2010 in photos, part 1

Each December I have a tradition of picking my 12 favorite photos of the year, one for each month, as a year-in-review exercise. This year was particularly difficult because 2010 has been such a dynamic year that simply picking pretty photos to summarize each month doesn't really achieve the reflection I'm looking for. So I'm doing a two-part series. Part one is simply my favorite photos of each month. This doesn't mean these photos are technically or aesthetically the best (as I begin to dabble with better equipment, I'm finally starting to understand just how limited my scratched-lens Olympus Stylus camera really was.) No, these photos are simply my favorite for various reasons. For part 2, I picked photos that I believe best represent the events of the month — the photos that capture my thoughts and impressions now that the year is done. Look for that post soon.

January, "Hell Storm:" A fierce winter gale whips a fury of snow near the wooden cross on Mount Roberts in Juneau. I like this photo because it reminds me of the incredible windstorms I often experienced during my mountain excursions in Southeast Alaska.

February, "Summer in February:" My friends mull whether to ascend West Peak again or drop over the cornice to the right while hiking on Juneau's Hawthorne Ridge during a warm 50-degree afternoon in late February. I like the snowshoe prints down the face of the peak, as well as the highlights on the snow that betray the balmy nature of the day despite the wintry landscape.

March, "My Back Yard:" My last residence in Juneau was perched near the shoreline of Fritz Cove, so this scene was literally the view from my back yard. I took this photo in the late morning just as the fog started to lift over Auke Bay, revealing this floating dock and the tip of an island ridge.

April, "Moving North:" While driving from Skagway to Anchorage, I made a spontaneous stop to hike Gunsight Mountain. I took this photo from a saddle below the peak, overlooking the Chugach Mountains and a frozen river to the south.

May, "Bold Ptarmigan:" My stay in Southcentral Alaska was brief but rich with experiences. By May I was already grappling with the prospect of moving away from Alaska and often went on long solo excursions to process my thoughts. I took this photo of a curious ptarmigan on Bold Ridge near Eklutna Lake during a long afternoon of mountain biking and ridge hiking.

June, "Cordova:" I took this photo of a stream near the Copper River during a solo bike trip to Cordova. I like the textures in this photo as well as the dramatic sky (in fact, most of these photos I picked for the skies.)

July, "St. Mary Fire Lookout:" Evening descends over St. Mary Peak during a quick after-work hike with Dave. This photo represents everything I loved about my early days in Montana: the truly big skies, dry trails, rich light and warm summer nights.

August, "TransRockies:" Keith rolls over the Continental Divide, crossing from British Columbia into Alberta during stage three of the 2010 TransRockies bicycle race. Again, fun mixture of shadows and light on the alpine tundra, in a truly incredible place to ride a bicycle.

September, "Glacier Traverse:" Danni is dwarfed by the Rocky Mountains in Glacier National Park during a huge 25-mile, 12,600-feet-of-climbing, cross-country traverse of a ridge in the southeastern corner of the park. This hike with my Kalispell friends (Danni, Dave and Brad) ranks as one of my top five favorite excursions of the year, with the 50 miles of the Bear 100, bike trip to Cordova, 140-mile Denali Highway Classic and White Mountains 100.

October, "The Last Day of Summer:" Beat descends Lolo Peak into a blaze of autumn-gold larch trees on an unseasonably warm day in early October.

November, "Golden Hour in Frog Hollow:" One of the best things about participating in a 25-hour race is that you get to see the dynamic ways light and shadows change the landscape over the course of a day. This is the sunset lap during the 25 Hours in Frog Hollow, near Hurricane, Utah.

December, "Dressed in White:" Beat hikes down the frost-coated University Mountain during an afternoon run. Missoula, like Alaska, doesn't see all that much sunlight in the winter, so any rare appearance of the sun has a tendency to bring on a blissful sort of outdoor mania.

Home for Christmas

The last time I spent Christmas with my family was 2004. Six years ago. Distance in Alaska and jobs in the newspaper industry created an insurmountable barrier to traveling home for the holidays ever since, so I was extra excited for the opportunity to head back to Utah for a long weekend this year — even though it meant coaxing Geo on yet another thousand-mile I-15 trip through intermittent whiteouts and nearly getting stranded on an onramp near the Continental Divide during my late-night trip south.

A lot has changed in my life in six years. But as it turns out, nothing has changed about Christmas. My large extended family still gathers in the primary room of an LDS church to eat Fourth-of-July picnic food (fried chicken, potato salad and ice cream), play silly games and sing off-key. My immediate family still exchanges the same gifts (Old Spice and Twizzlers for my dad, "normal" (non-outdoor) clothing for me), eats individual game hens for dinner even though no one, not even me, can finish one, and pops "A Christmas Story" in the DVD player even if it's already after midnight because all of the other Christmas Eve activities took so long. Ah, tradition.

This year I also conned Beat into flying into Utah for the holiday by telling him the running was great in Salt Lake County. Actually, he seemed genuinely excited to meet my family, and the meeting went well. We did get out for a couple runs in the Corner Canyon area even though family visits dominated the weekend by a large margin. The weather was warm and dry although foggy on Christmas Eve. We ran for three hours only to have clouds cut us off from the viewpoints on the south side of the Lone Peak ridgeline.

Christmas Day I only had an hour to spare for a run before heading to Ogden for more family stuff. It only seemed fair to give Beat a break or at least spare him from full submersion into my very large Mormon family right out of the gate, so he planned a longer run with snowshoeing in the higher elevations. Temperatures were in the low 40s with full sunshine. We ran fast up the dry trails, soaking in the most summer-like weather I have felt since September. After a half hour Beat continued up the Ghost Falls loop and I turned around, dropping to the Bonneville Shoreline Trail so I could run a wee bit longer in the full-sun exposure of the open mountainside. My legs moved with rare fluidity down the hard-packed singletrack. I was dripping sweat and completely blissed out. I wouldn't have minded having eight hours to spend in that perfect space, moving with purpose among the dirt and snow and sunlight. But I was happy to have a chance to see my fam before returning to the great white northland.

