up onto the Colorado Plateau, and right up to the Utah state line. My mind was able to push mybody harder than it ever had before, and I was fortunate enough to reach thenorthern terminus of the trail just hours before a group of ultra runnerfriends wrapped up a run in one of the local slot canyons. One of thosefriends, Caroline, was kind enough to leave her car unlocked so I couldfeast on whatever food was inside, should I finish before they left. I was quiteexcited to find a watermelon inside. It was rather warm and a bit past itsprime, but few other things would have made me happier at that moment.

My mind drifted as I cut the last part of the melon up intocrude triangular shapes. After I had emerged from the shrubby juniper and cedarwoodlands at the top of the final hill of the trail, the characteristic red andtan sandstone landscape of southern Utahsuddenly came into view. My focus suddenly shifted to the array of colors driftingpast me as I slipped through a spectacularly flower-filled meadow; pink, lavender,yellow, bright orange, and white. All this suddenly overwhelmed me as Ieffortlessly carved through the switchbacks of the final descent. I recalled all this over and over againas I sat in that shade. I still do quite often, nearly two years later.

The first bite, which I saved until I finished cutting upthe entire watermelon, tasted better than anything I had eaten all week. Just as I swallowed it, a rustling in the sage caught my attention. I turned tosee a scruffy man with long, tanned legs and turquoise running shorts stridingthrough the scratchy brush not more than ten meters away. He wore an oldexternal frame pack with a blue tarp strapped to one side. His shirt was slungover the waist belt, and it looked like he hadn’t worn it in quite some timejudging by his leathery tan chest.

“Hey, do you have a bit of water you could spare?” hetentatively asked.

“Yeah, there’s a couple gallons in a car over there that youcan have if you want,” I replied, happy to help out someone who obviously hadbeen on the move for quite some time in very arid country.

“Oh, maybe I could fill two bottles!” he said. He pulled outtwo small, crumpled plastic bottles from the side pouch of his pack.

“Fill up whatever you have!” I insisted.

I told him I’d be right back and slowly and awkwardly stoodup and limped over to Caroline’s car and took out a water jug. My feet ached asI limped back. My soles were blistered, pads sore, and one Achilles tendon in terrible shape. The tanned stranger had settled down in the sun next to where I hadbeen sitting and leaned back on the outhouse wall, eyes closed. He perked upwhen I got back, and I helped him fill five little bottles.

Sitting back down required a surprising amount of effort,but managed to get comfortable again and took another bite of watermelon.

“Have some, please,” I said, motioning for him to take a piece.

“Nah, that’s alright. I’ve got some beans I’ll eat in a bithere.” He guzzled down one full bottle and immediately unscrewed the cap fromanother and took a few more sips.

“I’m Kurt,” I finally said after a long silence. Clearly wewere both rather weary.

“Pat. Nice to meet you. Thanks for this water, by the way!”he replied cheerfully.

“Where’ve you been hiking?” I inquired.

“Well, I was trying to follow a jeep trail over that way,but apparently my map is old, and the trail doesn’t seem to exist anymore. So I’veended up walking maybe ten miles cross country this afternoon.” His bloody shinssupported his story. Then I noticed he was wearing sandals and couldn't help but wonder how he managed to hike off trail without shoes.

I convinced him to eat some watermelon, and we beganexchanging stories. He had walked across northern Arizonaand southern Utah.And Nevada.And eastern California.He had no route planned, no destination in mind, and no time constraintsdictating his travels. I, on the other hand, had just ridden a very specificroute as fast as I possibly could, hoping to reach the spot I currently sat onthe seventh day. Yet we both were traveling on our own across a large,relatively wild swaths of country.

Pat had left his home and job in San Francisco earlier in the year looking fora change. He had been caring for a sickly man for the previous fiveyears, but he knew it was time to move on. He found a replacement caretaker for his elderly friend,put his own belongings in storage, and walked out of the city. Walked.

The first snows of winter fell across the Sierra just as hereached the eastern side of the range. Over the winter, he explored the westernend of the Grand Canyon and the deserts to thenorth. He had been traveling using county maps that lacked considerable detail.Beans and tortillas had been his primary meals for months, and it sounded likehe just stocked up whenever he found his way into a town. Interestingly, he never used the words hiked, or trekked, or backpacked. Just walked.

His uninhibited freedom and having no specific destination fascinatedme. My focus and desire to move as fast as possible entertained him. We eachseemed to sit back and ponder each others’ experiences for more than a fewminutes. Under any other circumstances, the silence would have feltparticularly awkward, but for some reason, I felt only calmness in the stillafternoon heat.

We conversed at length, finishing the watermelon andconsuming all the water I had carried over. Pat pulled a plastic containerof beans out of his pack and spread them into a couple tortillas. He told me ofa place in the western Grand Canyon where the local Indians would let me ridemy bike all the way down to the river. I told him of beautiful routes he couldtake from eastern Utahinto the Colorado Rockies, an area that he seemed drawn toward.

After a couple hours, Pat started stuffing things back intohis pack and said he should be going.

“Where are you heading for tonight?” I asked.

“I’m not sure. Maybe I’ll take the canyon your friends arein. I’ve heard that it’s pretty back there.” He gazed eastwardly for a momentand then picked up the last of his water bottles and slid them into side pocketsof his pack.

Just then, Caroline and a few of her companions returned,and not long after introducing her to Pat and Pat to her, Pat slung his packover his lanky torso, said farewell, and was off. I wished him the best. Caroline did the same, seeming a bit perplexed by the whole situation. But if she had not returned and met Pat before he departed, I'm not sure I would entirely believe that I had met him, either.

Ever since that day, my mind often wanders to Pat and hisadventures. I have no idea where he ended up, what adventures he had along theway, or if he’s returned to any semblance of a “normal” lifestyle. But I’d loveto know. The paths our lives unexpectedly cross and the precise timing requiredfor such encounters to occur take me aback. Moreover, the effect such chancemeetings can have on one’s life make such an affair quite extraordinary.

Untamed

2012-02-03T17:19:00.000-07:00

The wild country of southern Utah continues to both fascinate and frighten me. The landscapes are enormous and beautiful, containing broad swaths of land seemingly untouched by human hands and technology. But at the same time, the rugged, desolate, and remoteness of this area provides fair warning to anyone entering it that they'd best be prepared for the worst. Early explorers and geologists making their way through these lands - Powell, Gilbert, and Dutton, among others - chronicled repeatedly and extensively the array of challenges presented by the unique geology. I've had the pleasure of spending a few days exploring this area, performing some reconnaissance for a variety of upcoming endeavors, both small and potentially large, and I thought I'd share just a few of the scenes that have been burned into my memory from our quick tour.

And now I find myself back in St. George for a quick visit and some riding with a big crew of friends. I spent a month training here a year ago, but that now feels almost like a distant memory since so much has happened in the interim. Either way, it feels good to be back here, even if just for a couple days.

Farther south

2012-01-29T22:38:00.000-07:00

The desert valleys and island mountains of the Southwest have always fascinated me since I first noticed their unique topography on a relief map back in elementary school. The entirety of Nevada, western Utah, a good chunk of Arizona, and even corners of Idaho and Oregon are covered in a seemingly monotonous array of craggy, lonely, and desolate ranges and basins. But as I've spent more time in this part of the world, I've realized that each mountain range is unique in a variety of ways. This past weekend, I had the pleasure of exploring just a tiny fraction more, as well as returning to one familiar area for a bit of bike racing.

The Harquahala Mountains are home to the tallest peak in southwestern Arizona. And as is the case with most big ranges, their size precludes them from being adequately captured in a single photo. And because we were hunting around in dry washes and steep gulches for exposures of a vareity of geological stories, my eyes were focused on the ground and the pointy vegetation that is, well, everywhere.

A sleepy owl in a mine shaft, a lone blooming ocotillo, beautiful stretched-pebble conglomerate...perhaps I'll get a few good shots of the mountains when I return to pedal to the high point.

At 5 am the following morning, I found myself pedaling along in a pack of crazies doing the 115-mile Antelope Peak Challenge. It's the first event on the Arizona Endurance Series calendar, and it leaves tracks behind on some of the most remote and seldom traveled sections of the Arizona Trail. It's a spectacular course, and this year, an amazing new singletrack section was added!

That little bump on the horizon is Antelope Peak. The goal is to get there, scramble to the summit, and then continue on for another 20 miles to the north before beginning to loop back. It was a long day in the saddle!

After the neutral paved start, I dove into the singletrack and tried my best to follow the route through a maze of cattle trails and drainages as my lights always seemed to be pointed in the wrong direction. One other set of lights followed closely behind, and after ten minutes or so, I finally found a rhythm and then inquired about who was tailing me. Max or Neil had hammered this singletrack early in the race last year, but it turned out to be Aaron Gulley. Last year he and I spent many hours riding together in a few different long races, so I was happy to find out that he had made the trip out.

We pedaled together as the sun rose, lighting up the new singletrack section with a brilliant glow among the long shadows. Max caught us, and we reveled all together in the beauty.

Antelope Peak grew larger and larger, seemingly far more quickly than it had for me any other time. Before I new it, I stashing my bike behind a prickly pear and power walking up the steep side while eating some apple pie. Aaron and Max were right behind me. The view north from the summit revealed how distant the far point in the course still was, but my legs were feeling great, and I managed to put down 900 calories during the 30 minutes of hiking.

The rest of the race flew by as my legs continued to pound out a steady rhythm. Soon I found myself alone under the warm mid-day sun. The weather was perfect. I turned onto the mind-blowing Ripsey segment and marveled at the trail's path and construction. It's a magical area. At the high point, I stopped for a couple minutes to drink a Mountain Dew, lube my chain, pull the rest of my food out of my pack, and soak in the views of the Superstition Mountains on the far side of the Gila Valley. After 20 minutes of descending loose switchbacks, my tires hummed onto a packed dirt road and the trip back began. Last year at this point, I put the hammer down to see if I could survive 40 miles of a relatively hard effort this late in a race. This year I increased my effort modestly, suffered far less, and in the end, covered that last distance considerably faster. Huh. I also consumed more than 3,800 calories in the 11.5 hours I was out there, which must be an all-time high consumption rate for me in a one-day race! All in all, it was as much as one could hope for in a bike race - a great course, strong legs, good company, and ideal conditions.

This morning, Caroline and I looked over the map to try to figure out what to do before heading home. I was pretty fried still, and my knee a bit achy, so we picked a trailhead marked on the map, knowing nothing about it other than that it was not too far off our route, and headed there. After a couple hours of hiking, we found ourselves marveling at this view:

I guess there's a reason that trailhead was included on the map. Now I've got a day or two to prepare for the next little adventure...

New dirt

2012-01-23T23:23:00.000-07:00

Moving to a completely new place should be exciting, especially when one considers all the time, money, and effort that goes into the process from start to finish. I have not moved many times in my life, but each time has been exciting. The first big move was to college. It may have been surrounded by cornfields, but it was college, afterall. Then I moved to Madison, Wisconsin, a beautiful city that I still miss a bit. After a couple years there, I transplanted myself to Boulder, Colorado, the place where so many people seem to want to live. I sure was one of those people, and I couldn't wait to finally arrive. Five and a half years there was great, but I was ready to be somewhere different by the end.

That brings me to January 23, 2012, which finds me sitting on a somewhat ugly couch in a still foreign-feeling room. A few snowflakes are falling on the tall Ponderosa Pines outside the window, and I can't see a single light from any of the neighboring houses. Sticking my head out the door, it's silent. We're renting a place at the bottom of a gulch just outside of town, the town being Prescott, AZ. I actually could throw a stone from this couch across the municipal boundary, so we're just barely outside of town in reality. But it feels far enough when I get up in the morning, eat some oatmeal, and then ride into work. The first obstacle is our driveway, which kicks up the gulch at a 25% grade. That feels great with no warm-up. Then there's a slimy, rutted two-track to navigate before hitting the winding paved descent into town. From, it's just a simple coast right into downtown, past the old post office and courthouse square, and in a couple more minutes I reach campus.

Campus is Prescott College. It's tiny. My office is tiny. The parking lots are tiny. The student body is tiny. The faculty is tiny. I like tiny, so it fits my style well. And I'm good at adapting, which makes dealing with other tiny things, such as libraries and budgets, more manageable. The strange thing, which still feels like some sort of a mix-up, is that I'm faculty here. Professor. Teacher. Guy in charge of a class or two. Kurt. Call me what you like since there aren't really titles here. Anyway, after a decade or three of being a student, I've finally have a real job, and it's in a great town at a neat little college. I'm pretty happy so far, although with the semester only a few weeks away, things are a bit hectic getting two courses off the ground. But that's a story for another day.

Sometimes when I ride up this steep driveway, I get to the top and turn right. The two-track climbs gradually, contouring gently in and out of drainages in a burned area, passing the last few houses in the area, and eventually ducking into the woods. A singletrack cuts off to the right. Pick a new direction. Soon the trail branches. Pick again. Climb steeply. Descent through a rocky gully. Meander through the pines. End on a steep ATV trail.

From these junctions, the decisions are as simple as, "How much time to I have to ride today?", and "Should I go up higher or down into the basin?" After living in Boulder, I'm not used to having such options surrounding town. Or an interconnected network of trails. Or regularly encountering surprisingly friendly people on said trails. Or being able to ride for hours without seeing a "no bikes" sign. So far, my favorite sign has been "This trail is even more technical than the Lakeshore Trail. Take care. Definitely not recommended for bikes." For the record, I laughed quite a bit while riding or attempting to ride that trail. It was great fun.

And from one of the higher peaks above town, the views in all directions are endless, as are, more or less, public lands. While the few paved roads in the valleys in this area are quite busy and ill-suited for riding, USFS, BLM, and AZ State Land Trust land is ubiquitous and filled with dirt roads, 4WD roads, and old and forgotten trails. Heading west of here, it doesn't take too long to suddenly realize that you're quite far from anything.

That's the synopsis after two weeks in a new town. The wave of excitement continues and the list of possible adventures rapidly continues to grow. So I'll refrain from continuing to ramble. It's time for a bit of shuteye. Hopefully in the morning, there won't be too much snow on the trails, and maybe there will be a javelina or two outside the kitchen window. They're still novel little beasts to have around.

The final days

2012-01-05T18:48:00.002-07:00

The final days of living in Colorado have flown by, with far too much to be accomplished in the given time. Far, far too much. Yet somehow, it's all been getting done. And of course, the long list of things to do included plenty of pedaling, a little camping to clear the mind, and a coffee intake that has increased rather dramatically from my weekly mug.

A big dump of snow turned the higher foothills into a winter wonderland. My Mukluk floated through the woods on some of the most enjoyable winter singletrack riding I could imagine, with almost entirely rideable climbs, long, fast descents, and tight, technical riding though the pines.

Christmas delivered a beautiful weekend, so Caroline and I threw some gear in our packs and headed off on snowshoes for a quick overnighter on one of my favorite mountains around. Deep, powdery snow blanketed the forest, and we didn't see another soul out there for our relaxing getaway. A warm night made for pleasant sleeping in our trench under a moonless sky.

