Halloween

Recently, there haven't been nearly enough hours in the day to catch up on sleep, let alone the blog. There are entire essays I'd love to write about the swirl of activity and plans in the past few weeks, but for now a scattered photo post will have to suffice.

This weekend Beat came out to visit me in Montana. On Friday night we headed out for a "quick" mountain bike ride to try out brand-new super-high-beam headlights (possible review to come, if I have time, but not in this post.) Compared to my former usage of various combinations of low-end headlamps, these lights made night-riding seem as natural and easy as riding during the day, although they do remove some of the mystery and excitement of riding with limited visibility. It was one of those situations where we frittered away an entire evening and didn't even go out until after 10:30 at night. I said "OK, we'll ride 10 miles," which turned into the whole Kim Williams trail, which was passively extended to the Deer Creek Sneak, which the lead to necessary singletrack explorations on the Sam Braxton Trail, and before we knew it we had a two-and-a-half hour, ~25-mile ride ending at 1 a.m. This seems to be an early sign that Beat and I make a uniquely dangerous combination — alone, I usually talk myself out of my own unreasonable ideas. But when someone else comes along and adds a voice convincing enough to make these ideas appear reasonable, there's really nothing to stop the cycle of sleep deprivation, outlandish endeavors, and taking already overreaching steps just one step farther.

Anyway, that's why we overslept on Saturday and headed up to Kalispell later than hoped. My friend Dave recently moved to these northern climes, and we met up in the late morning with the express purpose of searching for snow. None of us thought we'd find much. I even left my snowboard at home, because I decided that I didn't want to ride it through bushes and rocks. We headed up to Big Mountain ski resort in Whitefish, and discovered a few fresh inches right at the base.

A couple thousand feet higher, there were dozens of inches of fresh heavy powder, and stunning views to go with it. Was I disappointed that I left my snowboard at home? A little, but the truth is I don't really care. I relish the climbing more anyway, and I actually really enjoy trying to run down 30-degree slopes of bottomless powder, possibly more than I enjoy carving clunky turns on my board. Last winter I was all about learning how to ski (with only limited success.) This winter I have more ambitious athletic goals, but I do plan to work toward becoming more avy-savvy, and also to continue to boost my beginner mountaineer skills by hiking/running snowy mountains.

It was a beautiful October day at Big Mountain, with intermittent fog and glaring sun, and lots of skiers, jump-building snowboarders and not a small number of snowshoers. It really warms my heart to see so many people out enjoying the early-season snow on snowshoes. When I was younger, cultural obsessions with gear and technical skills essentially drove me away from winter sports and all of the beauty and rewards outdoor winter travel has to offer. I fall into a rare group that really just wants to be outside, without the pressure of shredding mad pow with truck-fulls of shiny expensive gear. Snowshoes open up a much wider world to people with limited skills and resources. Of course, you can argue that winter cycling is just as, if not more, gear-intensive as skiing. That may be true, but I think we all find our niche, and I'm no longer ashamed to face the all-encompassing ski culture that surrounds me and declare my love of snowshoeing, even as nearly all of my friends complain that it's boring and slow.

Beat had also never tried snowshoeing before ... or really any winter sport to much extent. (Beat: "I grew up in Switzerland and never skied." Me: "I grew up in Utah and never skied!" Aw, so much in common.) He found snowshoeing to be marginally fun when marching up steep inclines through knee-deep powder off trail, but not tolerable on the boot-packed trail. He eventually took them off and ran full-speed downhill, carrying the snowshoes like lunch trays in both hands.

Dave, on the other had, looked like he was having a fantastic time on skis. Here he is, apparently posing for a Patagonia ad circa 1992.

Here's my imaginary ad pose. Deuter backpacks: Go-to gear for the extreme snowshoer. (Oh yeah, I forgot that snowshoeing is supposed to be super lame. Oh well. The dangling fleece jacket would preclude use of this photo as a product placement anyway.)

There Dave goes again, ripping it up on skis, making the rest of us look bad.

The real reason for heading up north was Danni's annual Halloween extravaganza. At the bottom of my enormously overstuffed list of duties was finding a Halloween costume, and I hadn't completed it yet as of Friday night. While Dave and his wife, Meredith, came up with brilliant adaptations of characters from the Rollergirl movie "Whip It," I could only dig up a pair of mega-short shorts, cut up a T-shirt, pull on a couple of wrist sweatbands and call myself an "'80s jogger." I talked Beat into wearing his Google kit (Ha ha, I'm a runner and he's a cyclist, get it? No? Oh well.) Beat couldn't quite settle for that lame excuse for a couple's costume, so he donned a blaze orange cap and explained to everyone that he was a "Trail scout for Google Maps, trying to blend in with the Montana hunting community." Then, people would look inquisitively at me, waiting for my extensive story. "Um, I'm a jogger," I'd say, and then bend my elbows and knees in a jogging pose. They'd politely nod and look away, waiting for the conversation to return to Danni's "Sexy Ewok" costume.

Snow, costumes and candy. Could you really ask for a better holiday?

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?