Dad comes to town

There's something about having a parent come to visit the place you choose to call your home that can make a person so much more ... on edge ... than usual. You want your life choices to be validated, so you want your home to put on its best face. Even if you fall far outside the mold and your parent has already accepted this about you and still loves you, you want to prove that you are a functional adult who has valid reasons for living in a place that's not your natural home.

Every year, my dad takes a week off to go on a hiking vacation with his friend, Tom. This year, they planned to spend their holiday in central Idaho, but decided to swing a bit northeast first just to visit me. Their schedule just happened to put them here mere days after I moved into my new apartment, which put me in the embarrassing position of entertaining guests with only the possessions I could fit in a 1996 Geo Prism, four of those being bicycles, the rest being clothing and miscellaneous outdoor gear. I'd probably spend several weeks eating cold cereal out of plastic bowls in my camp chair had it not been for their visit. Instead, I put myself on a frantic track to acquire as many household possessions as I could within a span of days, aiming mostly for the ever-elusive appearance of normalcy. I went so far as to spend a fair chunk of my birthday driving around looking at Craigslist furniture before buying a couple of dressers from a place in Bonner - only to realize I'd have to enlist the help of my dad just to move them. Oh well. At least the house wouldn't be completely empty.

I also really wanted to show my Dad that the hiking in Missoula was every bit as spectacular as it should be, given that I live in the spectacular place that is Missoula. Problem is, I spent my first two months here almost exclusively riding my bicycle, because I was training for TransRockies, but it left me in a position of having no idea where to go for a hike. I asked friends and co-workers for advice. I did numerous Google searches. I thought I was well-prepared with knowledge, which I decided would more than make up for my lack of experience. Saturday's hike I decided would be Lolo Peak. It's a Missoula classic, I told my dad. Lolo's false summit is the most prominent feature you can see from town. Surely it would be a fantastic hike.

Skepticism began to trickle in on the drive up. My dad and Tom live in the Salt Lake Valley. They are used to 20-minute drives on smooth pavement taking them to trailheads where they can follow well-engineered, scenic trails to 11,000-foot summits. Lolo's trailhead requires 20 minutes on pavement followed by eight miles of gravel road that I assured them was "good" because I had ridden my mountain bike up there. But perspective is a bit different inside a vehicle, and they thought the approach was a bit rough and slow. But the annoying drive was quickly brushed from our minds as soon as we started up the shaded, soft trail.

After about four miles the trail dropped to a series of lakes, which we followed until the path petered out a fair distance below the summit bowl. We returned to the bowl and picked our way around the largest lake, looking for any sign of a trail. By the time we realized a trail to the summit probably did not exist, we had lost too much steam and mojo to begin the arduous task of route-finding. Another day, they declared, and we spent an hour lounging in the sun by the lake. Dad and Tom declared it a good, fun hike, but I couldn't help but feel disappointed, because I failed to deliver what I promised.

I really wanted to make up for it on Sunday, but had a tough time deciding where to go. As we discussed options, nearly all of the questions centered on what the drive would be like. The one hike I had done before, St. Mary's Peak, was nixed because it involved 14 miles on a rough gravel road. Trapper's Peak was much too far south. I suggested Stewart Peak just because the trailhead starts only six miles from town, but finally admitted it had taken me six hours to do with a mountain bike (from town), and would likely take nine or more hours solely on foot. We finally decided on Ch-paa-qn, mostly because the gravel road mileage beforehand was indeterminate, but I suspected it would probably be as significant as the others.

Here's why: Missoula is at 3,100 feet. The high peaks that most hikers covet stand at 9,000 feet. Most hikers aren't looking for 6,000 feet of vertical relief in their trails. So the U.S. Forest Service routes them up rough, narrow logging roads with poor signage until a trailhead unexpectedly appears somewhere between 5,500 and 6,000 feet elevation. Dad and Tom seemed to dread these drives, and toward the end I could tell they wished we had just parked on the pavement and walked up the road. I thought Ch-paa-qn was a safe bet because it seemed like a popular hike, but I am learning that Montanans do not care where they drive their cars. (Note: Utahns do. The state is full of SUVs that have never been off pavement.) For six painful miles we inched up a road that became increasingly rockier and narrower. I'm pretty sure we never broke the 5 mph barrier. In the back seat, I developed serious carsickness and thought frequently about asking if I could just get out and run the rest of the way to the trailhead, but I kept my mouth shut. For five of those miles, I was convinced that there was no way we were on the right road, and we were going to come to a dead end and I was going to be in big trouble. But amazingly, the road arrived at a trailhead with a brand-new-looking trail sign.

And then the trail itself was gorgeous, well-maintained, well-marked, with a fun scramble at the end and fantastic 360-degree views of everywhere from the south end of Flathead Lake to the Missions to the southern Bitteroots - a 100-mile spread. We saw three other groups hiking on the trail. Tom and Dad asked all of them about the road and they just shrugged it off. One of them had driven a white Saturn to the trailhead. Dad and Tom seemed to be more impressed with that feat than they were with the difficulty of the eight-mile, 3,000-foot-gain hike. As soon as we returned to the trailhead, and it was time to drive back down, Tom said, "Now comes the hard part."