Beat continued up to 8,000 feet through heavy breakable crust (should have warned him about that south-facing slope) but for his hard efforts he did get to enjoy all the views of the Wasatch Mountains and Utah Valley that we missed on Friday.

Beat and I drove together back to Missoula, and the first thing we did after stumbling in from yet another 10-hour stomach-clenching Geo epic was put his Fatback together. It's a truly beautiful bike — aluminum with a nickel finish, fat carbon fork, Speedway rims, one Larry and one Endomorph tire, and pogies from Dogwood Designs. I can't help but be filled with envy even though this bike currently lives with me. We're planning to take Pugsley and the Fatback on a night ride tonight, and I'm filled with excitement. One great thing about diversifying my outdoor activities is that the cycling excursions have become truly special, almost indulgent. Yeah for bikes.

P.S. Beat wrote a sweet commentary about my first 50K on his blog. Link here.

The picture just keeps getting bigger

(Photo from my lunch run on Tuesday, during the only spare 90 minutes I could find to get outside so far this week.)

“You’re leaving again Wednesday?” an acquaintance asked in an incredulous tone.

“I’m driving to Utah to spend Christmas with my family,” I said. “I haven’t been home for Christmas since 2004.”

“Didn’t you just get back from California?”

“On Monday afternoon,” I said. “I went to San Francisco to run in a race, and to see my boyfriend.”

She gave me the same raised-eyebrow stare that I’ve seen frequently lately. I got it from co-workers when I told them I had to make an early exit from the office Christmas party — the one I helped plan — so I could grab a little sleep before it was time to fly to California to run 50 kilometers in a trail race. I got it from members of the local bike club during my Tour Divide talk, when a friend in the audience forced me to admit I was training to run a winter 100-mile ultramarathon in Alaska. I got it from casual friends when I told them I would have to miss a weekend gathering because I was flying to Seattle — why Seattle? Well, because it’s … there. It was too difficult to explain that we wanted to check out trails in the surrounding area, and visit friends, and also chose Seattle because it’s a simpler destination for Beat than Missoula.

Much of it is difficult to explain. I’ve boarded a lot of planes in the past three months. I’ve limped around with various running injuries. My weeks are all but full with packing, unpacking, working, cleaning, errands, shoving whatever random food is on hand in my mouth, and — less frequently than I’d prefer — getting outside for exercise, usually running. My bikes hang from my wall rack like limp rags, gathering dust. An editor gave my Divide book a full read and recently returned it with all kinds of valuable criticism and suggestions, but I can’t fathom where I’ll find the time to return to that project. Even my blog, my last refuge, looks neglected these days. There’s a brand new Fatback in my front room that I haven’t even bothered to put together yet. That last sentence makes the least sense of all. But I can’t help it. Life is happening much to fast.

But how can I explain it succinctly? Yes, I am dating a man who lives 1,100 miles away. Yes, our relationship is quite serious. And yes, it’s complicated. Serendipity and the staggering reach of modern life brought us together despite incalculable odds. Really, what were the chances of us meeting — a Swiss ultrarunner from California and a new-to-Montana cyclist, neither of whom were looking to get into a relationship at the time?

Neither of us took it seriously until suddenly we did. I think the potential hit us both at the same time, in mid-September, about a week before our first official “date.” Beat was running a six-day, 200-mile epic in Italy called the Tor des Geants, and I was in Montana, obsessively refreshing the race update Web site. We were completely out of contact for the first time since we met at the Swan Crest 100 in July, and that step back gave us both a lot of time to consider how we felt about each other. When we converged in northern Utah to run the last half of the Bear 100 together, all of those thoughts and emotions were perfectly aligned, although neither of us knew that about the other quite yet.

We still laugh about the moment we figured it out, as we jogged along a high mountain ridge as the moon cast rich blue light across the grassy slope. After hours of regaling me with stories about the Tor des Geants and the structure of quantum physics, Beat handed me the rock he carried for me a the TDG and finally asked, “Are you interested in going out?”

“Sure, that would be great,” I said in a deeply fatigued monotone that struck Beat as humorous. “But, um, the Montana-California thing is a little complicated.”

“It’s a minor complication,” Beat said, and we let the words soak in amid the stark mountain silence.

And it is just a minor complication. How to you place value on a relationship with a person who, less than one week after a 200-mile soul-crushing race, flies halfway around the world to a remote outpost in northern Utah to run another 100 miles, just to meet up with you? And then, when you crack 40 miles in to your own 50-mile run, gives up finishing well in his own just to help you hobble to the finish? How do you quantify a person’s willingness to fly out to far-away Montana nearly every weekend just to spend time with you, and put in long hours during the workweek so he can afford it. How do you express appreciation for a person who not only shares your passions for the outdoors, but who relishes in big challenges and distances, with emotional and intellectual goals that align perfectly with yours. And it’s not just about short-term adventures and long-term goals — this person is funny and sexy and smart and has enough fantastic ideas and outlandish ambitions to fill a couple lifetimes. How do you not fight for that with every ounce of energy, every resource you have?

So my lifestyle is a bit complicated right now. And there probably will be more plane trips, more packing, more running. For Beat and I, the little annoyances, the details of it all, are already fading into the bigger picture — drawing widening circles around that moment of perfect serendipity, in ink.