





We also hooked up with a friend of mine, Eric. I refer to Eric as "a high school friend." He was actually my first serious boyfriend, through half of my senior year in high school and first semester in college. We met when I was a grocery bagger and Albertsons and he was the manager of Video Shark, next door. I was 17 and he was 21, which I thought was so, so cool. Nearly every day he would come pick me up from school in his Saab. He was the person who really taught me how to snowboard. Then, one day (a date for some reason we both remembered - March 26, 1997), we went spring snowboarding on a hot day in a lot of slush. He launched a jump in the trees and landed badly on a patch of ice, and broke his wrist. He wouldn't even let me drive him to the emergency room (I was 17, with a fairly poor driving record already, and his car was a Saab.) He drove himself there with a broken wrist, and wore a purple cast for the rest of the spring. It's really fun to go back 13 years later and laugh about things like that. It's even more fun to introduce him to a good friend who goes way back, but not that far back.
It;s been so fun to come back here and reconnect all the pieces, just to see how much things haven't really changed.
I traversed across Flattop, dropped down into the back gully and decided to climb the next peak on the ridge (which I later learned is called Peak 2). Below that peak, the ridge narrowed with fun scrambling along the edge of the knife. I dropped a bit until things started to get gnarly, but the place afforded me a great view of other accessible areas in the front range - Powerline Pass and so many other places I have yet to learn about. It was an exciting moment of discovery for me, even on what has to be one of the most-traveled mountain ridges in Alaska.
After that I started dropping, down, down, down, and beginning to notice that the trail showed no signs of looping back around the mountain that I was on the wrong side of. I finally stopped a snowboarder and asked him where the tracks I was following led to.
"Um, the parking lot," he said.
"Is it the main parking lot?" I asked.
He looked confused. "Which parking lot?"
"I don't know, the state park parking lot. I think it had Alps in its name?"
"Glen Alps?" he asked.
"Yeah, that's the one."
A strained look swept across his face, like he didn't want to be the one to deliver the bad news. "That parking lot is nowhere near this one," he said.
A frown crept into my own face. "Oh, crap."
I turned and started running back up the mountain, because I had a barbecue I wanted to go to at 7:30, and it was already 6:45. I didn't follow the tracks; I went straight up the mountain, ascending a 50-degree slope in shin-deep snow as fast as physically could. A waterfall of sweat poured down my cheeks and neck, my lungs burned and my vision blurred. It felt amazing to be working so hard, and I completely forgot about that step I had to downclimb.
Until I reached it. It was about 100 vertical feet of sheer terror, because I'm really not a climber and I felt like every tentative step was going to sweep me down the face, into the rocks or off the edge of the shadow side of the mountain. And I admit I watched two guys wearing sneakers purposefully sit and careen down the slope on their butts, spinning out of control in a cloud of powder. I watched them not only live through it, but get up at the bottom and walk out. I still couldn't coax my body to move any faster. I kicked steps and dug my bare fingers deep into the hard snow. It got me down, but it was so slow that by the time I returned to my comfort zone, I really had to run. I felt pretty wasted, because my mellow afternoon walk had turned into something close to 3,500 feet of vertical on snow with 20 minutes of all-out effort and a terror downclimb thrown in.
By the time I reached the barbecue, the party had moved inside due to cold (it may be spring, but temperatures still drop into the teens during the night.) By midnight, I was at the airport, and by 1:55 a.m., I was in the air, jetting south.
Utah has been great so far. I met my 7-week-old nephew, visited all of my grandparents, and went to church with my parents, which allowed me to see a lot of familiar faces from my childhood, from my former piano teacher to a woman whose journalist daughter followed a similar path to mine and pulled it off successfully.
I borrowed my dad's Trek 820 to ride to the top of South Mountain and check out the trail conditions. Yeah, lots of snow and mud (don't worry, Draperites, I did not ride my bike on the muddy trails.) It was crazy windy, with Juneau-esque gusts (probably 40 mph), and brought with it a thick and ominous-looking storm that is forecast to drop snow at fairly low elevations. So much for spring. Today, however, it was on the overly warm side today for my Alaska blood - high 60s.
I learned a bit too late that the Trek's cantilever brakes on wet rims don't work, well, at all - not a super fun thing to find out when you are trying to descend 2,000 feet of elevation on pavement. The bike works fine for what my dad uses it for - exercising and to commute to trails where he can hike - but it's a bit rough for me. I put out a Facebook appeal for a loaner bicycle, and within an hour had an offer from a guy who recently moved to Sandy who had a mountain bike for me to borrow. I drove the two miles to his house and we talked for an hour about Utah, Alaska and snow biking. He lent me a DVD of "The Flying Scotsman" and gave me maps to some nearby trails in Lehi that he thought I would enjoy. If the weather somehow doesn't turn to snow, we may meet up to ride them on Wednesday. People can say what they will about blogs and Facebook and the deterioration of society, but my experience has been just the opposite. Social media has put me in touch with more great people than I can even count anymore, many of whom I have since become friends with in "real life." I'm really grateful for that. And all y'all, those of you who have made it this far in what have recently been pretty rambling blog posts, I am grateful for you, too. :-)