My new favorite trail

One of the best aspects about being new to a region is that sense of discovery in everything you do - like a trail was created just for you; like you invented that tricky traverse. Of course this is far from the case; these places have been explored again and again, by tourists and college kids and REAL Montanans, who are second only to Alaskans in their ability to view long-term residency as a quantifiable gauge of status. So everyone and their brother has been to this lookout or that trail. What matters is that you haven't. You wander these mountains with an explorer's eyes, and you still see the mystery and wonder that are too easily forgotten.

I've had a bit of a hard time recovering from Hell Week. I took Monday completely off, as planned, and then on Tuesday headed out for a mellow ride with the Dirt Girls. We rode the Ravine Trail loop, about 25 miles and 2,000 feet of climbing total. The Dirt Girls are known for their fun, social pace, so I felt discouraged by how creaky and tired I felt trying to hold the paceline up Grant Creek Canyon. We collected the rest of the group at the trailhead and tackled the shaded singletrack 14-strong. I started off the far back but eventually passed most of the group. At the saddle, three of us encountered three guys who told us there were 17 men total in their group, all gathered at the SnowBowl Overlook. When we told them we were heading a group of 14 women, one guy said, "Awesome. We'll have a party at the top."

One woman replied, "Sorry, most of us are married."

"I didn't mean it like that!" he exclaimed with a huff, and took off. I had to laugh at the implication, but it's still quite the phenomenon when you think about it - 31 mountain bikers in two separate, segregated groups, all gathered at a remote little mountain knoll on a Tuesday night. But, unfortunately, there was no "party at the top." The guys took one look at our massive group of girls crowding the overlook and fled.

I still felt wooden and achy on the long, rolling descent, and contemplated taking Wednesday off as well. But then - and I should mention this happened while screaming over some guy's painfully earnest rendition of Bon Jovi's "Bed of Roses" at a karaoke bar late Tuesday night during Dave's wife's 26th birthday party - Dave mentioned a trail he was thinking about riding Wednesday night. "I've never ridden it before," he said. "So I'm not sure about the conditions. It could turn epic. "

How does one say no to that?

We got an early start right after work Wednesday evening, and brought lights and extra water, braced for a hopeful three-hour ride but a possible six-hour adventure. We churned up the loose gravel of Mormon Peak Road. My legs started to ache early and I decided not to push it, hoping Dave wouldn't mind of I dawdled a bit. Even on the access road, the ride was stunning - sweeping overlooks around every corner, soft evening light filtered through dark thunderstorms, and even bright pink fireweed blooms lining the hillside (I didn't even know Montana had fireweed!)

I thought, "The trail can't be better than this."

We came to the Mill Creek trail junction and started up the singletrack, lined with sweet-smelling spruce trees and bright green groundcover. After the fireweed sightings followed by a trail through a loamy corridor beneath thick, tall forest canopy, I felt like I had found my own little slice of Alaska in Montana.

I thought, "The descent can't be better than this."

We came to a junction where Dave pointed out where a mountain biker could climb another 2,000 feet to a high ridge on a more ambitious day. The ridge offered high-alpine hiking access to the Bitterroot Wilderness and a number of peaks. I vowed to return on a more ambitious day, and we dropped into the singletrack descent. A thin ribbon of moss-lined dirt switchbacked tightly through the woods and suddenly popped out along the edge of a steep, rocky ravine. That's where the rock gardens started, and Dave attacked them with zeal, yelling out as his single-speed Karate Monkey rodeoed over the boulder minefield. I took the obstacles a lot more slowly or not at all, my rock technical skills largely untested and my confidence small. But I vowed to return to this Mill Creek trail again and again, and practice and practice until I too could squeal out uncontrollably as I bucked down the trail.

"I forget sometimes that riding a new, awesome trail is the best feeling in the world," Dave said at a rare quiet moment against a sweeping backdrop of green mountains.

"Pretty much what I've been thinking for the last month," I said. "But this one is definitely the best."

If a ride is nothing but amazing fun the entire time, does it even count against recovery or toward fitness? Often, I wonder.

