Long way home

Sometimes, I truly believe that airline travel is the bane of modern civilization. Well, that and cell phones. How does something so unquestionably convenient become so inexplicably tedious? I've made the drive from Salt Lake to Alaska ... twice. Once I did Salt Lake to New York on a bike. I'd take these things any day over an equivalent flight.

Everyone has a "worst flight ever" story. I have several. Here's my latest:

I begin at 1:30 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, drive to the airport, leave a borrowed car in short term parking and check in. I leave the ground at 3:20, heading - confusingly - south for Los Angeles. I receive a packet of salted cardboard and 3 ounces of Diet Coke. Late lunch.

I arrive at LAX at about 4:15 Pacific Standard Time and receive another boarding pass for a flight with a different airline on the other side of the terminal. Scheduled departure: 9:30 p.m. I make the 15-minute walk and realize that I still have five hours to kill. So I step into the hot and humid afternoon and begin search for escape. I make my way to four dead-ends and three increasingly suspicious airport cops before I find what I believe is the only pedestrian exit at LAX. I walk in a nearly straight line down Century Boulevard for an hour and a half without ever completely leaving the wasteland of airport sprawl - hotels, synchronous palm trees and endless parking lots. Every restaurant, every storefront is nestled in unwelcoming concrete fortresses. By the time I make it back to the airport, the bottom of my feet burn with sidewalk blisters and it's time to catch my next flight.

Flight 8252 Los Angeles to Anchorage leaves at 9:30 PST. It begins with snack service. Flattened granola bar and 3 more ounces of Diet Coke. I pull out the cheese and crackers my dad packed for me and suck down a few Jolly Ranchers. At 10:30 PST I drift to sleep. At 10:35, the turbulence hits.

You know what's the most unnerving sound in the world? Those seatbelt-sign dings in a plane that is jolting violently back and forth. You know what's the second most unnerving sound in the world? Broadcast reassurances from "your captain speaking." You know what travels the least well in the stomach of someone prone to motionsickness in a rickety plane dancing through the night sky? Diet Coke and Jolly Ranchers.

I can't sleep, so I watch the blackness roll by. Around 1:00 a.m. Alaska Standard Time, a soft light reappears deep on the horizon. I can't tell if we're approaching sunrise or catching sunset. It doesn't matter, because it makes me feel better.

At 1:45 a.m. AST I land and make my way to yet another airline. My flight is set to depart at 6:35, so I pull out my sleeping bag and sweater and sprawl on the floor. Another passenger, bound for Kodiak, parks himself close by and commences with a virtual opus of snoring. The airline persistently, and loudly, broadcasts the time every half hour. I'm awake for every one of these announcements.

At 6:50 a.m. AST the plane pulls up. It looks like it just stumbled in from a bear viewing trip - stunted body, pointed nose, wing props spinning in an uncomfortable idle. The plane, in fact, seats all of 10. Only five board. The captain looks back from the open cockpit and rambles off the federal regulation rules. We take off into the morning fog. I scan the broken clouds for quick glimpses of the barren landscape I left behind while pouring through the last unread words of my tattered, soaked Sunday LA Times.

At 7:45 AST we land. I gather my 39-kg backpack (as weighed by Era Aviation) and head for work. I feel like 24 hours have passed. In fact, 20 have. There is no rest for the weary, no comfort for the economy traveler.

Grand Gulch

I spent the week backpacking through a backward sort of place - once a vast civilization, now wilderness.

Grand Gulch cuts into the Colorado Plateau on a meandering route to the San Juan River. It's a maze of sheer sandstone cliffs, towering cottonwood trees and scarce water - even in May. For some reason, about 900 years ago, many hundreds if not thousands of people decided to make their home here. They built a city of sandstone structures high in the cliffs - most accessible only to the bravest and strongest, but some accessible to anyone with some time to kill and a willingness to drink stagnant, salty water for four days.

This place is so congested with ruins that a hiker could randomly look up at almost any point in the canyon and see something - rock art, a kiva, another symmetrical stack of rocks. In the four days I spent in the canyon, stumbling over a cluster of pottery shards or even a human forearm bone became commonplace - almost boring. Not that I mean to diminish the experience in any way. It's just hard to spend the entirety of four days locked in wonder.

On day 3 we lost Craig. Backpacking is a strange state of social recreation, especially on a four-day trip. It's not quite enough time to make the dried beans and shredded tortillas in your pack sound appetizing, but it is long enough to to put hikers into the backpacking stupor - some might call it "the zone." You've already spent several nights working on rusty survival skills with the same people, bickering jokingly (and then not so jokingly) about startchy pasta and sore knees. So when you set out on the trail, there seems to be less talking and more rhythm. The result of this by day 3 was stretching our group out for several miles until we had no idea who was in front of the other. By the time we arrived at a possible camp, Craig had been missing for six hours.

While we organized a search, I started having a lot of anxiety. I joined the second leg, down-canyon party. We sat in a clearing near Split-Level Ruin and waited uncomfortably for Bryan to complete the up-canyon run. There was no getting around assuming the worse. And for the first time during the trip, as I waited in the shadow of the perfectly-preserved remnants of a lost civilization and the towering, impassable canyon walls that paralyzed it, I felt so small, so useless against the violent geology and relentless march of time.

When Bryan returned from upcanyon with no news, Geoff and I set out the way we came in a near-sprint, or as close as you can get to running in thick sand. We fully expected to find Craig sprawled out on the trail; we couldn't think of any other reason why it would take him eight hours to go five miles. We ran into him about a half-mile later. He was sweating but smiling, completely unaware of our anxious rescue effort. He told us he took a wrong turn and hiked up a side canyon - for three miles. It's funny how we never assumed the obvious. Getting lost is human nature, even when locked in a canyon. But it's funny how anxiety fades, adrenaline tones down, and suddenly you're seeing this sprawling sandstone graveyard in a different light.

I was happy again to stretch my legs in the sunlight, strenghten my quads while bouldering with a 35-pound pack, touch soft, green leaves for the first time since September and run my toes through the hot sand that I missed so much. Every time I visit the Colorado Plateau, I convince myself I could make a life in the sprawling emptiness. Unfortunately, I'm much better at weathering nine months of winter than I could be in nine months of intense heat and sun. As it was this week, it rained on us all day Tuesday, became cold enough that night to freeze all of our produce and scatter frost everywhere, and fell into the 40s every other night of the trip. Still, it felt refreshingly hot, soaked in sun, daytime temperatures in the mid-80s, which, up in Alaska, I may not see again.

Goin' back to the desert

Date: May 3 & 4
Mileage: 20.4 & 37.2
May mileage: 83.6
Temperature upon departure: 37 & 35

South wind and bike commuting in the rain, nothing much to do but stare at pavement and daydream.

It's high time to tap-dance barefoot in hot sand and go for swim in the abrasive water of a silt-choked winter. Soak up some of that sadist sun wrapped only in thin cotton and SPF 45. Wolf down burnt spaghetti in a tin cup and wash it down with sun-roasted water. Season my sunburned skin beside the spring-sweet smoke of a juniper fire. Watch the sun set before 10 p.m.

It's time to lay in the the shadow of endless canyon walls. Make sand angels in the wash. Watch clouds drift through a thin sliver of sky. Keep an eye out for coyotes and big horn sheep and eat gummi worms in my tent without fear of bears.

It's time to go back to the desert and go where cars don't go. Go where bikes don't go. Go where even feet shouldn't go but someone's going to make me get on that rope.

It's time to go back to the desert like I never even left. But I sure do miss it.