Ready to roll

So this is what my bike looks like loaded. I couldn't find a wonderful place for my sleeping pad so I finally just strapped it to the aero bars. Sleeping bag, spare tubes and clothing go in the seatpost bag. The bivy, batteries, headlight battery pack, med kit, pump, filter (if I decide to bring it) and food go in the frame bag. I hose-clamped a bottle holder underneath the frame so I have a place to carry a bottle. The rest of my water, tools and electronics go in a backpack. I've carried it with as much as nine liters of water inside. It's not too bad. The bike, on the other hand, is heavy.

But that's how it goes. I'm a tourist, not an ascetic. I haven't weighed the bike at all. These are things I'm best off not knowing. But I've made considerable improvement since my cross-country tour six years ago, when I carried a laptop and accessories that weighed close to 10 pounds by itself, along with a six-pound tent, a pillow(!), a full-sized Thermarest, three full changes of clothes and Tasty Bites (foil-packaged Indian dinners that we didn't really like and for some reason couldn't throw away, so we hauled a few most the way from Utah to New York.) Yes, I'm so much better now. At least I'm leaving the laptop behind.

I'm heading out Sunday for an overnight tour near the Uintas. I'll have my SPOT on but I'm not sure how interesting it will be. I don't feel comfortable mapping my own gravel route in the high country, so I may stick mostly to pavement. I may head out and back on some gravel if the conditions look good. I'm going to kind of wing it as I go. Sometimes, that's the most fun way to travel by bike. This is pretty much my last chance to dial in my gear in the field. After I get back, I'll talk about what comes next.

I had a great time visiting my friend Anna in Heber. She has a 1-year-old, Mia, who I've only recently met. Adorable, obviously. We met up at the Stewart Falls trailhead and I was surprised to see Anna's brother, Matt, in tow. Matt's with the Air Force and works all over the world - it was pretty random that he just happened to be visiting Utah during the same weekend I planned to visit Anna. It was fun to catch up with him. I went on a river trip with Anna's whole family four years ago and afterward felt tempted to ask Matt if I could run away with him to whatever exotic locale he was working at the time. He's married now. Too bad. :-)

After Stewart Falls, we hit the Dairy Keen for fresh raspberry shakes and then Cascade Springs. It was a pretty idyllic summer Saturday in Heber. I'm feeling a bit loathe to leave right now. But the solo bike tour awaits.

Road bike ride

The transition between the virtual world and the real one is strangely fluid. Since I left Alaska, I've had the opportunity to meet several people that before I only knew - or knew of - online. It's strange to look into the eyes of someone you've only seen pictures of, hear the voice of someone you've only seen text about, and really feel like you know them. I find myself listening to their stories and saying, "Yeah! I remember that!" Of course I don't remember that. I remember the blog post they wrote about that. The line between virtual and real is often more blurry than we're willing to admit, and I'm one of those people that's OK with that.

Today I met up with Elden and his friends for a road bike ride up the Alpine Loop. Since I don't have a road bike, Elden was nice enough to lend me one of his. He even gave me his geared Ibis road bike and rode his singlespeed so I'd feel more comfortable. But road bikes are still fidgety creatures. I feel weird balancing on 23mm of rubber and leaning over drop bars and only using two fingers to pump the brakes (I generally use more of a white-knuckle-full-fist braking approach.) All of Elden's friends turned out to be these buff-looking guys. I was the only female in the group, the only one on a borrowed bike and the only one who still feels severely oxygen-deprived above 7,000 feet. I braced myself for disaster.

Oddly, disaster did fall, but not on me. About three miles into the ride, Kenny - a guy I know from Elden's blog as "the singlespeeder who crushes every race he enters and rode the whole Kokopelli Trail in an unreal 14 or 15 hours" - hit a freak patch of gravel, swerved wildly in a dust cloud and toppled next to a large rock just as Elden and one other guy flew over him in a tornado of bikes and bodies. I was fourth in line and - as uncomfortable as I am with pace lines - hanging far enough back that I was able to slam on my brakes and stop just short of the wreckage. It was the most stunning crash I have ever witnessed - similar to those Euro-roadie pileups that I've seen on YouTube - but luckily everyone hit the tarmac laughing. It took a while for them to untangle themselves, and Kenny had a deep gash over his eyebrow and road rash on his shoulder and knees. It looked painful. I would have turned around on much, much less, but Kenny just washed his face in a waterfall and kept going.