Dave thought Mill Creek was fantastic, too: "Ride of the Year."

Hell week, finished

Last weekend, when I first formulated the idea to do one week of intensive time-in-the-saddle training, I knew I would either end up going pretty big this weekend - days six and seven - or do close to nothing at all. I even had a fairly ambitious out-and-back overnight ride tentatively planned. After Friday's big misadventure, I woke up too early Saturday morning with a throbbing dehydration hangover and not a single thing packed. I knew I was never going to make it happen. Instead, I spent the day doing a lot of neglected life maintenance. I even took my car into Jiffy Lube for the post-AK-drive Signature Service, and was conned into spending $121. Yeah, I'm one of those people. I can't even walk up to the free sample tables at Costco because I end up going home with one of those 174-packs of frozen taquitos that haunt me for months afterward. Every time I open the freezer, the giant frost-coated box taunts me with whispers of "what the hell were you thinking?" until I finally move out and have an excuse to throw it away. No, it's best that I avoid capitalism. Which is why I rarely spend Saturdays doing life maintenance chores.

Late in the afternoon, I started pedaling toward Mount Sentinel. I figured if I felt badly, I would simply go to the peak and back on the singletrack, ending with about 20 miles and 2,000 feet of climbing. If I felt good, I planned to drop into the canyon and work my way toward the upper ridge. But I did not feel good. I felt the opposite of good. I was in survival mode from the get-go, and I never perked up. My legs felt like they didn't have any power of their own, but were simply being propelled by imaginary fraying strings attached to the bike's wheels. I had to walk spots I never thought I would have to walk. I didn't even take any pictures, even at the peak where rich golden light stretched across the valley, because I was so frustrated and grumpy. Maybe it was time to cry uncle on Hell Week.

I don't like to succumb to mental defeat. I realize there are limited (if any) benefits to running oneself into a deep physical hole, but I'm the kind of person who likes to crawl up to the edge of these holes and look for ways to climb out of them. That way, in some future time when the going gets rough, as it inevitably will, I'll remember where to find that hidden source of strength. I decided, no matter what, come Sunday, I was going to at least set out looking for it.

Then, on Sunday morning, I got an unexpected hit of motivation. In general, I'm not all that competitive of a person in regard to other people (competition with myself and with the world at large is another story.) But I occasionally get hit with the race bug, usually in the unlikeliest of ways. This time, it came in the form of a simple Web post from my friend Sierra in Whitehorse, Yukon. Sierra and another friend, Jenn, are registered as a women's team in this year's Trans Rockies, so they are on the same training track as me right now. The three of us were supposed to go head-to-head-to-head in the solo category of the 24 Hours of Light in June, but I unfortunately had to move to Montana a week before the race, thereby posting a shameful DNS while those two killed it. On Saturday, Sierra and Jenn completed their big ride for the week, a "Triple Crown" of three mountains in the Yukon, for 100 km and 2,500 vertical meters (translated to American, that's about 60 miles and 8,000 feet of climbing.) I needed to try to match that! Never mind that I didn't stand a chance of matching it - but it at least gave me a high, high ceiling to shoot for.

I decided to return to Blue Mountain (location of the fire lookout) to check out a jeep trail that I had seen on my map. The jeep trail, called Forest Service Road 17806, intrigued me because it seemed to trace the high line of a ridge for a long distance. It sounded like a grand time, riding the contours of a ridge high above the canyons below, taking in endless sweeping views, rolling terrain and pretty wildflowers.

My legs felt encouragingly better on the highway ride out of town, but then came the 2,800-foot grunt just to get to the ridge, at 5,900 feet elevation. I came to an intersection with five roads veering off in all directions. Four of these roads looked relatively flat and gentle, but one shot straight up the mountain on a loose, rocky doubletrack with a two-foot-deep, three-foot wide runoff trench cut right down the center. And, much to my dismay, that one was FSR 17806.

