Pictures of Denali

On Friday, I traveled with my friend Carlene up to Denali National Park. As we packed up her car in Palmer, I realized that I forgot my camera - actually forgot my camera. I debated driving all the way back to Anchorage to retrieve it, but decided two extra hours of travel when we already had a late start was not worth it. I did remember an old digital camera that I keep wedged in my the trunk of my car for camera emergencies. Its lens is heavily scratched, so not only do most pictures end up blotchy, but it has a difficult time focusing. Also, it had no memory card. I stopped and bought one in Wasilla, and headed for my long weekend in Denali.

We arrived, set up camp, and traveled into the park in the evening. It was after 7 p.m., but the sun doesn't set until after 11 and twilight lingers throughout the short night, so our late arrival didn't stop us from going on a hike and an 18-mile bike ride before our 1 a.m. "dinner." In this photo, Carlene is expressing her extreme discomfort with walking down the talus in heavy wind blasts hitting from direction of that road in the background. I said, "In Juneau, it's like this all the time on ridges around town." And while that's true, I didn't tell Carlene that the 50-60 mph gusts were nearing the edge of my own comfort zone.

On Saturday we joined up with Carlene's partner, Pat, and friends Julian and Tom for a ride up the Denali Park Road, which is still closed to vehicles and tour buses. Although I pitched this trip to Carlene before I knew anything about the park road schedule, it turned out this was the last weekend it was still closed, so this is the weekend dozens of mountain bikers chose to hit it. We again got a late start and had the pleasure of greeting a steady stream of fellow mountain bike tourists on their way back to Teklanika.

The weather was OK - cold and windy with temperatures in the 40s and 15-30 mph winds that drove the windchill down to consistently uncomfortable levels. But the sun occasionally came out and we never got rained on, so in the end it was a great day for a ride.

We saw a lot of animals. We tallied 12 grizzly bears over the course of our ride - seven adults and five cubs, including two sets of spring twins. This is unfortunately the best bear photo I got (yes, I was regularly cursing my lack of professional-grade camera, let alone the fact that I had bicycled all the way into Denali with only an emergency camera.) Since you probably can't see them, they're the two brown dots in the bottom center. Still, we had a good set of binoculars to watch the bears, and frankly, I was glad they remained well out of the range of my camera.

Other animals were not quite as camera-shy as the bears.

Eventually our group broke up and three of us climbed two passes, dropped to the Toklat River and began to climb a third before there was a vote of two out of three to turn around (guess which vote was mine.) We ended up with 53 miles total. I really hope to go back this summer and ride the entire park road.

Pat riding up Polychrome Pass.

The views to the south consistently looked like this.

Pat at the top of our second ascent of Sable Pass, under the first direct sunlight of the day. He might be smiling about the sun, but more likely, he's smiling because it's all downhill from here.

Me, though, I'm smiling at the sun.

Sunday morning, I woke up early with the daylight and killed a couple pre-breakfast hours with a ride up to mile 11 of the Park Road and back. Denali is still experiencing the pre-spring season, which is always the ugliest time of the year. But there is something subtly beautiful about the washes of gray and brown - beautiful, if not photogenic.

Sunday afternoon hike up to Primrose Ridge, back to the wind and cold.

Photographs just do not convey wind and cold. I wish they could.

We found a bit of a wind block in the form of a rock outcropping, and sat for 20 minutes looking out over the Stampede Trail and the deeper Interior as I dropped hints that I would really rather start jogging to warm up my numb toes and not sit around pretending it's summer.

The people with jobs had to head back Sunday afternoon. Carlene and I decided to spend one more day traveling with Tom out the Denali Highway, a 135-mile gravel road that traverses the high plains beside the eastern Alaska Range.

It is very "Wyoming" up there.

We set up camp on a bluff above the Susitna River. Tom set up his spotting scope and we watched a herd of caribou on the gravel bars. Later, Carlene spotted a sow grizzly and young cub high up the mountain behind us. For an hour we took turns watching the two bears crawl up steep talus and snow fields. I was enthralled by the bear "mountaineers," and the scope gave us a clear view of the sow turning around to bark orders at her cub. They bedded down for the night on a thin ledge high up the mountain. Tom theorized that the bears were fresh out of their den, and traveled on the mountain to seek protection from potential predators (including humans. It is grizzly season right now. Although humans aren't allowed to shoot sows with cubs.)

I watched the evening light flicker across the valley. It was becoming late. How late? I don't know. You start to lose track of the time up there.

I headed out for a sunset ride on an abandoned mining road up Valdez Creek. The animals along the route were abundant and bold. This porcupine actually charged me. I swear it did. I'm still convinced it would have tackled me if I didn't lunge at it with my bike, and even then, it only retreated a few inches and then turned around to hold its ground. I skirted wide and slowly around it.

I rode until I encountered a cow moose and calf on the road.

The rode back as the sunset cast its rich pink light on the landscape.

Evening sunset. 11:04 p.m.

Where I was standing on the plateau, watching the sunset, a couple of caribou circled a wide loop around me and then stopped halfway around a second loop, only about 150 feet away, and stared at me. Their behavior was intriguing, and downright spooky. I thought, "Are these caribou stalking me?" I got back on my bike and continued down the road. I dropped into a steep ravine and encountered a cow moose standing in the middle of the road. I stopped 200 feet short and yelled loudly, and still she held her ground. There was no way around her. I walked forward another 15 feet. She did not budge. I stood silently and observed little details about her, from an extra-long waddle hanging down from her neck, to a large scar slashed across her shoulder. I wondered if she had a calf nearby. I began to fret about how I might crawl out of the ravine if she did not leave. Finally, she got bored and trotted away. It may seem I had a lot of animal-anoia during this ride, and that's probably true. But I still think those animals of Valdez Creek were especially unafraid and even aggressive.

