Chasing the rain

After three months of living in California, one thing I hadn't yet witnessed was a change in the weather. Oh, most Californians still talk about weather. Their senses are so refined that they can detect the difference between 68 degrees and sunny and 72 degrees and partly cloudy. They tell me this has been, similar to much of western North America, the coldest spring in a long time. There was that one day I rode the Fatback to the top of Black Mountain in a cold, windy downpour (March.) And then, mere days after we flew home from Alaska, the temperature nearly hit 90 degrees (also March.) And then there was that 50-degree evening in late May when I complacently climbed a mountain on my road bike without any warm clothing and suffered the worst chill I've experienced since February in Alaska. But for the most part, I'm almost starting to forget what it's like to be uncomfortable outside.

I admit that sometimes I miss the rain. After four years in Southeast Alaska, my memory still clings to those gray months when every single pair of shoes I owned would be propped up against the wall in line for the shoe dryer, every single jacket hung on doors and dripping gritty water on the floor, every single bike ride an exercise in blinking away sharp raindrops while slowly accumulating water weight through many layers of sopping clothing. It's not that I really want to go back to that kind of saturated, honestly dreary lifestyle. But back in those days of extreme weather changeability, there was true, ecstatic magic in every sunny day. Sometimes I feel like coastal California is the weather equivalent of eating lobster every day. Sure, the California suns casts remarkably brilliant light. But will it eventually stop tasting so sweet?

On Tuesday, it was sunny in the valley, but when I looked toward the mountains, I saw a thick crown of clouds streaked with rain. While I lived in Juneau, I often went to the mountains to escape the fog-shrouded channel in search of sun. Interestingly, now, I feel a strong desire to seek out the rain. I drove to the Saratoga Gap trailhead, where a steady stream of precipitation was soaking the parking lot. I pulled on my arm warmers, jacket and hat. Through the cold wind, I practically sprinted toward the singletrack, lost in a rush of anticipation and memories. Raindrops slipped through the thick canopy and hit the trail with a jazzy sort of rhythm. Bright green moss glistened with moisture and curtains of silver clouds draped the mountainside. Wet brush and grass instantly soaked my pants and shoes, but I felt more energetic than I had in a week. I bounded down the trail as far as I could muster and still make it back in time to celebrate Beat's birthday — about three and a half miles — and ran back as the clouds rolled west and the first hints of sunshine reached the ridgeline.

Recently, there's been a mass exodus of my friends from Juneau. Last weekend, as another one packed up to leave on a beautiful warm summer day in Southeast Alaska, he questioned his sanity in an online update. Our mutual friend Will replied, "No one leaves Juneau for good; it's like your prom date, or the car you learned to drive in — nostalgia brings em back."

It was cold and cloudy again on Wednesday. Beat and I went for an evening mountain bike ride on the Black Mountain/Stevens Creek Canyon loop. The sun came out, only once, for a gorgeous mock sunset right at the top of the climb. Stevens Creek Canyon is a fantastic ride. It starts from home, in the suburbs of San Jose — the third largest city in California. We ride amid thick rush-hour traffic beside Interstate 280 and veer into the road cycling haven along Stevens Creek Reservoir. We climb up Monte Bello amid gurgling creeks, idyllic wineries and wide-ranging views of the San Francisco Bay. Atop Black Mountain, the views open up to the green ridges of the Santa Cruz Mountains and the shimmering Pacific Ocean in the distance. Coyotes, deer, rabbits and crazy suicidal squirrels dart across the grassy fields as we veer onto singletrack and descend the dusty, swooping trail into Stevens Creek Canyon. The canyon itself is a different world, lush and shrouded with towering redwoods. The trail rejoins the road in a strange, rural-Montana-like residential area with rustic buildings halfway hidden in the trees. Then it's back to Cupertino, upscale apartments and children playing soccer in the park. It's like a tour of four distinctly different environments, in 26 miles.

But the rain never did make an appearance. It was just as well. Beat and I were looking for something to do this weekend before we head down to San Diego so he can run the San Diego 100. Beat is for some reason philosophically against tapering, so he suggested entering the Canyon Meadow 50K as a training run for me and easy "taper" run for him. It has also become a joke between us that I need to enter as many Coastal Trail Run events as I can because I have a title to uphold. Thanks to the fluke of winning two smaller CTR races due to a dearth of competition, I'm actually leading the women's 50K group in the Trail Blazer Awards. "Now you have to defend it," Beat said. I just laughed because there are already about a dozen other women registered for that race. It's extremely unlikely my inexperienced beginner/strategic-100-miler pace can win me another 50K. But then I asked Beat what the weather was going to be like.

