The Stansburys

I headed out to Tooele County today to visit my friend Mary Ruth in Grantsville. I worked in Tooele for three years and lived there for most of 2004, but I haven't been back since I left rather suddenly and moved to Idaho Falls in November of that year. Mary Ruth and I had completely lost touch, but she randomly e-mailed me a couple weeks ago and I wrote back one of those, "Hey, I'm in Utah!" replies. We planned dinner at 6 and it's a long drive to Grantsville, so I thought I'd make a day of it with a ride in the Stansbury Mountains.

I took the long way through the town of Tooele just to see what had changed, and felt a little unsettled by my first drive down Main Street in nearly five years. Tooele is the kind of place you can grow to love, but it is what it is ... a strip mall town in a rather desolate valley that's home to a chemical weapons incinerating plant and a big Army depot. I was fairly unhappy when I lived there. I weighed 25 pounds more than I do now, I ate a lot of fast food because I was really busy and watched a fair amount of television because I was burnt out. My relationship (yeah, that relationship) was going nowhere. I rode my touring bike a few times a week, but was fairly bored with the activity. My life in Tooele was mildly toxic. I knew it at the time but didn't know what to do.

Today, some of those old sour feelings came bubbling back up from somewhere deep in my gut. It's hard to revisit the places where your life took a wrong turn and wonder if you're currently on a similarly misguided path. But those unsettled feelings quickly dissolved as I mounted my bike and started pedaling up South Willow Canyon. Hard climbs turn off my brain. Usually, that's a good thing. I stopped at the wilderness boundary and turned around, thinking about the possibility of making it a short ride. But on the way back down, I stumbled across a sign for the Stansbury Front Trail and veered off. I knew 100 yards into that trail that I was in for a sufferfest. There's not much I can say about the Stansbury Front Trail as a bike trail. It's technically a trail and bikes are allowed, but unless you're the kind of manimal that can climb 1,000 feet in one mile on rocky, loose dirt, it's really more of a long hike with intermittent terrifying downhill coasting thrown in. I'm pretty sure my shoulders got a better workout than my legs.

Um, really?

Um, wow.

And that's the reason I stuck with it. The little creek valleys that the trail dropped into were absolutely stunning. I'd throttle the brakes to the bottom and mash the pedals to get as far up the next climb as I could stomach, until my forehead was throbbing and my legs were nearly stalled out. Then, off the bike and walking again, I'd look around at electric green aspen leaves and fields of sunflowers and think about the parts of 2004 that were good ... hiking to the top of Deseret Peak; making a fairly successful go of freelance outdoor writing for local publications; being adopted by an adorable little alley cat.

Sometimes it's good to go back to the places where you were unhappy, and realize you really weren't.

Clipless pedals hate me

Elden recently lent me a super-posh pair of Sidi cycling shoes to test out and determine whether or not I'm as inept on clipless pedals as I claim to be. I was skeptical, but one doesn't borrow a $300 pair of shoes and not at least try to fall in love with them. I bought a used pair of Time pedals in Hurricane, but decided to keep my platforms on through that trip because the riding there is hard and my knees and one elbow were already scarred.

When I finally set to removing my old platforms, I could not get them to budge. Rusted to the crank arm they were. My dad, armed with a fat crescent wrench, a hammer and a piece of lumber wedged against the crank, could not remove them. I eventually took the bike to Canyon Bicycles, where a pro with a big long pedal wrench failed on his first tries. I was certain I was looking at buying a new crank. But the mechanic took the bike to the back of the shop, and 20 minutes later came out with two fairly bent pedals and a stern lecture about the importance of greasing the threads (believe me, they were greased at one point, long before 16" of October rainfall followed by a freeze-thaw winter followed by a high-mileage spring in the dirt.)

Anyway, the Time pedals went on and I set out to take my maiden voyage on the trails around Herriman. Reaching those trails involves a 15-mile approach on pavement with a lot of stop lights thrown in. I had a beast of a time trying to click into those pedals. I'd position my foot and push and reposition my foot and push again and again, but nothing would happen. When I finally did get my foot clipped in, I'd race and race just to make a green light, but I rarely did. Then the slow-moving battle would commence, again.