The next morning, I woke up feeling groggy, wind-dried and admittedly anxious to get home despite the beautiful weather. Carlene and Tom were a bit slow to get going in the morning, and then the spotting scope came back out. I don't really like sitting around during the morning, whether I'm camping or not, so I said, "Well, I'll go for a ride and meet you guys down the road." I thought the ride would last an hour, maybe two, tops. I packed a liter of water and two granola bars (and, yes, I should know better to be a little more prepared when cycling in such a remote region.) I rode four miles down the road where we camped and entered the Denali Highway at mile marker 80, pedaling east into a fierce headwind. I climbed out of the Susitna River Valley and into the high, rolling tundra above treeline. It's been a dry spring and the dusty, windswept plains filled me with eerie memories of the Great Divide Basin. I kept climbing and descending, the temperature kept dropping, and the mile markers kept rolling by. I drank all my water. I ate both my granola bars. I started to become a little concerned. Then a little more concerned. Carlene and Tom are good people, but I didn't actually know them very well. What if they never showed up? I'd have to pedal myself all the way to Paxon, still 50 miles and a big pass away. I at least had my emergency iodine tablets with me; that was a relief. But I really wished I had food, and extra layers. I was already bonking and starting to feel the chill. It was going to be a long uncomfortable trip to Paxon at best. Finally, at mile marker 41, I came to the McMurren Lodge - a little oasis of salvation in the vast tundra. Luckily I had my wallet with me, so I was able to order hot coffee and a huge pitcher of water and lunch as I waited for my friends to show up, a full half hour after I arrived at the lodge and four and a half hours after I left camp. Turns out they spent the early afternoon stopping along the side of the road and setting up the scope to watch animals. When I told them that I hadn't really expected my hour-long relaxing morning ride to turn into 45 miles into a cold headwind, they said, "Oh, we thought it didn't matter because you do this kind of stuff all the time." I wanted to point out that I like to make my own decisions about the "epic" factor of my rides, but I already had food and water in my belly, so it was easier just to laugh it off.


This trip was a fun escape, and in its own way a very long four days. It was strange to come home after a weekend away from cell phone range to several "heart-fluttering" kinds of voice messages - the kind that jolt you out of your own little world and make you wonder if all of it could actually change, and fast. The first involves progression on something that might be a dream job of mine, but that would involve moving away from Alaska. The second involves progression on moving my book project toward a commercial venue, but involves really hunkering down in the next two days and polishing up materials I genuinely thought I would not have to produce for many more weeks. The third I don't really need to talk about on my blog, but yes, it is strange how my own life can move along without me. It makes me wistful to just remain in the simple world that holds cold winds, remote ridges and infinite possibilities - the world of Denali.

Locking myself inside

I have really been trying to buckle down and work. And no, that work hasn’t involved too many job applications … yet. Because what I really want to do first, why I’m here, open-ended in Anchorage, is to try to sell my book. And write a few articles. And maybe finally buy a Mac and software and see if I can pick up freelance graphics jobs, like posters and brochures. That kind of thing. It’s so hard to be self-motivated, though. So hard. And Anchorage has to be one of the most distracting places I could possibly be right now. There are bikeable roads going everywhere, big mountains and ridges to explore, free time to travel to farther corners of Alaska, and pretty soon, the mountain bike trails are going to dry out and the sun is going to be up until midnight and, oh boy, I am in trouble.

At the same time, it can be emotionally difficult to deal with unstructured time. This is probably why unemployed people end up spending whole days plopped on their couches in front of the Food Network. There really is so much to do that they don’t even know what to do with themselves. I admit I often think about tucking my tail between my legs and slinking back to Juneau and the open arms of the Empire. I do miss my friends and co-workers, my familiar mountains and roads. I realize that as time passes, that potential warm welcome is going to grow more cold. At the same time, I know I should stick this out at least through the homesick phase, and maybe even the poverty phase. (Don’t worry, Mom, that’s not coming any time soon.) I am facing a new homeless phase here pretty soon, which reminds me - does anyone know of a small apartment for rent in Anchorage, cat-friendly, preferably cheap? My roommate is talking seriously of moving and I will need a new place to live soon. This reality is difficult, because I feel like I have been perpetually homeless for more than a year. At the same time, these are the decisions I made, and I made them purposely to avoid anchoring myself to any one place, so transience is what I must live with.

The playing is still going well, though. These photos are all from a “run” I did on Bird Ridge the other day. I am still toying with the idea of entering a few mountain races this summer. I did not get into Mount Marathon, which was not a huge surprise (payment at registration and a low-chance lottery. That race is such a racket.) But there are still others. One of them goes up Bird Ridge. I tackled the trail on Sunday afternoon, just to see how it felt to run up a mountain. I can’t remember the last thing I did that was so horrifically painful. First of all, I wore the absolute worst shoes (Montrail hiking boots are great for snow, which I thought the trail would be covered with, but horrible for hard, dry dirt, which was the actual condition of the trail.) I started up the steep slope at what felt like a mellow jog, but after 10 minutes I was doubled over gasping, clawing up rocks and urging myself not to slow down. After 20 minutes, I was only about a mile (and 1,400 vertical feet) into the 2.5-mile trail. My feet were wrapped in searing blisters, my lungs felt like they were being pinched with hundreds of tiny tweezers, and my legs and knees ached so badly that they shook. Mountain running? Seriously hard! I limped the rest of the way up to the 3,500-foot point on the ridge, just so I wouldn’t feel so bad about myself. But I was beat. I walked slowly and took a lot of breaks. In the end, it would have been faster just to do the whole thing at my normal hiking pace rather than try to “run” the first mile. But I guess that’s what training is for. Will I train to run mountains? I don’t know. It’s nothing like training to ride a bike all day. It hurts more. A lot more.

But I guess that’s half the fun.

Success

One of the things I am really hoping to do this summer is several bike tours around Alaska. In order to tour the trails and roads of this great state, however, I must first figure out how to leave the city of Anchorage on a bicycle. So as soon as I came to town, I started asking around about the best way to ride to the Mat-Su Valley. The responses were surprising: "What do you want to ride for the Valley for?" "Oh, you'll have to get on the New Glenn Highway for most of it," and, "I don't think you can do that."

