Parents in Colorado

This weekend, my parents came to Boulder for a quick visit. Between babysitting their grandkids, a steady stream of summer travel, and a part-time job shuttling visitors in Salt Lake City, three days was all they could manage. I wanted the trip to be worth their while, so I made plans to drag them all over a wide swath of semi-local mountains. They didn't seem to mind; I pretty much inherited my manic FOMO personality trait from them. 

On Friday we drove a couple of hours through thick fog on the "scenic" route to Rocky Mountain National Park. I worried that the whole day would be shrouded in gray, but luckily our late start allowed time for the clouds to clear while we toured around the park in the afternoon. 

 Alberta Falls. Mom was willing to get closer to the edge than I was.

 Dad enjoys the view at Emerald Lake.

 Family portrait at Dream Lake.

 Views from Trail Ridge Road. Despite the approaching sunset and fact that we had brought neither lunch or dinner on this excursion, we spent a couple more hours dawdling around at 12,000 feet.

 An elk herd lounging near the ridge. So this is where they go in the summer, after visiting our neck of the woods in April and May.

On Saturday, Mom drove into town to explore Boulder, and Dad, Beat and I headed up to Eldora to hike. It's difficult to find anywhere to go on a holiday weekend that isn't overrun by crowds, and the Fourth of July trailhead was not an exception. I know, visiting Fourth of July canyon during the Fourth of July weekend — what did I expect? Still, I held out hope that this trailhead would be less crowded, as it sits at the end of a rough road. But this just meant that we had to sit behind Honda Civics crawling along at 5mph. Our late arrival — 12:45 p.m. — just barely afforded us parking spot. The weather forecast looked good so I planned an afternoon start, reasoning that there would be more space once the morning people left. This was partly true, but we did spend the first half mile practically running away from hoards of people before finding relative solitude. Alas, it's summer in Colorado. Not my favorite season, but I can sort of see the appeal.

 The plan was to climb to South Arapahoe Peak, and traverse the class-three ridge to the north peak if we were feeling saucy. Ultimately we didn't try the scramble. Actually, I was the one not feeling it. I was experiencing particularly poor fitness on this day, with my heart beating in the 180s while I crawled up the summit ridge. I've been told the elevated exercise heart rate isn't necessarily dangerous for me as long as I back off, but as it was I was maxed out and barely moving. I nearly asked Beat and Dad continue to the south peak without me, but it's difficult to reconcile my FOMO with physical inadequacy.

Despite the struggle I was stoked to reach the summit at 13,400 feet. Dad gave the hike "five stars." 

 Looking east toward home — the skyline in the distance is Green, Bear, South Boulder and Eldorado mountains. The water bodies are Gross Dam and Barker reservoirs. Beyond all that, of course, is the urban Front Range corridor. It's always fun to view many of the pieces of my world from 13,000 feet.

Arapahoe "Glacier." Apparently this is the largest glacier in Colorado.

 Looking back at South Arapahoe Peak from the meadow. We drifted off the peak too early and had to scramble our way through an interesting and somewhat sketchy traverse over those sheer gullies. From the top it almost looks like there's a way to drop directly down. But looking up from 2,000 feet below — definitely not.

 One nice aspect of starting a five-hour hike in the afternoon — nice light toward the end.

 Almost finished and still enjoying the five-star views.

On Sunday, I felt much better. Closer to my "normal," whatever that is anymore. I suppose I can try to blame altitude for sputtering so badly on South Arapahoe, but it's a stretch. Anyway, Dad and I decided to set out in the afternoon for a jaunt around Bear Canyon and Bear Peak. Fern Canyon gains 1,800 feet in one mile, so it was a strange to feel less winded there than I did walking downhill the previous day. Dad was steady as always. The whole route was surprisingly uncrowded, especially since it was overcast with temperatures in the high-70s, which is about as comfortable as it can be around here in July. We had Bear Peak to ourselves for twenty minutes, snacking and chatting while this chipmunk tried to get in on the trail mix action.

Thanks for coming to visit, Mom and Dad! A couple of years after retirement, they only seem to be speeding up rather than slowing down. I wish I could say the same about myself, but watching them gives me hope that it will turn around for me someday. 

Adjusting to the rollercoaster

 I'm back to feeling pessimistic about my health and the prospect of ever regaining my former level of fitness. Perhaps I've been spending too much time on thyroid forums. I found one devoted to Graves Disease and the community has been helpful — I post my labs and others legitimize my complaints. "Your T3 is too high; that often causes shortness of breath." I read through their experiences, identify with their symptoms and take heart in their successes. I feel gratified, like I've found my people. And then I realize this is a forum for sick people. I miss the days of spending my time on the MTBR forums, asking questions about wheel size.