Finally at gravel, I hit the steep stuff quick and stalled out a couple of times when my rear wheel ran into too-large-to-summit rocks. One time my foot made it down. Another, it didn't. I laid for a minute in the dust, knee bashed and bleeding, hands pin cushioned with thorns and sharp little bits of gravel, actually laughing out loud because I was so angry and amused at myself at the same time. Why am I such a perpetual beginner? Why can't I get better at the one hobby I love the most? Why can't the whole world be covered in snow?

I raced some roadies back to Draper, with a stream of dried blood still clinging to my leg. I kept up with them for a while. I really wanted to pass them, on my steel mountain bike with a big backpack and a T-shirt and all kinds of things hanging off my handlebars. But then I remembered that I was wearing $300 shoes, and I didn't feel so smug. I didn't pass them, anyway. They reached a slight downhill and dropped me.

Finally at home, I bent down to take the shoes off, and couldn't loosen the strap. It's set up like a snowboard binding, with the lever that clicks to tighten it. Everything I did only seemed to make it tighter. After about five minutes I just sat down and wrestled the tight shoes off my feet, reasoning that I'd figure out how to loosen the strap when I hadn't just returned home from racing roadies and my head was more lucid.

Later that evening, I was sitting in the living room with my entire family - my two sisters and my parents - and solicited their help. Everyone passed around the shoe and played with it for five minutes while we talked. No one could figure it out. We gave up for a while, but eventually everyone went back to it, twisting and clicking and passing it on like a Rubix Cube, intrigued by the sheer puzzle of it all. "It's just a shoe," I said. "A brand new expensive shoe. It has to be something I did." I said that I was going to have to call Elden, and he was going to laugh at me and probably pen a hilarious paragraph about it on his blog. "You tell him that three people with bachelor's degrees, one with an associates and one who's a semester away from a bachelor's couldn't figure it out," my dad said. Eventually my mom cheated and consulted Google, but that yielded little useful information. Finally, a light lit up in my sister Lisa's eyes and she grabbed the shoe, pressed down on the little red buckle that we had all but pounded with a hammer, and slid the strap out. Easy as that.

Somewhere down the line, this has to all be worth it. I just can't imagine how.

Land o' Zion

I spent the past few days in the southwestern corner of Utah. The purpose of my trip was to get the Karate Monkey overhauled by master mechanic Dave Nice in Hurricane (pronounced Her'kun), and visit my grandpa in St. George (Saint Jahge). And these two tasks just happened to reside in an area with spectacular biking, and on a weekend where early-season monsoonal moisture kept high temperatures in the low 80s. (I was fully expecting 105.)

I had a late, slow start Thursday and showed up just a few hours before I was supposed to meet Mr. Nice. I stopped in the town of Virgin for a quick ride, and chose a random gravel road off the map and ended up rolling along a high plateau just outside Zion National Park. The views became more spectacular as the road climbed steadily, and I was more than 2,000 feet above my car when a front brake pad popped out, again. This had happened to me a few days earlier and I replaced it with a new one, but it didn't seem to sit right and I became convinced there was something wrong with the caliper. But it seemed to work at the time, so I decided it could hold until Hurricane. When I tried to wedge the brake pad back in the second time, it wouldn't hold at all. I finally just turned around and inched back down the steep, winding road, riding my back brake at 9 mph because I didn't want to shoot off one of the hairpin turns. It was still a bit of a white knuckle ride to the bottom.

This is Dave Nice. He marches to his own drum, in a good way, because you know no one is ever going to accuse this guy of not living his life. He has a shirt that says "Bike. Drink. Blog," which Dave says pretty much sums it up. But he adds an essence of "Daveness" that makes everything he does deeply intriguing. He works at a bike shop in Hurricane, travels around to enter endurance bike races every chance he gets, has awful luck in general but is always smiling, plans to ride the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route from south to north starting June 5, and, oh yeah, he rides a fixed gear 29er mountain bike. Dude is nuts. In a good way.

Anyway, Dave and I stayed up until 1:30 a.m. working on my poor bike. We crashed out next to the register at the bike shop and woke up bright and early Friday morning to head out to Gooseberry Mesa for a ride. Gooseberry Mesa is technical. It's covered in cactus, boulders, slickrock obstacles, sand pits and head-spinning ledges. I knew this going in, but I couldn't say no to such beautiful trail. I came out with bashed shins, new cuts, and yet more eroded confidence. I keep telling myself I'll never learn to ride the desert if I don't ride the desert. But it's been tough. I find myself actually feeling angry at the general consensus that technical singletrack is the ultimate mountain biking experience.

