Breaking trail

The other day, while I was musing about starting to train for the Susitna 100 and/or the White Mountains 100 (i.e., my winter bike race season), a friend asked me if I planned to start doing intervals. I avoided the question, unwilling to admit that I was still planning on training for real races that involved bikes by doing whatever I felt like doing, which recently hasn't involved nearly as much cycling as my previous winter bike race seasons, and even less in the way of something resembling an interval. "There must be a way," I thought, "to incorporate strenuous, lung-busting workouts, like the kind you get when you sit on a bike trainer and pedal really hard for three minutes and more slowly for one, into an winter outdoor activity that is actually fun."

I think I found it.

Snowshoeing. Now stay with me here. You take a layer of bottomless fluff and spread it over a slope that varies from 30 to 60 degrees. Then you try to climb it, for two and a half hours. The result has all of the upper-body thrusting of swimming, the lactic-acid-generating leg work of speed-interval cycling, and the raw power of running. My heart still hurts.

I tried for the top of Mount Jumbo today, stupidly thinking that if I gave myself an extra hour than what it usually takes me during the summer months, maybe I'd make it to the top. I didn't even come close. Trekking poles may have helped, but not much. I worked close to my maximum capacity for much of those two and a half hours, weaving up the steep slopes and swimming straight up hill when the trees closed in, stopping frequently to catch breaths, then hitting the max again. I made it about two-thirds of the way up to mountain, to about 2,500 feet, before I absolutely had to turn around to make my work meeting. It ended up taking me about 55 minutes to descend what had taken me two and a half hours to climb (and would have been less had it not been for the icy exposed roots below 800 feet.) My summer split between climbing and descending this mountain is almost exactly 50-50, and the hike rarely takes me more than three hours total.

Weather permitting, I am strongly considering going back to this same mountain tomorrow to take advantage of that nice trail I broke, and aim for the top.

Sunday with Pugsley

I woke up late and intended to bike commute to work today, so I set out for a meandering pleasure ride through the Valley. Friday's strong cold front brought 170-knot winds to Sheep Mountain and mudslides to downtown, but it also brought something nearly everyone at city level has been craving — snow.

This isn't exactly what I consider snow biking — it's a soft dirt trail with a couple inches of fluff on top. But it is sweet just the same — the silence and simple beauty of white powder, the brow-furrowing challenge of negotiating well-disguised-but-not-yet-buried roots and rocks. Basically everything that Pugsley is good at, but then again, Pugsley is good at everything.

The Dredge Lake trails always flood in the fall, and they haven't yet completely frozen, so riding around the glacier moraine was a fun mix of powder skimming and "bike-swim."

I circled my favorite singletrack loops a couple times and veered onto the beach, where the sand was partially frozen and firmer than usual despite a blanket of snow.

I veered left and started following the Mendenhall River, biting my lip and throttling the grips as I tried to bulldoze small boulders that I could not see. It was a fun challenge, and I wanted to see how far I could follow the river downstream — something I had never tried before. I have been reading "A Long Trek Home" by Erin McKittrick, who in 2007-2008 walked and packrafted 4,000 miles from Seattle to the Aluetian Islands with her husband, Hig. She's coming back to Juneau for a book tour at the end of the month, and in anticipation of an interview with her on Monday, I've been speed-reading her book, which is beautifully written. It also inspires me to consider the possibility of overland, off-trail adventures in my region. After all, Erin and Hig managed to walk away from downtown Juneau, cross Stephens Passage in a packraft, and eventually end up in Anchorage and beyond. As someone who often feels trapped in a town disconnected from the North American road system, the idea of walking away from here is a beautiful dream.

I followed the river bank until a bend forced me into the woods, where I connected up with a faint deer trail and rode on the soft moss, weaving between trees, through spaces so narrow I could barely fit through most of them (and couldn't fit through the rest.) I thought I was heading toward the main trails, so when I got tangled in alder thickets, I kept pressing forward. Then I reached an impossible bushwhack, veered left, pushed forward, turned right, and found myself inexplicably back at my own track. I turned the other direction, continued for a while at what I thought was mostly forward, and found my own track again, except for back a ways, where I was still riding and there were no footprints. It was impossible to tell which direction the track was headed. #$@! I was lost.

Funny how the simple act of being lost is so unnerving, even when you are in a small area and know that if you just picked a direction and walked in a straight line, you would fairly quickly come to a familiar place. But I was sick of bushwhacking with the bike and didn't want to go all the way around the lake again — I had pretty much already used up my time window for bike commuting and was going to be late for work as it was. So instead of following my path, I crossed my fingers that the river was to the right and pushed blindly through the alder thicket, with snow-covered branches slapping my face and grabbing my bike from all corners. I just yanked and thrashed and swore. I'm probably lucky I didn't snap a derailleur. I did sustain a few scratches on my neck. But I emerged from the thicket to this place, this tranquil beach, with small hints of sunlight stretching beyond the clouds, and the trail entrance in clear sight.

Happiness is forging your own route ... and finding your way back.

A strange form of life

There is an incredible wind and rainstorm going on outside right now. Boats are knocking around in the harbor. Water is streaming across the road at a hydroplaning velocity. The Sheep Mountain weather tower at 4,000 feet recorded wind gusts of 115 mph, which on the East Coast would be a Category 3 hurricane, with below-freezing temps and daggers of snow. Here at sea level, we're getting gusts to 65 mph. It's entirely too insane to try to pilot any kind of bicycle. I wavered on going out for a run. I'm still wavering.

This reluctance to go out in insane weather has instilled a certain sadness, because it reminds me that I'm not training for the Iditarod this winter. There's a sense of loss, not having that in my life, which right now means I don't have even a remotely rational reason to go out and face the 65 mph blowing rain with a sense of duty. Now, if I go out in the hurricane, it's because I'm crazy enough to go out in the hurricane, not because I have to go out in the hurricane to learn crucial survival skills, and have the wherewithal go out into the Alaska backcountry and experience the scope and awe of deep winter.

I have been continuing my mountain walks, which in their own way bring that scope and awe closer. On Wednesday I headed up Thunder Mountain in the fog with Bjorn and his brother. They wore fleece pants and cotton T-shirts, but I got my first taste of snow-stepping on a short but near-vertical, icy-hard pitch.

Thursday I did a long bike ride out the road - probably the last I'll be able to comfortably ride on the skinny tires this year. The air was nearly calm, and a lingering sunset bathed the mountains in lavender light.

On Friday, I hiked up the Grandchild route in a snowstorm. A thin dusting of snow soon became waist-deep up high. I relished in the brute exercise of wallowing, pitching myself forward like a loping bear, but I was regretting leaving the snowshoes at home. Outside my outside life, it's been a strange kind of week, and it left me feeling in a somber mood, wallowing solo in that frozen, black-and-white world, shuffling through music like Bonnie Prince Billy ... "a hard way to come into a cabin, into the weather, into a path, walking together. A hard one."

The Sun Bowl in a snowstorm. Wind whisked through the trees, but in the lolls, it was eerily quiet. It took me a while to climb up there and I continued upward far too late. I had to climb down a ways in the dark. I was prepared for it with a headlamp, but I haven't yet become accustomed to that deep, penetrating loneliness of the winter forest at night, with its ghost trees looming ominously over hollow black space. I was more than ready to rejoin civilization at the bottom of the mountain, at what felt like midnight but in reality was 5:30 p.m. I put away my pack and ax, changed out of my ice-crusted shoes and shells, and went to see "Men Who Stare at Goats."