Hey, it's the sun, and it makes me shine

Date: Nov. 4
Mileage: 42.8
November mileage: 122.3
Temperature upon departure: 37
Rainfall: 0.0"

Don't you hate the mornings that you wake up feeling a lot less than spectacular? Maybe you have this lingering dull pain in your mouth, and a headache too because you were up for several hours in the night worrying that you have a cavity. And your legs still burn from weightlifting two days ago and your caffeine's not kicking in and you know you have a heavy afternoon workload waiting for you at the office and you think some Chips Ahoy and a nap sounds about perfect. These mornings are even worse when they happen on the only 25-hour day of the year. But even without that extra hour weighing on your conscience, there's the weather forecast calling for "mostly cloudy with a 20 percent chance of showers" to consider. Letting any morning that promises to be not only long but dry pass by in bed is an unforgivable waste.

It was in this condition I slogged out on my mountain bike this morning, anticipating ice on the road and hoping to hit some trails if I could muster the motivation to pedal all the way out to the valley. I caught the tailwind north and slipped onto the Mendenhall trail system as soon as I could, winding through the neighborhoods and homeless camps atop frosty mounds of mud.

I crossed over to the glacier moraine and continued to ponder turning around. The mud was becoming softer, and anything that wasn't mud was an outright puddle. Splatters of wood chips, dead falls and other beaver carnage obstructed the trail. I practiced my moving dismount to jump the gnawed-off logs without stopping, until I finally splashed down into a huge stretch of beaver dam overflow. Piloting the mountain bike like a paddle boat through the hub-deep cold water, I nearly bogged down in the silt before I made it to shore. But I hammered hard up the last knoll and cleared the swamp without getting so much as a knee brace wet. I stopped on the edge of Dredge Lake to stomp out the water in my booties and soak in the satisfaction of my small victory. It was there I first noticed the sky shining through a patchwork of thinning clouds, backlit by a hidden sun and bursting with rays that nearly reached the ground. The world was suddenly infused with shadows, and light, and slivers of warmth. It felt like newfound energy, and renewal, and, come to think of it, the aftermath of a pretty fun cyclocross-type obstacle course, which definitely demanded to be re-ridden, only faster.

Funny how some mornings start out with head/muscle/toothache grumpiness, and end with a 40-mile mountain bike ride. Don't you love mornings like that?

Looks like November

Date: Nov. 3
Mileage: 12.1
November mileage: 79.5
Temperature upon departure: 38
Rainfall: .10"

Perseverance Trail, again. I could ride this trail every day of the week, and nearly have this week. I usually avoided this trail in the summer because of the crowds. Hikers on Perseverance tend to be out to lunch - some literally were out to lunch, as in state workers on their midday break; and others simply could not or would not acknowledge me when I screamed "On your left! On your left!" as they staggered up the wide trail.

But as summer disappears, so do the crowds. I do not know where they go. This has always been a great mystery to me. Where do people go in the winter? The town's population doesn't change much. I still see garbage trucks picking up trash and baristas serving oceans of coffee. But everything else - the trails, the bike paths, the beaches, the back roads - seem to go into some kind of stasis. I wonder in passing where the people go. But frankly, I do not care. It means more room for me, and I am greedy greedy greedy when it comes to space. A trail doesn't have to be great for it to be my favorite trail - it just has to be scenic and deserted.

As I become more and more anxious for winter conditions, I wonder if it's really winter I like so much, or just the fleeting luxury of solitude? It must be a little of both, because there's something about following a light dusting of snow up the most popular trail in Juneau to its quiet and peaceful conclusion that's just so ... satisfying.

Good faith effort

Date: Nov. 2
Mileage: 54.2
November mileage: 67.4
Temperature upon departure: 39
Rainfall: .64"

I got a flat tire about six miles from home today. No huge surprise there - Juneau roads are after all approximately 19.76 percent glass. I've had so many flats, in fact, that I started carrying this huge but supposedly efficient bike pump that I never bother to carry, because it weighs approximately 19.76 pounds. Problem is, I never actually tested this pump, nor had I tried to use it. Today was the test run, and I failed miserably.

After about 20 minutes of fidgeting and taking the thing apart, when my fingers became sufficiently numb, I decided that even if this was a working pump, I was not going to figure out how to use it. Across the street were a gas station and the Western Auto Marine store. But I had no Schrader conversion piece for my Presta valves. And no money. Not a cent. I had somehow managed to leave the house with 19.76 articles of spare clothing and no cash.

I clopped in my bikes shoes over to the store, a treacherous journey with those silly LOOK bindings sliding all over the wet pavement, on the off chance that a store called Western Auto Marine sold bike pumps, and that some sympathetic employee might agree to barter my MP3 player for a $15 floor pump. They did sell pumps. Well .. the did sell "a" pump. It looked like it had been sitting there since 1976, seemed to be made of cast iron, and only fit Schrader valves. I felt so lost. There I was, standing in the middle of a store in the middle of town, completely stranded.

I didn't have the courage to ask anyone for so much as a quarter to make a phone call, because I found my situation to be sufficiently humiliating. I could hardly walk even a few steps in my bike shoes, so I grabbed a couple of real estate guides and stuffed them in the bottom of my neoprene booties. Then I put on my extra pair of socks, wedged my feet in, and resigned myself to a six-mile walk home in my sock feet.

Luckily, I live in a small city in Alaska. I hadn't even walked a full block when a crab fisherman named James stopped his truck and asked me if I needed a ride. He took me all the way home. Even though I had wasted more than an hour in the ordeal, I still had enough daylight to (mostly) salvage the ride.

Sufficiently humbled, I grabbed my old pump, an extra spare tube for good measure, and stuffed my pockets full of cash and a credit card (even though I had already decided to ride on North Douglas Island, which has no stores.)

The one blessing of that whole disaster is that it pushed my ride all the way back to sunset. I rode past the glacier beneath the heavily filtered waning light of the afternoon, cast in electric blue hues and framed in gray. I made a U-turn at the dead end and rode up to Eaglecrest, which was absolutely inundated by a downpour of sleet and snow that hadn't quite reached the point of accumulation yet. I felt like I had landed in the midst of an Arctic blast, with sleet so heavy that it actually stung my skin through my coat and stabbed my eyes. I turned around, descended through the rush of Arctic wind and rain that can only be described as cold shock, and returned to the relative calm of sea level. A yawn of blue sky had opened up over the channel, and streams of light from setting sun peeked through just long enough to cast a small rainbow beside the glacier. A fitting end to a strange afternoon.