I rode most of the climb with Kenny. Probably because of a combination of soreness from the spectacular crash and the unreal gear he was running - I think he said it was a 50x17; Elden analyzed us and said I made two and a half rotations for every one of Kenny's - I was able to keep up with him. We talked about Kokopelli and photo processing. We talked about a funny picture Elden photoshopped of me towering over Kenny (one of the ongoing reactions I have heard after meeting virtual friends for the first time is that I am bigger in person than they pictured me. It's funny to me, because I don't view myself as a big person. Maybe it's because I'm usually wearing six layers of clothing in my self portraits. I'm 5'7" for the record. But notice Kenny ducking in the top photo? That's intentional.) But it was a fun ride up. I felt like I was catching up with an old acquaintance. First time I ever met the guy.

After we descended (everyone else in a couple heart beats; me very, very slowly), Elden and I headed up the Suncrest hill to do about 1,300 more feet of climbing for good measure. One amazing thing about road bikes, especially Elden's road bikes, is that they're so superlight they make climbing feel a lot less like climbing. Still, I was surprised Elden was up for 4,500 feet of gain just one day after a race. I wondered if he was thinking about blogging prospects of the ride. I know I'm guilty of that sometimes. :-P

The Stansburys

I headed out to Tooele County today to visit my friend Mary Ruth in Grantsville. I worked in Tooele for three years and lived there for most of 2004, but I haven't been back since I left rather suddenly and moved to Idaho Falls in November of that year. Mary Ruth and I had completely lost touch, but she randomly e-mailed me a couple weeks ago and I wrote back one of those, "Hey, I'm in Utah!" replies. We planned dinner at 6 and it's a long drive to Grantsville, so I thought I'd make a day of it with a ride in the Stansbury Mountains.

I took the long way through the town of Tooele just to see what had changed, and felt a little unsettled by my first drive down Main Street in nearly five years. Tooele is the kind of place you can grow to love, but it is what it is ... a strip mall town in a rather desolate valley that's home to a chemical weapons incinerating plant and a big Army depot. I was fairly unhappy when I lived there. I weighed 25 pounds more than I do now, I ate a lot of fast food because I was really busy and watched a fair amount of television because I was burnt out. My relationship (yeah, that relationship) was going nowhere. I rode my touring bike a few times a week, but was fairly bored with the activity. My life in Tooele was mildly toxic. I knew it at the time but didn't know what to do.

Today, some of those old sour feelings came bubbling back up from somewhere deep in my gut. It's hard to revisit the places where your life took a wrong turn and wonder if you're currently on a similarly misguided path. But those unsettled feelings quickly dissolved as I mounted my bike and started pedaling up South Willow Canyon. Hard climbs turn off my brain. Usually, that's a good thing. I stopped at the wilderness boundary and turned around, thinking about the possibility of making it a short ride. But on the way back down, I stumbled across a sign for the Stansbury Front Trail and veered off. I knew 100 yards into that trail that I was in for a sufferfest. There's not much I can say about the Stansbury Front Trail as a bike trail. It's technically a trail and bikes are allowed, but unless you're the kind of manimal that can climb 1,000 feet in one mile on rocky, loose dirt, it's really more of a long hike with intermittent terrifying downhill coasting thrown in. I'm pretty sure my shoulders got a better workout than my legs.

Um, really?

Um, wow.

And that's the reason I stuck with it. The little creek valleys that the trail dropped into were absolutely stunning. I'd throttle the brakes to the bottom and mash the pedals to get as far up the next climb as I could stomach, until my forehead was throbbing and my legs were nearly stalled out. Then, off the bike and walking again, I'd look around at electric green aspen leaves and fields of sunflowers and think about the parts of 2004 that were good ... hiking to the top of Deseret Peak; making a fairly successful go of freelance outdoor writing for local publications; being adopted by an adorable little alley cat.

Sometimes it's good to go back to the places where you were unhappy, and realize you really weren't.