Dave, on the other hand, has mad skillz. Who says fixies can't coast?

Still, I ached to take on the terrain and find my flow, any kind of flow, even as I dodged cactus and kicked my back wheel sideways on loose rocks and knocked over boulders and tried to force back the dizzy sensations brought on by sheer ledges. Dave explained how to find the Gould-Jem-Rim trail loop - a Hurricane classic - and I set out to ride 24 miles of techy singletrack on my own.

Whenever I ride alone, I still think a lot about my relationship situation and how unhappy I am about it, regardless of what may or may not be best. Right now I'm in this phase where I think about going solo for good ... about how this biological need to form unions is as easy to suppress as sleep and food in an endurance ride, and I don't need it. And when I ride techy singletrack, I start to understand Geoff's views on monogamy. When you commit to one person, one narrow line over a vast plateau, you're rewarded with instant direction, a swooping, fun, often bumpy ride, and feelings of accomplishment and gratitude. But you become so focused on the task at hand - every rock, every cactus, every hairpin turn directly in front of you - that you completely lose sight of the surrounding landscape. Eventually, you're going to look up, and realize that your entire experience is that trail. You know almost nothing of the world around you. And you feel bewildered, and lost. But I've vowed to work to become more comfortable with technical riding. Then, when I go back to Juneau, I'm going to move into a studio apartment and get seven or eight more cats.

Yes, on to the "I hate men" phase. Except for Dave Nice. You're awesome. (Thank you, thank you for all of your help with my bike.) I headed down to St. George on Friday to visit my grandpa, a gruff old guy who likes to yell and can go from smiling to rant in 60 seconds, but who also has a kind heart and a high tolerance of granddaughters showing up an hour after his bedtime covered in red dust.

I headed out Saturday morning (OK, it was actually 12:11 p.m.) with my decade-old regional map and this idea that I wanted to make a loop out of some jeep roads east of Veyo. I climbed up Snow Canyon and found a dead end on the first road I tried. The second was rougher and quickly launched into a steep climb. I decided that was a good thing. After all, it was 79 degrees and I was roasting. :-) Elevation sounded good.

Climb, climb, climb. I went from 2,600 feet up to 7,000, and the road kept going while petering out to little more than a severely overgrown rock garden. I was not detecting any spur roads that I hoped would connect my loop, and pretty soon I was winding up a set of switchbacks toward what had to be a pass, because the GPS was nearing 8,000 feet. Down that pass was another possible route that seemed appealing, but it would have tacked 30 or more miles onto a ride that was already moving a lot slower than I had anticipated. (Who knew those roads climbed 5,000 feet? They looked so flat on the map.) I turned around, bummed that I couldn't test my route-finding skills on an actual loop of my own making, but reminding myself that I really don't have any route-finding skills. And, anyway, I had to be home before grandpa's bedtime.

On the way down, dark stormclouds moved in like a freight train. In an instant, the temperature plummeted 20 degrees, from the high-60s to the high-40s, and the wind gusts picked up from 20 mph to at least 50 mph - enough to knock me sideways off my line down the rocky trail, forcing me to slam on the brakes. I stopped to grab my jacket out of my backpack, and I didn't even have one arm in before sheets of rain began to pummel me. Streaks of lightning lit up the black sky, but they were fairly far away and I was well below treeline. Still, I was frightened. I fixed my eyes in the direction of the lightning and huddled down next to a little pinon bush, a good 50 yards down the trail from where I had left my metal bike. My bottom lip started to shiver. I kept telling myself that 48 degrees with heavy wind gusts and rain is nothing I don't deal with nearly every day in the fall in Juneau, but lightning is another uncontrollable factor altogether. Luckily, the storm moved past me as quickly as it arrived, the temperature returned to normal, and for the rest of the ride I was rewarded with a strong tailwind. The Southwest is such a strange place.

Dave and I got in one more early morning ride Sunday. He took me out to Sand Hollow Reservoir - the first time I had seen the body of water that covers an area I used to visit often as a teenager. If you squint, you can see in this picture a little sandstone island on the right. That was once a playground of redrock formations and sand dunes where I really started to cement my love of the desert.

"That right there," I said to Dave as I pointed at the reservoir, "is the image of childhood lost."

"I dunno," Dave said. "It's kind of pretty."

Time marches on. It always does.