Really? In all of Anchorage, no one regularly rides bicycles to the Mat-Su Valley? It seemed implausible. It's the only way out going north. And as someone who spent the last four years in a place where the only road out of town dead-ends after 45 miles, I could not fathom how all of the people I asked about that ride had never even been remotely curious about it. Suddenly, the simple act of riding a bicycle to the Mat-Su became a challenge.

I casually mentioned it to my friend Mark in Eagle River, and he replied, "I have always wanted to do that! It would be like PBP (Palmer-Birchwood-Palmer, which is a real event, so I guess organized rides to the Mat-Su do exist), only backward!"

Only we didn't know the way. Our only agenda was to stay off the New Glenn Highway as much as physically possible. We started in Eagle River and made our way north on the bike path. After that ended, we made a few unnecessary detours up into the hills, often being forced to loop back to where we started (Mark started labeling these side-trips "Adventure One, Adventure Two, etc.") We hopped a gate near Mirror Lake and made another meandering trip into the community of Eklutna. We were finally forced onto the New Glenn, skirting a gravel-coated rumble strip as trucks streamed by. But that was only for a mile. We jumped off at the next exit, found suitable back roads for a few more miles, conceded to the New Glenn for another mile or so, before finally connecting with the Old Glenn and our free back-road passage to Palmer.

The riding was fantastic - greenup has just started in Southcentral Alaska, and the landscape was filled with tiny leaves set against a backdrop of snow-capped mountains. We stopped at the Coffee and Cream to celebrate our success with espresso before heading back a few miles to Butte to have lunch with my friends. We took one more five-mile detour while checking out the reindeer farm and discovering fairly late that the loop road we were on actually looped in the wrong direction. Still, the ride can be done with minimal highway time. This was a great revelation for future trips. Mark is a gear geek and GPS'd and Power Tapped the entire ride, even though it was more of a leisure cruise than anything. Here are some of the stats:

Time: 04:57:35
Distance: 76.18 mi
Elevation Gain: 2,441 ft
Calories: 3,767 C (I think this is because Mark is a big guy.)
Avg Temperature: 59.5 °F (I think this is because we spent more than an hour indoors. It wasn't much above 55 most of the trip.)
Moving Time: 04:56:30
Elapsed Time: 06:18:33
Avg Speed: 15.4 mph
Max Speed: 33.0 mph

This weekend I attended the 2010 Alaska Press Club conference. The introductions were a little awkward at first - "I used to be an editor for the Juneau Empire, but, um, now I'm not." When the notion of a voluntarily unemployed journalist was met with slack-jawed stares, I sometimes even added the qualifier, "Yeah, I left for personal reasons, not professional ones." But as the workshops progressed, the more people I met that still gave me a card and said, "Send me an e-mail; we;'ll talk," the more comfortable I felt saying, "I'm a freelancer." Even though I don't have much to back up that statement yet, I stopped feeling the need to apologize for myself.

The last time I attended the conference, in 2007, the atmosphere was decidedly more grim - along the lines of "Blogs and Craigslist are closing in and journalism is dying." This year, the mood was more, "Journalism is dead! Long live journalism!" It says a lot that our keynote speaker this year was a guy from Twitter. More and more mainstream journalists are embracing the new model, which is that there's no model at all. Journalism is simply the art of telling stories, in any way one wants to tell a story. I attended a workshop titled "Entrepreneurial Journalism," where the presenter proudly listed all of the failed magazines and start-ups she had been a part of before the successful one she landed in. Her theme was "%$@# Fear."

"Think up an idea, and try it," she said. "What have you got to lose?" She asked me what my idea was and I told her my story of a decade of working for community and daily newspapers before landing open-ended in Anchorage. "But I also have this blog," I continued, "About living in Alaska and endurance biking."

"There you go!" she said. "That's you! Use that!"

The hope and enthusiasm was contagious. I was frantically typing ideas onto my laptop as fast as they occurred to me. Some of them were way out there. Most of them were way out there. But for all of my life, I have always been a person that said, "I could never do that." Now, I'm beginning to ask myself "Why not? Why couldn't I do that?" Just as I've had to do so many times in my endurance biking, I'm beginning to look into the heart of my anxieties and saying "%$@# Fear."

Tonight I attended the awards banquet. The Empire couldn't afford to send anyone out to the conference this year, so they asked me to step in for them in proxy. It was a jovial setting, and the Empire pulled in an enormous number of awards - 21 in all. I won third place in "Best Page Layout and Design" and first place for "Best Graphic." Best Graphic! That's competing against all of the newspapers and magazines in Alaska. First place! I was stoked, because I'm not even a graphic designer ... anymore.

But that's OK. I can still be a graphic designer, and a layout artist, and a Web master and a writer and photographer. I can be anything I want to be, and that's why I'm going to succeed in the new world of journalism. $%$@# fear.

Return to Homer

From September 2005 to August 2006, I lived in Homer, Alaska, an "End of the Road" fishing and tourism community of about 5,000 people. I still regard that year as the best of my life. There's just something about that cheechako year in Alaska - that fish-out-of-water discovery and evolution. And in a place like Homer - which is populated by sophisticated artists, grubby fishermen and general misfits living in cabins made of plywood, tires and Tyvek, all surrounded by an incredible panorama of mountains and sea - the process of becoming Alaskan is perpetually interesting. We lived in a great cabin on Diamond Ridge, with a huge single-room living space and a loft. We had cross-country ski trails out our back door, regular backyard visits from moose and bears, snow until June and vast fields of fireweed after that. I rediscovered my love for cycling and took up this little hobby called snow biking. I tried new things like run/mountain bike/ski triathlons and winter camping. I went to fun little art openings, independent movies and live music shows. Life was great. I know about the rose-colored lenses of the past and all that, and I certainly had my reasons for leaving. But seriously, I had no idea how good I had it. I just assumed all of Alaska was like Homer. Then, in early August 2006, I left Homer to start a new life in Juneau. I took one last glance in my rear-view mirror as I rounded Bay View hill, sighed happily, and I hadn't been back since.

