Riding to snow

"22 degrees!" Bill called out, as though a temperature rise of 1 degree was the best news of the night. His headlight beam cast a streaming glow on the whitewashed forest, starkly framed against the black sky. Trees wore new snow like children in oversized dresses, bewildered by the heavy formality of winter. I clenched my numb fingers inside my mittens and pressed my palms against the handlebars. A fountain of fine powder streamed from Bill's rear wheel. I shifted my shoulders in an attempt to follow his line. Once powder is six inches deep or more, you don't so much ride a bike as surf with it, feathering the handlebars and gently shifting your weight as the wheels slice through the swift current. The rear wheel was swept sideways and my mountain bike fishtailed wildly through the snow. I pressed the brakes and righted it, then veered away from Bill, who was fishtailing himself. I blinked against the weight of ice frozen to my eyelashes. City lights sparkled in a distance far below.

"What are you doing tonight?" Bill wrote to me eight hours earlier.

"I brought my mountain bike to work, so probably a bike ride," I wrote back.

"Where to?" he asked.

"I don't know. I kind of want to ride to the snow."

Snow had fallen in the mountains just outside Missoula over the weekend. It was the first significant snow cover of the year, and snow line looked like it was up around 5,500 feet. I was trying to think of how I could access it the fastest when Bill sent me a list of possibilities. And for some strange reason, I read through them and picked the destination that was both the longest and highest of all.

Bill met me at my office at 5:20. Our pace was too fast right off the bat. Whenever I feel cruddy while riding with others, I'm never sure if they're pushing it more than we usually do together, or if I'm just having a bad day. Either way, my heart rate was severely elevated and I was breathing hard enough I had to deliberately enunciate each word in response to Bill's questions. We veered up Grant Creek canyon and my responses nearly trickled out altogether.

The larch trees were in the peak of fall splendor - golden towers tinted with scarlet light at sunset. My throat started to burn from breathing excessive quantities of cool air. Bill let up on his pace a bit when I stopped chasing him. More than an hour and 15 miles had passed and we still hadn't reached the base of Snowbowl. My mind still hadn't registered that this was likely going to turn into a long ride.

But it was one of those evenings where time didn't really matter. The crisp air, the color, the sunlight - it was all so idyllic that nothing else really mattered. The pressures of our day-to-day lives and our routines and our obligations didn't matter. Even the fact that my body was feeling cruddy and I was perhaps riding too hard didn't matter.

Bill and I rode toward the alpenglow and the one thing that did matter in that moment - the mountains with their inaugural snowfall, and the white silent world we were seeking.

We climbed and climbed. The dirt road turned to mud, and then frozen mud, and then ice. The first dusting of snow came into the beam of our headlamps. Then the snow grew deeper, the forest more saturated, until we found ourselves in a frozen world entirely different from the city's bright autumn hues. Bill watched his thermometer and announced the status of the rapidly plummeting temperature. "28 degrees ... 27 ... 26." Because I had come straight from work, and didn't anticipate riding in temperatures lower than the mid- to high-30s when I left in the morning, I didn't have all the gear I normally would for temperatures in the 20s. I was a bit underdressed, especially on my feet, so I occasionally jumped off the bike to run beside it. I ran until my throat burned, then jumped back on until my toes tingled. When I became too exhausted to run, I just walked, but by then the snow was so thick that I could easily keep up with Bill, even as he pedaled and I pushed.

The snow started to become too deep to ride at all. Our wildly ambitious destination, Point 6, still loomed 1,000 feet above us. It was late. We were both cold, shedding heat and dreading the descent as it was. We pulled off at the top of Snowbowl - the ski resort we had been riding the perimeter of - and pushed toward an A-frame on the tenuous hope that the door would be unlocked. It was. We ducked inside and put on our remaining layers. It was time to stop seeking the snow, and start facing it.

Before we left, Bill pulled out his special surprise - curry lentil soup in a thermos. It was halfway cold - a result of a ride that ended up being much colder and longer than planned. Bill's thermometer read 21 degrees. There was more frost than snow on the windblown building. I sucked at my Camelbak hose, but it had long since frozen solid. "Let's do this thing," I said.

