Sunday, Pugsley Sunday

This seems to be inadvertently becoming a tradition ... the last day of the week rolls around and I sleep in, eat a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, finally make an effort to look out the window and note that the weather is actually pretty nice, and head out with Pugsley for a relaxing late morning/early afternoon hunt for rare pockets of snowbiking. A recent long thaw means everything at sea level is pretty much bare. Must climb.

Lake Creek Trail - which in the summer isn't actually a trail, so most everything beneath the snow is undeveloped terrain. Climbing to snow means clearing the myriad obstacles - clumps of frozen muskeg grass, rolling glare ice streams and flake-frosted mud. Much of it involves mountain bike moves as technical as any I've ever tried, on uphill slopes as steep as any I've ever climbed, and yet I try them, despite rather painful falls on hard ground that await me, because I have this delusion that Pugsley is invincible.

I was hoping for more hard crust in the meadows but I guess conditions stayed pretty wintry up there this week. This is my best attempt to ride downhill through the fluff. I'm not sure how much I was still moving when the self-timer clicked.

Elusive winter singletrack. Day-old ski tracks sometimes make great bike trails, but they're so narrow that the swerve-margin is near zero. Skiers usually have dogs that punch deep holes in the track and make it very difficult to hold a straight line.

No matter. Half the fun is in trying. Furrowing my brow, biting my bottom lip and funneling every ounce of available concentration into 30 continuous feet of riding is surprisingly satisfying.

Frost feathers. Today was also the day I discovered that the "super macro" setting on the Olympus Stylus isn't half bad.

But frost has a way of even making the ugliest patches of nutrient-starved muskeg look enticing. The temperature today held steady in the 20s, which feels downright toasty compared to 35 and raining (you'll note in the self portrait that I wore neither a hat nor gloves, at least until I started bombing downhill.) I wish it could be Pugsley Sunday every day.

Support this blog by buying my book! Signed copies only $11.95 plus shipping.

First day of sun

Yesterday was Juneau's 51st consecutive day of precipitation. Fifty one wet days. Rain, snow, sleet, slush and snain - sometimes just a trace, sometimes close to two inches of water, sometimes nearly letting an entire 24-hour period pass between squalls, but never completely, not quite. A lot happens in 51 days. Fall leaves wither and disintegrate. Friendships spark and fade. Snow falls and accumulates. Relationships begin and end. Fifty one days.

And then the sun comes out, and it promises not to leave again for a while, and you squint into its glaring light, and you're not even sure how to react, because an entire season rolled over while it flickered noncommitally, and even now that it's set to stick around, it's too late, it's December, it can only linger low on the horizon for six hours a day. No matter. Those of us wedged in the tight spaces between the mountains and the sea don't have the luxury of choosing our sunshine. We take what we're given, and we cherish every second.

My former roommate, Shannon, and I decided to celebrate the first day of sun with a trek up Mount Jumbo. We haven't really seen each other since I left for Utah in April, so it was a good day to get together. We're similarly struck right now, caught between strange hiccups in our lives, holding our breaths a little too long, hoping that when our heads stop pounding and lungs stop gasping, we'll finally breathe easy. When we last lived at the Cliff House in March, life was different for both of us, quieter. I was hobbling around on crutches and Shannon still ate sugar. Now he goes out for 22-mile runs training for nothing and I'm addicted to elevation, otherwise directionless. Five times 51 days.

We did the snowshoe thing, tough work for runners and cyclists alike, but at the same time so mindless that we could spend lots of time commiserating, joking and gaping at golden hints of sunlight against a cerulean sky.

Mount Jumbo. A familiar place, but not so much now. I must have climbed at least the first section of it close to 51 times during my tenure at the Cliff House. But I've never been up here in December, with snow shoved in every crevice and 12-foot-tall trees reduced to nubs. The wind-scoured, hardpacked surface crust kept us off the summit ridge - Shannon only had small running snowshoes and nothing more. So we stopped at the saddle.

No disappointment. On a day as bright as today, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. There are no goals, unless being out in the clear cold air counts as a goal. We settled in a wide spot of direct sun at 2,600 feet. Shannon snapped iPhone pictures and I plied him with king-sized peanut butter Twix bars. "Can I tempt you with refined sugar?" I asked. "Gimme," he said, and devoured two with a wide grin.

We laughed in the stark light as beads of sweat froze solid on our faces and frost stiffened around our fleece jackets. We pulled on coats, hats and gloves, sipped slushy water and fought to linger high on the mountain even as the chill gripped our cores. Sun invited us up and then refused to provide anything but views - cold and uncaring, noncommital to the end.

No matter, we make our own warmth. Sun just gives us perspective, and reason to hope.

Into December

Today was December 3, the latest in the year I have climbed to Blackerby Ridge.

The weather was marginal and I had been planning on a three or four-hour bike ride. Yesterday I officially signed up for the White Mountains 100, which means by March 21 I have to be well-conditioned for a long, hilly snow bike century in subzero temperatures near Fairbanks. But this past fall left me with an alpine bug I can't seem to kick, and after several lazy morning hours, I was craving mountains. I only had about four hours of daylight left, so I decided to go up Blackerby Ridge. On my way out the door of the house I am housesitting, I noticed fresh bear tracks ambling up the driveway, circling the locked garbage hutch and disappearing into the woods. I took a few photos and went back inside to quickly send them to my friends, the owners of the house, via Facebook. By the time I came back outside, there were new fresh bear tracks, this time heading back down the driveway. I ducked back inside the house and debated how much I wanted to climb today versus risking contact with a black bear that is not in hibernation and therefore probably hungry. Strangely, mountains still won. I pulled my ice ax off my pack and walked outside, swinging it back and forth and yelling "Hey Bear!" until I reached the bottom of the driveway and jumped into my car.

At first, it was hard for me to fathom why Blackerby Ridge held such an appeal that I was willing to take on a garbage bear with only an ice ax as a weapon. The hike was tough. There was bare trail and patchy ice to 600 feet, followed by a landslide or heavily wind-damaged area covered in piles of downed trees and branches (I don't think it could have been an avalanche, because there was no snow among the piles.) Then there was hardpacked, crusty snow, and then uneven cookie-filled snow, and finally enough powder to strap on my snowshoes at about 1,400 feet.

But as soon as I cleared the alpine, all of the drama - the lurking garbage bear, the landslide bushwhack, the slow snowshoe plod, the job angst, the unease - disappeared beneath a pillow of white silence. Such a tranquil place - Blackerby Ridge in a calm December snowstorm. I gazed out toward the indistinguishable transition between white mountain and white sky, and smiled, because it felt like peace.

Support this blog by buying my book! Signed copies only $11.95 plus shipping.