As I grappled with homesick feelings for Juneau, I decided it would be gratifying to go down and visit Homer for the first time in four years. I wanted to be back in Anchorage in time to attend a journalism conference this weekend, so I only had a couple of days to spend down there. I hit the road south on Tuesday afternoon, wearing short sleeves with my window rolled down in the warm sunlight. As a cyclist, I have a guilty confession to make: I love driving. I love to buy a huge jug o'soda at the gas station and crank up the music and enjoy the effortless views of the world. I think my enjoyment of driving is connected to my cycling habit and my tendency to change locations frequently: I seem to be happiest when I am on the move.

The first thing I did when I arrived in Homer was park my car on the Spit and stroll along the beach. I admit I choked up a bit when I saw the backdrop of the Kenai Mountains against landmarks that haven't changed a bit: the dilapidated pirate ship, the Alaska flag flapping in the middle of the mud flats, the Salty Dawg. I went for dinner at my old favorite haunt, the Cosmic Kitchen, and then loaded up with groceries for an overnight bike camping trip.

Something I always wanted to do when I lived in Homer was ride the beach between Homer and Anchor Point. Back then, I didn't have the bike or the bravery to do it. But now that I'm armed with Pugsley and a GPS, I thought it would be fun to load up my camping gear and head north. I wanted to go luxury camping, with magazines and a pillow and a bunch of warm clothing, so I opted to take panniers. Because my rack is outfitted to only fit the front end of Pugsley, the bike bags had to go on the front. Note to self: Never, never load Pugsley with front panniers. It already steers like a tractor. Add 15 extra pounds of low-riding weight on the front, and I might as well just let the bike steer itself, because my ability to maneuver it is about zilch. Oh well. Beaches are wide, and as long as I avoid the largest boulders and the sea itself, I'll be OK. (Note to self: This isn't easy.)

Once I survived the cheek-clenching descent to sea level, the beach riding was surprisingly relaxing. I expected more Juneau-type obstacles: Wet grass, quicksand, clam shell graveyards, barnacle-coated sharp rocks and waves crashing against cliffs. What a found was mostly cobbles and sand - the riding was never fast, but for "off trail" cycling, it was about as good as it gets.

And the evening was stunning. It was after 8 p.m. by the time I hit the trail, with the sun still high on the horizon, moist air that was warm enough for a single layer, and only the tiniest breeze wafting off the surf. A deeply familiar smell permeated the air - a smell unique to Homer - salt infused with a gritty sweetness. It's different from the more earthy, musky smell of Juneau's shoreline. It filled me with nostalgia as I rode along a beach I had never before visited.

And it's so quiet down there. Even though the highway parallels the shoreline just a couple miles to the east, the beach is hidden by a fortress of sand bluffs, so I really began to feel that sense of being "away," a lone traveler in the backcountry.

I sang songs to myself; songs I genuinely hadn't thought about in years, because they never occurred to me until that moment. I sang and smiled at the strength of my distant recognition. Like the aroma of Homer's shoreline, some things just stay with you always. Even though I was only averaging about 7 mph, I imagined myself flying. Sandhill cranes and seagulls flew beside me; their shrill voices echoed in the breeze.

As late evening settled in, I came upon a brown mound rendered almost invisible by the flat light. I nearly bumped against it before I realized it was an animal and swerved quickly around it. I hit the brakes to see what it was. A ragged little sea otter looked back at me, nodded slowly a few times and then rolled back into the stones. It didn't growl at me or try to squirm away; it just looked at me with these soulful eyes, deep and black and hinting at a kind of desperation or resignation. I thought this sea otter must be injured, or very sick. I lingered for several minutes, wondering if there was anything I could do for it. It kept nodding toward its back end, as though something were wrong with its legs. Then its head would lull and it would settle back into a crouch, but the whole time, it never took its eyes off me. I was shaken by the interaction - knowing this otter was probably going to die, and there was nothing I could do to help. I wanted to call the SeaLife Center or PETA. It was all I could do to turn my back and let nature continue doing what nature does. In this modern world, lucky are the animals that aren't affected by human intervention. Still, humans are what they are, and it's difficult not to get emotionally involved.

The sun set just before 11 p.m.; its orange-tinted twilight lingered long and late. I rode to the end of a long spit of land before the Anchor River. I knew the river would block my passage, because GPS told me so, but I was having such a great night of riding that I guess I somehow hoped there'd be a way to cross it. There wasn't, not without swimming, and the water was flowing dark and fast. I backtracked a couple miles until I was out of sight of the bluff-top homes of Anchor Point, and set up camp on the cobbles at midnight.

Sunrise came a lot earlier than I would have liked. I enjoy bivy camping but I can't really sleep when the sun's out, which it usually is in the summer in Alaska. The temperature was down near freezing and there was a layer of frost on my bivy sack. I walked out to the edge of the water to take some pictures of the soft colors, and that was all it took for two ravens to attack my bag of bagels and peck disgusting holes in every single one of them. I yelled for a few seconds and resigned myself to eating a Power Bar for breakfast. I bundled up in my luxury down coat and booties and sat on the beach reading a magazine, but eventually the cold needled through and I had to get moving.

I rode to the state park and cut up to the highway, hoping to cross the Anchor River on the bridge and find a new access point to the beach. However, all of the roads I tried north of the river dead-ended at the bluffs, and I became frustrated with the effort. I backtracked down the highway and rode up the North Fork Road instead.

North Fork is a nice little backroad between Anchor Point and Homer. I used to ride it fairly often when I was training for my various first endurance races. Like most of the longer roads in Homer, it contains one big climb and a lot of rolling hills. (Note to self: Pugsley loaded with heavy front panniers does not climb.) And, like most of the longer roads in Homer, it's full of interesting sightseeing. This house is just one example of the many strange structures on North Fork Road. Why would anyone build a house shaped like that? It's such a mystery. But this is one thing I love about Homer: You can build a house shaped like that, made of plywood, and no homeowners association or planning commission is going to crack down on you.

The North Fork Road also has great viewing of Cook Inlet's famous volcanoes. I'm pretty sure that's Illiamna on the left, with Redoubt on the right. Mount Redoubt blew its top last year, and Augustine went off in 2006, so this is still a very active region for volcanic activity.

