Farther south

One of the advantages of life in Alaska is that it makes everything in the Lower 48 seem so inexpensive. $1.79 for a Pepsi? You gotta be kidding me! (You know, because I'm used to paying $2.69.) Fifty cents a pound for oranges? I'm gonna buy eight pounds! (Never mind that I'm leaving this place in three days.) You know what else is cheap? Air travel! No one believes me. I once paid nearly $300 for a one-way commercial airline coach ticket from Fairbanks to Juneau (two central cities technically located in the same state.) Down here, you can jet cross-country for $149 if you catch travelocity.com on a good day. When I looked into the logistics, I realized there was no good reason why I shouldn't drop a few more hundred miles south to visit my little sister at her new home in Huntington Beach, Calif.

This is my baby sister, Sara. She'll be 23 years old next week. She's four inches taller than me, with the long legs that both my little sisters got and I always wanted (mine are more like tree stumps.) She and I share some of the same facial features and all of the same family members, but that's about where our similarities end. Basically, if you took my personality and inverted it, the result would probably be like Sara. She likes to shop. She has a great fashion sense. She's sociable and good with people. She doesn't care much for the outdoors. She hates winter. Her preferred form of exercise is bikram yoga, where people sit in a dark room in 100-degree heat and do painful stretches (oh please, just kill me first.) But despite our differences, we always got along well (perhaps because of the age spread; I was too busy tormenting our middle sister to pick on her.)

Still, we were never close. That began to change last summer as we were both dealing with life upheavals. We reconnected and began contacting each other frequently. Then in December, she announced she needed a drastic change. And suddenly my baby sister -who was still living at home, who had just barely graduated from college, who had worked the same stressful retail job for years - threw everything to the wind and moved to Southern California.

True to our differences, Southern California is probably one of the last places in the U.S. I would choose to live. While I do recognize its beauty, I would likely begin to feel suffocated by the sprawl, lost in the crowds and driven to distraction by the ceaselessly perfect weather. But Sara loves it here, and after a mere four months, she's really thriving. Watching her take this risk has been a huge inspiration to me. It's been great to come here and see major life change from her point of view. It was also fun to check out the sweet new beach cruiser she just acquired. ("It's my first bike!" she exclaimed proudly, because before this she always had to use our hand-me-downs.)

Coaster brakes and chain guards freak me out, so she let me borrow her roommate's father's mountain bike. It's a Liahona, an honest-to-goodness mission bike, custom-manufactured specifically for use by LDS missionaries. It appeared solidly built, with decent base-level parts, but it hasn't had a tuneup in a long, long time; the seat was humbling in its ability to dig into all the wrong pressure points, and I couldn't find a pump to inflate the soft tires. I had to stop at Target to buy a $10 helmet (I will give it to my sister. I doubt she'll wear it.) Sometimes I really think I should covert to running, because the gear aspect of cycling can be so annoying sometimes. But, oh, it was wonderful to get out on a perfect day, plowing into the sea breeze to Newport Beach to have lunch with my sister, dodging four-seated pedal taxis out to Balboa and grinding along the PCH to Laguna Beach before sprinting on the soft tires and limited gearing so I could beat my sister home from work. The things we will do for a bike ride.

You may at this point be wondering when and if I'm ever going back to Alaska. The answer is Monday or Tuesday, hopefully. But since I'm flying standby to avoid the breathtakingly expensive plane ticket home, my return date is up in the air.

When it rains in Utah

Compared to Southeast Alaska, the weather in Utah is so boring, except when it's not. As much as I've lamented the frequent lack of UV light in Alaska, the truth is I'm inclined to feel sun-fried much faster than I feel the effects of seasonal affective disorder. And as soon as my lips are blistered to the point where I can't even eat medium salsa without crying (and believe me, I try everything - from slathering my lips with SPF 60 to continuous applications of SPF 30 chapstick - and they still burn) ... I start to wish for a few clouds.

But the clouds weren't particularly welcome on Wednesday, when I was going to meet up with a couple of my Utah friends that I had yet to see, to go mountain biking in Draper. "I don't know about today," my mom said when I told her about my plans. "It's going to be wet."