I've spent the last week and a half in a NOLS/WMI Wilderness First Responder course. This has relegated my riding to either very early or very late in the day, but I think I've seen more spectacular sunrises and sunsets from in my saddle than anytime since racing the Divide back in June. The class has been quite intense, but I would strongly encourage anyone who spends any appreciable amount of time in the backcountry on self-supported adventures to seriously consider taking such a course. It has really opened my eyes to the wide range of injuries and health problems that could very reasonably occur on any excursion. I wish I would have committed the time to doing this years ago, but better now than after a serious situation arises!

Our 15" of snow melted quickly, and I was delighted to get back to my local playground trails a couple more times this week. Writing this, I'm reminded that I'm apparently excited whether the trails are packed with snow or dry and rocky, so long as my legs are spinning the pedals and my mind is free to roam. Just get out there and take advantage of any opportunity to do whatever it is you enjoy doing!

But for me, I'll soon be doing what I love doing in Arizona. Three more days and I'll start putting down some new roots and exploring a whole new world of possibilities. This is going to be such great fun . . .

Three zeros

2011-12-19T18:47:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening, history was made. It may not have mattered to anyone but myself. The cows sure didn't seem to care. Caroline at least willingly snapped a few photos before starting to shiver in the chilly twilight air. But I was quite happy to surpass the milestone of of 1,000 hours of pedaling this year. Never before had I tallied a thousand hours of total training in a single year, and strangely, for the first year since I bought my first road bike when I was 13, I don't think I rode on skinny tires once. Mountain bikes have completely taken over. And earlier in the day, I gradumutated (for the last time, I swear), to boot! Then I did some math and realized that there are not even 9,000 hours in a year. How did all that fit into a single year?

After a weekend of relatively balmy temperatures, I awoke this morning to low clouds and sub-freezing temperatures. I grabbed my Horsethief and headed into the foothills for what may have been the last ride on my favorite trails. The lower sections were skating rinks, but a bit higher, the snow and ice disappeared, and the muck from the weekend was replaced by high-friction, ice cemented gravel.

Soon the snow began to fall, and into the clouds I rode. It was completely still and entirely silent, save the grinding of my tires in the dirt, the strained chattering of my chain, and the thumping of my heart as it labored to keep my muscles going. And I had the trails completely to myself.

The spectacular views routinely offered by the summit were completely absent. The contrast of scorched tree trunks draped in mist was enough to preoccupy my thoughts as I strapped on my pads. Then without further delay, I launched into the fog and relished one last run back down into the canyon. I'm really going to miss this ride.

Winter.

2011-12-12T15:06:00.005-07:00

Winter has arrived to the Front Range. Trails are blanketed with snow. The dirt roads along the western margin of the Great Plains are mucky when the sun warms them and frozen the rest of the day. Adjusting to the more limited riding opportunities of this time of year always provides a bit of a mental challenge.

But this year, I've got a new tool (toy?) to help combat the winter riding blues. A Salsa Mukluk. I built it up with both snow and dirt riding challenges in mind, so it's a bit of a unique setup. But it seems to be working just well for some winter exploration of trails that were previously relegated to the snowshoe realm for me.

I spent six hours on Saturday pedaling along Peak to Peak Highway checking out all the possible riding areas. No snowmobilers had yet been out on their rather limited trail network, so while options were limited for good snow riding, I still found plenty.

These included a narrow canyon incised into the foothills, some well packed snowshoe trail, and a few roads that are closed to motorized use during the winter months. That created a nice mix of riding on a beautiful afternoon.

But this is not to say that there is no other good winter riding to be had in the area. Yesterday I joined a group of local MTB hammers for a hard training ride (photos from Jeff Kerkove). We rode the same loop as we had a couple weeks ago, linking up 60 miles of mostly dirt roads through the foothills with more than 8k' of climbing. I guess this means the cob webs have been worked out of the legs and that it's time to start thinking about training and racing goals for 2012. Hmm...

I also got everyone hooked on warm, caffeinated chocolate gas station drinks. These are tough to beat in the middle of chilly winter rides!

Saying goodbye to the Granite Goblins

2011-12-01T08:38:00.001-07:00

We've had a decent run of warm November weather, but with an impending winter storm (which has now dumped 7" of white annoyance on my front porch), I felt the need to get out and pay one last visit to my favorite trail network. With most of the trails at 7 to 8k in elevation and many north-facing sections, I wasn't sure that the snow from the storms from the beginning of the month would have melted off completely yet. Alexis and I played hooky and headed up to investigate.

I was right to be a bit worried about trail conditions. There was snow. Lots of it. But it thanks to a few hikers, a cyclist or two, and many deer, the singletrack was packed and mostly rideable. The steep climbs required some delicate balance and paddlewheeling, but the traction on the descents was rather incredible, letting the tires hold firm until right when it was time to kick the rear end around through a switchback.

There was also some ice.

But there was also some rock.

Lots of rock.

And a little bit of air.

But mainly lots of snow. And now it's a winter wonderland up there, most likely until everything melts out in the spring. It's been fun...I'm sure going to miss this place.

A different kind of canyon country

2011-11-27T17:16:00.001-07:00

I've been meaning to post some photos of a beautiful and relaxing quick trip taken last weekend. The time to actually do this has been illusive, but today I had a bit of a revelation after returning from an exhausting ride well before dark. Late November generally signals the return to some form of a structured training regiment for me, and with no big races (i.e., Tour Divide big) on the horizon for next summer, that means training is going to include more short, hard efforts. That means I don't need to be on the bike all day every weekend. Huh.

Anyway, last weekend Caroline and I headed to the rather unknown canyon country of southeastern Colorado. It's been on my list of areas to visit for a while now, and fall seemed like a perfect time to go. Here's a bit of what it looked like...

Apatosaur tracks!

Not bad. Most of the canyons are near La Junta. The dino tracks are in Picketwire Canyon, and there are some other trails in that area and plenty of scenic dirt road riding in remote country to be had. The last few photos are from Pueblo Reservoir State Park. The trail network there is a gem. Check it out...you'll be glad you did.

Turkey(eve) Trot

2011-11-24T12:00:00.001-07:00

Since quitting running last summer after 8 months of dabbling in the painful sport, I haven't been getting out on all the trails immediately above Boulder nearly as much as one should. There are seemingly endless miles of trails up there, but sadly, they're entirely closed to bikes.

Last night Caroline and I got out for a quick hike on a warm November evening. It reminded me of how, once again, my leg muscles are frustratingly unfit for anything except pedaling.

We had the mountain to almost to ourselves, having only to share it with the now seemingly incessant winds that have been battering the Front Range off and on for the past few weeks. But I'll take wind over snow any day...

Happy Thanksgiving, all. Enjoy all you have, and don't take it for granted!

The windy days return

2011-11-13T22:14:00.001-07:00

I've been having a bit too much fun lately on my Horsethief. I should have gotten a 5" bike years ago for the kind of terrain I like to ride. After two frightening crashes in my backyard playground a few weeks ago, I've only been back a couple times.

On Saturday, Rob, Dan, and I braved 50-70 mph wind gusts to have some fun. My confidence was back, partly due to some even knobbier tires, and I spent the entire time either grinning (on the descents) or grimacing (on the nasty climbs).

We each blew completely off the trail at least a few times, eliciting more than a bit of laughter by everyone involved. It also highlighted the sheer craziness of the roadies we saw trying to ride (or walk) their bikes along the base of the foothills. The cracking of nearby branches and the freshly downed trees weren't quite as comical.

It was great to get back out there, and with some strong riders to boot. Now I should get some sleep before heading to my dissertation defense in the morning. My seemingly eternal days (years!) of being a student are nearly over...

Mountains

2011-11-01T11:26:00.004-06:00

A few highlights from some little mountain adventures over the past few weeks...first some backpacking, then some pedaling and relaxed exploring. Both were quick trips packed with impressive landscapes.

Pawnee Pass, with 50 mph wind gusts to make things interesting

3 am below Pawnee Pass

Up over Pawnee Peak to create a nice loop route

Riding the Laramie Enduro course. Good stuff up there!

Granite goblins

Caroline enjoyed the warmth of the fire

I tried to keep my fingers warm while writing

Petrified camel

The Medicine Bows

I've lived in Boulder for 5 years now, and there's still so much unexplored territory within easy striking range. I'm a bit amazed. Get out there - you'll never realize what how much you're missing until you've scratched well below the surface!

Canyon country

2011-11-01T11:13:00.001-06:00

Last night I managed to submit my dissertation to my thesis committee, so I now have a bit of time to catch up on all the things that were pushed to the wayside over the past month. That long list of minor sacrifices included blogging. But with working long, long days (and sometimes nights, too!), I was able to carve out some time every weekend to go exploring in new places. Some of this was by foot, some by bike, and a tiny bit by boat.

This past weekend, Caroline and I headed west to the desert for a loop some ultra runner friends suggested. A note of caution: just because a local endurance freak did something in 9 hours doesn't mean it'll be easy to do at a leisurely pace in two days!

This loop followed two very remote tributary canyons to the Colorado River near the Utah state line. Each canyon had a bit of a trail from the plateau above down to the bottom, but in between was 8-12 miles of bushwhacking, boulder hopping, low speed travel.

The scenery was spectacular. The weather was pleasant. And the only footprints we saw were from deer, mountain lions, coyotes, bobcat (?), and smaller critters.

We reached the big muddy river while the sun was still low and frost covered most of the grass along the riverbank. We inflated the packraft I had been carrying, crammed two bodies and two packs into the tiny thing, and pushed out into the strong current.

Easy miles. A few rapids and boils had me a bit nervous, as our little craft was a bit overloaded.

Unexpected shapes and colors of rocks at the valley floor - I now see why this immediate section of river is called Black Rock

Back on dry land, we headed up our exit canyon. It was even more impressive than the first canyon we had been in.

We hiked on granite for most of the climb up, meaning we were right on the Great Unconformity, a gap of 1.4 billion years in the geologic record. It isn't exposed in too many places between the Rockies and the bottom of the Grand Canyon, so I wasn't expecting be hiking along it for several hours.

Another sunset. Time to switch on the head lamps and hustle back to the trailhead.

3 am on Teton Pass

2011-10-18T14:58:00.007-06:00

I shot this snippet of video during the Tour Divide this past June as I was layering on all my warm clothes atop snowy Teton Pass mid-way through the longest single push I've ever done on the bike. I'm still not able to comprehend how I was able to cover 370 miles in 37 hours after 5 solid days of racing, how I was up at 1:45 am the following morning to tackle the Great Divide Basin, or how I was sufficiently recovered two days later to feel good enough to go on the attack again climbing out of Gore Canyon. I wouldn't say forgoing sleep on that particular night was the wisest move, but at the time, it seemed like a half decent idea given how good my legs were feeling.

Too bad I didn't shoot a little video at the end of that when the waitress at the Miner's Grubstake was trying to convince me that I was in no shape to continue riding without first sleeping. Boy was she ever right!

And not more than 2 minutes after setting off from the pass, a porcupine jumped out in front of me and nearly got flattened. I have had more close encounters with porcupines than dogs in the Tour Divide!

7 days, 8 laps, 9 images

2011-10-13T10:42:00.006-06:00

I seem to have developed a bit of a problem. A gravity problem. The other night I found myself browsing tire manufacturer websites to see if any new, wide, knobby 29er tires have come out because my Ardent and Rampage aren't quite doing what I want them to do. I realized that I probably should have a real full-face helmet instead of the MET helmet/chin guard that I've been using. My shins are covered with lumps and cuts from being hit with jagged rocks that my front tire kicked up. A knee-to-rock encounter left one kneecap achy, making me very glad I was wearing pads. The sum total of these points is that this scrawny enduro rider is in some new territory.

The thing to blame for all this: my new Salsa Horsethief. Together for each of the past seven days, we headed up Lefthand Canyon to one of my favorite places to ride. I've spent a lot of time here over the years, struggling up the climb and doing the best I could to survive the steep, loose, rutted descent. It's a 3.1 mile climb that maxes out at a whopping 36% grade to get to the top, some 2000' above, followed by a descent that's considerably shorter and steeper. And to make this an even more enjoyable place to ride, the views and lighting are routinely absolutely spectacular.

All bikes I've had in the past had some very distinct limitations that were reached on this descent. It took a year or so of riding here before I finally became comfortable riding loose and pushing my limits. After a while, I instead found myself pushing the limits of my bike - not enough traction, insufficient travel, too much frame or fork flex to force rough lines through the rocks. Because of how challenging the riding here is (both up and down), this is precisely where I take new equipment and gear for testing. If it survives a lap here, it'll probably survive any 300-mile route you throw at it.

Last month, Salsa sent me their new Horsethief frame. I built it up with some sturdy wheels from Mike C, 2.4" knobbies, and the new White Brothers LOOP 140 mm loop fork. I'll post a more complete review on all this equipment in a few more weeks after I've spent some more time getting to know it. But let's just say that on the first time around this rugged loop, I finally found myself on a bike that had capabilities far exceeding my own abilities. So I returned the next day to try some new things. And the next day. And the next day.

Yesterday marked seven days in a row of riding this loop. I don't think I've ever ridden the same loop seven days in a row before, anywhere. The trails here are constantly changing as 4x4s move rocks around and dig new holes on the steep sections, and motos shred the rutted singletrack in different places. But as best as I could, I learned every loose rut, slippery root, hidden hole below a drop; where I can ride loose and skitter over endless cobbles without worrying about the lack of traction, where to force lines and when to back off, brake a bit more than I want, and play it safe at the traction limit.

It's safe to say that I've learned more on the bike in this week than perhaps any other week in recent years. Every day I kept descending faster and more comfortably. Bigger grin, more adrenaline.

Photo by Alexis Ault

Then a couple days ago, I found myself at some new limits, twice ending up on the ground unexpectedly and several other times kicking myself back upright. Traction limits. 'They' always say that you're not learning if you don't occasionally crash, right? I limped home, tail between my legs, body sore, ego bruised.

But each crash revealed something. Perhaps not entirely traction limits. Focus limits. I let my guard down slightly after making it through tough sections. Mentally, I let out a sigh of relief after clearing lines that require all the commitment I can muster. The tunnel of focus that had been zeroed in on a 3"-wide swath of gravel-covered bedrock expands. And then if I'm not careful, down I go.

It's been a blast. But my legs need a day or two to recover from all the trips up that climb, and the rest of my body needs a day or two to heal up. Then it'll be time to go explore some other trails..

More alpine exploring

2011-10-03T12:00:00.005-06:00

Not too far southwest of Boulder, familiar terrain surrounds an area of mountains into which I've never really been. After discovering a unique network of high alpine trails while roaming around in TopoFusion, Caroline and I set off for a short overnight loop with hike-a-bike shoes, plenty of food, and some warm clothes since winter is not far off. Our 60-mile route ended up having 13k' of mostly steep climbing, hours and hours of spectacular views, some rain, some snow, some rumbling skies, and of course, plenty of hike-a-bike.