We surfed the steep downhill powder and picked up speed in a single truck track pressed into the road. The wind hit my face like sharp ice so I pulled up my face mask, which quickly started to fill with ice. 21 degrees with a 20 mph windchill equals a stinging slap of reality this early in the season. Eventually bodies acclimate and winter gear is figured out all over again and the biting edge of winter finally dulls. But right at the beginning, the cold is as sharp and forceful as a razor blade, and Bill and I cried out with equal amounts of exhilaration and pain, right at that center point where bodies feel the entire scope of what it is to be alive.

More strategic running got us back to town with hands, torsos and feet that had reached a workable equilibrium. I felt more tired than I had after a post-work ride in a long time, so I asked Bill what the numbers were. 45 miles. 4,524 feet of climbing. Max elevation 6,933 feet. Time 5:35. Moving time 4:51. But GPS knew nothing of the high-friction snow, of the battles with the cold, of the silence and beauty and peace. That's because GPS isn't alive, and we are, which is why we seek these high places, steeped in the wonder of life.

California streaming

I'm consistently amazed by the almost metaphysical transition of a mundane plane ride. There's something strangely enticing about entering a small metal cylinder that essentially serves as a sensory deprivation chamber, sipping a tiny cup of Diet Coke and reading a guilty pleasure magazine like Outside while the world disappears below me, and emerging hours later in another place entirely. Car and bicycle travel just doesn't have the same sudden impact. I find myself stepping out of the airport and grappling to take in the rush of new sensations — the warm moist air, the rich urban smells, the city lights stretching over the horizon. I'm in awe. How did I get here?

I flew out to California this weekend to visit Beat. I landed in San Jose, which is not really the kind of city I ever envisioned as a destination, but that's just part of the surprising way life works out sometimes. Beat took me to see his place of employment, which is the world headquarters of Google. I work at the world headquarters of Adventure Cycling — about two dozen employees housed in a former Christian Science church with historic bicycles mounted on the walls. Google is a jaw-dropping contrast to that — a vast manicured campus where many thousands of employees from all over the world zip around on tiny primary-color bicycles, eat frozen yogurt from on-site soft-serve machines and gather in sprawling cafeterias. The weather was California perfect when we visited. The lawns were too green to be real. There were outdoor tables made out of cruiser bikes and 12-foot-tall statues of donuts. I stumbled as I tried to take it all in. How did I get here?

Before all that, we traveled to Yosemite National Park. Our planned early start Saturday morning turned into a very late start, and it was well into Saturday afternoon by the time we wended through the Sierra foothills into the fog-shrouded Yosemite Valley. We didn't really have a plan for what we would do when we got there, but we did have a campsite reserved near the Yosemite Village. We followed a stream of cars into a parking lot and fought wandering crowds of people to find the visitor center. We looked at maps but didn't find any solid ideas. The weather was dreary. I found myself feeling more and more distressed. I was crammed into a crowded national park without a plan. How did I get here?

Beat sensed my distress and was also uncomfortable with the atmosphere of Yosemite — although necessary, national park infrastructure just feels so contrived. Gift stores amid towering cliffs are a part of my culture, and well ingrained in my childhood recollections — but that doesn't change the scar they seem to carve into places so beautiful they defy memory. We walked into the wilderness office and requested a backcountry permit. They made us pick a region so we arbitrarily pointed out the John Muir Trail on the map. We returned to the car and organized our gear. I stuffed the backpack that has long since become mainly airport luggage with everything I hoped would make us comfortable — my minus-40-degree sleeping bag, tent, pad, tons of warm and dry clothing, food, lights, water. Beat's pack had even more weight, with a bear-proof food canister and stove. We hoisted our packs and he immediately breathed out a few words of distress.

Try to convince an ultrarunner that backpacking is a good idea, when they know that they can just leave the crap at home, run all through the night and cover 10 times the distance as a waddling backpacker. It's not easy. "We're not going hiking, we're going camping," I reasoned as we passed the overstuffed campground where we had planned to spend the night. The rain started just as we began to make our way up the smooth paved trail. The weight of my pack pressed down like an oppressive hand. Hoards of people returning from their day hikes regarded us with a mixture of pity and derision. "Where are you guys going this late in the day?" "You do realize it's going to rain tonight." "What will you do about bears?" We were happy to see the pavement end.