I rode all the way around North Fork, spent some time scouting out old snowmobile trails near Beaver Creek, and even rode around Diamond Ridge and back up Bay View hill, for a total of 16 miles on day one and 43 miles on day two, but I had gotten up so freaking early that I was still back to my car before 11 a.m. I had just about enough of riding the front-heavy, squishy-tire bicycle, so I headed out East End Road to do some snowshoeing near McNeil Canyon. It's crazy beautiful up there, with open, rolling hills to the north and a parabola of mountains hugging the south end.

Oh, and glaciers. There's glaciers, too. I mostly just dawdled around to kill a little time and then headed to my friend Carey's house. She spent the day fishing and caught a 45-pound halibut, so guess what we made for dinner? It's a special occasion, that first fresh halibut of the year, something to both savor and gorge on. We chatted about all the changes in our lives and flirted with the idea of going out for Cinco de Mayo, but neither of us felt like dealing with the party scene. Instead we filled sandbags on the beach for Carey's greenhouse project, and enjoyed yet another incredible sunset.

I figured the overnight below-freezing temps would lead to some nice crust conditions in the morning. I meant to get up early, I really did, so I could take Pugsley out for some summer snow biking on Crossman Ridge. But I didn't get up early; these things happen. By the time I did get out, the sun was out in full force and the snow was pretty punchy, but still rideable on the flats and downhills, and pretty darn fun, especially when you factor in the unpredictable fishtail factor and occasional dive into drifts.

So it was down from the snow, to Two Sisters Bakery for holistic organic vegetarian lunch, and then back to the beach. I rode one of my old favorite loops - down West Hill, out the Spit, around Kachemak Drive, up East Hill and across Skyline. Near Kachemak Drive, I found another good access point to the beach and did a little riding on the mudflats (yes, I did give Pugsley a real good spray-down and lube afterward.) I was back on the road north at 4 p.m., meaning I spent less than 48 hours in Homer. It definitely feels like I was there for longer than two days, and it definitely doesn't feel like I've been gone for four years.

When homesickness sets in

It was the most beautiful day of the year. I realize the same could be said about many days of similar light, warmth and clarity, but this day was the most beautiful because, like a painting strategically placed in the middle of a gallery, this day had an in-your-face boldness to its perfection. It was bright and blue and free to move whichever direction it pleased. It was a strange day to wake up in the midst of a full-on identity crisis.

"Wait a minute, what am I doing here? Why did I leave Juneau? Why did I quit my job? I liked Juneau. I liked my job. I can't even focus here. I sit down to write or edit and my mind goes blank and all I want to do is ride my bike. Maybe I should just ride my bike for a living. Travel hobo-style around the continent. I could probably get by on 10 bucks a day."

I opened the window to a rush of sweet, cool air and exhaled the sour onset of something at once familiar and unsettling - homesickness. I know this malady well. I fully expected it to hit at some point. I accepted it and braced for it. Like the fast-food junkie who devours onion rings even though they give him heartburn, I crave change despite its undesirable physical effects.

As I usually did on the most beautiful mornings in Juneau, I decided to hike into the mountains. This Chugach place isn't like Juneau's slice of the Coast range. It's much bigger, with many more readily accessible starting points. The ridges aren't quite as rolling and friendly. They're jagged and pointy, with rough scree fields flowing down the slope like a suspended avalanche. I decided to go check out the ridge I had scoped out from Peak 2 last month. I haven't yet had a chance to buy the adventure bible known as the Chugach State Park map, so I don't know the actual name of the ridge. I'll call it the O'Malley Ridge, since it rises up from O'Malley Road and the peaks have O'Malley in their names. The snow across the valley was rotten and punchy. I stamped knee-deep craters even with snowshoes, stumbling and stabbing with my poles in what promised to be a wet slog of a hike. But the day was still beautiful and my mind was still wandering elsewhere, in places where dull anxiety festers as ice shards sting shins.

"It will be better if I make a plan. I gotta start training for Trans Rockies, there's that, and it would be fun to do the 24 Hours of Light and Fireweed 200 to work up to it. Maybe just the 24 Hours of Light. I'll train every day in the morning, and then I'll spend two hours working on my job search and other such administrative stuff, and then I'll really sit down and write. Eventually I'm going to sit down and write. Why can't I just do it? Why is it so impossible? Why does it have to be so distractingly beautiful here?"

I saw a ramp to the ridge that looked friendly enough and started up; like most distractions, it was steeper and longer than it seemed. I tracked my way through thin strips of snow just to stay out of the leg-sucking scree, then took off my snowshoes to scramble up the last 500 feet. I picked my way along the jagged ridgeline, tip-toeing beside soft cornices and skirting rocks still ringed in ice. For the first time all day, I was wholly focused on the physical effort, the here and now. Having briefly forgotten my anxieties, I looked back at the city skyline, and behind that, the looming mass of Denali, sharp and shimmering in the perfectly clear air. I smiled and sighed. As long as I can remember, my identity has been deeply routed in a sense of place. One of my earliest memories is as a 3-year-old, proudly reciting to people I met that "My name is Jill Homer and I live in Allen, Texas." Then, a few years later, in Sandy, Utah, I wandered the sagebrush hills surrounding my house and buried time capsules full of mementos to forever cement my presence there. It still makes me sad to think of all the new houses now smothering those spots. I fall in love with places the way some fall in love with people. I can leave them, but I carry them in memories that sometimes feel too close to bear, and I miss them in a way that feels a lot like loneliness.

A cold wind tore along the ridge and whipped up a storm of powder snow, still dry and untouched by spring. Change is slow on top of mountains. That's something I like about them. I can pretend that time doesn't always have to move incessantly forward - that sometimes it can move up, to a different dimension, where even the future lays somewhere behind.

"So what if I've been a little slow on the upstart? That doesn't mean I made the wrong choice. I can't force these things to happen. That doesn't mean they won't. And I can miss Juneau. That doesn't mean I shouldn't be here now. There's always space to return. I should head south this week. I think it's time to go visit Homer."