A taste of Wilderness

2011-09-29T17:42:00.009-06:00

The sun was already touching the highest peak to the west as I hit the dirt road and raced a freight train up a moderate grade. I was amused that I was riding the same speed as a train being pulled by 9 engines was moving, but it turned out that there was no rush since the train was second in line to make the dark trip through the Moffat Tunnel. The train screeched to a halt as I pedaled on, soon turning off onto a much steeper road.

Dusk came and went as I labored steadily upward. The bright aspen stands turned grey before settling on a darker shade for the remainder of the night. Stands of spruce stood stubbornly along the trail despite increasingly strong gusts of wind coming down the flanks of the mountains into which I was climbing. But the high peaks became simply dark outlines as stars gradually surrounded them.

The critters that skitter and dart about are often unique to the dark hours. The smells are richer and Earthier. The sounds are far more pronounced and striking. And one's place in the world seems just a bit more uncertain. But foremost, I believe, is that first glimpse of a new landscape when dawn finally arrives. Traveling by night rarely allows the traveler to discern anything more than the shape of the passing country; subtle details beyond the reach of the torch are neither seen nor appreciated. But as the sun prepares to rise again, a thick, diffuse light spreads from the east, revealing to the traveler all that was hidden while the sun sped around the back side of the globe.

The climbing continued as I pondered why I have grown such a fondness for riding in the dark. Finally, as my lungs finally began to signal that there was no longer quite as much oxygen as they should like to have, the rocky trail tilted downward. I dropped my saddle and rattled down the rocky hillside before veering off onto the tundra and dismounting. The sticker on a Carsonite post in front of me glinted in my headlamp. "Wilderness Area," it read.

In most instances of finding myself face to face with similar signs while sitting on a bike, I've grumpily turned around to find more friendly places to travel. Some USFS ranger districts are apparently quite strict about allowing bikes to even be carried while hiking through Wilderness, but our local district has been accommodating and has even approved one local race in which competitors are required to carry their bikes through 3 miles of Wilderness. On this night, the plan was to continue into the heart of this little Wilderness, bike strapped to my back. Owen and I had tried this route once last year and were turned back by the first real snow of the year. Earlier this year, I tried again, but my legs didn't have it in them that day, and storms were building rapidly as the strong summer sun fueled convection overhead. This time, my legs were feeling fresh and there wasn't a cloud in the sky, just a dark summit looming a thousand feet above.

The climb soon turned rocky as I crossed stone garlands and then continuous talus slopes. I probably should have taken the trail around the south side of the mountain, but as always, the direct route seemed like the best idea ahead of time. After a few quick breaks to rest my back, I crested the final false summit, hit the trail, and climbed the final few switchbacks to the summit. The wind howled through my handlebars and steerer tube as I leaned the bike against a stone shelter that had been built at the high point. "EEP!" shouted a nearby pika. That little guy would wake me up every hour or two all through the night with a single exclamation each time.

The view of the Boulder and Denver lights to the east were impressive, and a few little clusters of lights below the other side of the Front Range marked Winter Park, Fraser, and Granby. I heated up some dinner, put on all my clothes, and nestled in among some rocks to try to get out of the wind. But sharp gusts still found me, blowing around my bivy and making it challenging to sleep at times.

The soft orange glow of an approaching dawn seemingly awoke me just in time to enjoy the sunrise. It had been quite some time since I had the pleasure of watching the Sun appear from such a high vantage point. I tried to make some hot chocolate, but my little fuel canister only had enough left to thaw the little ice crystals in the water, so I sipped cold chocolate and snapped some photos of the mountains as they basked in first orange, then pink, followed by yellow.

The plan for the morning was to hike down the north side of the mountain, pick up some alpine singletrack beyond the Wilderness Boundary, head over to Rollins Pass, and get to work before lunch. As expected, a steep hike brought me to a saddle and the exciting sign that marked the edge of the non-bike-friendly territory. I hopped back on and sailed through some of the most beautiful singletrack I've ridden in some time.

I ended up dropping into Winter Park instead of heading directly to Rollins Pass. The aspens treated me to quite a show, a porcupine waddled out of my path in the middle of the long descent, and I just kept grinning. What a morning. What a route.

Eventually, I climbed back up, stopping to chat with a guy heading the opposite direction on a heavily loaded bike. He was headed off on a 3-4 month tour with no particular destination in mind. "Perhaps Arizona," he said, "Or maybe I'll follow the Arkansas and head down to the Gulf." It sounded like this wasn't his first time on such a journey. Or his second. Or fifth.

It wasn't until almost 3 o'clock that I rolled into work. I suppose that wasn't quite a quick overnighter, but it certainly was one of the most breathtaking loops I've ridden in the Front Range. With so many of our trails off limits to bikes in Wilderness Areas or National Parks, options are a bit limited. I offer my gratitude to all the folks in Grand County that fought for the creation of this "Special Interest Area" as an alternative to making it all Wilderness.

While those off us on the east side of the Divide lost bikeable territory to the James Peak Wilderness, Grand County residents fought to not lose bike and snowmobile access since their economy benefits greatly from it. A compromise was reached, and the Special Interest Area was created. I hope that such a compromise will not go unnoticed as proposals for new Wilderness Areas across the country are considered as long as the Wilderness Act remains unchanged and inflexible.

Aspenglow

2011-09-25T21:31:00.003-06:00

A weekend of beautiful fall weather pulled me out of my dissertation-writing-trance and up into the hills to a playground of singletrack.

There were crowds of leaf peepers clogging up the nearby highway trying to take photos of this distant stand of aspens...

We left them behind, bumped down some old trails, and found ourselves basking in the golden glow beneath the trembling canopy. The leaf peepers didn't know what they were missing out on.

Play time in the rocks

Even the small leaves are creating their own vibrant glow

This new squishy bike is pretty fun

Stefan taking in the views on our first ride together in far too long. He's been running too much this summer. What's with these strange running compulsions?

Failure followed by failure followed by failure. Nuts.

So this is what a chain in the process of exploding looks like?

Autumn

2011-09-23T19:23:00.002-06:00

The first crisp days of autumn have arrived here in Colorado. The days are getting shorter at an alarming rate, and the sunsets are coming earlier and earlier with each passing day.

The evening view from my favorite local trails

While skittering down steep trails, flashes of yellow shout out from the scattered aspens within the pine forests above town. Afternoon thunderstorms are becoming less frequent, but now long sleeves are usually needed during my morning commute. But most troubling was the appearance of fresh snow on the high peaks last week. Winter is no longer months away.

Taking advantage of every last minute of twilight

Get out and enjoy the ever-shortening days!

Horsethievery

2011-09-21T11:32:00.005-06:00

A few weeks ago, a new toy arrived in the mail from Salsa. 5" of cushy travel for downhill ripping. A moderately long wheelbase for incredible stability. A moderately steep geometry for surprisingly good needle threading capabilities. I'm still waiting for the proper fork, so the build isn't quite what it should be yet, but who wants to have a new frame just sitting around for weeks on end, begging to be built? I sure didn't.

At the local proving grounds under a splendid late afternoon sun.

New bike, new views.

Dan is selling his Yeti. He wants more travel. And he should put his chain on before beginning this descent.

2200' up, steep enough to make the leg burn. Then 2200' back down, steep enough to make me grin. I ran into the trail's creator on his way down, and he had recently raked the upper part of the track, so it was in prime shape.

No action shots yet...this bike is too much fun to want to stop and pull out the camera!

Alpine endeavors II

2011-09-06T08:02:00.002-06:00

Last year after I ran my second 50-mile trail race, my desire to run completely vaporized. I had been running to hopefully help a couple knee problems caused by being purely a cyclist, and then I had created other problems by deciding to see what it was like to run an ultra, as opposed to riding one. The running also payed huge dividends racing the Arizona Trail, with that annoying canyon near the northern terminus. But once I finished a tough race in the San Juan Mountains that was my primary goal for the year, I had had quite enough suffering on my feet.

More than a year later, I've finally started to have urges to run again, and I've managed to get out on a few short runs to try to get my running muscles to remember what they had become relatively comfortable with. But sadly, that muscle memory just isn't there.

Anyway, I wanted to get back above treeline and take in some vistas this weekend, so it was off to Breckenridge for the Breck Crest Marathon. This race uses a rather, uh, challenging course, climbing steadily and steeply from the start, high up into the Tenmile Range, over Wheeler Pass, and then it traverses the ridge crest at well over 12,000' before eventually plunging down the Colorado Trail back into the Blue River Valley.

A few of the leaders nearing Wheeler Pass

It was a beautiful morning for a running race, and the frost on the ground was the first I had seen since Spring. The climb up toward Wheeler burned my legs, and I struggled to simply find traction up the loose trail surface. The fastest runners passed me while I was stopped at the second aid station, trying to catch my breath. I cheered for them and then continued on.

The guy in front of me was particularly chatty. And he didn't seem to be breathing very hard. Apparently he was also a mountain biker, and he said that he was sure glad he wasn't trying to ride on this trail like I was. Oh yeah, I guess I didn't mention that I was on my bike. Caroline was running somewhere in the pack lower down on the mountain; I just came along for the ride, and the running course happened to use some of the same trails I had planned to ride. I was amused to find that my pace on this terrain was the same as the runners until the trail tilted downward. And I sure was glad that I wasn't running!

High in the Tenmile Range, back on the Colorado Trail

After another hour or so of tundra riding with endless views and a big blue sky above, we finally hit the high point of the Colorado Trail in this area and began to descend. The runners I had been near hopped aside to let me finally pass, commented how they'd much rather run down this trail then attempt to ride it (it's a spectacular descent on a bike in my opinion), I wished them luck in their race, and skittered down the loose track, grinning until I crashed. I righted my bike, hopped back on, and was grinning again before my feet even found my pedals.

That CT descent is an absolute blast. I see why it destroys most CT racers heading in the opposite direction! By the time I finally reached the river, I realized that only a few hours had passed, so I still had a little while before Caroline expected to be finishing. With no shortage of routes to reach the sky in the area, I headed east and soon found myself climbing Georgia Pass. But the climb took longer than I anticipated, and an internal debate began as to whether I should turn around and head back to town or climb to the pass so I could ride the rocky CT descent down instead. The CT option won out.

A glimpse of South Park off in the distance

Out of water and overdue, I pushed hard back into town, bought all the tasty beverages I could carry at a gas station en route, and got back to the car to find Caroline all ready to ride, despite finishing her race faster than her goal. Hmm. I don't think she races hard enough. I needed a bit of time to recover, but soon we were rolling up into the mountains again.

The Sallie Barber Mine

No storms anywhere in sight and cool air really made it feel like fall has finally arrived. Now if only I could find someone to finish writing my dissertation for me so I can spend more days in the mountains...

Alpine endeavors

2011-08-29T12:47:00.004-06:00

After having spent almost the entire summer riding and traveling far from home, I've been hit with a bit of a sense of guilt for having spent almost no time in the Colorado alpine since the snow melted off. I'm sure some of these emotions will be appeased over the next month. I started things off this weekend with a grueling but spectacular ride right from my front door.

This beautiful vista is 7000' higher than my house, and one can ride there with almost no time spent coasting downhill en route. I think that makes this the longest, highest, continuously rideable climb from Boulder. My legs were feeling it for the last could hours of the 5.5 hour effort, and my lungs were working overtime trying to find oxygen in the thin air at the high point.

I had some rather ambitious plans to continue into the adjacent Wilderness, giving my bike a ride to the summit that is tantalizingly close to this point, but alas, my legs and some moderately threatening clouds colluded to change my mind.

Instead I lounged on the tundra for a while, enjoyed the views, and divulged in a couple slices of pizza that had conveniently been warmed by the sun beating down on the top of my backpack. I fought off the desire to take a nap and eventually made the decision to head farther south and ride a steep, rocky, overgrown section of the Continental Divide Trail that skirts the Wilderness boundary.

I skittered down the descent, at times awkwardly contorting my body above the bike to simultaneously allow the bike to pass over and between jagged rocks while keeping my shoulders out of the overhanging pine bows. Eventually I hit the rugged 4x4 track below, rallied down the remainder of the descent, and chuckled as wondered why it had been such a tough choice as to whether or not I should head down that trail. But soon, my legs were screaming and arms dripping with sweat on the steep, loose climbs to get back over the high ground that stood between me and the dirt roads that pointed toward Boulder. A couple wrong turns took me back up to treeline, but eventually I found myself coasting as often as I was pedaling, and it was only a matter of time before I would be sprawled out on my living room floor.

Now I'm looking forward to the coming weekend and getting back up to the crest of some other mountains...get out there and enjoy it, because the first snows of the year are no longer too distant!

Alaska fatbike armada

2011-08-22T10:31:00.005-06:00

The final destination for filming took us to Alaska following a 45+ hour travel marathon to reach Anchorage, followed immediately by a beautiful evening drive to Clam Gulch. There we met up with a colorful cast of characters - Pat and Kathy, both very, very accomplished cyclists and backcountry racers, Bjorn and Kim, a pair of fat-bike enthusiasts and passionate environmentalists, and Salsa Cycles' own Kid and Jason who provided Mike, Hunter, Matthew and I with some cushy bikes for our 3-day beach ride.

The riding was relaxed, with siestas each afternoon while we waited for high tide to pass. With 20' of tidal swing, the beaches of the Kenai Peninsula are ideal for beach riding as the tide starts to go out. Concluding our 5 week of travel with this group of riders, despite most everyone being strangers prior to the start of our ride, and in such a wonderful setting was perfect. Everyone had ample stories to share of past adventures and the 3 days were over before I knew it.

Here are some of my favorite photos from the beach. Also check out some other great shots by Jason and Kid.

Welcome to Alaska!

My first fatbike tracks

Big beach, big sky, and big volcanoes on the horizon

Mad clouds

Kathy and Jason, clearly enjoying the day

Crunching barnacles under your fat tires is bad karma

As we rolled up to this spot, Hunter proclaimed that he hated shooting waterfalls. He said that they're too cliche. It is possible to find a unique perspective of some falls, though.

Someone was apparently out of position

Settling down to enjoy our final evening on the beach

Rainy Nepal

2011-08-19T17:24:00.003-06:00

I apologize to those of you that were following along via this blog for updates on our round-the-world adventure. Slow or non-existent internet access and a very hectic travel schedule caused me to drop the ball on that one. But now that I'm back at home and recovering from more than 2 months of steady travel, I'll try to catch up a bit.

Nepal was the next destination after Morocco, and it provided a somewhat wetter and greener experience than had northern Africa. The people in Nepal, at least outside of Kathmandu, were even more friendly, and we enjoyed a 4-day ride through the hills surrounding Kathmandu Valley. More adventurous routes up where the air is far thinner will have to wait until our next visit...

Riding out of Kathmandu. Too bad I wasn't daring enough to pull my camera out while we were riding in the wild traffic within the city itself!

Into Shivapuri National Park, where the cicadas buzz was absolutely deafening

Didn't anyone tell these guys early August is the peak of monsoon season in Nepal? They weren't smiling that night after 4 hours of riding in driving rain on exceedingly muddy trails through a forest full of leaches, all after the sun set.