We climbed into the fog and growing twilight. Darkness descended, and beams of light from our headlamps revealed the swirling mist and thick, chunky precipitation that fell somewhere between rain and snow. After about four hours, we had walked about 11 miles and climbed 4,200 feet. Beat found this to be a pitiably small distance, but we agreed that since the point of the excursion was camping, it was a good time to camp. I set up my tent and unrolled my Arctic bag next to his 40-degree ultralight bag (I referred to them as Mama Marmot and Mini Marmot.) We hoped the combination of the two would somehow carry us through the wet cold night. The rain fell harder. We wandered down canyon until we found water, then fired up the stove to add moisture to a couple packets of freeze-dried food. We found the expired meals were too bitter to choke down very easily, so for dinner we ate a mixture of energy bars and Haribo candies. We forgot to bring tea or instant coffee, so for a hot drink I melted a Snickers Bar in a cup of water. We sipped the sweet drink with its soft boiled peanuts, savoring it like it was the best cappuccino from the fanciest cafe in all of San Francisco. There's something to be said about the virtue of camping — it does make all the simple things matter.

It rained all through the night. Sometimes it rained very hard, and sometimes so softly it almost sounded like snow. The temperature was in the mid-30s at best, and we had a very difficult time motivating to hoist ourselves out of the Arctic gear and into the damp morning. Any inclinations we had to press deeper into the wilderness disintegrated with the passing hours. We finally rousted in the late morning to deal with damp everything — damp tent, damp shoes, damp (more like drenched) packs, damp energy bars for breakfast. I rung out my shirt before stuffing it in my pack rather than endure the pain of putting it on my body. "Sorry I forgot to warn you how much camping sucks," I apologized to Beat. "Next time, I promise, we can run all through the night." He just laughed.

We waddled a few miles down the trail to an intersection for a high point called Cloud's Rest. We dropped the packs and the oppressive hand finally released its grip. We comparatively flew up the trail through a chilling curtain of wind-driven rain. Sometimes, the swirling clouds would shift just enough to reveal our spectacular surroundings — sheer granite walls and the shrouded monolith of the Half Dome. I'd never been to Yosemite before, and the slivers of clarity were a startling reminder of the grandeur that existed just beyond my own ghostly world. How did I get here?

We rose into the clouds and climbed onto the appropriately named peak, elevation 9,930 feet — about 3,000 feet higher than the point where we dropped our packs. Wind blew the rain sideways and we were both drenched through and frozen, with nothing to see beyond the thick gray mass surrounding us. "This is all worth it because we have the entire place to ourselves," Beat said, and I grinned because I agreed. I appreciate spectacular scenery and the adventure of the outdoors and am glad that plenty of other people do, too. At the same time, the experiences I value even more are the ones that pull me just a little bit farther, closer to the edges of the unknown, closer to the margins of my own personal boundaries, closer to others who not only feel the same way I do, but imagine the same things as we gaze into the invisible distance.

On the way back, we saw a benign-looking sign pointing out the junction of the Mist Trail, which we took mainly because it was 1.5 miles shorter than the trail we were on. The trail tumbled down a rock fall alongside a spectacularly sheer waterfall, swollen and streaked with brown hues from the runoff. The veil of water seemed to engulf us fully, until even the rain was little more than a memory from above. We worked our way down Nevada Falls and stood on the edge of Vernal Falls — both places only a couple of miles from the main trailhead, probably visited by hundreds of thousands of people every year, but in the cold October rain we were nearly the only people on the Mist Trail, lost in the mystical beauty of a world so far from our own.

In a way, it really doesn't matter where your wilderness exists. What matters is where it takes you, to those quiet and contemplative places where the deep past and distant future collide, and where two people with remarkably different environments and backgrounds can find startling quantities of common ground. My trip to California was short but provided me with a lot of insight into myself and my own values, what matters, and what I have yet to discover. When I look back on a weekend that passed through my life like a streaming cloud, I can only smile and reflect. How did I get here?

Differentiation

Beat's hunched figure cut a spooky silhouette against the city lights. With a mountain bike dangling from his shoulders, he emerged from the steep curve of the summit like a sea monster slowly rearing its long body from a sparkling ocean. I stood up and tried to stem the rising tide of guilt. It wouldn't wash away. Because what I had done is trick another person into carrying a mountain bike 2,000 feet straight up Mount Sentinel for me.