Welcome, almost summer

The coming of May always seems to ignite a flurry of new activity among Alaskans. In my four summers here (five if you count tourism), I have yet to fully grasp why the frenzy is so sudden and furious. I mean, yes, it is a bit warmer outside (42 degrees when I left the house at 11 this morning. Strangely does not feel warm after three weeks in Utah and California.) And yes, there is still usable twilight at 11 p.m. (which I haven't used since 8 because I've been inside typing up a resume/cover letter and an article query; and, yes, I am proud of myself for spending three hours doing this.) And yes, the snow is mostly gone (but seriously, who doesn't like snow?) What I can't understand where everyone went in January, during one of those crisp bluebird days when the land was full of sparkling beauty and the trails were empty. I just don't get it, I really don't, why the mania is so acutely seasonal.

Still, summer fun is incredibly fun, and the timing is good when I'm trying to learn new landscapes and meet new friends. On Saturday, a woman who I worked with very briefly in Juneau, who now lives in Anchorage, invited me to join her on a group bike ride. The circumstance itself was interesting, because we were coworkers for all of a week when I first moved to Juneau four years ago. She understood my plight of being a stranger in a strange town and invited me to a barbecue, which happened to be her goodbye barbecue because she was moving to Anchorage. Now, four years later, I'm in the exact same position and she's still as friendly as ever. We met up with the Arctic Bicycle Club for their Saturday ride from Anchorage to the Eagle River Nature Center. Despite a few inches of fresh snow on the hillsides and a forecast that called for more white stuff, nearly a dozen people showed up for the May Day ride (this is one of the things that amuses me about Alaskans, because dates seem to matter more than actual weather.) We endured a brief hail storm, but the rest of the 40-mile ride was washed in sunlight, with a mellow pace and smiles all around because for some, it was the first outdoor ride of the year.

Saturday night was the "Welcome Almost Summer" barbecue with several Anchorageites/fellow endurance nuts that I met when I visited Fairbanks in March. We grilled outside the house in light, cold rain as a small herd of moose casually grazed the brush in the front yard; we ate big plates of fresh grilled vegetables and summery salads, and then drooled over pictures from the Wilderness Classic, where the guys who completed the race skied 180 miles in about four days over a remote, rugged and deep-frozen mountain range in northern Alaska. That's Alaskans for you - celebrate summer prematurely while dreaming and scheming about faraway winter.

Today I met up with a man I met during Saturday's club ride and a few of his friends for a hike up Mount Baldy. It was a pretty laid-back trek, more about the "thinking about it" breaks and "butt sledding" than hiking (we actually trudged back up hills a few times just so we could "sled" back down.) I have to admit that even I will be pretty excited when these ridges finally clear of snow and their possibilities really open up. But as long as the snow remains, at least the trek down is fairly fast.

Later in the afternoon, we regrouped for a ride around roads in Eagle River and Chugiak. It was great fun, and we already have a hill climb slated for later this week and a possible ride to Palmer on Friday (I don't know why I have become so fixated on riding a bicycle from Anchorage to the Mat-Su Valley, but I seem to already be recruiting others in my cause.) It's been fun to spend a weekend hanging around several groups of people and wonder if I may eventually work my way into part of a "crowd." It will be pretty funny if a simple group bike ride leads to me hanging around a bunch of people from Eagle River, who seem to share a healthy rivalry with Anchorage (as we stood on top of Mount Baldy, I looked out at downtown Anchorage and made the mistake of saying, "Yeah Anchorage," wherein I was warned to instead say, "Boo Anchorage; Yeah Eagle River.") Either way, that's part of the fun of being a stranger in a strange town.

Getting to know you

It's only my third day in Anchorage, and already I feel a mixture of triumph and guilt. Although I did get my most important resume package sent out and met with one editor, I really haven't settled in to start much of the work I promised myself I would start. So far I have a good excuse. It's not that I'm a bad self manager (cough, cough) ... it's just that I need to spend a little time getting to know this city.

And there's really no better way to get a feel for a city than by bicycle. On Wednesday, I honestly couldn't have told you where my house was in relation to downtown (and was yelled at by a taxi driver because of this.) By Thursday, I understood the triangle shape of the city, where many important landmarks were located on this triangle, and how to use bike paths to navigate the northern and central portions of town. By this afternoon, I could locate a multitude of different parks and major arteries, and already feel like an old pro of Anchorage (OK, not really, but at least I can tell a taxi driver where I live.)

All it took was 40-60 miles a day of relaxed if confused pedaling - sometimes in circles, sometimes on roads not all that suitable for biking, but always new to me, and always an adventure. I actually love biking around strange cities. I love the feeling of being completely, bewilderingly lost, and then passing unique and intriguing places as I search for somewhere familiar. Riding aimlessly around Portland and San Fransisco was one of my most effective methods for coping with my relationship breakup last May. Getting purposefully lost in the city also is great therapy for coping with the unsettling feeling of being temporarily displaced from my career.

On Thursday I wandered around the north end of town, finally putting together the Chester Creek greenway (seriously, what is up with all the spurs?) and checked out Government Hill, Mountain View and Muldoon. Then it was on up the Glenn Highway bike path, lost again in Eagle River while searching for a bike route north (how do cyclists get to the Mat-Su Valley? Do they just ride on the highway?) Then I took a nice respite from spastic city riding with a jaunt up the Eagle River Road, a quiet, narrow country road with light traffic.

On Friday I decided to ride around the perimeter of the city. My favorite ride in Anchorage so far has been the Coastal Trail. It's scenic, quiet and only seems to be lightly used, at least on weekday afternoons in April. I have yet to see a single person beyond Point Woronzof, so past there I really crank it up, laying into the pedals in my highest gear and leaning hard into the multitude of swooping turns. It makes road biking feel like riding singletrack (don't worry, I always slow way down if the turn is blind or if I see another person or animal. I understand the etiquette of multi-use paths.) From there, I made every effort to stay as close to the Turnagain Arm as possible. This allowed for lots of fun discoveries - winding through scenic neighborhood streets and riding rocky singletrack trails through parks with my skinny-tire touring bike. Using back roads, I managed to work my way to the Old Seward Highway, and from there jumped on Rabbit Creek Road and climbed up to the foothills, where I proceeded to make my way around the outskirts of Hillside (hilly). Then I raced a bus all the way home on the Lake Otis Parkway.

