Another Sunday with Pugsley

I've still got the bike love. Lately, I've been genuinely worried about it fading. I mean, these things happen. I rode a bicycle across the country in 2003 and then barely touched it for the next two years. This past summer, with three months solely focused on mountain bike training and a 2,700-mile jaunt down the Continental Divide, was pretty much the bike binge to end all bike binges. I've been admittedly bipolar about the activity ever since. But snowbiking brought me out of my first bike funk; who knows, maybe it can happen again.

This is what it looked like when I woke up in the morning. I'm still sick, sore throat and the like, but when you have a free morning and a date with your favorite snow bike, these things just don't seem to matter.

I hit up the Lake Creek trail. The gate's still closed, the snow's still shallow and the muskeg definitely isn't completely frozen yet, but the trail was surprisingly rideable up to the first meadow.

The thing about snowbiking that really makes it for me is the downhilling, picking a line and kicking up powder as the squishy tires hold true to an unseen surface. It's a blissfully weightless feeling, a bit like snowboarding, except for with Pugsley I can hit the flats, the dirt, the pavement, and keep on rolling.

Another thing about snowbiking that makes it for me is of course, the snow. Seriously, how can anyone be grumpy in a scene like this? You almost expect carolers to come out from behind the trees and sing "Winter Wonderland" as reindeer prance about.

I haven't been keeping track of my mileage for a good long while, partly because I fear how low the numbers might me, and partly because I don't have working odometers on either of my bikes, and I no longer have a boyfriend who is willing to do small tasks like ordering and installing odometers for a girlfriend who is truly, unforgivably lazy when it comes to optional (and non-optional) bike maintenance. But I do want to start tracking my effort, because I do want to enter a couple of snowbike races in 2010, and I want to be strong and tough and maybe even fast during those races. And I also want to climb mountains, snowshoe run, snowboard, learn to ski, and bomb downhill on my Pugsley.

Either way, I think it's going to be a good winter.

Warm light on a winter's day

There's one main reason why winter is genuinely my favorite season of the year in Southeast Alaska. Spring has promise and new growth; summer has warmth and ease; fall has color and storms; but winter has stark, seemingly endless, staggering beauty.

Of course this beauty begins with snow, lots of it, as it whisks through white, bright sky, dressing the hemlock trees in billowing gowns and smothering the rot and decay on the ground. This elevation on Douglas Island, about 2,500 feet, is already coated in more than five feet of fluff, in mid-November. As the season progresses, snow becomes all-encompassing.

Another catalyst of beauty is the low winter sunlight, which in the north sometimes fails to reach above the mountains. Here in Southeast Alaska in mid-November, the sun lazily stretches out from the southeast at about 8 a.m., rolls over a shallow arch low on the horizon and slumps beneath the mountains to the southwest sometime after 3 p.m. Daylight is short and often smothered in clouds, but each clear winter day feels like a continuous sunrise/sunset, with the low-angle light casting a golden glow and long, dramatic shadows across the shimmering snow.

So I think I am coming down with a cold. We here in the Southeast have nothing on the brutal cold temperatures of much of the rest of Alaska, but even spending all day in temperatures in the 20s takes some getting used to, especially when you haven't yet mastered the conservation of body heat or the calorie intake needed to stoke the furnace. After my cold climb up McGinnis I was feeling pretty beaten down, thinking Friday needed to be a recovery day indoors, but then I woke up late to sunlight, casting its morning glow over the mountains at 11 a.m. I don't like to waste sunny days. I'm willing to give them what I've got, even if it's just about everything I have left, leaving me sore and coughing in the evening.

I carried my snowboard a short way up the Dan Moller trail, but then decided it was too annoying and unwieldy to be worth a short run or two down the snowmobile-tracked Douglas Ski Bowl. And, anyway, with the noon sunlight failing to reach above the ridge, I was more interested in traversing that ridge in the warm light than bombing down it in the shadows. So I ditched the board and continued on, lighter and happier in my snowshoes. (Despite my ambitions, I sense this is going to be an ongoing theme for me this winter. I'm willing to push my bike for miles just for a good ride, but for some reason I can't summon the same motivation for my snowboard.)

The ridge was bathed in golden light and flanked by low-lying clouds. Despite my growing cough and heavy-headed fatigue, I was in heaven. The snowshoeing got tough, with waist-deep powder transitioning invisibly to wind-hardened ice, and me without poles because I had planned on snowboarding (I don't like to carry too many things on my back that could impale me if/when I fall.) I grunted and dripped sweat as zig-zagged my way up a staircase of short cliffs, taking the hard way to avoid anything that looked avalanche-prone to my limited knowledge, although the snowpack seemed settled and stable.

The sun finally dipped below the low clouds just before 3 p.m, casting the last of its yellow light on the mainland mountains. I've become emotionally attached to these mountains, and felt a warm glow as I traced their contours and remembered the moments I spent on their peaks and in their shadows: From left, the high point on the Juneau Ridge, Mount Olds, a small sliver of Clark; then on the next ridge over, Gold Ridge, Gastineau Peak, Mount Roberts, and Sheep Mountain.