Not a bad view in the morning looking off toward the Everest Range

Ubiquitous ferns

Insects galore

Matthew enjoys a rest at a most wonderful little gazebo

The gazebo's guard

Hunter made some friends that liked his bike

It's big country, but villages dot the landscape even far from roads

We spent the final night of our ride in this village of 16 houses and were treated to a delicious dinner, local home brew wine, and I was given a thorough tour of the area by the kids

Matthew and I struck off on our own for the final day. Muddy roads like these were far easier for us than for the overloaded buses.

Spinning prayer wheels while riding past them provided the locals with some amusement, although once we alarmed them by riding around in the wrong direction. After correcting this, we were told we had to go around the loop once more just to be safe. We obliged.

Yet another place I'd like to return to...

Next up . . . the Alaskan fatbike beach armada.

Half way to boiling

2011-08-02T01:03:00.003-06:00

A whirlwind of a week in Morocco is already wrapping up as we're about to head to the airport. Given the amount of country and culture we were trying to see and experience, we weren't able to spend as much time riding as we had hoped, but we were fortunate enough to experience just a tiny bit of what living deep in the Atlas Mountains entails, as well as what to consider when planning potential bikepacking routes through the region.

Our ride to the airport is about to leave, so all you get for now are a few of my favorite photos from this leg of the trip. There were going to be a few more, but the internet is too slow to get the rest posted right now.

Wrapping up in Scotland

2011-07-16T16:41:00.006-06:00

The crew wrapped up our Glasgow-to-Inverness bikepacking (or expedition biking as they call it here) trip this evening, although I made it here last evening via taxi for a quick visit to the ER to get a dislocated finger x-rayed and reset. The riding and weather has mostly been incredible, and we made friends with some great people along the way, including the members of the Scottish band North Sea Gas, Tour Divide fan/bikepacking enthusiast Iona (who tracked us down via our SPOT), a few colorful cyclotourists...the list goes on. We're spending the night at a hostel in Inverness before heading back to Glasgow tomorrow to continue on with this adventure. Also in town tonight are Simple Minds and Lance Armstrong. Imagine that.

Along the Great Glen Way

None with four leaves?

Enjoying a quick dose of mid-afternoon caffeine

Loch Lochy (and no, it doesn't mean Lakey Lake)

Iona rode with us for a bit on her Salsa Fargo (accompanied by her gopher friend) before continuing on with her own weekend bikepacking trip

Hunter days the afternoon's food supply

Uhrlach Castle on Loch Ness

Hmm. It looked worse than it was.

I managed to be crash-free on all the trails, but put us on a road through a town and accidents happen. Freak accidents. Like the webbing loop on the waist strap of Matthew's Osprey backpack waving in the wind on a descent and snaring my bar end as I rode next to him. I think we had 2 seconds to coordinate a solution before my front wheel got ripped out from beneath me. Hunter and Mike are quite pleased that they managed to catch all the aftermath on film, including the doctor getting the bone back in place, me screaming, and then me putting on a show while sucking down the laughing gas.

Scotland

2011-07-14T06:55:00.005-06:00

The crew spent the past few days riding the West Highland Way route up across the Scottish Highlands. Filming definitely throws off the riding rhythm to which Matthew and I have become accustomed, and the miles and technical nature of riding has been tough on Hunter and Mike, so we've been making the necessary adjustments to accomodate all we can. Last night, mechanical and timing issues forced a short train ride for half the group, giving Matthew and I the chance to rip the last 50 miles of the trail into Fort William, though it meant we only could squeeze in a few hours of sleep. But the sensations of riding across the moorlands below peaks silhouetted against the full moon or the faint orange glow of twilight until the wee hours of the morning will not be soon forgotten.

Now we're off to pedal to along Loch Ness and on to Inverness. Here are a few photos of the riding so far...

And follow our trail at Trackleaders.

The first few steps

2011-07-09T19:09:00.003-06:00

Filming for The Path began this past weekend with a quick shakedown overnighter in the Colorado Rockies. We learned a lot about the pace of riding while filming, how much camera equipment can reasonably be taken, and thought long and hard about what gear we need to bring along for 5 weeks of riding and traveling abroad.

Not a bad place to wake up in the morning, aside from the thin air at 11,000'. In a few weeks, we'll probably be longing for that much oxygen while far higher in Nepal.

Sunset over the Cochetopa Hills

Hunter in a sea of wildflowers beneath a vibrant morning sun

Matthew fixing a flat after slicing a sidewall on a seemingly never ending descent

After unpacking and repacking all my gear for a third time, waffling on what bike to bring, and swapping out most of the components after settling on my Spearfish, I think I might just be set for our departure for Scotland tomorrow morning.

The adventure continues

2011-07-06T23:09:00.005-06:00

No time for too many words describing the Tour Divide adventure this time around. I've been back in Boulder for a couple days after meeting Caroline at Antelope Wells on Saturday evening, but processing all that went on in the past few weeks is going to take a bit longer. I'm still dumbfounded at how far, fast, and long Jefe and I were able to ride each day (and even more so that he did it with only one gear...). The toll on the body during the race was huge, but it's recovered quite quickly, and now I really only have two tired legs and one slightly achy Achilles.

Tomorrow morning, Mike Dion, Hunter Weeks, Matthew Lee, and I head off on the next adventure, beginning in the Colorado mountains for a quick shakedown before heading off to bikepack across Scotland, through the Atlas Mountains of Morocco, the thin air of Nepal, and the rugged coastline of Alaska. The other guys also have some amazing riding planned in the French Alps while I spend a week at a conference in Bern (I really should probably do something work-related for at least a week this summer...). I hope I have everything packed that I might need for all that. And I also must mention that I owe Joe DePaemelaere of Primus Mootry a huge thanks for dropping everything and fixing some severe chainsuck-induced frame damage that needed repairing prior to our departure.

So I'll leave you with some of my favorite photos from the Divide.

Caroline at the start. Think she ever imagined that she was going to ride away with the women's race? Or finish with a broken rib?

Ben Oney riding along Spray Lake

Mucky Elk Pass

Evening storm clouds over Whitefish

Ethan Passant and I taking a quick break in the Swan River Range

Deep snow and swollen rivers characterized southern Canada and Montana this year

A beautiful place to wake up, high above Helena

Nearing the end of Montana

Ethan pedaling under a mid-day halo

A full moon rises over the Tetons on a very windy evening, some 15 hours into my rather unwise 37-hour push

The ever-enthusiastic Jefe Branham in southern Wyoming

Threatening evening skies over South Park, Colorado. A terrific lightning storm frightened me sufficiently that I spent the night sleeping beneath a camper.

Columnar basalt at the mouth of Carnero Canyon. I had hoped to get well beyond this the previous night, but the sleep monster gained the upper hand around midnight and I was forced to sleep not too far below the pass.

Jefe in Abiquiu: Where the heck am I supposed to put all this food and water?

Sunrise over the Jemez Mountains was a welcome sight after Jefe and I had already been riding for several dark hours.

Deep in the Gila and already out of food for several hours, Jefe picks crumbs out of his bag. Running out of water only made the situation even more dire...

The southern border! Our mission completed, we were almost immediately asked, "So are you guys going to do it again?" I think that's a question for another month. We really pushed the envelope this year, in terms of sleep deprivation and body degradation, much farther than I thought it could be pushed, and I'm left wondering what it would have taken to ride more than a few hours faster. I'm really looking forward to seeing a few other headbangers time trial the route later this summer and seeing how many hours they can knock off the record.

Finished!

2011-06-28T21:47:00.004-06:00

Wow, I can't put into words how good it feels to be done with the beast that is the Tour Divide. It was an incredible year, with long snow slogs and flooded roads in the north, huge days and short nights of sleep in the middle, and 100-degree temperatures and tight racing in New Mexico. I'm still a bit in disbelief that I managed to make it to Antelope Wells before anyone else.

Photo stolen from Eddie Clark's beautiful collection.

The racing this year was nothing less than intense from the start. Ethan, Jefe, and I beat the crap out of one another for the first 1500 miles. Averaging 180 miles per day for that stretch, the toll on all of our bodies was huge. Ankles and knees seemed to take the brunt of the abuse, and watching one another try to get up in the morning when we happened to be camped at the same spot was downright comical until it was your turn to try to become less horizontal. I did a little math and found that I averaged 4 hours of sleep per night for those 16ish days, and that included two nights that I didn't sleep at all (one was the final night) and one that I only napped for an hour. I didn't really think such minimal sleep could be possible for this race, but what do you know?

I really enjoyed the company of Ethan and Jefe when we were riding together. Both are incredibly impressive athletes and simply nice guys. It was refreshing to see that all of us were racing on minimal budgets, on bikes cobbled together with whatever parts we were able to get deals on, and Jefe and I both had quite a bit of homemade gear. It really goes to show that the fanciest bikes and most expensive gear fall far short of what's required for riders to do well in the Tour Divide. It's instead sheer determination, endurance accumulated through years of cycling, savviness in planning, and familiarity with multi-day racing that the fastest racers usually possess, and Ethan and Jefe clearly had an abundance of each.

Photo by Mike Dion/The Path

I'll try to post some more thoughts on the past couple weeks at some point in the near future, and if I can figure out how to get the photos off my camera without a USB cable, I'll post some of those. In the mean time, keep an eye on the Salsa Cycles blog, Cyclingnews, and Mountain Flyer for some upcoming features on the race.

But I'll thank all that have helped me out with the gear used in this race - Salsa Cycles, Revelate Designs, Pearl Izumi, White Brothers, LaceMine29.com, Cane Creek, University Bikes in Boulder, and Michelin. Everything worked FLAWLESSLY, and that made life so much easier for me. I could focus on pedaling, eating, drinking, and enjoying the passing miles instead of futzing with components, repairing broken equipment, and figuring out how to get replacement parts. The one mistake I made was starting with fast-rolling WTB Nano tires - big error on my part. The amount of air that leaked through tiny holes in the sidewalls and the speed at which the tread wore was astounding. I swapped out the rear for a trusty Michelin WildRace'r half way through and had no more problems and spent the rest of the race wishing I had a WildRace'r on the front, too.

I'm hanging out in Silver City recuperating and waiting for Caroline to finish. She's in Cuba this evening and only has a few more days to go before she can hopefully best the rest of the women's field! Then I need to pedal back down to Separ to meet my ride back to Colorado before meeting up with Mike Dion, Hunter Weeks, and Matthew Lee to begin filming of The Path. Hopefully my body is interested in riding again next week!

Thanks to everyone that's sent their congrats...it means a lot, and I'm proud to hear that I've been able to inspire so many others simply by doing what I love to do.

The beginning of a whirlwind

2011-06-05T00:17:00.007-06:00

In three days, I'll be on the road to Banff, watching the countless miles roll by while slowly realizing once again how dang far it is across a single state, much less across the country. The Tour Divide begins on Friday morning, and it's looking like 75 brave souls will have their sights set on making it to Antelope Wells, New Mexico. My parents are again giving me a ride up to Canada for the start, and this time we'll also have Caroline along for company as she is about to embark on her own Divide adventure.

Record-breaking snowpack along stretches of the northern half of the course have forced some detours for the first time ever, meaning that no course records can be set this year. Even with the detours, there will be more snow than any Divide racing has ever seen. Flood potential is high in many areas between Banff and northern Colorado, and fire danger is extreme along the drought-stricken New Mexico stretch of the route. It's going to be an interesting race - that can be guaranteed. Even though my primary goal for this year was to challenge Matthew Lee's record and now that won't be realized, I'm still quite excited for the race. We'll see how lady luck treats me along the way.

The TD rig, gear, and a friendly cottonwood*

You can follow the weeks-long racing action using the GPS tracking provided by Trackleaders on the leaderboard of the Tour Divide website, and there will most definitely be some discussion and commentary here and here. For a bit more insight into my goals, gear, and thoughts on the race, keep your eyes on the Outside blog for an upcoming interview.

I must thank Salsa Cycles, University Bikes in Boulder, Pearl Izumi, Cane Creek, White Brothers, Revelate Designs, LaceMine29, and SRAM for the outstanding support they've been providing this year. I've truly enjoyed working with each of these companies and the unparalleled products and support they provide, and that's why almost all of them have been personal sponsors since I got into the twisted world of ultraendurance mountain biking.

Following the Divide, the pedaling continues as filming for The Path begins. Hopefully I'll still be able to ride at that point, but fortunately, I was able to convince Mike D that I'll need at least a few days to recover. So don't expect to see many updates here this summer - it's going to be a whirlwind, and for the first time in years, I'm essentially going to be sans computer/interweb for a couple months!

And one last photo - a partially finished prototype folding snowshoe. Why are there no companies out there making folding snowshoes?

With a bit more fabric, could this possibly work?

* I predict that this will be the most viewed photo on my blog. Routinely it's a tight race between photos of Caroline and photos of my bikes, but everyone wants to see TD bike setups, (as evidenced by the search phrase "tour divide bike setup" bringing many visitors to these pages) so I have a feeling that this time the bike will win out over the beautiful lady. The internet is a funny place.

Tranquilo

2011-06-01T19:06:00.004-06:00

This past weekend, Caroline and I headed out on one last bikepacking trip before leaving for the grand adventure that will be the 2011 Tour Divide. We opted to stay close to home, spending our precious time in the saddle rather than behind a windshield. It was, as always, good to make a few minor adjustments to gear selection, bike setup, component adjustment, and so on. My legs felt like they had finally recovered from drilling it on the Kokopelli Trail.

A beautiful evening and a warm first night was a nice change after so many chilly, snowy bikepacking trips in the past few months. That was all about to change, though, as we decided to climb Trail Ridge Road to the end of what was opened so far. The Park Service has struggled to get the road opened up this year due to record snow on the continental divide. So we climbed for 12 miles into a road through thick fog filling the void between two walls of snow. The number of Memorial Day drivers heading up the dead-end, fogged-in road was astounding. I think there was more traffic on that climb than any I've ridden in several years!

A chilly descent was followed by a quick, warm meal in town before it began raining. After a day of seemingly endless climbing, we quickly logged 30 effortless miles, but with all the canyons filled with no tresspassing signs and private residences, finding a dry place to sleep out of the rain was an unexpected challenge.

We stopped at a picnic area to fix a sliced sidewall (from pavement riding?!), found nowhere dry to sleep, and continued descending. Darkness fell, the rain picked up, and we rode on. I thought of an open space park that might work...we rode up the muddy entrance road, past 'day use only' signs, found a nice deserted out building, only to realize that the park ranger lived in the house just a few hundred meters away. We continued on, failing to find any dry spots in the next tiny town. The rain let up, we stopped to eat, and then big drops started falling with the greatest intensity yet!

It dawned on me that there was a school 8 miles down the road. With new motivation, we quickly pounded out some more pavement miles and soon had a dry place to sit down, cook up some dinner, change out of damp clothes, and stretch out.