Now that I'm an expert (ha!) at riding a bicycle through Anchorage, I just need to find some riding partners. I have loads of free time as long as I can keep coming up with excuses not to do the work I promised myself I was going to do. So if you live in Anchorage and have a favorite place to ride, and don't mind showing it off to a newbie who doesn't own a real road bike and may never own a real road bike, because deep in her heart she understands she is merely a simple bike tourist who sometimes likes to play in the dirt and snow ... please get in touch! You can comment here or e-mail me privately at jillhomer66@hotmail.com.

A place to get lost

A hot and heavyset fog hangs over the coastline. I ride along glistening sand but the ocean is nowhere to be seen. The cloud blanket can't be more than a few dozen feet high and I can still feel the blistering sun on my skin. I only have a couple of hours to ride before I have to be at the airport, so I ride as fast as I can muster on the missionary bike with the bouncy tires and blistering seat. Since I can't see the ocean, I turn off the Pacific Coast Highway and veer up the bike path along the Santa Ana River. I have this vague idea that if you ride far enough inland in Orange County, you hit mountains, or at least hills. The fog dissipates into a gray haze and the path turns to dusty gravel. The river corridor is lined with sun-faded houses and exotic-looking crops. Multiple signs warn me not to drink the irrigation water. I ride beneath freeways and skirt the edge of massive industrial complexes. The river itself fades from flowing water lined with grass, to stagnant water and marshes, to mud flats, and finally to stark concrete. A thin strip of brown water trickles down the manufactured channel. I stop and look for the haze-obscured hills.

Where am I?

The next day, I'm in Sandy, Utah. Delta Airlines couldn't find a space for me on their nightly flight to Anchorage, so I'm spending a bonus day with my family. I have a little bit of time before I have to return to the airport, so I go for a run. 40 and 50 mph wind gusts tear down the streets and the air is choked with dust. I can't see the mountains to the east or west, only a thick brown mass swirling into gray sky. I sprint with the wind at my back, past my former middle school, past my old high school. I laugh at the student drivers in their matching, lurching cars. I reminisce about the time I almost joined the cross country team until they sent me out to run two miles around the neighborhood streets. I remember that I quit because I had never experienced anything so simultaneously boring and painful. I reminisce about the time that freckled blond kid in my English class rode by on his motorcycle as I was walking home from school, then turned around, stopped, and gave me a ride. I smile and fly north, carried by an unholy wind that I don't even recognize until it is time to turn and face it. For two miles I plow into an invisible wall, holding my hand to my forehead to shield it from blasting sand. I squint until the world is a blur of uneven shapes. I feel suddenly bewildered by this place I know so well.

Where am I?

The next day, I'm in Anchorage. I spend the morning working on my resume and cover letters, so I decide to reward the afternoon with a "research" trip around this city where I supposedly live. The fact that I'm not going back to Juneau still bewilders me. There's a reason I ripped myself out of my comfort zone, but the truth is I'm still looking for it. In the meantime, I'm only wandering. I ride south on the Coastal Trail and marvel how most of the snow is already gone. I loop around Kincaid Park and grumble about how much snow and mud is still covering the singletrack trails. I zig-zag through the south part of town, end up on some rough trail near Campbell Creek and find myself ducking beneath the Seward Highway in a rocky underpass scarcely taller than me. I climb into the foothills, where the streets are lined in rippled layers of snow and the mountains capture streaks of silver sunlight filtered by an overcast sky. The city is far below me now, sprawled across the valley on a scale that was familiar to me a long time ago, but feels more foreign now. I try to pick out the neighborhood where I reside, but the orientation isn't there. I grasp for a sense of place, but it slips away in the wind.

I feel a rush of new perspective, because I don't know where I am.

Weekend in California

So how do an urban girl and a hopeless outdoor junkie spend a weekend together in Los Angeles and Orange County? Our skeptical family members were all curious ("So, um, what exactly are you guys going to do?") I was open to suggestions ("Disneyland? Shopping in Newport Beach? How can I refrain from looking like one of those bored kids in a department store?") My sister was willing to compromise. ("I found a few suggestions on good hikes, but I'm not doing anything that takes all day.") There's just something about having a childhood in common, though. No matter what you do, you're going to spend the whole weekend laughing.

Afternoon at the Los Angeles Zoo. Sara and I both agreed the dancing harbor seals were our favorite. (Me: "I used to see these outside my office window in Juneau. But ours weren't nearly as talented.)

Walking around Hollywood. (There were forays into clothing stores that contained no trace of bicycle jerseys or running shoes. I tried not to stand around looking like a bored child.) We also wavered a little dinner. I had already dragged her to one sushi restaurant the day before, and she didn't see anything that appeared edible on the menu at the Greek place, so we ended up at Quiznos.

But we did agree on this: Ice cream sandwiches at Diddy Riese near UCLA. $1.50 for the most amazing rocket fuel you have ever sunk a spoon into.

Sunday cruise along the beach with a cool breeze, live music and the smell of kettle corn and charcoal wafting through the air. We rode close to 25 miles, which was perhaps Sara's longest bike ride since, well, possibly ever ... and she had a big smile on her face the entire time.

Lunch on Sunset Beach. The bikes laid out to get a nice California tan while we slathered on sunscreen and ate turkey sandwiches and extra cookies from Diddy Riese. Fantastic weekend! Back to more northerly climes tomorrow. I hope breakup is about over in Anchorage. I'm pretty sure I'm ready for summer now.