"What you guys think of as wet is not wet!" I exclaimed. "Maybe you get rained on for a minute, but you're dry before you even look up."

Still, because I (I mean my parents) live in Draper, my friend Anna called me before coming out to get the weather report. I walked to the front window and looked outside. "It's not even bad," I said. "It's dark overhead, but I can see sunlight to both the south and north. There's hardly even a breeze."

"What do you think?" Anna asked. "Is it going to clear out?"

"Well," I said, drawing a long breath as a loud howling sound approached like a train from the north. Flowers and bushes started to whip wildly and trees bent over backward. "It does look like the wind is starting to pick up."

Before I even emitted a closing breath to indicate to end of that sentence, the sky opened up. A blast of hail pellets rained down like bullets, pounding the roof with such violence that I had to raise my voice over the racket. "Now it's starting to hail! They're the size of marbles!" Before the barrage of ice balls even stopped, a solid sheet of rain slammed into the ground. In seconds, the storm released enough water to fill many hours of those seemingly endless misty drizzles in Alaska. The waterfall stirred up the solid white blanket of fallen hail like so much popcorn in an air popper.

"Yeah, now it's raining."

And, perhaps it's needless to say, but my friends decided it was not a good day for a bike ride. I ventured out about three hours later, hoping to check out the state of the sandy trails around Corner Canyon and perhaps still coax a meet-up. It continued to sprinkle and although the hard-packed trails yielded only the faintest track, I still felt self-conscious about trammeling trail etiquette. So I ventured onto dirt roads and even then hardly got splattered by mud. As I had predicted to my mother, everything was already mostly dry, despite the moisture still falling from the sky, and the rolling thunderstorms seemed to have abated.

I tried to call my friends out again, but it was too late. According to them, riding in the rain, even on pavement (my idea), demanded a "hardcore" disposition, which of course both of them have but neither felt like yielding to a silly thing like a Wednesday afternoon bike ride. I just kept riding for another couple hours in intermittent sprinkles, with both my hair and clothing magically becoming dry mere minutes after the rain stopped, in air that was warm and downright pleasant, grumbling to myself about how "hardcore" just doesn't mean what it used to.

And all the while, I kept a wary eye fixated on the dark clouds in the distance, wondering when the sky was going to open up and unleash all its fury again.

I was disappointed when it didn't.

Sojourn in the desert

It seems there is much I could write about my long weekend in Southern Utah, from frustration with my inability to get over an irrational fear of water to the one-year "anniversary" of my relationship breakup and some of the thoughts I had about that. But sometimes the time to write just isn't there, and it's necessary just to sort through the vacation photos and sigh happily about recent good times.

I headed south late Friday night with my friends Chris and Becky. The plan was to float the rapids in Westwater Canyon with about a half dozen other people. The more I tried to psych myself up to do it, the more I felt low-level panic gurgling up from my gut. And it wasn't the good panic like the kind you get before a big race. It was debilitating panic like the kind that makes you feel dizzy and incapable of simple movements. Basically, I'm afraid of moving water. I have been for most of my adult life. It hasn't improved one bit over the years. I need help, like therapy. But I don't feel that river trips are important enough to warrant therapy, so instead I deal with my fear by forcing myself into one every so often. Last May, I had the Tour Divide coming up and felt like I had to prove something to myself by sitting in a raft as it floated down Westwater Canyon. It was horrible. This year, I didn't have anything to prove. So as we set up camp at the put-in, I expressed my desire to opt out.

While everyone else went on a splashy-fun float trip down the Colorado River, I drove the shuttle and made a short detour to Fruita, Colo., where I rented a mountain bike and spent five hours riding the 18 Road trails. I felt gleeful, probably because I had narrowly escaped a river trip, but my good mood put me in prime singletrack form. Trails like these are pure guilty pleasure - at least compared to the kind of riding I thrive on. The banked curves feel sinful, the smooth trails are too fast-flowing to be real, and it's downright pointless to spend five hours wending around a few acres of land on progressively smaller loops, often returning to my favorite stretch of trail to see just how far I can lean into the turns. But I don't care about all that because I become completely immersed in the "flow," which is pure and primal and knows no fear.