As the last light left the sky, the mountain called Split Thumb stood alone in illumination. This mountain stands as a symbol of "someday" for me, the hopeful promise of the future.

Self portrait on top of Mount Troy at sunset proper. I had planned to go back down the Dan Moller Trail, but it had taken me nearly three hours to get there and dark was not far away. I'd never before done the "traverse," but when I saw skin tracks I started following them down the other side of the mountain toward Eaglecrest Ski Area. I took long, loping strides through the deep powder to the side of the tracks, feeling as weightless and effortless as if I had been on my board, and arrived at the ski area in less than a half hour. I tromped down the slope and stuck out my thumb. A couple of tele-skiers drove me 12 miles back to where I started, scrunching their noses at the ice-crusted snowshoes hanging from my backpack. "You need to get some skis," they told me. Maybe, I replied, but it certainly would be a long learning process before I could take skis to the places I had visited that afternoon. I asked them if they saw the sunset, and they told me they spent all afternoon in the Wedding Bowl, making looping runs through the powder beneath the shadowed darkness of the Douglas Ridge. "So you didn't see the light and the clouds below Admiralty?" I asked them. They shook their heads. All of us sat back, satisfied with our own methods of adventure.

Mountaineering 101

My friend Bjorn is teaching me how to climb snow-bound mountains. It is not an enviable task. First, you take this rank beginner person whose natural inclination toward vertigo has led her to avoid climbing all of her adult life, then drag her up to a cold and barren environment that is completely unforgiving of any error. I certainly don't try to hang out with people who may turn out to be liabilities, and yet Bjorn was the one who called late last night and asked if I wanted to accompany him on a November trip up Mount McGinnis.

We both brought snowshoes but never took them off our backs. The snow was weird and unconsolidated, meaning I was slipping on frozen grass even as I stood in knee-deep fluff. We picked our way up a thickly wooded area between two large avalanche gullies, using tree branches as pull-up bars to lift ourselves over chin-high bluffs and grabbing at thin blueberry twigs when the footing gave out underneath us, which happened frequently. It was surprisingly strenuous, more new stuff that I'm not quite in shape for, and a couple of times I had to concentrate hard to direct all of my power to my quads just to thrust my body over another waist-high step. Feel the burn.

We broke out of treeline and entered a very steep, icy slope. It was the kind of snow slope that as recently as three months ago would send fleeing downhill for fear of slipping, and this was during the soft, slushy summer months. Now these slopes were covered in a hard crust, so much so that Bjorn had to use his ax to carve out steps so we could climb. I waited patiently behind, watching low-level clouds move in fast from the south, quickly losing heat because I was not working very hard. I started shivering but I didn't want to take off my pack and pull out more layers, for fear of throwing off my balance. We reached a wind-scoured saddle, with exposed rock and grass and a lot of solid ice, and decided it was time to put on the crampons. My first time in crampons. I never actually took the time to practice putting them on before, so I played with the straps and fiddled with the adjustments while my fingers quickly went numb in the strengthening wind.

The storm moved in as I sat there. Temperatures and visibility both plummeted, and streams of snow hit us sideways. I was worried about descending our ice steps in low to zero-visibility, and Bjorn agreed that it would be pretty sketchy, so we decided to turn around shy of the summit. I didn't feel sad about that. After all — it's just McGinnis. I didn't feel all that afraid about descending, either. Bjorn gave me a tutorial about walking in crampons, and how I needed to take extra care not to cross them and spur a big fall. Then we saw ptarmigan fluttering around the ridge. Bjorn wanted to get pictures, and I decided to take a few admittedly bad ones with my point-and-shoot. As numb as my hands had gotten putting on my crampons, as a cold as it had become and as low as my core temperature was getting, this was a stupid idea. I lost all feeling in my right thumb. I've done this enough to know the difference between numb and partially frozen. I put my mittens back on and braced for the downclimb.

McGinnis in all of its wind-scoured glory. We slowly and methodically worked our way down. Despite the security of the crampons, I did much of it backwards, tracing my way down the snow steps. It felt just like climbing down a ladder, and was somewhat disorienting in the way ladders can be when you spend all of your time looking for the next step rather than observing the terrain around you. Just as I was doing this, my thumb starting to come back to life. I had mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I was happy because I knew the thaw meant my thumb was still very much alive. On the other hand, thawing body parts is remarkably painful. It's like having someone hold a hot iron to a crucial appendage while you're trying to concentrate on something difficult and scary. My thought process for the next 10 or so minutes went something like this: "OK, feet apart ... GAAAAAA thumb! ... pant, pant .... Ok, step slow .... UGGGGGH ... feet apart ... thumb, thumb, thumb, stop, hurting, please ... OK, down .... GAAAAAAA!"

It finally dissipated just as we were getting back down into the subalpine. My thumb is a little sore and shiny red now, but for the most part it's fine. It was a little refresher course on the perils of too much skin exposure when I'm already shivering. And I learned a little about the wonders of crampons. Many valuable lessons were learned today. Thanks, Bjorn.