Farther south

One of the advantages of life in Alaska is that it makes everything in the Lower 48 seem so inexpensive. $1.79 for a Pepsi? You gotta be kidding me! (You know, because I'm used to paying $2.69.) Fifty cents a pound for oranges? I'm gonna buy eight pounds! (Never mind that I'm leaving this place in three days.) You know what else is cheap? Air travel! No one believes me. I once paid nearly $300 for a one-way commercial airline coach ticket from Fairbanks to Juneau (two central cities technically located in the same state.) Down here, you can jet cross-country for $149 if you catch travelocity.com on a good day. When I looked into the logistics, I realized there was no good reason why I shouldn't drop a few more hundred miles south to visit my little sister at her new home in Huntington Beach, Calif.

This is my baby sister, Sara. She'll be 23 years old next week. She's four inches taller than me, with the long legs that both my little sisters got and I always wanted (mine are more like tree stumps.) She and I share some of the same facial features and all of the same family members, but that's about where our similarities end. Basically, if you took my personality and inverted it, the result would probably be like Sara. She likes to shop. She has a great fashion sense. She's sociable and good with people. She doesn't care much for the outdoors. She hates winter. Her preferred form of exercise is bikram yoga, where people sit in a dark room in 100-degree heat and do painful stretches (oh please, just kill me first.) But despite our differences, we always got along well (perhaps because of the age spread; I was too busy tormenting our middle sister to pick on her.)

Still, we were never close. That began to change last summer as we were both dealing with life upheavals. We reconnected and began contacting each other frequently. Then in December, she announced she needed a drastic change. And suddenly my baby sister -who was still living at home, who had just barely graduated from college, who had worked the same stressful retail job for years - threw everything to the wind and moved to Southern California.

True to our differences, Southern California is probably one of the last places in the U.S. I would choose to live. While I do recognize its beauty, I would likely begin to feel suffocated by the sprawl, lost in the crowds and driven to distraction by the ceaselessly perfect weather. But Sara loves it here, and after a mere four months, she's really thriving. Watching her take this risk has been a huge inspiration to me. It's been great to come here and see major life change from her point of view. It was also fun to check out the sweet new beach cruiser she just acquired. ("It's my first bike!" she exclaimed proudly, because before this she always had to use our hand-me-downs.)

Coaster brakes and chain guards freak me out, so she let me borrow her roommate's father's mountain bike. It's a Liahona, an honest-to-goodness mission bike, custom-manufactured specifically for use by LDS missionaries. It appeared solidly built, with decent base-level parts, but it hasn't had a tuneup in a long, long time; the seat was humbling in its ability to dig into all the wrong pressure points, and I couldn't find a pump to inflate the soft tires. I had to stop at Target to buy a $10 helmet (I will give it to my sister. I doubt she'll wear it.) Sometimes I really think I should covert to running, because the gear aspect of cycling can be so annoying sometimes. But, oh, it was wonderful to get out on a perfect day, plowing into the sea breeze to Newport Beach to have lunch with my sister, dodging four-seated pedal taxis out to Balboa and grinding along the PCH to Laguna Beach before sprinting on the soft tires and limited gearing so I could beat my sister home from work. The things we will do for a bike ride.

You may at this point be wondering when and if I'm ever going back to Alaska. The answer is Monday or Tuesday, hopefully. But since I'm flying standby to avoid the breathtakingly expensive plane ticket home, my return date is up in the air.

When it rains in Utah

Compared to Southeast Alaska, the weather in Utah is so boring, except when it's not. As much as I've lamented the frequent lack of UV light in Alaska, the truth is I'm inclined to feel sun-fried much faster than I feel the effects of seasonal affective disorder. And as soon as my lips are blistered to the point where I can't even eat medium salsa without crying (and believe me, I try everything - from slathering my lips with SPF 60 to continuous applications of SPF 30 chapstick - and they still burn) ... I start to wish for a few clouds.

But the clouds weren't particularly welcome on Wednesday, when I was going to meet up with a couple of my Utah friends that I had yet to see, to go mountain biking in Draper. "I don't know about today," my mom said when I told her about my plans. "It's going to be wet."

"What you guys think of as wet is not wet!" I exclaimed. "Maybe you get rained on for a minute, but you're dry before you even look up."

Still, because I (I mean my parents) live in Draper, my friend Anna called me before coming out to get the weather report. I walked to the front window and looked outside. "It's not even bad," I said. "It's dark overhead, but I can see sunlight to both the south and north. There's hardly even a breeze."

"What do you think?" Anna asked. "Is it going to clear out?"

"Well," I said, drawing a long breath as a loud howling sound approached like a train from the north. Flowers and bushes started to whip wildly and trees bent over backward. "It does look like the wind is starting to pick up."

Before I even emitted a closing breath to indicate to end of that sentence, the sky opened up. A blast of hail pellets rained down like bullets, pounding the roof with such violence that I had to raise my voice over the racket. "Now it's starting to hail! They're the size of marbles!" Before the barrage of ice balls even stopped, a solid sheet of rain slammed into the ground. In seconds, the storm released enough water to fill many hours of those seemingly endless misty drizzles in Alaska. The waterfall stirred up the solid white blanket of fallen hail like so much popcorn in an air popper.

"Yeah, now it's raining."

And, perhaps it's needless to say, but my friends decided it was not a good day for a bike ride. I ventured out about three hours later, hoping to check out the state of the sandy trails around Corner Canyon and perhaps still coax a meet-up. It continued to sprinkle and although the hard-packed trails yielded only the faintest track, I still felt self-conscious about trammeling trail etiquette. So I ventured onto dirt roads and even then hardly got splattered by mud. As I had predicted to my mother, everything was already mostly dry, despite the moisture still falling from the sky, and the rolling thunderstorms seemed to have abated.

I tried to call my friends out again, but it was too late. According to them, riding in the rain, even on pavement (my idea), demanded a "hardcore" disposition, which of course both of them have but neither felt like yielding to a silly thing like a Wednesday afternoon bike ride. I just kept riding for another couple hours in intermittent sprinkles, with both my hair and clothing magically becoming dry mere minutes after the rain stopped, in air that was warm and downright pleasant, grumbling to myself about how "hardcore" just doesn't mean what it used to.

And all the while, I kept a wary eye fixated on the dark clouds in the distance, wondering when the sky was going to open up and unleash all its fury again.

I was disappointed when it didn't.