After the equinox

I am back in Alaska. We are building toward inch 13 of our September rainfall. Temperatures no longer seem to climb above 49. The nights are officially longer than the days, and that can only mean one thing - winter training season!

I have been trying to formulate a plan about how I can get into "the best shape of my life" by February, all while maintaining my income and spotty social life, and hopefully avoid burning out on cycling. I am thinking about treating the next six weeks as a sort of pre-season base builder. I hope to focus on speed workouts - maybe see if I have it in me to go fast on a bike - and weight lifting. Late September and October are good months to do this because they are essentially the worst months to spend out in the weather. So I renewed my gym membership today. I wrestled with the decision to do so for most of the month. It seems like a horrible waste of money given my obvious preference for training outside - even out in the weather. At the same time, I spent all of last winter out in the weather, and paid for it with a long-term overuse injury. This winter, I am going to do some squats.

In November, I'll launch into endurance training ... slowly increase the hours I burn each week until I'm only marginally holding onto my income source and no longer have even a spotty social life. Hopefully by then there will be enough snow on the ground that I can spend more of that time building my spotty snow-riding skills ... even if it means hiking my bike up steep hills and white-knuckling the handlebars all the way down. There aren't a lot of maintained winter trails around here, but there are plenty of slopes. I have a hunch that Pugsley can plow through a lot when gravity is on his side.

I am really looking forward to winter training. It has been a while since I have had a goal, a real goal, to work toward. Goals always seem to make all the random adventures and myriad mishaps and glassy-eyed gym sessions swirl together toward some sort of greater meaning. What that meaning is ... I'm not yet sure. In the beginning, maybe a way to pass the time. In the end, survival.

Soggy Grand Canyon

You know how there are people who, no matter where they go, always seem to bring sunshine with them? Well, I am just like that, except for with rain.

It would seem that every day, a person, not unlike myself, travels to the Arizona desert in September with a tank top, SPF 50, a camelbak full of ice and a fear of heat that only someone who never sees temperatures above 70 can understand. But it is not every day that this person, not unlike myself, is blasted with nearly a half inch of rain (.47" according to weather.com), temperatures in the high 40s and the deep chill that only a person who hikes in a half inch of rain on a regular basis can understand.

This is the story of my trip into the Grand Canyon ... epic by some standards, normal by others. But any way you project it, it is a 24-mile walk through a small slice of some of the most intense country carved into this big Earth. It is life laid bare, a glimpse of blood-red waterfalls cascading down cliffs and a realization that to battle the elements outside is a simple task when compared to the battle with demons within.

I made the Grand walk with my dad and my aunt Jan. It was walk number four for my dad, number three for me, and Jan's first. She had trained all summer, but she was fearful of the scope of it all. And I'll be honest ... I was feeling a little overconfident. I assumed that I could skip across this trail in my sleep, unless the heat took me down. I was not going to let the heat take me down. I packed my arsenal ... my sunscreen, sun glasses, hat, ice, electrolyte tablets, a bag of easily digestible Power Bars. The rain jacket went in almost as an afterthought.

We started on the South Rim and worked our way north. The cloud-streaked sunrise gave way to quick morning heat. By 8 a.m. it had climbed past 80; in the direct sun, it felt like 450. I clinched my fists and geared up mentally, chanting my mantra: "It's only heat. Only heat. Drink, drink and be free."

Ominous storm clouds built over the northern horizon. Dad and Jan were worried about thunderstorms, but rain was not even in my thoughts. I could not imagine a situation of rain in the desert that would be bad enough to bother me. And, anyway, rain in the desert is a few drops and some thunderbooms. Maybe a downpour if you're really unlucky. Either way ... eh.

We hit the Colorado River at 9 a.m. Looking up from the bottom, the Grand Canyon does not seem like the gaping chasm that we gawked at from the top. The Grand Canyon becomes a small place at its heart, swallowing the echoes of the roaring river and pulling inward until I find myself wandering through my own tiny world.

It was shortly after the river crossing that Jan started to struggle. She became nauseated and stopped eating or drinking. After a few miles of this, she felt bad enough to complain. Dad and I plied her with any solution we could think of, but in the end, everyone feels differently about battling the vicious cycle of the bonk. She looked up at the distant rim many thousands of vertical feet above our heads, that unmistakable look of bewilderment splashed across her face. And I felt awful about it, because I remember what it's like the feel that way; the fear is even worse than the pain.