Still, I tried, and I think for the most part they enjoyed the hikes and had a good weekend. And since the hiking itself was so easy, Dad had plenty of energy for an afternoon ride. We took out the Karate Monkey and my new fixie on gravel rail trails, and much fun ensued. I think next time my Dad comes to Missoula, I'm going to take him riding.

31

Today's my birthday.
It seems as I learn and grow,
There's less that I know.

Why

"There were times - especially on stages 3, 4 and 5 - where I was in the depths of a personal hell. Not exactly a pain cave, something different. I was desperately despondent and unhappy."

My friend, Jenn Roberts, wrote this phrase in her race report about TransRockies, which she and another friend, Sierra, completed in the Women's Division. I first met Jenn in June 2007, during the 24 Hours of Light, while I was trying to pound out as many laps as possible with a bad knee and almost no training, because I had been injured for the past four months. Needless to say, riding solo in a 24-hour race was an abysmally bad idea, and by the 1 a.m. "twilight lap" - my 12th - I was struggling mightily. Jenn was taking photographs at the base of the short, steep descent into camp. Since even 12 times around the block hadn't given me enough confidence to ride it, especially while I was being observed, I stepped off my bike and walked toward her.

"This lap is going to have to be my last," I said. "I don't want it to be, but my knee is locking up."

Jenn shook her head. "I don't know how you do it," she said.

"It's easy," I said. "You do one lap, and then you do another, and another. You just keep going until you can't."

"Well, I did one lap and that was enough for me," she said. Jenn was riding the race in with a team of eight women.

"You're not going to ride any more?" I asked.

"If they need me in the morning, I might," she said. "But I'm really more of a one-lap kind of person."

Jenn lives in Whitehorse, Yukon, and I only see her once or twice a year. So I don't know what her journey has been like during the past three years, but it landed her at once of the more difficult endurance mountain bike races in the world, TransRockies. Jenn was an inspiration to me during the past week, because every stage managed to throw out more and more challenges, and every night she was clearly at her limit of stress, fatigue and fear, but every morning, come rain, wind and bitter cold, she toed the starting line and started the suffer-fest anew. She went from a "one-lap kind of person" in 2007 to riding 400 kilometers and 39,000 vertical feet of muddy, rooty, rocky trails in TransRockies 2010. And in her transformative journey, I can't help but see reflections of my own.

I'm sure there were innumerable times during the week when Jenn asked herself the question, "What in the #$%& am I doing here?" It seems from her race report that even now, with the glow of finishing the race still fresh, she continues to wonder about that ever-present question - "Why?"

"Why?" Personally, I have never been all that interested in getting on a podium. I'm sure I would enjoy it were I ever to achieve it, but instead I continue to seek out races that are way over my head and glean satisfaction from simply surviving them. It would be logical for me to choose shorter, more surmountable goals, then work on my speed, work on my skills, perfect my strategy and finish knowing I did the very best I could do. But that whole approach seems so mechanical to me; not that there's anything wrong with it, but it's just not who I am. I view my cycling not as mechanics, but as art. I don't want an instruction manual. I want a blank canvas, as white and wide as the summer sky, that I can imprint with my joy and sorrow, and color with my blood, sweat and tears. Then, long after the race is over, and long after the race results have been relegated to the deepest regions of the Internet and the instruction manual has been rewritten, the experience is still permanently rendered in my heart with abstract shapes of knowledge and beauty.

"Why?" It's easy for me to say I race for fun, but I don't. Yes, I do think biking is fantastically fun. But if I was purely interested in fun, I would spend my holidays on fair-weather joy rides, taking in front-country scenery and sipping cold drinks on a beach. Instead, I take the hard way into the back-country, purposefully experiencing a wide range of discomfort along the way.

I could say I do this for my health, but battering my muscles and bones amid physical extremes, not sleeping and stuffing my craw with refined sugars isn't doing my body any favors.

I could say I race for personal challenge, but that's not entirely true either. Trying to build a bicycle or learning Spanish would be challenging for me, but I don't spend my time immersed in challenges that are actually useful. Instead, I go out and destroy bicycles, and grind my body into the dust, and cry out in pain and frustration and get back on the bicycle and do it again. I pay a lot of money to do this. I allot a large chunk of free time and vacation to this. All because of these beautiful works of art. These works only I can see. These works that I can never forget. And I cherish the hard moments, the moments of despondency and unhappiness. I cherish these moments because they're so intense and real, like bold, red brush strokes through a life of placid beige. And then, when the placid beige gets me down, as it sometimes does, I close my eyes and see the flickering green aurora that filled the sky the night I bonked on the Iditarod Trail ... the night I was so scared and weak that no movement before or since has been as difficult ... the night I was so overwhelmed and uncertain that I wasn't entirely sure I would live. And the green waves of northern lights were so bright that they still reflect warmth and joy in my heart, two and a half years later.

"Why?" I want to take the image of something impossible to me and make it real, make it possible, just for the sake of creation. In that, I feel a glimmer of what it's like to fully live.

And then I see others do the same, and it fills me with hope:

"It was hard - as I knew it would be - but what was hard about it wasn't what I expected. And I suppose that's a good thing. It's almost enough to make me want to try it again. Which is crazy."