One woman has pushed the idea of looking for "environmental triggers" that increase autoimmune response — allergens, smoke, chemicals, certain foods. It haven't found studies on this, and it's difficult to convince myself this is a real problem. She's adverse to cleaning products and can only use the most gentle natural substances without triggering thyroid symptoms. I definitely thought "that can't be a thing" ... until yesterday, when I was using a bleach-based spray to scrub the pinkish mineral deposits from shower tiles. I made the mistake of spraying down a large area, then kneeling right down into it. After a minute my eyes began to burn and I erupted into a violent coughing fit. By the time I rushed into the next room for fresh air, my airways were tightening. I pounded up the stairs, wracked with painfully suppressed coughs, eyes clamped shut, snot streaming from my nose, gasping for air. I came close to calling 911 — the phone was in my hand — but gradually the coughs subsided and I could breathe again. It was awful. I've never had a reaction like that to anything.

After everything calmed down, I figured I was overreacting. Still, my eyes and throat burned, and I felt somewhat sick to my stomach for the rest of the day. Interestingly, I also seemed to experience a spike in "hyper" symptoms. My heart rate shot up to 105 and stayed there. I had hand tremors and jitteriness hours later. It seemed likely this was just leftover stress from my morning scare, so I still opted to head out on my bike to meet Beat as planned. That was a mistake. I felt short of breath during the long descent, and somewhat dizzy by the time I arrived in town. By then I was committed and had no choice but to ride the long climb home. Beat offered to ride ahead, get the car, and pick me up at a trailhead halfway up the hill. It took me nearly that long to muddle through half of the miles that Beat covered. As I sat on a rock waiting for him, I ruminated about what a feeble person I'm becoming. A few whiffs of bleach and my day is ruined.


Ugh. I've actually felt hyperthyroid for most of the month, and my June 12 labs confirmed that my T3 was (is?) too high. Starting the Bryce 100 was probably a mistake, but I can't take it back. The main reason I've been haunting online forums for tips and reassurance is because my endocrinologist wants me to stick with the status quo for now. The forum people tell me the rollercoaster is common. Treatment is specific to the individual, and it takes time to find the right balance. But after four months of treatment, my optimism is beginning to wear off. I know four months isn't a long period of time. It's still long enough to imagine what life will be like if things are always this way. It's going to have to be different. I won't be able to run an ultramarathon on a whim anymore. Possibly I won't be able to run an ultramarathon at all. So the reluctant struggle toward acceptance begins anew.


As long as I can keep hiking, I'll be okay. Beat and I went to James Peak on Sunday. My breathing was bad, and worsened as we climbed to 13,000 feet. Because of that, I felt rundown and frustrated. Mostly I felt frustrated. Frustration is an ego-based emotion, so I worked on adjusting my outlook as I plodded upward through the stunning landscape.

 It was as beautiful as a summer day can be — pleasantly warm, nearly windless, with bluebird skies above a cloud layer that hung over the plains.

 Beat on James Peak. As usual, he bounced back from Bryce 100 like it was a conventional weekend stroll. I admit I hear about others' training efforts and feel envy for their confidence and seemingly dependable bodies. For more than ten years now, I've looking to adventure planning and goals as a way to keep momentum going — physically, socially, and creatively. It has been and will continue to be difficult to adjust my outlook, and not just let nihilism take over.

Beat challenged me to consider where I'll be ten years from now. He likes to think big — finally vanquishing my demons on the Tour Divide, writing a best-selling book, moving to a cottage in Switzerland. I find myself thinking, "Alive. Alive would be nice." Somewhere in there is a happy medium where I hope to spend the next decade. I could start by siphoning my creative energy away from adventure, building it from other sources, and directing it toward a wider range of projects.

Until then, I can still draw a lot of peace and satisfaction from even these more-difficult-than-they-should-be outings. Although I have ambitions for next year's Iditarod, I'm trying to remove the internalized pressure. And there will definitely be no racing before then. In the meantime, I'll continue to work on stabilizing this rollercoaster and directing whatever energy's left to more productive and satisfying projects. If I'm healthy enough to hike in the mountains, I'm healthy enough. 

