Hell week, day three

Some thousand or two feet up, Dave stops to look out over the valley, a collage of streets and buildings and farmlands walled in by mountains. He offers me one of his candy orange slices and I greedily choke it down through the sweat and dust coating my lips.

“No way to ride around here without climbing,” Dave says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I reply, and we turn toward the thousand more feet in front of us.

We climb and climb and at the top of the mountain is a fire lookout tower. From its base we can see the great Mount Lolo up close, and the valley, too, although its faraway features are becoming more abstract. The lookout himself saunters up with his little dog, Sparky. He tells us the elevation of the mountain is 6,458 feet, and his room with a view is 50 feet higher. He tells us he’s worked the tower for 35 summers, and he hardly ever sees “people ride their bikes up here.” I’m hit with a spark of pride because this isn’t a special occasion; it’s just a Wednesday-night ride, embarked on after full days at the office, and the third similar ride in a row at that. I try to calculate the elevation gain in my head, with the earlier and future rollers, and come up with another night of ~4,000 feet. Just another ride. Day three.

The lookout lingers in conversation. I think maybe his job gets a little lonely up here. Dave points out that the sun is setting and we still have a long way to descend. We pedal to the top of the moto trail, all washed out singletrack and chunk and moon dust, and it’s rugged, and intimidating, and I feel more than a little bit dizzy. But I launch in anyway and hold on tight, real tight, because I have to find a way to survive this thing; after all, I have to do it all again tomorrow.

Fire roads

I crested the rounded spine of Miller Divide and suddenly felt a sensation not unlike sliding my tongue across one of those giant, swirly lollipops. A vast network of rugged roads rippled along the mountains to all sides, and I had just tasted the sweet surface of the expansive bike candy in front of me. I pulled out my map, tried to orient myself and looked back up, entirely bewildered by the possibilities. I had made turns on numbered Forest Service roads that weren’t even on the map, and in turn made more turns on overgrown roads that weren’t even numbered. I left Missoula with aspirations to ride a loop, but realized that if I didn’t turn around and retrace my exact route to this spot, I would be entirely lost. I was going to have to come back here with my GPS and an entire day to burn, maybe days, and I still wouldn’t be able to scrape the surface of possibility in this region, this simple cross-section of Lolo National Forest. And even if I tried, the result probably wouldn’t be unlike trying to finish one of those giant, swirly lollipops — I’d be tired and more than a little sick to my stomach, but satisfied.

Whenever I tell Montana cyclists that I moved here from Alaska, I often get the same response — “Oh, wow, the biking there must have been incredible.” People just assume that because Alaska is big, everything that takes place there must be big. “Well,” I’d reply. “Actually, no. It was pretty limited.” Alaska is incredible for the same reasons the biking is actually quite terrible — it’s largely untouched, almost completely undeveloped wilderness. With a few notable exceptions (such as beach biking), bikes need developed surfaces to function — snow bikes need snowmobile trails, mountain bikes need cleared dirt surfaces, and road bikes need pavement. Alaska is refreshingly lacking in all of these surfaces, even snowmobile trails (although snowmobile trails are by far the most extensive of the off-road options, thus the growing popularity of winter biking in that state.) I grew my passion for cycling in Alaska — specifically mainland Southeast Alaska, which incorporates a tiny sliver of impossibly steep mountains wedged between an icefield and the sea — so the region's limitations didn’t bother me. However, I am only now starting to realize just how limited it really was.

Western Montana is, by contrast, uber-developed (at least relative to Alaska.) As an avid cyclist, this is both a good and bad thing. The road cuts in the mountainsides aren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, but they do offer seemingly endless possibilities in terms of access. Instead of slogging for days over tussocks and across raging streams on foot to access the backcountry in Alaska, I can race up rocky logging roads at 8 mph and find myself fairly deep in the high country within an evening. And that’s just an evening. If I had a good reserve of energy to tap and enough time to burn, I could travel miles and miles into the “wilderness,” come across lots of wildlife and soak in vast views, and the only sign of humanity I’d even see are the logging roads on which I travel, and possibly the occasional moto (although I have yet to see a gas-powered rider on these roads.)

And though mountain bikers often decry the boringness of doubletrack, I rather enjoy it myself. It’s a more peaceful, reflective sort of riding than singletrack, it tends to offer more real travel possibilities (rather than just riding loops around a small area), and can still be technically challenging in spots. And interesting! Just before I took this photo, I saw a flash of brown fur race across the trail about 100 feet front of me. It was too small to be a bear, too big to be a rabbit, but too fast to be a beaver (and too high up on the ridge for the third possibility to be likely.) My first thought was “wolverine!” but I’m pretty sure there are no wolverines in this area. I’m still a little flabbergasted about that animal, but it’s experiences like that — small but transcendent in their own ways — that really make this kind of “training” worth it.

As far as my Tuesday training ride, I ended up with four hours and fifteen minutes of pedaling, I’m not sure how many miles and about 3,800 to 4,000 feet of climbing, based on my map and some up-and-down explorations I did along the ridge. Good day, and my legs are starting to feel it already, but I’m hoping to rally at Blue Mountain tonight. Maybe this time, I’ll even bring my GPS.

Time to train

I was just about to send my friend Jen a text message, asking her if I could come out and visit her in Idaho this weekend, when the guilt crept in. Trans Rockies starts Aug. 8, which means I should really spend this week beating myself up on a bike, not lounging next to a lake with my non-cyclist friend. I put the cell phone down and packed up my bike for day one of a training week I hoped would mimic seven days of hard riding in the Canadian Rockies, in scope if not breadth. Monday evening’s objective was TV Mountain, a 6,800-foot peak that incorporates about 3,900 feet of climbing and 36 miles of pedaling. Not a bad “after work” ride.

A 30 mph wind blew directly in my face as I churned out of town. I took a break to reposition my helmet and briefly considered quitting, but I talked myself out of it. I turned up Grant Creek Road, for a while leaning hard into the crosswind, until it shifted, and suddenly I felt like I was being rushed up the mountain by a massive tailwind. The gravel road snaked up the mountainside, turning north, east, west, every direction imaginable, and the tailwind inexplicably followed me, racing sunset to the peak. At the top, the wind tore through the television towers with such velocity that they vibrated; I could no longer hear my iPod over the jet-engine roar, and I struggled to keep my balance amid the gusts as I walked along the edge overlooking Snowbowl, searching for possible singletrack trails (none were found.) I turned the bike downhill and the tailwind followed with a breathtaking blast of cold speed. Down, down, down, 3,500 feet down, and it wasn’t even yet dusk when I popped out eight miles from town and raced home. I made myself a dinner of egg and turkey spinach salad — because I am trying to up my protein intake — and marveled at how I good and rested I felt, like I was making dinner after a slow day at the office, not a three-and-a-half-hour-long mountain ride. I might as well not have even gone for a training ride, I thought, because I certainly couldn’t feel it.

“That crazy tailwind was something else,” I thought. “How could it possibly have followed me almost the entire way, in all directions?” And then I smiled, because I realized there was a good chance I was crediting the wind with what was more likely just a very good day, one of those rare “untouchable” days where nothing fazes me and I can do no wrong.

“I feel awesome and I just climbed 4,000 feet,” I thought. “Who needs training?” I picked up my cell phone and thought about texting Jen, but stopped myself again. “No, I need this week,” I thought. “Because the only way it will be a good peak training week is if it ends with me feeling absolutely shattered.”

Yes, Monday night was an awesome ride. And it may sound crazy, but I look forward to the goal of tearing it all apart.