"Hmmm, 61 degrees in Oakland," he said. "90 percent chance of rain."

A smile spread across my face. "Let's do it."

On Thursday, we went for a one-hour taper run. The sky was almost clear again, and the evening light so rich that the landscape glowed in iridescent colors. Beat joked about sore legs but then motored up the steep incline as I gasped and dug deeper to keep up with him. We stopped at the top for a brief, sweat-drenched kiss and watched the pink light wash over San Jose. Sometimes I think I miss the rain, but then I remember why I came here.

Be Brave, Be Strong eBook release

Note: Thanks to everyone who bought eBook and paperback copies of "Ghost Trails." It's now officially past June 1, the day I was hoping to release of my new book. Thanks to last-minute proofing and printing needs, it will be a couple more weeks before the paperback is available. But the digital eBook of "Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide" is available now for $8.95. You can purchase it in many different formats from this Smashwords link: ePub works best for iPads, iPhones, the Kobo eReader and the Barnes and Noble Nook; LRF for Sony Reader; PDB for palm devices; and RTF or plain text for reading directly on your computer screen. You can also purchase the Kindle file directly from Amazon at this link. A fully formatted eBook that includes black and white photos and a couple other extra features can be downloaded as a PDF file here.

For now, here's an excerpt from Chapter 15, "The Great Divide Basin"

A layer of frost coated my bicycle as I packed up my stale pastries and Spam and pedaled out of Atlantic City. A chill hung in the pre-dawn air, which was thick with frozen vapor. My right knee was still slightly swollen and stiff, and protested loudly after just a few strokes up the hill out of town.

“Lucky for you, the Basin’s pretty flat,” I said as I hopped off the saddle and started pushing. The gravel road cut steeply up the bluff, gaining 600 feet in just over a mile. Cold oxygen burned my lungs as I labored around the switchbacks, trying not to think about my knee or the remote miles that lay in front of me.

As I rounded the last switchback onto a plateau, my shoulders relaxed and my jaw dropped. The Great Divide Basin yawned over an unbroken horizon, as vast and open as an ocean. Rolling drainages rippled like waves, clusters of sagebrush appeared as islands, and tall grass shimmered like seawater as it swayed in the breeze. The warm light of sunrise saturated the surface in iridescent colors. Greens took on a florescent glow, browns became bronze, yellow turned to gold. I pulled out my camera to take a few photos, but understood the images would always be a disappointment. Such is the price of great beauty, because while eyes can see and cameras can mimic, only experience and presence can reflect the sublime.

Of all of the regions along the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, the Great Divide Basin has perhaps the most notorious reputation, at least among racers. Veterans speak of it in dismissive tones and warnings: “There’s no trees, there’s no water, there’s no people, and there’s nowhere to get food. There’s only wind and heat.” It was hard for me to believe that a lack of crowds could be a bad thing on a cold, calm morning, with a pack full of food and water, and the absence of trees to open up a spectacular view. It’s on these open plains where the true shape of the world becomes apparent, with its scoured surface and arching horizon. For all of its jagged contours and conventions, from a distance the globe is just that — plain and round.

I felt deeply drawn to the Basin for personal reasons as well. My family on my Dad’s side comes from a long line of Mormon pioneers, hearty stock who immigrated to Utah in the 1850s after traveling through this region with a human-powered handcart company. The Great Divide Mountain Bike Route closely parallels the old Mormon Pioneer Trail, crossing historic sites where my ancestors and their families and friends toiled, struggled, and sometimes perished in a harsh, high desert that hasn’t changed all that much in 150 years.

Of course I had modern gravel roads to follow, the modern wonder that is a bicycle to propel me forward, and modern knowledge and technology to help guide me. But on some levels, my struggle was not entirely different from the struggles of my pioneer ancestors. Like many of them, I carried my whole life on a contraption that I had to move with my own power. I had to cope with similar isolation and uncertainty. I had to battle a primal sort of pain and fatigue that even 150 years of progress hasn’t stripped away. As I gazed out across the prairie, I liked to believe that I was seeing the same things that my great-great-and-so-forth grandparents saw, that I was feeling the same things they felt. Their blood pumped through my veins, their sacrifices inspired me, and their faith drove me forward.