A few minutes after dozing off, a hissing sound awoke me with an instant sense of alarm. Sprinklers! Luckily, they were at the end of the building. I jumped out of my sleeping bag and searched out the nearest two sprinkler heads and hid them beneath my empty handlebar bag and the hood from my jacket, each weighted down with a pair of shoes. Caroline never even awoke enough to realize how close we came to a miserable awakening!

Sunday morning brought more drizzle, but the clouds gradually broke up, revealing a very intense sun. We rode pavement back home as my mind wandered to the Tour Divide course, thinking about the dozen heavily snowed-in passes, the severely dry conditions in New Mexico that are resulting in entire National Forest districts being closed to all access, the flooding rivers in Montana and Wyoming. In a world of contrasts such as these inflicting such an uncontrollable influence on this year's race, it's going to be an adventure just to sit back and watch what happens. Racing is going to be a whole other level of unpredictability, demanding flexibility, mental strength, and, um, snowshoes.

All plans for a run at Matthew Lee's course records flew out the window when it was clear much of the high-altitude course sections in Montana wouldn't be melted out in time. I changed my mind on where to start and settled on a northbound attack, giving the north more time to melt. That plan failed when it became obvious that the mountains and passes of NW Wyoming will be shrouded in a deep, record-breaking snowpack until well into July. Revert to a Banff start and enjoy the company? Settle on the first-ever snow detours to avoid some of these nearly impassable stretches? Delay and start in late summer following the traditional TD course?

Self-reflecting on what drives me to challenge myself to these endeavors reveals no Earth-shattering revelations to help make any such decisions easier. But I realize that no matter how anyone takes on the TD or GDMBR this summer, the adventure will be a huge one. Challenges will differ for everyone and every start date, and each adventure will be unique, unrepeatable, memorable. Sure, one attempting to break such records could wait for ideal conditions, but there's something mentally unsettling to me about this, akin to almost trying to minimize the experience. Then again, any of these ultras are more than long enough to provide ample material for future enjoyment and reflection with even the most perfect luck, conditions, and preparation.

So I sit back in my chair, chuckling at how easy it is for one to become frustrated with the seemingly stochastic means through which the weather gods play out their annual game. But the scientist in me just grins, quietly reminding me that it was obvious in December that this wasn't going to be any ordinary spring. Take it as it comes, for a life without uncontrollable variability would be rather dull, no?

Borrowing a term used all too frequently by the famous cyclists who find themselves implicated in doping scandals, I find myself tranquilo with a week and change before the Grand Depart from Banff. It's going to be a memorable June, worlds apart in so many ways from my June of two years ago.

Decisions

2011-05-23T14:46:00.004-06:00

May 22, 2009 modeled snowpack depth

May 22, 2011 modeled snowpack depth

Tour Divide day 1 option 1

Tour Divide day 1 option 2

The Path begins

2011-05-19T13:50:00.004-06:00

An exciting announcement of what's to follow on the heels of this year's Tour Divide and will undoubtedly be another incredible adventure. Leave it to Mike Dion and Hunter Weeks to create another great adventure biking film!

Kokopelli rides again

2011-05-16T12:09:00.003-06:00

The Kokopelli Trail and I have never gotten along particularly well. Putting that another way, it has handily destroyed me the past 3 times I've ridden it. The full trail runs approximately 135 from Moab, UT to Loma, CO with something like 17,000' of climbing, very little water, and no resupply. The varied terrain takes you up to the foot of the snowy peaks in the La Sal mountains, through rugged sandstone canyons, breezy desert mesas, and right down to the muddy Colorado River. For me, racing the trail has usually been a solitary experience due to a wise evening or midnight start time and the remote nature of the route.

My goal this year was to ride fast and feel good most of the time. Two years ago, I managed a 16-hour time during which I felt good for no more than 30 minutes. It was a pretty dang miserable day on the bike. This year, I also wanted to see how close to Dave Harris' very impressive 12:41 record I could come.

Eszter and I set off around 12:30 am from Moab and starting the climbing-heavy first 26 miles, which includes a 4000' climb immediately followed by a 2000' climb. The nearly-full moon shone down on me, glinting off my frame and rims. I turned off my light and was surrounded by the outlines of spectacular rock formations. Riding both climbs with just the light of the moon was absolutely spectacular. My head was enjoying things, my legs were feeling good as I floated up to 8000'. A turn onto pavement at that point marks a brief respite from the climbing - a 2000' paved descent. I turned my light on as bright as it goes and launched downhill. The cold air made me shiver, but I was too impatient to stop and put on any more clothing. I dove into the first set of switchbacks, and in middle of the second hairpin, I somehow horribly misjudged my speed and shot straight off the edge of the road, down an embankment, and into the woods! Miraculously, my bike and I were unscathed save a bruising a tree gave my elbow. I dragged my bike back up to the road and continued on, wide awake from adrenaline. That extra attentiveness helped me avoid hitting an elk a few turns later!

The early-morning hours of darkness flew by. I was making good time, my legs felt great, and the long, rough descents after all that initial climbing were a blast. I debated between riding my hardtail and my Spearfish, and I was very glad I had decided to go with the latter. I filled up two water bottles at the last reliable stream crossing that holds good water and pressed on. The first glimmer of light in the east excited me, and by the time I began the descent to the Colorado River at Dewey, the sun was about to pop up over the distant cliffs. That meant I was at least 90 minutes ahead of my pace from last time.

I don't particularly enjoy much of the second half of the Kokopelli. It's dry desert, a mix of rocky mesas and sandy 2-tracks, and the technical singletrack at the end is frustratingly slow and difficult after 120+ miles. My arms were starting to ache, and fatigue was beginning to settle into my legs. I forced myself to keep eating, but after being ravenously hungry for the first 5 hours, I was actually a bit worried about having enough food to get to the end. My water supply seemed good, and I knew that I'd grab a bit extra thick, brown water from the river in a couple hour just in case I'd need it.

The next few hours passed by uneventfully. An aggravating headwind persisted despite a weather forecast that suggested that there would be a tailwind there. My knee started to ache a bit, and my stomach stopped wanting food. I arrived in Rabbit Valley, ~2.5 hours from the end, and a minor meltdown ensued. My legs suddenly had no power, the mid-morning heat was already starting to get to me, and I was dreading the last part of the course. Dave's record, which previously had seemed to be just within reach, slipped away. I glanced back to the southeast and half expected to see Eszter closing in on me. I crammed down 250 calories of sugar and hoped for the best. My legs gradually gained some strength, and soon I found myself at the rocky, rutted, steep descent to Salt Creek. Skittering down it brought a smile back to my face, but the subsequent hike-a-bike sections stole it right back away.

I muddled my way through the last 8 miles of singletrack at a pathetic pace. I recalled suffering like a dog on these same trails last year during my first running race and was glad I could at least coast on the short descents. The area was crawling with other cyclists this time around, and seeing all those people was a bit of a shock after spending the rest of the ride alone with just the scenery and my thoughts. Minutes ticked by...the prospect of a 13-hours finish came and went. I pressed on, finally reached the last climb, coasted down the backside to the parking lot, and finished in 13:25 (managed to keep the stopped time to only 20 minutes!).

After running out of water a few miles from the end, all I could think about was a cold, sugary beverage. Lucky for me, Caroline had finished up her bikepacking trip in Moab and had just the ticket waiting for me in the car. Muscles on the verge of cramping, I lounged uncomfortably in the shade of the car, amazed at how horrible my body felt upon finishing. Eszter came in with a very fast time of 15:25 and was also very happy to be done. We both agreed (and hoped!) that the Kokopelli will be out of our systems for a while.

The Cordillera Volume 2

2011-05-13T13:22:00.003-06:00

Eric Bruntjen has put together another beautiful volume of writing from Tour Divide racers and their families. The publisher sums up the contents nicely:

"From the Canadian Rockies to the deserts of New Mexico the Cordillera features engaging stories from the longest, most grueling mountain bike races in the world. Follow world-class athletes as they dash from Canada to Mexico, unsupported, while fighting temperature extremes, sleep deprivation, mechanical breakdowns and physical and emotional hardship along the way. At times nerve-racking and heart-breaking, but also touching and inspiring, this collection explores the heart of human endurance. In these pages, you'll discover men and women who are obsessed with seconds in the 2,700-mile long course. You'll meet a spouse left behind to wait and wonder. You'll travel to the Arctic Circle, where a young racer stumbles upon a decades-old mystery from the "World's Toughest Bike Race," and much more."

As mentioned, included in this content is the mind-boggling story of my discovery of the bikes of "Divide pioneers" Mike and Dan Moes' left behind on Baffin Island during their fateful final expedition. This spooky story still sends shivers down my spine and captivates anyone with whom I share it.

All proceeds from sales of this second edition will go to Linnea Blumenthal, the young daughter of Tour Divide racer Dave Blumenthal who was killed last June in an accident en route from Banff to Antelope Wells.

Please consider purchasing a copy or three directly from the publisher. It will later be available on Amazon.com, but their cut will reduce the funds passed on to Linnea.

Divide training

2011-05-09T18:51:00.002-06:00

Training for racing the Divide generally just involves big volume all around, but as important as the physical training might be, it's far from everything. While the mental side of things is not going to win an ultra for you, it sure can send you home early. I've been taking good care of my head, and Dan just posted a video of some riding from a chilly, snowy, slippery Sunday last week. We spent the afternoon on my favorite trails, and this clip shows the steepest, loosest descent there. The helmet cam perspective provides some footage that's a bit underwhelming, but it's the fun that counts, right?

Too big for words

2011-05-09T00:45:00.004-06:00

Forty-five minutes of looking at topo maps and aerial photos in Topofusion on Thursday night resulted in a unique loop that formed the plan for the weekend - a 180-mile tour of the high plains in southern Wyoming, including some fast dirt roads and long stretches of 2-tracks of unknown quality stitched together along the northern rim of the Great Divide Basin. The trip didn't go entirely as planned, but it was absolutely delightful nonetheless. Here are a few photos, possibly with more to come. The landscape is too large for my camera and my late night frame of mind, but suffice it to say that this ride reminded me once again of just why I love pedaling my bike.

The foreboding clouds predict 10 hours of strong headwinds to follow

Please don't poke me. I'm pretending to sleep, and this sun feels so nice without you casting your lousy shadow across my back!

Two thin lines stretched to the horizon, and we followed them that far and beyond

Tens of miles from anything and anyone

What's a bikepacking trip without some hiking through snow?

This view explains how we managed to climb 11k in an area that doesn't really seem to have any substantial climbing. It actually has a lot of hills. (photo by Caroline)

A beautiful place to camp, and very popular among the deer, elk, and antelope, too.

Looking down upon our scenic campsite

Hmm. The Sweetwater River could not be forded as planned - more than hip-deep and flowing fast over slippery rocks. Let's backtrack a bit and take the Oregon Trail instead! So we did. Somehow those brave pioneers got their wagons across this river at 9 different fords. (photo by Caroline)

This guy had some place to be and was uninterested in slowing down for us

Abandoned heavy equipment provides about the only shelter from the incessant wind out here (photo by Caroline)

The trace of the Oregon Trail snakes its way among the knobby granite outcrops and sage-covered hills and across saline streams, providing a reminder of past adventures and struggles in a landscape that probably looks completely unchanged from what travelers saw in the 19th century.

Big things in the works

2011-05-04T19:22:00.005-06:00

The next seven months are guaranteed to bring a whirlwind of adventure, exhaustion, and change between racing down the spine of the continent, making use of an around-the-world plane ticket for some adventure biking (more on this later...), and finishing my dissertation. Now in a brand new development, I'll soon have a foreign landscape to call my back yard. It looks something like this:

Not bad, huh? And to go along with this, I'll have a real job. I have managed to survive nearly 30 years without having such a thing, but since I'm coming close to being all grown up, I figured it was time to look around a bit. And how could one pass up the opportunity to join the faculty of Prescott College and teach earth science, climate, and mountain bike courses? I couldn't.

Unsettled

2011-05-02T10:08:00.004-06:00

Another weekend of strangely unsettled weather along the Front Range, another weekend of long hours in the saddle, and another sleepy Monday to follow that up.

Ride toward the light . . . just don't fall into gaping the cracks en route. Photo by Caroline Soong.

I had no idea this trail existed, but it was open to bikes and clearly sees very little use. Either way, a bit of singletrack is nice in the middle of a long dirt road/pavement ride.

Yesterday Dan and I headed up high to ride amazing trails. We got snowed on, as usual.

Squid plant?

Dan marvels at the a new trail we discovered. By new I mean very old, eroded, rocky, and steep, but new to us. On one end it hits a gate that on one side says "Private gate" and "Private property, no trespassing" on the other, yet we were standing on USFS land. Strange.

Just before getting lost in a sea of criss-crossing trails that all led across a narrow section of USFS land surrounded by houses, and each trail dead-ended in someone's back yard. Eventually a friendly homeowner laughed at us and said we could cross his property to get back to a road.

And I made a dorky new bag.

It keeps all my trinkets arranged nicely. Everything with a place and everything in that place, an important thing to consider when preparing for ultras.

Spring freeze

2011-04-23T14:27:00.004-06:00

The sharp contrasts of life in the West continue to impress me. Last weekend I was worried about baking in the Sonoran Desert oven, and this morning I was left wondering when I would ever be able to feel my toes again. My knee has been improving with a week of babying, so last night I headed off for a quick overnighter to get a few miles in on my new bike, evaluate my knee's progress, and test some gear. I convinced Caroline to join me, and I think she was pretty quickly kicking herself for doing so. Right now my fingers are still a bit sluggish from the cold descent down from the foothills, so here are a few photos instead of excessive words.

There's something disturbingly unwholesome about stream crossings in the dark. The Tabeguache Trail always comes to mind when I encounter one of these...

A nice campsite high in the foothills, and with the fire ban lifted two days ago, we enjoyed some warm flames

Um, wait. What just happened? And 4" of it!?

Progress was slow navigating frozen ruts, hidden rocks, and slippery slopes

Gobble gobble! Share the trail! Gobble gobble!

Mud, fog, and frozen up drivetrains on the ride back down to Boulder

The new bike has been initiated.

Foiled

2011-04-20T20:21:00.004-06:00

The Arizona Trail holds a unique charm that isn't really found anywhere in my home state of Colorado. Two years ago, I headed down to race the AZT300 for the first time, spending 2.5 days battling a strong contingent of Colorado racers, some awful winter weather, and a string of flats like I'd never had before. In the end, I somehow beat Stefan G. by a minuscule margin and simultaneously did enough damage to my knee that I was out for a month after the race. Last year I succumbed to Scott M's challenge of racing the full AZT to Utah. I time trialed the course, starting alone alone and used the race as a venue to really push the limits of sleep deprivation and my physical stamina. Again, things turned out unexpectedly well with two new records in the books, but this time I walked away with a severely damaged Achilles tendon.

This year, I decided to give the AZT300 another go, but for fun and training this time. The race wasn't one of my main goals for the season, so I went in with no pressure. This time, inspired by Jefe's huge ride there last year, I decided to try to push the sleep deprivation a little farther to the point of seeing if I could simply forgo sleeping. This would work to my advantage in keeping me either up high or in the dark in place of battling the high forecasted temperatures at key times.