In Fruita, though, there are still plenty of opportunities to venture onto long dirt roads that actually go somewhere, or off the beaten path up a wash, where the riding is chunky and sandy with lots of on/off-bicycle moments - in other words, frustrating but refreshingly real, which is more my style.

Don't get me wrong. I do love well-built bike trails, and would likely be a much better rider if I rode this kind of terrain more often. But I couldn't do it every day. My need to explore would take over, and I'd end up chattering over long miles of cow-trammeled four-wheel-drive roads and spinning along pavement. If I lived in Fruita, I'd probably end up being the crazy girl riding her mountain bike down I-70.

Chris and Becky were understanding about my chickening out of the Westwater trip. Becky is posing with the Fat Tire amber ale I picked up for her in Fruita. Supposedly you can't buy that stuff anywhere in Utah, so I managed to prove my worth on this trip after all.

We spent a couple hours on Saturday night trying to find a campsite near Moab, only to end up on the Kokopelli Trail near Onion Creek. Up at 6,000 feet, the temperature dropped to the 30s and my Thermarest went flat, so at about 4 a.m. I woke up on the cold ground, shivering. I warmed back up by going for a short walk along the route, gazing at an explosion of stars in the sky and remembering last year's journey down the Kokopelli. I wish I had time to do it again.

Sunday was refreshingly lazy. We woke up late and ate big egg and cheese burritos for breakfast, then sauntered up Negro Bill Canyon. We saw some climbers repelling on the arch near the end of the canyon. Then I headed over to the Slickrock Cafe to meet up with my dad.

This is my dad. He loves to hike. Every spring, he makes a trip down to the Needles district of Canyonlands National Park to stretch out his hiking muscles and enjoy the warm air and sun. This year, I was lucky enough to join him on his annual ritual.

My dad also likes to get after it, so we didn't just go out for touristy strolls. We hiked 20 miles on Monday and nearly 11 on Tuesday, over rough and sandy and slickrocky terrain.

On Monday we walked all the way down to the Colorado River, near Brown Betty Rapids in Cataract Canyon. Cataract Canyon is what I consider the catalyst of my fear of water - although I have a few childhood experiences that sparked the phobia, it was Cataract where I was first truly convinced I was going to drown as I was briefly dragged under an overturned raft with a rope caught around my neck. It was interesting to look out over the fast-flowing brown water to the Dollhouse, a place I visited just a few hours before I took my fateful swim in 2001. I was struck with a strange but strong desire to jump into the river and swim across to the other side. I wonder what my future therapist would make of that?

But Canyonlands itself is for the most part dry as a bone. And it's invigorating in its remoteness. We saw only two other people on Monday, both near the end of the hike, and in the canyons above the river, I felt the exciting sensation of truly being "out there," off the grid, the way I sometimes feel in Alaska.

Lots of varied terrain, too.

The view from our campsite in the morning. My dad likes to camp in style, with a springbar tent, a fire and camp chairs. Because there's no bathroom, table, water or $250,000 RV, most people would probably consider this "primitive" camping. But if you have become accustomed to rolling out your bivy sack wherever the urge to pass out strikes you, this kind of camping is pure luxury.

"But do they sleep any better than us?" my dad wondered aloud as we passed an expansive motor home parked down the road from our site. I'd be inclined to say "no." As I get older, I watch my friends acquire more creature comforts and tangible stuff. Sometimes I feel guilty that I have yet to build a real desire for any of that. I'm actually perfectly comfortable plopping down my bivy sack beneath a pinion tree in some nondescript valley deep in the desert. My goal is to keep it simple as long as I can, or until I have no choice, whichever comes first.

This is my home and I can visit it whenever I want, even if it means jumping on a bicycle and riding 2,500 miles south. Come to think of it, there's not much right now to prevent me from doing that. Of course there is something to be said about burdens and the joys they bring you. But for now I am enjoying being a "light-packer" in life.