As I pedaled into the rising daylight, a small group of antelope grazing next to the road became startled and sprinted beside me, loping through the brush with enviable grace. I passed the cutoff marker for Willie’s Handcart. Marjane had told me this was the site of a Mormon tragedy, where sixty-seven pioneers became trapped in a severe October snowstorm and died. I asked Marjane why they were traveling through Wyoming so late in the year. She told me the pioneers had difficulty with their handcarts. They had built their wheels in the humid east, and when they reached the west, the wooden hubs cracked and broke. The collapsed wheels and required repairs slowed them considerably until winter caught up to them. It was a quiet reminder of that precipice everybody straddles; that sometimes all it takes is one thing going wrong for entire lives to spiral out of control.

The first thirty miles of the day passed in dreams about the distant past, until the present was all but lost to me. Grass shimmered in the sun and breeze, antelope darted beside me, and my imagination didn’t have to stretch too far before it was 1854 again. I was still floating through the time machine in my mind when I started up a hill and my crank suddenly stopped working. The bike slowed to a stop. I spun the pedals frantically but the back wheel stayed planted in place until I nearly tipped over. I jumped off the bike. “What the hell?” I said out loud.

I lifted the back end off the ground and spun the crank with my hand. Even as I turned it as fast as I could, the rings did nothing to engage the wheel into motion. I checked to see if the chain was broken somewhere, but it was still intact and the rear cassette still turned with the cranks. I thought with sinking dread that the problem must be my freehub — one bicycle part I definitely did not have the capacity to fix.

A freehub is an internal part of the wheel hub that allows a cyclist to coast. When the cyclist spins the crank forward, the pawls inside the freehub engage and catch the hub, turning the wheel. Then, when a cyclist stops pedaling, the pawls release, which allows the wheel to spin free even if the crank and pedals are not moving. It seemed my freehub was stuck open, which caused the pawls to disengage even when the pedals were being turned. My bike was locked in “coast” mode, a mode that only works if you have gravity working for you. Without a working hub, my bicycle was as useless as a laundry cart.

“Crap! Crap! Crap!” I called out to the still air. I threw my bicycle onto the road and paced around. What were my options? It was a thirty-mile walk back to Atlantic City. Doable in a day, but what exactly could I do when I got there? I needed a new hub — and probably an entirely new wheel. As lucky as I had been in Atlantic City, expecting that town to contain an available 29-inch rear mountain bike wheel was pushing that luck more than a little. There was no way I could walk forward on the route. It was 110 miles to Rawlins with no towns or even houses along the way. I didn’t have enough food or water to make such a trek on foot, and hitching a ride forward on the route was a race-ending infraction, although I didn’t expect the temptation to arise because I doubted that much vehicular traffic ever ventured out this way.

I remembered from my Iditarod days a trick racers used when their freehubs froze in the extreme cold. They would zip-tie their cassettes to the spokes of the wheel, converting their drivetrain to a fixed gear and bypassing the need for a hub. But I had only heard about this repair in theory. I had never seen it in practice. I carried a few emergency zip-ties, but I only had about five of them. The expectation that five thin strips of plastic could handle all of the thrust and force of 110 miles of gravel-road pedaling seemed dubious at best. If I didn’t break the zip ties, I’d break the spokes, I felt certain. And if I broke the spokes, then my wheel would collapse, and I’d really be screwed.

Slightly off camber

Have you ever experienced a string of days that were just a little off-tilt? Call it getting up on the wrong side of the bed, for a weekend. A good weekend nonetheless, but, you know ...

Beat and I went out for a mountain bike ride on Friday evening. I have a favorite mountain bike loop from home, over Black Mountain and down Stevens Creek Canyon, that's 26 miles with 3,400 feet of climbing. I recently introduced Beat to this loop and he was excited to go back on Friday, but I just wasn't feeling it. I was weak, sluggish and struggling with the climb a lot more than normal. I self-prescribed "slight overtraining" and admitted I was glad I had a mellow weekend planned. My baby sister, Sara, was visiting from Huntington Beach, Calif., for Memorial Day. She's not what you'd call an outdoor type, so I figured our weekend activities wouldn't be all too active. But that didn't make the ten-mile climb any easier.