I pushed my bike 300 vertical feet to the top of the first knoll, where the road discouragingly dropped just as steeply down the other side. In daydreams of my fantasy ridge road, I hadn't deduced the obvious - that high line meant fall line, with impossibly steep, loose climbs that led to difficult steep, loose descents. There were no switchbacks, no gentle grades, no skirting around the high points. This road hit every high point in the quickest way possible, which is fine if you're a gas-powered jeep but not so good if you're a mountain biker with weakened legs. Still, I had climbed all the way up here, and GPS said I had only traveled 20.5 miles and 3,200 feet of climbing so far, so I was going to give it a go.

Even now, my memory of my time on the ridge is a bit hazy. I was sweating a lot, and pushing my bike a lot, and once my rear wheel slid sideways on a heavily braked descent and I had to bail. One guy on a motorcycle passed me. He floated up the fall line in a ethereal cloud of dust. I was beyond envious. About eight miles and two hours into FSR 17806, my legs mutinied. They've done this to me a couple of times before, and it remains a terribly alien sensation. I was struggling to ride up a hill, and suddenly, my legs involuntarily stopped moving. I jumped off the bike just in time and stood there, staring up the hill. I envisioned myself pushing my bike up it, but nothing was happening. I just stood there, and stared, and my legs did nothing. I leaned my bike against a tree and sat in the shade. I knew that however far I traveled on this ridge, it was going to be just as long and hard getting back. I checked my water supply. My three-liter Camelback was nearly empty, and I had already downed my bottle of Nuun, which meant I had already consumed a gallon of liquid and only had a two-liter reserve bladder left. I had promised myself that no matter where I was, I would turn around as soon as I was down to the reserve. So that cemented what my legs already knew. The limited water supply was my ticket out. My legs cheered and we got back on the bike. The road quickly bottomed out and started up the next 300-foot climb, the first of several just to get back to the trail junction. We still had a long way to go.

According to GPS, I finished the ride with 54.3 miles and 5,214 feet of climbing - significantly less than what Jenn and Sierra did on Saturday. (Jenn and Sierra, if you read this, you guys rock, by the way. I'm sure glad I'm entered in the mixed category of TR so I don't have to do head-to-head with you two, because I'm sure the competitive spirit would be fierce :-P) But it was a sufficiently indulgent way to end Hell Week. Sunday's was the only ride I GPS'd, so I don't know my total mileage or elevation, but I ended the week with 29.5 hours of saddle time. I'm happy with it, because my body is partially wrecked, but I found that ever-elusive reserve of strength that I can tap down the road.

Hell week, day gone awry

We were 16 miles outside of town, rolling a flat, paved road as a stiff tailwind rushed us along, when I started to bonk.

"I thought you said this was going to be a short ride," I said to my co-worker, John, who had promised me one of those infamous "three-hour tours." We were more than an hour into it and we hadn't even hit the climb yet.

"Do you want to turn around?" he asked.

"Maybe," I said, sounding more irritable than I probably needed to. "I feel crappy."

"I didn't think you were such a wuss," he replied with a smile.

"That' a common misconception people have about me," I said. "I'm actually a huge wuss. Anyway, I need at least one easy day in Hell Week."

Still in heavy whine mode, I began to rattle off the symptoms I was feeling, all common signs of overtraining. "You know," John said, "what you're doing is probably not actually helping you much. In a way, it's probably hurting you. Now, if you were train a little more scientifically ..."

"I know, I know," I interrupted. "But this is how I like to do things. Some people are physical riders, but I'm more of a mental rider. I like to train because I like to go out and have adventures, and push my limits, and learn more about life and myself in a process. Some people ride for performance; others ride for experience. I think they're both valid reasons. Riding a lot of strung-together, long, hard days is how I trained for Tour Divide, and I don't regret it.

"Anyway, you're not going to see me doing regular hill repeats up Pattee Canyon any time soon," I continued with a laugh. "I'm too much of a wuss for interval training."