So as usual, I had a little cheat sheet with distances and time goals between different places. There were a few major course changes for this year which helped my timing, but still, Patagonia in 5 hours? Tucson by 2 am? Summerhaven by noon? This seemed just a little outlandish.

After driving down to the finish in Superior, we met Dave and Lynda to help them with shuttling, the primary logistical challenge of the AZT. Lynda was primed and ready to go. And not unsurprisingly, she went on to finish in an incredible time, thriving in the searing heat and actually winning outright! Dave was looking to enjoy a few days on the bike, but some horrendous blisters on his heals knocked him out early.

At the start, a crew of brave riders anxiously lashed, taped, and strapped gear to their bikes before the group rolled out at 9 am. I quickly found myself in the company of young gun Taylor Lideen, Salsa teammate Joe Meiser, and Aaron Gulley, who I raced with a couple weeks back in New Mexico. All three were riding strong in the Canelo Hills, and Joe was particularly impressive on his first day of riding singletrack this year. My legs felt great, and I set a comfortable pace that brought us to Patagonia in just a bit over 4 hours! I questioned the seemingly high pace a bit, but pushed on to Sonoita for some ice cream.

After picking up a few extra calories and a couple liters of liquid, Aaron and I set off for Kentucky Camp and beyond. I struggled up the gradual climb toward the base of the Santa Rita mountains after sending a thousand gas station calories into my stomach. My legs also felt like bricks, worrying me a bit. They gradually improved as I digested my food, and fortunately, that was the worst they would feel over the 190 miles I rode. Aaron struggled with leg cramps but continued to push a strong pace, and after floating through some great singletrack built on an old flume, we arrived at Kentucky Camp and stopped briefly to eat and fill up on water.

The sun was still high, but I wanted to push on to get as far into the windy, hilly singletrack south of I10 as possible. I recalled my struggles on that section last year - no power in the legs, sleep on the mind, and the inability to navigate the steep ravines. By dark, Aaron and I were well into this section, and armed with a second light this year, I hammered through this section, only briefly delayed by a broken chain. A quick stop for some food after this section saw Aaron, Joe, and me regroup before heading north toward the rocky limestone trail through the Colossal Cave area. Joe took the lead, and almost instantly, the tiniest shard of rock jumped up from the trail and sliced by sidewall. I managed to plug the hole and was moving again in a few minutes, but Aaron never passed me. It turns out his GPS failed, and he soon bailed due to that.

I pushed on through the warm night, swooping in and out of turns cut between prickly pairs and the first saguaros of the AZT. These tall figures stood as desert sentinels faintly lit by the nearly-full moon. But there were more pressing matters on the mind, so I didn't take the time to fully appreciate the changing flora. Joe and I tackled the technical trails through these rugged hills just outside of Tucson. My legs in past years were dead by this point, and sleep was the only solution. We whisked past both spots I'd camped, and before I knew it, we were on the pavement into town. The roads were deserted, and I was secretly hoping for a soda machine somewhere in the near future. My dream came true as we stopped for water and found a vending machine full of 29-degree cans of pop (or so the sign claimed). I drank one can, shoved two in my pack, and we headed off toward the climb up Redington Road.

The night was cruising right on by, and I was wide awake. Joe's company helped keep me going, but neither of us had a lot to say. Darkness still filled the entire sky when we reached the turn onto a series of gnarly jeep roads, but the murky silhouette of Mount Lemmon towered above. I was uneasy of how near it was, but I tried to keep my mind on the local terrain. We cautiously bounced over the rough and rocky track before rejoining the AZT.

"There it is!" I shouted to Joe, waving toward the east. "The first daylight!" Joe whooped with delight. Before long, we were chasing our shadows toward the Mount Lemmon highway on singletrack that I had never before really enjoyed.

On the steep hike-a-bike climb out of that valley, the sun, still very low in the sky, already baked us. It was going to feel good to get up high on Lemmon. One last steep section of singletrack stood between us and the pavement, and Joe succumbed to hunger and fatigue and stopped a few times to get some more calories down. I stopped once, but I was anxious to continue going. A bit higher, I pushed my bike up a steep series of switchbacks. A group of four guys on came ripping down from above, so I stepped off the trail to let them by.

"Chad?" the first guy asked.

"Nope."

"Oh, Scott then?" he asked again.

"Nope, I'm Kurt."

"Oh. I'm Dylan. Have a good one!" And with that, he was gone. I chuckled. Chad and Scott's bikepacking reputations precede them.

I soon found myself chatting with some roadies on the smooth pavement. They were in disbelief that I had been riding for 25 hours straight. I was, too. I also couldn't believe how strong my legs felt. I stood up for a few minutes and passed a couple more roadies. They gave me a strange look, so I didn't slow down to say anything more than good morning.

Cool air swept down the highway, and I relished the feeling. Last year I was blown all over the place by winds topping 40 mph. Two years ago, I was riding through several inches of fresh snow and sub-freezing temperatures. I'd take this to those past years any day.

I stocked up on food in Summerhaven, stopped briefly to talk to some downhillers that were getting set to ride, and then nervously dropped down onto Oracle Ridge. The AZT here degrades to a place where bikes aren't welcome. Foot travel is challenging enough on this steep, overgrown ridgeline. The sun baked the west-facing slope I had to traverse, and there was little wind to cool me off. It wasn't long before the briar, loose rocks, and continuously unrideable terrain got me frustrated, but right around that point, Tim and Fritz emerged on their way up from doing some much-appreciated trail work. We conversed for a few minutes, and then I was back at it, battling Oracle Ridge.

I made good progress, and soon I was riding more than I was walking. But overeager to ride as much as I could, I suddenly found felt my front wheel sliding sideways on some loose cobbles, and I was sent to the ground. I wasn't going more than walking speed, but I managed to knock my left kneecap right on a rock. It didn't even break the skin, but I instantly realized that I had hit the exact spot where I've dealt with inflammation off and on over the past few years.

With that, I made the decision to call the race right there. For once, I saw no point in pushing on and doing more damage to my knee. So I sat down, ate some food, drank the two cans of Red Bull that were in my pack, arranged for a pickup that would arrive to a road below me in a few hours (thank you Caroline and Tim!), and then went to sleep.

After a nice nap, I stood up and discovered that my knee had tightened up so much that I could barely walk, and pedaling was out of the question. What a response to a minor fall! So I coasted the downhills, limped the uphills, and extracted myself from the lower slopes of Oracle Ridge without too much difficulty. I even had time to chase around a little horned toad for a few minutes. I had never seen one of these cute critters before, so that had me smiling again.

Obviously, this wasn't the ending I had had in mind for the AZT this year. My legs felt like they had many, many hours left in them, and I only had 90 miles to go, though those included some heinous jeep road climbs toward the end. My Spearfish was running flawlessly save the flat and broken chain, and I was slightly ahead of my ambitious plan. I'm not sure if I could have held sleep completely off for a second night, but it sure wasn't out of the question. So I walked away more confident than ever in my fitness, as well as the fact that several more hours minimum should come off the course record. We'll see when that happens. I was sure Joe was going to do it, but he bailed the following day. Only 4 of 22 starters finished, attesting to both the tough course, high temperatures, and the fact that riders must be prepared for a variety of gear failures.

Once again, thanks to Scott for organizing this little event, and a huge congrats to Lynda on the win, props to the other tough finishers, and some virtual encouragement to Max M. who is the sole rider pushing on toward Payson as I write this. He's traveling light, incorporated a lot of running into his training, and is in a great position to make it all the way to Utah, especially with the cooler weather in store.

Arizona bound, again

2011-04-13T14:19:00.002-06:00

Arizona is a great place for early-season suffering. Like the past two years, it's time for another round of Arizona Trail racing. At least this year I won't have to carry my bike across the annoying Grand Canyon . . .

Follow along here and here. The action begins at 9 am MST on Friday. It's going to be a hot one, so let's hope my plan of avoiding the worst of the heat works out!

Granite goblins

2011-04-09T20:46:00.002-06:00

Gear testing requires putting everything through the wringer. This week the goal was to ride some of the roughest, steepest trails around and see how everything holds up...new components, new frame bag, new tires. Today I headed up to check out my favorite trails in the land of the granite goblins, and amazingly, the area is entirely snow free! So I spent a few hours bopping around and enjoying the sunshine. That lasted until a cold front rapidly blew through and brought with it snow squalls!

The results of said testing are positive enough this time around that nothing needs modification aside from replacing my worn out pedals with a fresher pair.

A new chassis

2011-04-08T02:12:00.003-06:00

A new friend arrived in Boulder yesterday, freshly fabricated with a variety of custom tweaks to make it perfect for all my picky bikepacking desires, thanks to the amazingly supportive crew at Salsa Cycles. Say hello to the El Mariachi.

I feel a little guilty for welcoming this beautiful frame into my home but not openly sharing with it the beating it's in for come June. I'm sure my other bikes will fill it in, though.

Sadly, it'll have to wait a couple weeks to be built up. There are some more pressing matters to deal with in the mean time. More pressing like a fresh round of desert Spearfishing.

High desert humility

2011-04-04T21:43:00.003-06:00

I've had the pleasure of exploring some new country over the past few days. It has been a breath of fresh air in more ways than one - there aren't any raging forest fires here, unlike in the Front Range, but beyond that, this town is literally surrounded by trails that are all open to bikes, everyone is remarkably friendly, and I can count the number of 'no trespassing' signs I have seen on one hand.

The environment here is one of contrasts. Forested north-facing slopes, dry and grassy south-facing slopes; rounded granite knobs on one side, eroded volcanic features on the other; smooth and buff trails up, rutted and loose fall-line trails down; burned areas devoid of trees abut stands of mature ponderosa pines; but one cannot pigeon-hole everything into end-member cases, so I suppose in reality, it's more analogous to black and white with shades of grey in between. Inspired by this, here are a few photos I've snapped along the way.

Clouds swirl ominously over Thumb Butte

Refuge from strong winds and a gentle Spring sun

Descending into the unknown expanse of Skull Valley

Beyond my technical abilities. Nearly beyond my walking abilities. The existence of such a trail made me grin.

Spring

2011-03-31T22:44:00.002-06:00

There's nothing like blasting down a challenging descent, crashing, laughing as you watch your bike chase you down, hopping back on, and regaining that beautiful descending rhythm immediately.

Spring time in the hills is a wonderful thing.

Desert gravel grinding

2011-03-29T22:42:00.004-06:00

It's always fun to change things up and head somewhere different for a weekend of racing and riding - new courses, new terrain, new vistas, new challenges, and in this case, an entirely new group of riders to meet and befriend. Caroline and I headed down to the state below us for the first event of the New Mexico Endurance Series, the San Ysidro Dirty Century. The name is a bit of a misnomer, since there are 80, 90, and 123-mile options. We opted for the long one, which was about 100 miles of dirt road of variable quality (including some of those eternally frustrating gas line roads that stretch as far as the eye can see and across every drainage between wherever you are at the time and the distant horizon) and 20ish miles of fun singletrack in the White Mesa trail system.

All photos below are by Caroline, since I went light and didn't carry my camera. There was the unfamiliar option of dropping food/water at a point the race passed 3 times. Somehow between the food I started with, ate, and then took from this location on my last pass (whatever was left was to be thrown away), I finished with more calories than what I had at the start of the race. That means (1) I definitely had trouble taking in calories, and (2) I need some practice with non-self-supported races. Hmm.

7 am start and a balmy (apparently compared to last year) 40 degrees

Dirt roads and big vistas

White Mesa singletrack!

Mount Cabezon was circumnavigated on the second loop

I found myself in the company of Dan Durland and Aaron Gulley at the front of the race early on, and Aaron kindly guided me through the many turns on the White Mesa trails. Soon after that, the course turned into a stiff headwind. I dropped into my aero bars and slowly rode away and spent the last 4 hours by my lonesome, only occasionally passing riders doing one of the shorter options. Caroline and I stopped to chat briefly, and she went on to become the first woman to finish the long course. My legs carried me back to town a bit over 8 hours after starting, missing my ambitious goal of a sub-8-hour time. I guess I'll blame that on having a headwind on the way out and part of the way back. Aaron came in just under 25 minutes later, and Dan followed another 20 minutes to put in an impressive singlespeed ride. And thanks to Lenny Goodell for organizing the event. I'll hopefully get a chance to return for one of the more technical NMES events this summer and spend some more time riding with this fun crowd.

Sunday was another beautiful day, so we headed north for an easy ride in the Jemez Mountains. Northern New Mexico has some astounding landscapes with a very low population density, so it's easy to find oneself in the middle of nowhere. I think that's one reason why I enjoyed this section of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route so much. It was good to be back...

Looking north across the Shining Stone Valley toward the snowy Brazos Ridge region

We climbed until we found snow, which was at 9500', and then turned around in time to make it back to the car by dark.

Ghostly volcanic rock features serve as a reminder that the Jemez Mountains are the intimidatingly massive result of some extensive eruptive activity.

Thus begins yet another cow standoff. I was victorious in this round.

Now I'm back in Boulder for a brief stay before returning to the desert, but this trip to Arizona involves more important things on the schedule than pedaling for a change. This time I'm trying to land a job since my career as a student is reaching its terminus. Queue the grown-up music in the background, whatever that might be.

Riding, writing, riding, sewing, riding

2011-03-24T16:47:00.006-06:00

The hare-like year of 2011 continues full bore into Spring as the days grow pleasantly longer and warmer. Big adventures have sadly been kept to a minimum lately as things like structured training, dissertation writing, sewing projects, and job interviews have temporarily taken precedence. A few relatively unexciting photos are all I have to share for now.

Yet another blaze spooked Boulder County residents last week. It burned up the terrain surrounding on of my favorite trails in the area, which will sadly now be closed to public access by the USFS for an undetermined length of time for "rehabilitation." The fire wasn't hot enough to crown, so most of the pines are still green.

My Spearfish can now easily carry 70L of water and assorted other goodies in it's snazzy new framebag. The rear shock and frame design made attachment a bit challenging, but I think this approach should work. I actually took some photos at various steps in the creation process, so if anyone is interested in the do-it-yourself approach, I could post some step-by-step instructions for what I did. Keep in mind that I have never sewn anything besides fleece mittens and two frame bags, so I don't necessarily know what I'm doing.

A second chapter of my dissertation almost completed...

...and a third chapter follows right on its heels. Apparently my version MS Word doesn't approve of French.

Both these chapters are on what these exceptionally unique carbonate features on Baffin Island tell us about conditions beneath the Laurentide Ice Sheet when it was at its greatest extent 20,000 years ago. Very few other geological archives contain such information, and the validation of numerical ice sheet models require this kind of data.

Greasewood Flats and beyond

2011-03-14T10:28:00.003-06:00

The past few weeks have been absolutely jam-packed with work, training, and more work. There hasn't been time for much else. I've got 10 spare minutes now before heading to a PT appointment for some more work on the ankle I injured in Sedona six weeks ago (it's getting better, but very slowly, but the most painful part of the injury has still not been diagnosed!).