Love these adventures in roadtripping

Our trip to Utah was a brief one. I drove from Colorado on Wednesday and returned on Monday. Beat flew in and out of St. George — both to save vacation hours, and because I suspect he finds road trips as tedious as I find them exhilarating. I love long drives. Every time I'm out on the road, pausing in front of an immense soda fountain or flipping through garbled variations of NPR, I imagine my life in another universe as a trucker. There's not quite enough stimulation in driving (in my ideal alternate universe, I'm somehow a professional bike tourist.) But road-tripping is moving through the world, rather effortlessly, and thus is one of my favorite activities.

We spent Saturday night in a hotel near the entrance to Bryce Canyon, but were too tired to venture into the national park. By evening I was quite grumpy, having spent most of the day marinating in my DNF misery. Okay, it wasn't that bad. After spending four hours under harsh sun at the Blubber Creek aid station, I crowded into a pickup truck with four other runners who dropped out of the 50-miler, and three volunteers (two sat in the bed on a mound of stuff as the truck rumbled down the bumpy dirt road.) It was a good 45-minute drive to the finish, where more than 50 people were lined up — under direct sunlight — to board the shuttle van to the hotel, seven miles down the road. No shuttle showed up the entire time I was there.

I stood in line for about ten minutes until I felt woozy — I had yet to acquire any food or water since I dropped out of the race five hours earlier — and walked away to a thin sliver of shade to text Beat, who had finished the race a couple hours before. I wanted him to pick me up in our car, but a misunderstanding led me to believe that he wasn't coming, he just wanted me to collect all of our drop bags and bring them back to the hotel. This led to several seconds of stomping around in a silent rage before texting him that I couldn't take it any longer, I was going to buy a pita bread pizza and eat it as I walked the seven miles back to some form of indoor sanctuary. I'd had it with the sun and the desert and I never wanted to do this to myself again.

Luckily, in my sleep-deprived haze it took me a while to garner one of the personal pizzas being sold by a youth group at the finish line, and a can of generic ginger ale, which was lukewarm and somehow still tasted like the elixir of life. I felt markedly better after eating, and then Beat showed up in the air-conditioned car with a icy fountain soda. I thought I might cry for happiness. All was right in the world.

The sunset that night was beautiful, in part because of a wildfire burning near Brian Head. (The fire was started by an idiot using a torch to kill weeds. As of this post it had grown to 11,000 acres, and the town of Brian Head remains evacuated.)

On Sunday morning, we made the two-hour trip to St. George to drop Beat off at the airport. We had about an hour to kill, so we stopped at a park on the outskirts of town to scramble on rocks. The temperature was 98 degrees. It felt downright cool compared to my experience in the canyons at the Bryce 100, but I know it's all a matter of circumstance.

On our way to St. George, we stopped for coffee in Cedar City. Next to Starbucks was a place called "Sushi Burrito." It was closed until noon. But I knew I'd have to make my way back through Cedar after dropping Beat at the airport, and I was so excited about the prospect of a sushi burrito that I held off snacking until I returned. Sushi Burrito was open, not crowded (yes it was Sunday in Utah), and I was stunned that my purchase only cost $8.99, including a free fountain soda. The "burrito" was really just a giant maki roll, but it was amazing, so amazing. Words don't describe it, I mean, for $8.99 — the seafood tasted fresh, the rice was perfect, and there were sprinkles of tobiko to round out the deliciousness. It was everything I dreamed about. The perfect post-race meal.

Google maps told me to continue up I-15 to I-70, but I didn't really want to do that, so I crept through town toward Highway 14, which is just another one of those nondescript, incredibly scenic byways that are so prevalent in Utah.

Along the highway was a sign for Cedar Breaks National Monument, and I thought, "I don't think I've ever been there." I lived in Utah for 22 years, and as a young adult spent nearly every weekend traipsing around little-known corners in the San Rafael Swell, Grand Staircase Escalante, Uinta National Forest. But in all that time, I couldn't recall ever visiting Cedar Breaks. So I made it happen.


The views were, predictably, jaw-dropping. Within the small park was a four-mile out-and-back panorama trail that couldn't be left unhiked. I couldn't bear the thought of putting my running shoes back over my still-throbbing blisters, so I set out in my rather worn out gym shoes with a 44-ounce tanker of soda in one hand (you can probably see a theme here in my road trip love story. I allow myself to drink gallons of Diet Pepsi when I'm on the road.)

I paused at every overlook, but spent even more time lingering under bristlecone pines. Of all of the living things in this world, those I respect most are ancient trees. The oldest in Cedar Breaks is more than 1,700 years old — gnarled and stripped almost bare from centuries of turmoil and hardship in this harsh environment. But it's still alive. Incredible trees, the bristlecone pine. I think I would like to have my ashes spread in the shade of one of these trees, after I die. 