We turned off the I-90 frontage road onto a rough dirt doubletrack that looked more like somebody's driveway than a road, and started up the long ascent. I choked down a granola bar and drank a lot of water, and began to feel better. Long climbs are my favorite kind of riding, and even when I'm just a little overtrained and fighting off a bonk, long climbs are where I'm happiest. My good mood was short-lived, though, because just before we reached saddle, I slurped up the last bit of water from my bladder. I had brought my two-liter bladder to the office because I had believed John when he said we were headed out for a "mellow" three-hour ride after work. But already nearly three hours had already gone by, and we were a long way from anywhere, and I knew it.

"Crap, I'm out of water," I announced.

"It's OK," John said. "It's mostly downhill from here. There's a bar on the highway not far from where this road comes out."

"I have iodine," I said. "Are there any streams?"

"I don't know," John said. "But we'll reach the road before long."

The bonk began to creep up again so I ate a Power Bar and told John my story of the time I ran out of water on the White Rim in Utah and experienced my closest brush with dangerous dehydration. We began the descent into an entirely different drainage. The sun set to the west as we moved north into a large swath of mountains and forest. I saw no sign of a valley, or civilization, and I started to feel a little bit stressed.

A few miles down the rough, rocky road, John got a flat. He stuck in his spare tube and we continued down the road, but not more than two miles later, he flatted again, this time on both tires. He was riding a cross-bike with relatively skinny tires, and had snake-bite pinch flats in both of his tubes; one tube had snake bites in two spots. We dug through our kits and both discovered that neither of us had a functioning patch kit. I especially was cursing this stroke of bad luck, because I always carry a patch kit, but lately have been shifting my stuff between two mountain bikes on a regular basis, and sometimes things get inadvertently left behind.

We spent 45 minutes dealing with the problem. We wrestled my 2.1-inch mountain bike tube into John's tiny tire, working together to lever in the large chunks of rubber that repeatedly tried to burst free. John tied a big knot into the tube with the smallest snake-bite holes, and wrested the now substantially shorter tube into the rim. He pumped up the tire and the tube burst. He tied another knot into the second tube. This one seemed to hold air for a short time, but still had a fairly swift leak. Meanwhile, the sun set and darkness started to fall. I had lights, but only my tiny commuter headlight and a helmet-mounted headlamp whose batteries were nearly dead. John had no lights at all. A chill started to seep in. I put on my only extra layer, a rain jacket.

"How far is it to the highway?" I asked.

"Pretty far," John said sternly.

I looked out into the blackness. I could forge on ahead and seek vehicular help, but I had no idea where we were or where we were headed. We were in the middle of a veritable maze of logging roads - gated ones at that - and my chances of finding the way out on my first try, alone, were slim to none. I was dependent on John for directions, which meant we were both going to have to walk out. My throat was parched and dry. John gave me a sip of his gatorade, but he was nearly out himself. We had no water. We were down to a Gu packet and a crumbled up Odwalla Bar for food. My emotional reaction at this particular moment struck me as significant. A few years back, before I embarked on my non-scientific, experience-driven endurance training, I would have panicked, and probably started to cry and made the situation even worse. I know this, because I have reacted that way before in less daunting situations. But now, just a few years later, I felt like laughing out loud. It was the perfect storm, and the universe had smacked us hard for being complacent, because the universe does that sometimes, and we were just going to have to deal with it.

John filled the front tire again and decided we could probably roll one to two minutes at a time before he flatted, so that's what we did. We crept gingerly around the big rocks strewn all over the road, through the overgrown grass and flowers, making our painfully slow descent one minute at a time. I rode the brakes and stayed beside him, craning my neck to shine my dim helmet-lamp beam over to his side of the road so he could see at least a little. We ducked beneath deadfall. We swerved around obstacles spotted at the very last minute. A herd of elk startled and raced down the road beside us. An elk fawn darted in front of me and we nearly collided. John and I passed a stream. I announced I wanted to collect water, but John promised we were at that point less than a half hour from the highway, so I'd get water sooner if I waited (because iodine takes a half hour to kill all the bacteria in water, it can't be consumed for at least that long.) I didn't necessarily believe him, but I knew every minute we wasted not rolling would burn valuable time in which John's tube was still slightly working - time we may not be able to get back.