Days on the bike have been including more intensity than the past few months...intervals, long and steady tempo efforts, and moderately hard climbing workouts. I've gotten back to 'time trialing' a few of my favorite climbs around the area, and the results are pretty impressive, with my times only lagging my times from a couple years ago by a couple minutes for 35-minute efforts, and I'm now doing these on a mountain bike instead of a road bike.

Last weekend I met up with these guys (and a bunch of others at the start of the ride, as well as Topeak-Ergon riders Jeff, from whom I stole this photo, and Yuki who is hiding from the camera) for a climbing fest. We logged 10,000+ feet in 5.5 hours of riding, and I think it's safe to say that everyone was shelled by the end of the day.

Yesterday I checked off two objectives on my list of rides I've wanted to do for the past couple years. One was to ride so far east that the mountains disappear from the horizon before turning around and riding home, and the other was to check out a desolate region of northeastern Colorado that only has a couple dirt roads cutting through several hundred square miles of land. I proposed the 180-mile ride to Caroline, and after mulling it over, she ended up joining me.

The route was pretty damn beautiful for being entirely on the plains...lazy rivers, bald eagles, pronghorn antelope, very little traffic, and gravel roads stretching as far as they eye could see.

The ride ended up being 175 miles, with close to half of that on dirt. We managed to make it home just after dark, doing the whole thing in 11.5 hours riding time. That's just over 15 mph, on knobbies...I'm still surprised at that speed.

Yesterday, despite having legs that felt pretty good considering Saturday's ride, I had another challenge to face. I spent 12 solid hours cutting fabric, sewing, pondering, sewing, being confused, sewing some more, and finally, triumphing over my very own home-crafted frame bag. Now I just need the frame on which it is going to hang...

Dots

2011-02-20T22:36:00.005-07:00

With considerable reticence, I must declare that my adventures in the desert have reached their end. Despite a few minor setbacks along the way, I managed to meet or exceed all my racing and training goals, enjoyed more than 1000 miles of exploration in new places, logged nearly 120 hours in the saddle, and somehow managed to finish drafts of two (!) more chapters of my dissertation. Spending some time with a couple of crackheads provided me with quite a bit of cycling knowledge to consider and some great motivation for the coming months of training (which says a lot coming off a binge that I would have expected would leave me a bit drained mentally). Thanks to Caroline for some great company with which to explore the Sedona area, and a HUGE thanks to Dave for providing a place to crash (complete with a miniature office) for a couple weeks. With any luck, I might find myself back out in the desert come April...

To sum up this riding in one neat little animated package, I present some pretty little dancing dots:

I'd say that's some pretty good coverage of the area, no?

Inner diesel

2011-02-19T11:34:00.005-07:00

Riding back to St George on Thursday evening, I glanced over my shoulder and almost fell off my bike with surprise as I saw an enormous and glowing white moon rising over the Hurricane Cliffs. After admiring the view for a moment, I pedaled on, not wanting to interrupt the seemingly invincible state which my legs had found.

In ultraendurance bike races, after a couple days, it's not uncommon for competitors to describe settling into a sort of diesel mode in which their legs can drive a solid pace all day long. For me, the discovery of the existence of such a state was the revelation required to understand how ultra racers can keep pushing for days on end. It wasn't until racing on the Arizona Trail two years ago that I experienced this on the final day as I pushed to outrun Stefan Griebel to the finish and couldn't believe what was left in my legs. It's happened a few times since then, only after 2+ long days in the saddle when I'm on great form. And on those days, it usually takes 2-3 hours for my legs to get warmed up in the morning, making for a rather uncomfortable start.

This week I once again found myself in diesel mode, the second time I've achieved this state during training. Following my shadow cast by the full moon the other evening, I decided it would be worth doing a little comparison. On Monday, the first day of this training binge, I rode a tough 130-mile loop. I seemed to feel better 100 miles into Thursday's ride than at almost any point on Monday's ride. What if I did that exact loop again at the end of this 5-day binge?

So that's what I did. Since I don't have a power meter, my only quantitative comparison is based on time. I tried to ride at the same sustainable level that I did on Monday, not consciously "racing" my old time. Six hours in, I crested the second pass within 1-2 minutes of my time of 5 days earlier. Then I crossed the 100-mile mark about 5 minutes ahead. I gained a bit more time climbing Bulldog Pass, and in the end, I came in ~20 (3%) minutes sooner with 30 seconds (2%) more non-riding time clocked. Looking at the GPS data playback, Friday-me and Monday-me were within no more than 1000' of one another for the first 70 miles. The separation finally began on a long canyon descent which I apparently rode a bit faster yesterday since I knew what was around each bend.

I haven't fully digested what all this means, but I'm intrigued. It's tough to experiment with scenarios like this since I only find myself in them a few times a year, and usually it's during races. If nothing else, it reinforces a few things about how my body responds to these consecutive all-day efforts. If any readers have any physiological insight into this, I'd love to hear it.

One fish, two fish, goldfish, Spearfish

2011-02-17T22:10:00.003-07:00

Tonight I find myself deep in the midst of a training binge. It's one of those weeks where the goal is simply to ride myself into the ground, and that takes a lot these days. I'm not sure such training practices are recommended by anyone, but for my endurance racing goals, the fitness I gain after a few weeks of recovery is pretty huge.

And given the hour and the fact that I have one more big ride on the docket tomorrow before getting rained out for the weekend, there's not time for many words. A few photos will have to suffice.

Mesmerizing geology in these parts

I met up with Fixie Dave for a great ride/bike-toting hike the other day.

After parting ways with Dave, I climbed to that annoying Wilderness boundary and enjoyed some evening scenery while laboring up a climb that hits 30% grade. Seriously.

Shades of yellow and grey before oranges and reds took to the stage.

Yesterday's combination of an incredibly remote route, unknown territory, 50 mph wind gusts all afternoon, and skies that threatened to open up at any second left me feeling isolated and helpless. But all one can do is keep on the gas and hope for the best.

The highlight of yesterday's ride was finding big goldfish in this cattle tank.

This tank I passed late this afternoon only had a Spearfish in it.

Mud, sand, and Joshua trees

2011-02-14T22:16:00.004-07:00

Over this past weekend, I successfully wrapped up a week of painful restraint. Hanging out in a place surrounded my almost endless riding in all directions, I was forced to take a recovery week because my "training plan" called for one (and my body clearly was in need of one) and my bum ankle. I wrapped up the week with a couple great weekend rides, the first of which took us down Icehouse, a trail that sees far less traffic than it does given how fun it is. I was joined by these two characters:

By the end, the legs felt relatively fresh and the ankle had made remarkable progress healing itself. Today training in earnest began again, and with foul weather in the forecast for the future, I decided to ride a variant of a big ol' loop of Dave's suggesting. It was beautiful, remote, desolate, and stupendous. Almost entirely dirt, it traversed rugged country all the way around the Virgin Mountains.

Backroads carried me deep into an area that is strikingly distant from anything. I didn't see a soul out there.

But was some unfriendly mud. A lot, in fact.

Followed by a fun descent that brought me low enough that mud was no longer a problem.

Instead there was sand. Deep sand. Leg-killing sand. 10 miles of it.

But over a pass and in the broad valley beyond, my legs regained their strength and I was again able to enjoy the scenery.

The sun sank low in the sky as I began the day's final climb. The grade was just about perfect for the state my legs were in, and I soaked in the golden lighting as the loose road snaked up a canyon carved into the limestone mountains.

Joshua trees dotted the slopes, creating crooked, pointy figures that I am very unaccustomed to seeing.

I raced the shadow of the mountain whose base I had just skirted to the pass above, but as always, I was beaten by a few minutes. But I raced on, trying to get to the bottom of the 2500' descent before I needed to switch on my light. I came close, but again fell just a bit short.

The final stats didn't quite agree with how much strength my legs still had at the end, but the GPS doesn't lie, so I'll gladly accept these good sensations after 130 miles in the saddle. It's not often that I feel this good before April.

Fatigue woes

2011-02-10T20:32:00.004-07:00

Today was one of those rides that left me with an uneasiness about the volume of abuse many of the parts on my bikes have been subjected to over their short lifetimes. The ride was rolling along nicely, with my ankle and legs feeling good, company enjoyable, and the sky as blue as it gets in the desert.

We wound our way through a maze of singletrack, moto routes, and ATV trails, never really straying all that many miles from where we began. My chain sounded annoyed, somehow realizing that it was due for replacement at the end of the day. My cleats seemed to echo the sentiment, feeling more wobbly than ever.

Then, as I pedaled up a short, steep sandstone slab, I heard the PING of a spoke breaking. Or rather, in this case, it was of the aluminum nipple failing. I twisted the spoke around one of its neighbors and kept on riding. The rim had only a modest wobble to it, a sure sign of any well-built wheel.

Then only a mile or two later, as I stood up to climb another short slab of rock, my left knee suddenly hit the handlebars as it does when the chain unexpectedly drops off the chainrings. But I glanced down as I hopped off, and the chain was right where it always is. I swung my leg back over the saddle to pedal on, and my pedals turned, the chain squeaked as it moved forward, but my rear wheel just sat right where it was. Uhoh. The pawls in the freehub body must have all snapped. Nuts.

This is one mechanical failure for which there's no good solution, so I coasted the descents, walked the climbs, received some friendly assistance on the flats, and eventually made my way to the nearest highway. I clamped all the zip ties I was carrying around the biggest cog and the nearest spokes and gently pedaled back to town, making it to the last half mile before the zip ties snapped, forcing me to do the walk of shame the rest of the way on the sidewalk.

Metal fatigue. It happens. How will you make it home from your next long ride through the middle of nowhere when the unexpected, unlikely, challenging-to-remedy mechanical failure happens?

Black rocks, red mountain

2011-02-08T19:33:00.002-07:00

Late this afternoon I finally got out for an easy ride. My planned route ended up feeling a bit dull after staring at my computer for the past couple days, so I went exploring. What resulted was one of the most enjoyable rides I've been on in a while. The thousands of feet of climb felt effortless, the trails were delightful, and the lighting incredible. A few photos will do it more justice than my words presently can.

Hell Hole

2011-02-06T22:21:00.004-07:00

There is some innate draw to places that include "Devil" or "Hell" in their name. Such places were often named so because of some characteristic that defied explanation or logic at the time of their discovery . . . Devils Tower, Hell Canyon, Devils Lake, Hell's Half Acre . . . the list could go on. In many cases, these places are geologically fascinating, making them particularly intriguing to me. Last night while scooting around in TopoFusion and making plans for today's ride, I came across Hell Hole Pass, sitting high up to the west. Then I noticed a jeep trail that climbed from the pass to the summit above, towering nearly a vertical mile above St George. Obviously, that's where I headed today.

I struck off at the lazy hour of 11 am, meaning I'd have to ride swiftly or else I'd have a fair amount of unknown territory to cover in the dark. The climb up to Blake's Lambing Grounds (a relatively interesting name in and of itself) on nice narrow gravel road flew by, taking me high above town and to the base of the Beaver Dam Mountains.

Narrow tributary canyons of the Virgin River Gorge claw into the rounded hillsides above. My path skirted the heads of these canyons before descending back down into the badlands to the north. I peered at the skyline and caught sight of a grouping of TV towers sitting atop sheer cliffs some 5000' above me. My legs were feeling good, but perhaps this was an overly ambitious plan.

The longer I climbed, the more challenging the road became. It steadily steepened, and the heavy December rains had washed out sections, created deep ruts, and spread sharp limestone rubble elsewhere. Hell Hole Pass was relatively uninteresting, but it signaled the beginning of the obscenely steep finale. I'm used to this sort of climbing, but these were the longest mariginally-rideable pitches I've encountered. No longer was I pushing the pace - it took everything I had to merely continue moving forward and upward. Snow and ice on the final few switchbacks forced me to finally dismount and walk tentatively on my injured ankle.

Two hours of laborious climbing brought me to the summit, which boasts expansive views in all directions . . . the Virgin Mountains to the south, the arid, rugged hills of eastern Nevada to the west, low mountains I know nothing about to the north, and the multi-colored hogbacks, clifflines, and plateaus of the St George-Hurricane-Zion region to the east, with the dark Kaibab Plateau just visible in the distance. The vastness of the Colorado Plateau is overwhelming.

After a quick snack, I tackled the long, steep descent and made tracks in order to find my way back to town by dark. When I returned and downed a pile of burritos, I pulled up the GPS data from the ride - oof!

Active recovery?

2011-02-05T21:29:00.004-07:00

Bitter about my injured ankle, I packed up my pile of bikes and wheels and headed north, leaving the red and yellow cliffs of Sedona in the rearview mirror as followed the slithering road up Oak Creek Canyon. Walking on flat ground caused enough pain, but uphill and downhill were even worse, so sitting in the car enjoying the stunning Arizona landscape seemed like a perfect way to spend the day.

I spent the drive in the solitary confinement of my car, speakers silent, just trying to take everything in and reflect for a while. There's so much desolate, isolated land down here just begging for huge rides, and with millions and millions of acres of public lands, the door is wide open. Hopefully it stays open for a while longer.

This morning I awoke in my temporary new abode, ankle still sore, but the sun was shining, a different desert begging for exploring, and my gracious host itching to ride. I slipped on some shoes and pedaled around the block. Miraculously, the pain subsided, and as long as I kept things smooth, it felt fine. So Dave and I headed out for a few hours and the ankle felt a little better by the end, despite a few parts that were a bit rougher than was ideal.

Bitten

2011-02-03T17:20:00.003-07:00

Just when I was thinking I had some pretty good desert mojo going, the desert struck at me with a couple fierce bites today. I headed off to explore some of the more challenging trails after dropping Caroline off at the airport up in Flagstaff. My legs were feeling good, and my rock crawling skills were surprising me on the trails around Airport Mesa, which is mantled with a veritable blanket of round basalt boulders that are on average the size of my head.

The only dab I had on those rocks put my foot straight into a prickly pear, covering my shin in thick spines. I cursed my line choice and sat down to pull out the daggers.

Then I snaked my way up into the canyon to the northeast, eventually finding myself on what has got to be the most impressive wildcat trial I've encountered. The route traverses soaring slickrock ledges up to a vista fit for a king's palace.

Heading down the north side of the ridge, the trail switches back through a series of expertly-built turns, easily rideable with my 29er wheelbase. The panoramic view and the narrow trail wrestle for one's attention, both deserving of it in its entirety.

I was grinning continuously while I was on this trail until gravity gave me a little tug while I crossed a couple sandstone slabs spanning a narrow gully. My left foot instinctively unclipped and shot out to halt my fall, but there was nothing to support it. Nothing . . . nothing . . . nothing as I found myself entirely detached from the steep slope. Then my toe caught the ground, followed by the outside of my foot, causing my ankle to roll as the rest of my body vaulted over it. I landed on my back and tumbled through the rocky sand. A cloud of red dust briefly enveloped my upside-down body as I slid to a stop.

