Homesick

Mexican Mountain, December 2004

Date: May 14
Mileage: 33.4
May mileage: 500.7
Temperature: 39

My computer's hard drive is all full up again. I'm tired of deleting my music, so last night seemed a good time to go through the old photo archive and cull. Bad idea. Instead of throwing away 1,268 of the 1,269 shots I have of my bike in front of the Mendenhall Glacier, I spent all my time browsing the really old photo archive just so I could feel wistful and, well, homesick.

Cataract Canyon, July 2002

Every May, my old college friends converge from our respective far-flung paths for a spring vacation in Utah. Recent upheavals at work, compounded by the two weeks of '08 vacation I already spent just to do the Ultrasport in February, prevented me from joining them this year. I was disappointed about my situation at first, until I learned their plan was a river trip. I generally dislike river trips. Sitting all day in the hot sun, doing nothing, baking, burning, unable to do anything about it because you're stuck on a raft, with the monotony broken only by completely terrifying whitewater rapids, is actually not my idea of a good time. "No thanks," I told them. That was two months ago. Today, I would give just about anything to be sunburned and bored and minutes away from churning over keeper holes.

Outside St. George, Spring 2004

I doesn't help that Geoff is currently having an amazing time on his Utah adventure, bikepacking on all the four-wheel-drive roads and trails that we used to always talk about but never attempted because we were so inexperienced and those places were remote, so remote. Now I have a little Alaska experience behind me, and suddenly those deep desert spaces don't seem so far away - even though they're more inaccessible now than ever.

Dirty Devil sidecanyon, May 2005

I am angry at myself for throwing away the Utah vacation. There is the fact that May time off wasn't really an option this year - but the truth is I didn't try too hard. I feel like there was something I could have worked out with my co-workers, with my savings, with unpaid leave. Did I need a new mountain bike? No. Do I need a week to run my bare toes through warm sand, laugh with the friends of my youth and roast in the desert sun? Yes.

Pelican Lake, March 2004 (Ice fishing is fun)

Sometimes I feel torn between Alaska and Utah, unsure which one is really my home. Even though Utah is the place where I'm from, there are a lot of ways in which it's wrong for me. I wither in any kind of heat, I'm disinclined to return to the freeway and suburban lifestyle I grew up in, and, the truth is, I've fallen in love with Alaska. I like that I can leave my house, walk two blocks, and hike up a mountain. I like taking 1,269 pictures of my bike in front of the Mendenhall Glacier because I like that I can ride my bike to a glacier that often. I like that it's winter six months out of the year. I like the Xtratufs-in-church Alaska culture and the small-town bohemian feel of Juneau. But Geoff, who grew up in upstate New York, typed something yesterday that really resonates with me ... "When you spend time outside in southern Utah, the red dirt just gets onto your body, and then into your body, and eventually into your mind and heart."

Buckskin Gulch, May 2001

Homesickness is exactly that, I guess.

Still the one

Date: May 13
Mileage:27.1
May mileage: 467.3
Temperature: 45

When I left work at 11:07 p.m., there was still a strip of soft blue light stretched over the horizon. Sometimes I think I don't care much for summer, even Alaska summers, what with the bugs and the bear spray. But little things like this make me happy.

I am starting to really enjoy my bike commute. It's like free miles. I crank hard into work because I never give myself enough time. By the time I leave, there's almost no traffic. So I just turn on my headlamp, crank up the volume on my iPod, and stream through the cool night air until suddenly, I'm home. I'm hoping to make it one whole week without driving my car. Then, I plan to celebrate with a big trip to Costco. I'm out of cat food, cat litter, Pepsi, coffee and basically all forms of food. I plan to leave that store with at least 200 pounds in goods. I hope my neglected Geo can handle the load.

I did my "workout" today by going hard up the Perseverance Trail. The trail is littered in all forms of landslide and avalanche debris, and the recent blasting has created some strange new pitches. A few times had me breaching Zone 4 and going right to "Near Vomit Zone" ... not a place I enter voluntarily, although I do need to work harder to get in shape for real climbing.

I pulled out my Pugsley for the ride - not because any of the snowy patches on the trail are rideable (they're not) - but because Pugsley makes all the rest of the going a breeze. I was plowing through one landslide-wrecked stretch - alder branches, boulders and petrified chunks of snow all over the muddy trail - when I passed another mountain biker who was walking his bike. "Wow," he said. "You go." I laughed because I am never, never the strong one on technical trail. But with Pugsley, I feel like I can do anything.

Is it possible Pugsley is the best bike in the world? I think so.

Smells like spring

Date: May 12
Mileage: 31.2
May mileage: 440.2
Temperature: 41

I first set foot in Alaska on May 30, 2003. We rolled across the state line at a point much further north than the city where I live now, crossing the Yukon River on a ferry and entering the state on the “Top of the World” highway. The first Alaska town I visited was Chicken, followed by a few days in Fairbanks before we set out to drive our crumbling Ford Econoline van “all the way to Prudhoe Bay” on the Dalton Highway.

My first memories of Alaska are set in the drab background of early spring - barren birch trees, twisting black spruce and skeletal devil’s club stalks. Fairbanks was just starting to green up when we rolled through. But then we just kept moving further north, to places where the rivers were still clogged with ice and clumps of matted yellow grass carpeted the tundra. We crossed the snow-patched plain of the North Slope and took an oil company-owned tour bus the last nine miles to the edge of the Arctic Ocean. I remember walking onto the frozen surface of the sea as a 35-degree chill gripped the June air and thinking that weren’t driving “North to the Future.” We were running away from spring.

I didn’t know then that the life cycle moves very quickly in the Arctic, and that spring had already arrived. We had scarcely reached the northern edge of the Brooks Range on the return trip when green began to burst from the ground. Blades of grass poked up from the dry tussocks and white and pink flowers opened overnight. We set up camp near the Bettles River, and my three friends went to bed after a small thunderstorm rolled in. I took shelter in the van and read in the gray evening light until the rain moved through. From behind fading strips of storm clouds, the 1 a.m. sun emerged low on the horizon. The Bettles River, which seemed so quiet and peaceful just hours before, was roaring with murky storm runoff and floating chunks of ice. I put my book down and pulled open the van door. The sudden rush of aroma was so intense that I stepped outside just to make sure there wasn’t something wrong. There was an otherworldly sweetness to the air, almost chemical, like saccharin, infused with musty hints of mulch and cedar. It was a smell that had stagnated for months and months, frozen and flavorless in winter. With the accelerating thaw, all of the subtle odors that lingered through the seasons - the fermented berries of fall, the wilted flowers of summer, the wet grass and dirty ice and millions upon millions of newborn seedlings - broke free all at once in a blast of fragrance. It was almost like being sprayed in the face with strong perfume - revolting and exhilarating at the same time. It was the smell of the slow rotting of the dead and the rapid rush to new life. The smell of Alaska in the springtime.

The air smelled a little like that outside today.