I still felt a bit short of breath while hiking. The rim is at 10,000 feet elevation, but I don't think I can blame altitude. My recovery from Bryce wasn't that swift, but my legs felt surprisingly nimble, and my mildly sprained ankle was only mildly sore. Still, the ankle remained unstable, and I had to pay attention to my weight balance with every step. I stumbled once, right in front of a group of hikers near the end of the trail.

"Maybe you should put that big drink away," one guy said.

After leaving Cedar Breaks I drove to Highway 12, rolling right past the Bryce Canyon hotel that I'd left eight hours earlier, and continued past the park entrance because I'd dawdled all day and needed to make some miles. Perhaps predictably, I only managed another 45 minutes on the road before I saw a sign for Kodachrome Basin. "I don't think I've ever been there, either," I thought.

The state park was named in 1948 with the approval of Kodak Film, and it's funny to think about a park that will long outlive its namesake and anyone who even remembers that color film was a thing. But Kodachrome is quite fitting for a name. It's a photographer's playground. 

The park is thousands of feet lower than Bryce Canyon, and the temperature was 101 degrees. I thought "no big deal," but within 0.10 miles of my car, I felt woozy and wondered if this was really such a good idea. I had yet to collect actual water for my bladder, so I sipped on an extremely hot bottle of sparkling water that I found in Beat's stash of snacks. The trail climbed to a small plateau with spurs out narrow sandstone fins. A blow-dryer-like wind blasted the rim, and it took a lot of bravery to coax myself out this spur. I actually did it, but then stood there so weak-kneed that I couldn't take out my camera for the intended photo.

There were some beautiful views, though. You didn't need to walk out the fins to see them.

The sun was beginning to slip toward the horizon (what? so early? I know that two days ago I said the sun spends too much time in the sky during the summer, but I take that back.) I headed out to the other side of the park to whittle away the magic hour.

Then I saw a sign for Shakespeare Arch, and managed to coax myself into another hike.

By now I was mostly out of liquid and my legs were protesting, finally. I was following a trail that wound around sandstone spires, and there was always something interesting to explore just around the corner. Shut up, legs.

Views of Rock Springs Bench. Out there is the BLM land where things really get interesting. But when you're on a time-starved road trip, quick front-country hikes more than suffice.

Early evening, magic light, still 90-something degrees.

Initially I had ambitions to drive into the night, but as the sun set I deflated rapidly, with a crushing exhaustion that can best be described as jet lag, or the post-75-miler crash. I stopped at a hotel in the town of Cannonville, which was so tiny that it didn't even have a restaurant or a store. The hotel had a small convenience store, so I enjoyed a Tour Divide-esque meal of microwave burrito, a banana, a Kit Kat Bar, and of course more Diet Pepsi, heavy on the ice.

The room was air-conditioned to the point of being frigid, and I startled awake a half dozen times during the night. Each time I awoke, my mind was racing not with memories of being back on the trail at the Bryce 100, but with all the possibilities for the following day. Grand Staircase Escalante! Petrified Forest! Hell's Backbone! Capitol Reef! Boulder, Colorado, was still ten hours away, and I knew I needed to dial back my mania if I wanted to make it home before I crashed again.

Mania is difficult to dial back on Highway 12. Yup, that's Highway 12.

Also Highway 12.

Still Highway 12.

Okay, Jill, you need to stop pulling over at every roadside pullout.

This would be a beautiful place for a bike tour, but there's no shoulder and I'm sure the road is very busy for most of the summer. Perhaps a winter bike tour? I wonder what these 9,000-foot passes are like in January.

Nearing Capitol Reef National Park. Highway 24 passes through Fremont River Canyon without requiring a park entrance fee, and I knew I wouldn't have the strength not to stop.

9 a.m. road trip math. How long can I hike and still get back to Boulder before dark?

Perfection landed right in my lap — Chimney Rock, a four-mile loop right off the highway. The temperature was a cool 82 degrees, and for my liquid I had a quart of Beat's Gatorade that I froze overnight. Sips of ice-cold purple drink gave me all the energy I needed to wrap this up in less than an hour ... well, more like an hour and twenty minutes.

Views from Chimney Rock.

This is definitely somewhere I need to plan a backpacking trip in the future.

I did manage to buckle down after Capitol Reef. Before long I'd collected bits of convenience store lunch at Hole-in-the-Rock in Hanksville, rumbled toward Green River and I-70, and the NPR-supported Interstate autopilot that carried me all the way home. It certainly was fun while it lasted, though.