Finally at the top, Beat and I bundled up in several layers of warmers, hats and jackets as a cold wind blew along the ridge. We launched into the singletrack, and the rush of gravity and wind pumped new life into my tired legs. The feeling of well-being was extremely short-lived, however. I rounded the first curve at high speed and washed out both tires on the gravelly trail. I've rounded this same corner in this same way more than a dozen times, and it caught me so off guard that I didn't even put my arm out to catch myself. I just full-body slammed into a garden of small but pointy rocks and skidded several inches, slightly ripping my shorts as well as a decent amount of skin across my right leg. If I hadn't been wearing so many layers, I would have surely sustained more trail rash, but as it was, I was dust-covered and bleeding. Beat stopped just before the curve to find me staggering around in an effort to walk it off. When he asked what happened, all I could say was, "Crash ... hurts ... not hurt ... just impact ... hurts."

With an elbow, leg and confidence all badly bruised, I rode the brakes the rest of the way home.

My little sister is what you might call Bizarro Jill — on the outside, we share several common traits, but as far as personalities go we're the opposite in nearly every way. Sara is fashionable and outgoing, picky and a little high-strung. She dislikes seafood and actually most foods that I consider amazing. She also doesn't really like doing stuff outside, unless that stuff is shopping, going to the beach, or watching a concert.

I am on a constant if low-key crusade to get Sara hooked on cycling. Last spring I helped coerce her into buying a beach cruiser, which she sadly stopped riding after it got a flat tire. For her first visit to the South Bay area, I convinced her and her boyfriend to join me on a "mellow" bike path ride to Google headquarters and back, about 16 miles round trip. I set up Sara and Spencer on my and Beat's mountain bikes, and joined them on my fixie commuter. I adjusted the mountain bike's seat post for Sara but failed to shift the bike out of the gear it was in, which just happened to be the highest gear. See, when you ride a bike as much as I do, it stops occurring to you that functions like shifting and braking a bicycle aren't simply second nature to everyone. Sara's entire bike experiences basically amount to short rides on single-speed cruisers with coaster brakes. She mastered the mountain bike's brakes just fine, but she never shifted out of high gear.

Leading from the front, I didn't notice Sara mashing the pedals to get up the steeply inclined pedestrian bridges along Highway 85. About two miles from Google, she tweaked a muscle in her back, in a way that stopped her in her tracks. But Sara, being a Homer, only mentioned in passing that her back hurt and insisted she wanted to keep pedaling to Google. It wasn't until we were halfway up the viewpoint hill that I noticed Sara walking her bike, with a distinctly pain-stricken, arched-back chicken stride. I discovered the high-gear faux pas too late. She was in considerable pain. We called Beat for a rescue ride and Spencer and I raced the rain home — a hard effort that put him on the floor, too. Bad older sister, bad.

Luckily Sara's back injury didn't turn out to be too debilitating. Despite the stiff chicken walk, Sara still rallied for their planned trip to the city. Beat and I had a friend's wedding reception to attend in San Francisco. In my effort to purge belongings before I moved away from Alaska, I managed to unload nearly all of my formal clothing, and I don't own a single pair of stockings. (Somewhere in Utah, my mother is cringing right now.) I ended up wearing a business suit with a knee-length skirt, and below that was my lower-leg mountain bike trail rash in all of its scabbed glory. Beat said the wedding would be full of ultrarunners, so most of the guests would laugh it off, but I had to explain myself to more than a few commenters.

The wedding reception was held on a small "floating island" in San Francisco Bay called Forbes Island. It was a fun place and a beautiful reception, but I have a penchant for sea-sickness and Sunday was a particularly windy day in the harbor. I had a few moments early on where I was truly worried I might have to "feed the fishes" at my friends' wedding reception, but luckily a couple of glasses of ginger ale from the bar and a retreat to the lower deck set me straight.

On Monday, Sara and Spencer headed home. Beat and I joined Steve for a "short, mellow" run in the East Bay area that turned into 12 miles up to Mission Peak, along the ridge to Monument Peak, and back. I felt much better after a relatively restful weekend, but once we started downhill my leg bruises started to bother me with increasing sensitivity, and I mostly limped down.

It was still a great weekend if slightly off camber. I'm hoping I can right myself this coming week.

Also, in anticipation of the new book release in a couple weeks, I'm still offering copies of my first book, "Ghost Trails" at a discounted price. I have a few signed paperback copies available for $12.95.

The digital eBook for your Kindle, Nook, Sony Reader, smart phone or computer is available for the discounted price of $2.99 at this link.

Purchase the eBook direct from Amazon at this link.

Signed paperback copies of "Ghost Trails" are currently available for $12.95 plus shipping. Click the gold button for checkout.

Signed copy of "Ghost Trails"

I posted an excerpt from "Ghost Trails" below. This is all of Chapter 9, "Rainy Pass"