We convinced her to drink some Gatorade, and then stopped for a lingering lunch. After our long rest, she said she felt much better. Still, she didn't eat much. She was digging deep into her energy reserve and we had a long climb ahead. That's about the time the rains came.

A swift wind down the canyon foretold of something ominous, but I really had no idea. We stopped to pull on rain gear just in time to be blasted with the kind of thick, pelting downpour that can only hit the desert. It was like we were blasted with a fire hose, continuously, for about 10 minutes. The dry desert floor rejected the moisture immediately; it came cascading over the cliffs in ketchup-colored waterfalls and covered the trails in deep puddles and wet clay.

I was frightened of the downpour, but when it tapered into a gentle, steady rain, I really perked up. I realized that I was just given my final free pass out of the canyon. This was exactly everything I had trained for ... walking up steep, muddy slopes in the cold rain. Without meaning to, Juneau had prepared me perfectly for the Grand Canyon. I felt like I had nothing left to fear.

Jan continued to struggle, but she soldiered on without muttering a single complaint about the weather, the walk or the rain. I made a couple of stops along the climb to make sure we all stayed together. I paid for it with a chill. Then it became a deep chill, and I knew then my only choice was to keep walking or let my body temperature keep dropping. But I wanted to stay with my group; I had come all this way to spend time with my family.

Watching Jan quietly marvel at the waterfalls, even after she had fallen deep into her hurt phase, was inspiring. It made me want to look inside myself for the reasons I felt joyful: for the yellow aspen trees fluttering in the wind; the patter of rain on the flooded trail; the sudden intensity of the red on wet sandstone; the elevation that turned the canyon into a deep chasm again; my dad and aunt marching up the trail beside me; my mom, aunt and uncle sprinting down the trail to greet us.

And I looked over the edge of the north rim to the fog-shrouded Grand Canyon as though I was seeing it for the first time.

Grand expedition

Date: Sept. 19
Mileage: 18.1
September mileage: 405.5
Temperature upon departure: 46
Rainfall: 1.11"

This is a picture of me and my dad at the Colorado River near Phantom Ranch in October 2005. It was my second rim-to-rim hike across the Grand Canyon ... something that was becoming an annual pilgrimage of sorts for us. We had been planning the trip all year ... long before the day I just up and moved to Alaska. So after living in Homer for less than a month, I flew down to Salt Lake to complete this whirlwind epic with my dad.

There was a bittersweet tinge to the trip, an understanding that it was the end of an era. My dad and I have always been able to connect through hiking. When I was 16 years old, he convinced a very reluctant teenage version of myself that I had it in me to make the 18-mile trek to Timpanogos Peak and back. I wore my brand new hiking boots, a concert T-shirt and some jeans. He carried frozen Gatorade bottles in a bulging backpack and stopped every few miles to ply me with chewy granola bars. We marched into the August sun until I could see my pain, in spots, spinning in the sky. But on the crest of the mountain, looking out over Utah Valley with the chill of raw wonder pulsing through my veins, was where my life of adventure really began.

My dad and I did a lot of hiking in the years that followed. We were always trying to top our epics ... traveling to Nephi to hike Mount Nebo, traveling to California to hike Mount Whitney. In 2004, he invited me to hike the Grand Canyon - which, at 26 miles, with roughly 7,000 feet in elevation change and temperatures that range from 32 degrees at the rim to 100 degrees at the river, was arguably our most ambitious plan yet. So when it went off without a hitch, we talked about making it a yearly event. The next year, when I contemplated moving to Alaska, one of the activities at the top of my "things I'll miss most" list was hiking with my dad.

On Thursday, I head south for trip No. 3, the Grand Canyon now being "the" hike, the only one worth making the commute for. This one is especially looking fun because my three aunts, my mom and my uncle are going; one aunt trained to make the hike with us, and the rest are along for the ride. Beyond the epic-ness of it, it's going to one big, strange family reunion. Strange because, at age 28, I am still the "kid."

I feel good about the hiking I've done this month to prepare. I think I am as ready as I was ever going to be, knee injury, bike-obsessed lifestyle and all. Most of all, I am really looking forward to hiking with my dad. Maybe I can even talk him into carrying the frozen Gatorade.