About an hour and many tube refills later, we reached the highway. It was 11 p.m. The bar John spoke of was closed, but there was a pump outside where we could refill our water. I drank what felt like an entire two-liter bladder worth, choked a bit, and then refilled my bladder again. I felt a sudden rush of new optimism. The bleak darkness of the evening seemed to fade into warmth and light, because I had water in my body, and all was going to be OK.

"I'm sorry I couldn't buy you a drink at the bar," John said. He was already accepting a lot of the guilt for our misadventure, although I attributed it to bad luck that just happened to hit him harder than it hit me. We were both guilty of being underprepared.

"I got exactly what I wanted from that bar. Water." I let the beautiful word linger on my tongue. Life is really so simple. Food, shelter, water. After a few years of experienced-based endurance training, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

A few miles down the highway, John's front tire stopped holding air. He tried to retie the knot in the tube, and it exploded. He tied a couple of knots in his final, double-flatted tube, and ripped it in two pieces in the process. "Well," he said, "I'm f%$@^&."

We agreed that he would continue walking down the highway and I would ride ahead until I obtained cell phone reception, where I could call John's brother, Chris, who was visiting from out of town. If I didn't get ahold of Chris, I would simply ride all the way back to Missoula, still some 16 miles away, grab my car, and return.

About six miles down the road, my phone finally caught reception. It was after midnight. I called John's home number, and Chris answered on the tenth ring. He sounded sleepy. I told him our story. "Where are you?" he asked.

I paused. "Um, that's a really good question that I'm not sure I can answer," I said. "Shoot. I'm really new to town myself. I don't even know exactly where we are. But I think John said this was Highway 200. I've seen freeway signs for Highway 200 before. I think you head east on I-90, and near the town of Bonner - that's about seven miles east on the freeway - you'll see an exit for Highway 200. Then head up the highway; I'm pretty sure the direction is east, northeast or so. Hopefully you'll see me riding down the road with my lights on. John's a few more miles back and doesn't have any lights."

Not more than five minutes after I hung up my cell phone, I heard a horrible ker-chunk, followed by a hissing noise. I stopped and watched in disbelief as all of the air quickly left my rear tire. I ran my hand along the flat tire and pulled out a four-inch-long nail, embedded all the way to the rim. Finally, I was ready to laugh out loud. My semi-delirious cackling rang out in the still air.

"No way! No %*$%&@^ way I just got a flat!" John had my only spare tube in his rear tire. I had no patch kit. I just kept laughing, because it was so perfectly hilarious, like a comedy of errors, right there, on day five of my hardest span of physical effort in more than a year. And then I did the only thing I could do. I started jogging. I decided I would jog until either Chris - this man I had never met - somehow found me, or until I reached Bonner, where I could call a cab. Bonner could have been as little as two miles away, or as many as ten. I had no idea. As I jogged, the fatigue and delirium set in hard. It's often called the "sleep monster," that overwhelming urge to crawl into a bush off to the side of the road and pass out. I fished out my iPod and turned it on full-volume, hoping a blast of raw noise would keep me from falling asleep on my feet. And I ran.

I came to an opening in the canyon and could see the lights of Bonner in the distance when Chris found me. As we loaded my bike on John's car, the flashing lights of a police car and ambulance raced by. My stress-level, long subdued, hit full-tilt, because I knew John was back there walking down the shoulder of the highway with no lights. Only a couple cars had passed me since we parted and I knew traffic was quite light, but I worried something bad had happened. Happily, we found John several miles up the road, unscathed except for a lot of scuffs on the bottom of his bike shoes. I could barely keep my eyes open during the ride home, and repeatedly nodded off for a couple seconds at a time. Chris dropped me off at home and I collapsed in bed without even bothering to eat anything, even though my stomach was so empty it seemed to gnaw at my sides.

"Wow," I thought as my eyes drooped for a final time. "Now that was a good training ride."