It's always the benign looking obstacles that send me to the ground it seems. This one was no exception. I'm sure I could ride it with my eyes closed if I gave it another shot. But that was out of the question as I limped my way down into the canyon and across the river far below. I stopped to soak my ankle in the frigid water before tucking my tail between my legs and riding the highway back across town.

I think dirt roads are going to be my friend for at least the next few days while this unhappy ligament has some time to recover.

Iced over

2011-02-02T22:14:00.002-07:00

I continue to be astounded at the vast expanses of public lands in the West that demand exploration, whether it be on bike, foot, or some other mode of self-conveyance, perhaps with a bit of motorized assistance from time to time. Unfortunately, the duration required to do just does not exist in one's lifetime. I'm grateful to have just an occasional week or two to devote to this pursuit.

Taking my first week completely off work in quite some time, the cliffs of the Mogollon Rim have provided an astoundingly stunning backdrop while I've been leaving tracks on the wonderful singletrack network that surrounds Sedona.

I'm not sure why multi-use trails around the Boulder area creates such a controversy. It's an enormous challenge for well-organized, committed, and positively-involved mountain bike advocacy groups to make significant headway there, while towns down here (e.g., Sedona, Flagstaff, Prescott...the list goes on) have built and continue to expand upon stellar networks of multi-use, primarily singletrack trails that surround town and are generally well linked. Again, another post for another day.

Today, surprisingly cold weather (high in the low 20s today?!) combined with some serious fatigue in the pedaling muscles necessitated a day off the bike, allowing us to explore some of the trails that cross the Wilderness boundary. I have a love-hate relationship with the Wilderness designation, but I'll save that for a possible future post.

Whatever the reason for all these trails, I've got two more days here and a many miles of official tracks left to explore.

Desert 'fishing

2011-01-31T21:17:00.010-07:00

After a marathon drive and a scant few hours of sleep in a dirt parking lot, I found myself lining up at 3 am for my first race of the year. A strange sequence of events presented me with the opportunity for some more racing on the Arizona Trail. Chad and Scott put on a neat race called the Antelope Peak Challenge, which involves either a 65- or 115-mile singletrack-rich route with the option of climbing to the top of Antelope Peak along the way. I've raced this section of the AZT twice before, both in the middle of much longer endeavors, but the 115-mile route includes a new section of AZT that has been spoken very highly of. How could I pass this up?

At 3 am, five of us rolled out for the long event, not particularly talkative given the early hour. I was aboard my new Salsa Spearfish frame that I've only had for a couple weeks, so I was a little nervous about how it would treat me on this day. We rode the first 15 'neutral' miles at a moderate pace and then blasted into the AZT singletrack. In reality, we were moving rather slowly on the windy, overgrown, rocky singletrack crossed by countless cattle paths, but in the dark, it felt fast enough because I felt like I was bouncing off everything in sight. We gradually spread out, and I ended up riding the steep climbs and descents of the gasline road with Max as we complained about how much our feet were hurting in the cold early morning hours.

I found myself alone as I mashed a big gear through the rutted sand of Bloodsucker Wash, trying in vain to find a slightly firmer line. The first hint of light appeared in the southeastern skies, but I was too focused on the challenge at hand to really notice. By the bottom, I caught sight of Neil, who had ridden into the lead on the Gasline hills. I soon switched off my light and negotiated the trail as it crossed the steep valleys on the east side of Antelope Peak. Occasionally I'd hear Max hollering behind me as he cleaned a switchback (or maybe as he got whacked in the leg by yet another cactus...).

Antelope Peak itself is only a short trot above the AZT, so I stashed my bike in a ravine and scurried up to the top. Just below the summit, Neil popped over the other side of the ridge, also headed up. We chatted for a minute, took in the view, and then headed down opposite sides. He was looking strong and riding well, so I was expecting a challenge.

Back on my bike, I followed Max's lone tire tracks out onto the fast and sinuous Boulders Segment. The miles flew by, but I tried to maintain a reasonable pace without pushing too hard. The upcoming Ripsey Segment included a ton of climbing, and then the trip back south had far more up than down. I finally hit the Ripsey loop and found myself on loose, steep singletrack descending a remote canyon before starting a long sequence of impressively-built steep switchbacks up Ripsey Hill. My tire choice was doing me no favors here, forcing me to ride far more cautiously than I generally enjoy doing.

I saw Max up ahead, pushing his bike, and caught him before too long. He was in good spirits, and we stopped for a couple minutes at the top to take in the view and eat some food. Eating on this course is a huge challenge, but after 8 hours of riding, this was my first actual pause to eat.

Neil caught us at that point, and I took off after him as we dove into the long, switchback-filled descent into the valley far below. I passed Neil as he missed a turn, he passed me back as I overshot one soon after, I passed him as he missed another, and then I was suddenly alone. By the bottom of the descent, my hands were aching from the hard braking, and I genuinely welcomed the sight of a graded dirt road, even if it did climb 1500'.

This was the lowest point in the course, as well as the farthest point from the start. The road wrapped around to the south, and with my legs still feeling fantastic, I finally let the reigns loose. I wasn't sure if I could make it the last 40+ miles pushing hard, but one of the reasons I was there was to test such limits.

From there on, everything is a bit of a blur. I pushed the pace a bit up that first climb and then increased my effort a bit more on the shorter climbs beyond that. Turning back onto the singletrack, I felt like I was going just as fast as I had been earlier, but this time it was a gradual climb that stretched on for 10 miles. The miles flew by, and my legs continued to put out as much as I dared ask from them. This was a completely new sensation for me after 10+ hours of riding.

Before I knew it, I steered onto a dirt road that signaled 15 miles to go and kicked up the tempo even more. Choking down food and liquid was becoming nearly impossible despite the smooth dirt roads, but bonking was not far of at all, so I took in all I could bear. 65-mile racers appeared on the road ahead, and could barely even croak a greeting to them as I passed. These last miles began to hurt more and more - burning quads, exhausted arms, parched lips, and sweat burning the catclaw-inflicted wounds all over my legs. Eventually, with the sun still high in the sky, I rolled into the trailhead parking lot as Scott snapped a couple photos (like the one below, stolen from his blog). My total time was just under 12.5 hours, and I managed to keep the non-moving time to only about 20 minutes.

I was completely spent. But my legs dished out more than I thought they had in them, the new bike outperformed anything I've previously raced on this sort of terrain, and I had enjoyed yet another long day on the AZT. What more can one ask for? Neil and Max came in a bit over an hour later, and Jonesy slogged it out and finished in 19 hours.

Caroline, in her first mountain bike race, rolled into the finish just after dark and was all smiles despite a long day and having to skip the final few miles of faint singletrack after the sun set. She even got to experience the pleasures of pulling cholla out of her leg mid-race. Pretty impressive...

Now we're up in Sedona, slowly recovering from the efforts and trying to explore the amazing landscape and trails surrounding us. Yesterday we rode for 4 hours, and covering 20 miles in that time was asking a lot from my tired body.

10+ hours of sleep later, today's ride felt like far less of a chore. We explored a 50-mile loop of entirely unknown territory, and it turned out to be a fantastic ride with a bit of everything (except other cyclists...we saw only 2, one of whom immediately asked me how I got my hands on a Spearfish already!).

The rain showers managed to steer around us, and by late afternoon, the skies cleared up and made for some of the most astounding lighting I've seen on desert rock formations in quite a while. This is why I'm never bothered when I realize that I'm not going to be home by dark...

Tradition

2011-01-23T18:41:00.006-07:00

For some unknown reason, I've found myself repeating the exact same solo road ride in nearly the same week of January the past three years now. It's a great ride through low ridges along the western edge of the plains, up a solid climb up into the foothills, down beautifully winding canyon dotted with punchy climbs along the way, and then back through the ridges and plains to Boulder. I think this is one of my favorite road rides around.

Two years ago, I snapped this photo along the way as I enjoyed a calorie-packed snack:

Today, I again hit the ice cream sandwich shop and then took a similar shot:

Note the first of two differences between today's ride and past rides along this route - knobby tires. With a 115-mile off-road race in Arizona coming up in a week, I wanted to test my fitness while continuing to get used to my new Salsa Spearfish. With a 10-hour door-to-door ride time, I was able to put in a solid effort pushing the pace just a little harder than I normally would. Despite wrapping up two solid weeks of training today, my legs responded remarkably well.

And the second difference?

That's Caroline cresting the Rist Canyon climb, meaning that I had company for the full day. Despite being a former roadie, this was her longest ride ever, and she also did it on knobby tires.

And I also got the chance to practice what's sure to be a new race-winning strategy for me: Applying lubricant to the chain while pedaling. I think all the pavement must have been going to my head...

We finished up right at twilight, enjoying yet another picturesque sunset. Not a bad day at all.

January squalls

2011-01-22T17:12:00.003-07:00

In the never-ending quest to find different and exciting places to ride, this afternoon was spent something that probably wouldn't be considered an ideal route given the recent snow we've received. But in an effort to stave off the boredom that comes from riding the same roads and trails over and over and over again, we found ourselves slipping, sliding, and spinning away in the foothills.

After a couple of tough training weeks, all the climbing was hurting my legs despite the easy pace. Strong winds aloft blew brief but intense snow squalls through ever couple hours, but then the sun would return and warm my body and my smile would return.

We rode through the heart of the area burned in the Fourmile Fire earlier this year. At one point, the front end of a burnt out truck caught my eye as a rainbow of color shone from the front bumper, one of the few things around that wasn't blackened. Life is slowly returning as homes are rebuilt and Ponderosa pines that weren't killed show just a bit more green in their needles. I often debate the appeal of living in the mountains versus the threat of losing everything in a forest fire and whether or not millions of dollars should be spent trying to save these homes. But there will always be people living in these forests, in floodplains, atop major faults...the list goes on. But I've strayed off topic...

This blog is supposed to be about cycling and nice photos!

Making lemonade

2011-01-20T14:51:00.004-07:00

There are few sensations more peaceful and relaxing than that of laying down the first tracks on smooth singletrack covered in fresh snow on a cold, sunny morning.

Fickle

2011-01-19T15:00:00.005-07:00

The past couple mornings have been absolutely beautiful, as long as one does not mind riding in sporadic 30+ mph wind gusts. I took advantage of the weather to ride some fun dirt that has dried out nicely after the warm weekend melted off the south-facing slopes.

Today was Bike to Work Day in Boulder. I took the long route, venturing high into the foothills. I could see some foul weather moving in over the mountains, but I enjoyed the sun's warmth for a few hours.

The current view out my office window is depressing. It looks like it's time to put the dorky fenders back on, let some air out of the tires, and make use of my waterproof booties.

Going big, again

2011-01-18T22:16:00.006-07:00

The soggy Old Bannack Road (photo by Chris Plesko)

Well, let's have this serve as some sort of motivational (for me) announcement that I'll find myself back in Banff in June with my wheels aimed southward toward Mexico. Plans have been in the works for a while, but all the pieces have now fallen into place with good certainty. After I finished the race in 2009, I was sure I wouldn't bother doing it again. There's virtually no singletrack, I already saw everything once, aside from what I rode through in the dark, and I met my goals of (1) finishing, and (2), finishing with a sub-20-day time.

But Dave Harris was quick to point out that no one does it just once, which is actually a disturbingly accurate statement. A year later, I was jonesing to ride it faster. And after carefully probing the limits of my endurance, tolerance of sleep deprivation, and what distance I can cover after running out of food during the the AZT750 last year, I feel like I have a much better feeling of what I can do, but it'll require substantial luck with weather, gear reliability, not hitting towns in the dead of night, knee happiness, and avoiding mental meltdowns. And with some other strongmen rumored to be joining the festivities, it could be a very exciting race.

There's no gold at the end of this rainbow, just Idaho. But get to Idaho, and you'll almost certainly make it to Mexico.

Old days, new days

2011-01-17T11:15:00.005-07:00

Nearly six years ago, I double-poled across a bustling finish line in the former Olympic stadium in Lillehammer, utterly exhausted from 58k of racing and already wondering how I was going to get back to Oslo. I handed my backpack to the gentleman at the scale, and he confirmed that I had finished the race carrying the required weight, that of the newborn prince carried along the same rugged route through the mountains of southern Norway some 800 years earlier. Stumbling forward, I stopped to take off my now-clumsy skis and ate some of the cookies and yogurt that were stacked high on a line of tables. Forty-five minutes later, I was staring out the window of a coach bus watching the snowy countryside passing by. Little did I know, after having been racing on skinny skis for a decade, I had just finished my last ski race.

In the subsequent years, my focus shifted to racing bikes, and I only find myself on skis a few times each winter. Last week I was back in the Midwest to do some lab work at the University of Minnesota, so I brought along a couple pairs of skis and took advantage of the amazingly snowy winter the region has had.

My parents and sister have been skiing quite a bit over the past few years, and I was fortunate enough to have a couple days on which I could join them on the trails where I used to spend countless hours training. I also got to spend a couple days along the shores of Lake Superior, tending to some more research-related tasks (which provided some amazingly intriguing data) before swinging through western Minnesota to visit some friends out on the prairie. I was able to ski on nicely-groomed trails everywhere I went, and the technique and balance returned quickly. The arm strength was lacking, but even so, some of the racing desires worked their way up from the depths of wherever they disappear to. Should I ever find myself living in a place with real winter again, ski marathons will be back on my calendar.

Emphasizing how things have changed since my privateer ski racing days, I also pleasure of spending a few hours at the headquarters of a great Minnesota company that's sponsoring me for 2011 - Salsa Cycles. I have long been a fan of Salsa (evidenced by the Salsa shop apron I've had since high school), and the attitude of the company meshes seamlessly with my own. After leaving their office, I am even more excited for this season and the adventures that are on the not-so-distant horizon.

Upon returning to Boulder, I quickly built up my new Spearfish frameset and put in a couple 7-hour days of pounding soggy dirt roads and loving every minute of it. And my legs are feeling stronger than they have in months, and clearly stronger than they ever have been so early in the year. That bodes well for the first racing of the season, not even two weeks away now!

Windburn

2011-01-03T09:46:00.003-07:00

Winter riding is a nice change of pace, at least for a little while. When you're riding down a road just a mile from home, battling a fierce cross wind that's pushing your traction to the limit as you slowly get pushed off the edge of the road and laughing heartily all the while, it's clear that it's going to be an entertaining day on the bike.

We ended up riding mostly dirt roads to Carter Lake, somewhere I've never never been on fat, knobby tires before. Yesterday, those tires had about 15 psi, so it was slow going. While the winds aloft were sculpting some remarkable clouds, we pedaled away, enjoying the relatively balmy temperatures created by the Chinook breeze and explored some new territory on soft, snow-covered roads.

The sun set just a few minutes later than it did on my rides the past few days, a clear sign that the shortest day of the year is indeed behind us. Gradually, rides will involve progressively less night riding, until, of course, the all-night riding begins again.

Snotcicles

2010-12-31T22:01:00.003-07:00

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.

2010-12-29T16:30:00.002-07:00

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

2010-12-27T17:19:00.005-07:00

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