It made me look like a monster, but I swear it started so innocently. Beat and I did a trail run on Saturday that aggravated my probable case of plantar faciitis, and I was mildly gimpy. Conversely, I guided him on an after-dark mountain bike ride Friday night that was several notches above his comfort zone. So I suggested the Sunday moonlight hike up Sentinel. Beat argued that I should avoid the downhill running/hiking that seems to aggravate my foot injury the most, lest I draw out my slow recovery indefinitely, so he suggested I bring my mountain bike for the descent down the backside.

Most of the time, I consider myself to be a reasonable person. But sometimes I fail to connect simple strings of logic that end up resulting in wholly ridiculous situations. For instance: The direct trail up Mount Sentinel is exactly that - direct - and thus extremely steep. Carrying a mountain bike up sustained steep terrain is extremely strenuous compared to not carrying a bike - bikes are awkward, heavy, and press on one's body in the most uncomfortable ways. Therefore, carrying a bike up Mount Sentinel is extremely strenuous. And of course, I should have factored in the knowledge that Beat, being the chivalrous guy he is, probably wasn't going to let me do the work myself no matter how much I begged. But I didn't put any of this together. Instead, I showed up at the trailhead at 9 p.m. and directed him — like my own personal man-slave — up the first known human-powered mountain bike shuttle of Mount Sentinel.

Beat shuffled toward me with a glazed look in his eyes. His hat was askew and his emerging hair was drenched in sweat. He stood in silence for a few seconds until I said, "Um, this is the top. You can put that thing down now." By the time he set the bike on the ground, he was noticeably shivering. Cool October air swirled around us, 35 degrees and dropping. Beat was absolutely drenched in sweat. Before our "hike," I had pictured this romantic night picnic on the summit where we could gaze out over the golden lights of Missoula, share a package Haribo Fizzy Cola gummies and coast down the mountain together, runner and mountain biker side by side. Instead, we had to start down quickly to stave off hypothermia. There was no romantic midnight picnic to assuage my guilt, just the frigid downhill ride and the knowledge I did nothing to earn it.

"If you want to break up with me now, I completely understand," I said. He just shook his head and smiled, and we launched off the summit together.

It's an interesting problem to consider: When two parallel if distant paths suddenly curve toward each other and intersect, what is the outcome? Will they continue on their directional tangents toward parallel if distant futures? Will they merge into one distinct path? Will they continue to curve away and back toward each other, colliding and separating in an undulating ribbon? What determines each path's direction? How does a change in one path affect the other? Are they related at all, or are we simply deriving the appearance of patterns from the bewildering chaos of life?

"It's like a difficult math problem," Beat tells me. "For hours you stare at it. When the answer comes to you, it's like, 'a-ha.' You realize you understood all along."

I nod as I dredge the dimly lit cellar of my memory for insight. I haven't given serious consideration to any math problem since 11th-grade calculus. (I used to brag that I tested out of all of my required college courses and managed to get a bachelor of science degree without taking a single math or science class, until I realized that a limited education isn't really something to brag about.) Beat, on the other hand, has a PhD in physics, and a quiet confidence about him that makes it easy to believe that this complicated mash of variables — the established lives, the 1,100-mile distance, the reality of travel — really can be a simple thing to solve. So we agreed to forge a relationship, not because we know what the outcome will be, but because we're excited to explore the intrigue and beauty within our complex equation.

So Beat came out to Missoula to visit me over the weekend. He arrived early enough on Friday that there was plenty of time to embark on the night mountain bike rides I had been gushing about, so I equipped him with my Rocky Mountain Element and decade (or more)-old halogen light that Bill let me borrow because he disapproved of me tearing down dark and winding singletrack with only a small helmet-mounted headlamp. I guided Beat along the narrow corridor of Hellgate Canyon before veering up the meandering Deer Creek climb. We didn't say much during those first miles. I think Beat was a little nervous about the unknowns — the frosty weather I had warned him about, riding a strange and small mountain bike when he already has limited mountain biking experience, and riding in the dark Montana wilderness with woefully inadequate lights. I admit I was a little nervous about other unknowns — actively acknowledging the launch of a new relationship for the first time since I was in my early 20s — but I tried not to let it show.

As we approached Pattee Canyon, I realized that I had never guided a night ride up Mount Sentinel before, and actually had no idea how to get there. When Beat and I first started corresponding back in July, he asked me about the characteristics I don't like about myself. Near the top of that list is the way I can be startlingly inattentive to important details, despite having what I consider to be a decent memory. There were a number of dots in the climb that I couldn't quite connect. I guided Beat up a road that I thought was possibly the Crazy Canyon Road. The gravel was loose and steep and I quickly approached the entrance of my pain cave as I attempted to grind up it on my singlespeed. A whole bunch of quiet minutes passed before I looked up, saw the flashing red lights of the University Beacon, and said, "Oh, no, we don't want to go up here."

"Why?" Beat asked. "How much farther is it?"

"Pretty far. The Beacon's about 1,000 feet higher than Sentinel. It's a heinous grind of a climb. And I promise you the descent is way too gnarly for either of us. It's like a loose fall-line direct shot down the mountain. It's seriously unfun." (Note to Beat: Now that you've seen the front side of Sentinel, imagine what descending down that trail would be like. That's what the Beacon is like.)

So we turned around, skidded down the gravel road for the 1,000 feet we didn't need to gain, then veered into the confusing and convoluted network of ski trails in Pattee Canyon. (Note to cross-country skiers: Why the need to create such a tight maze of trails? Do you really enjoy being constantly lost in a few acres of forest, or am I the only one who can't find their way out of cross-country ski mazes?) Anyway, we burned up more than an hour between the Beacon detour and me being lost - and complaining about it. I started to fear that after we actually rode down The Gut in the darkness, Beat really was going to go home and bump up his flight back to San Francisco and never speak to me again. But he was an amazingly good sport, proving to me that not only can I be myself around him, but I can be the worst of myself around him.

That's another thing we're trying to reconcile - the fact that I'm an avid mountain biker and beginning runner, and he's an avid runner and beginning mountain biker. Since we're both excited about the other's passion, there's no conflict, but it is difficult at this point to mesh our abilities. Beat found himself well beyond his comfort zone during the switchbacking singletrack descent on Friday, so on Saturday I decided we should go to Blodgett Canyon for a trail run. I'd never been to Blodgett Canyon before. It was surprisingly spectacular: a little bit of Yosemite, Northern Rockies, and fall in Vermont, all wedged into a narrow corridor in this fairly remote corner of Montana. Because of my foot issues, we played it conservative, alternating running and walking. We traveled about six or seven miles up the canyon, to the edge of the wilderness area. We stopped often to gaze up at the mountain ridges and discuss the various ways we could access them (this is another way we fit together well. We both crave higher ground.)

Despite playing it conservatively, I was still slightly hobbled by the end. I admit I am a little frustrated right now with my inability to join Beat on a long trail run. I feel like my legs are up for it and my lungs are getting there, but unfortunately feet are important for that sort of thing. (And of course what I'm dealing with is an overuse injury, so I have nothing to blame but myself.)

On Sunday, we put outdoor passions aside and behaved almost like a normal couple might — going to lunch at an amusingly hip (for Montana) cafe, walking around downtown and commenting on the stuff in the shop windows, sharing ice cream cones at Big Dipper. The Indian summer has gone quite late this year, and the sun was hot and high, enough so that we could walk around outside in T-shirts, in mid-October. Beat, because he lives in California, wasn't nearly as impressed as I was by the weather, but it was a wholly beautiful day, rare in both its timing and perfection. A sunny Sunday afternoon.

Still, the pull of adventure is hard to resist, and by 8 p.m. we had hatched the convoluted Mount Sentinel shuttle. The theory sounded simple - him on foot and me on mountain bike, working in harmony. But the result was much more difficult if predictable - him doing all of the work for none of the fun (he argued that he had much more fun running The Gut than riding it, and while I believe him, I still agree that no one should have to carry a bike up Mount Sentinel for any reason, even as a punishing form of training, ever again.)

But I know that seeking the common derivative in our wildly fluctuating paths will be a beautiful journey in itself, and I look forward to it, complications and all.