North Fork

Date: 6-6-6
Combined mileage: 65.4 (inc. June 5)
June mileage: 170.2
Temperature upon departure: 57

A loop ride is always a bigger commitment to make than an out-and-back ... Especially when you don't quite remember the mileage, and it's a Tuesday evening, and you think you're embarking on a sort-of "before dinner" ride. As it turned out, 40 miles on the mountain bike was a little more than I bargained for.

But, really, what's the harm in a 10 p.m. dinner and a few quiet grumblings about the four long months in which I lazily neglected to re-install Sugar's pedal cages and water-bottle holder? Small price to pay for three hours of free-rolling by fireweed blooms, coasting an uphill tailwind and cresting near the point where a local man was mauled by a grizzly last weekend. That's the kind of eyes-wide-open excitement that money can't buy and ski lift-served downhill rides can't replace. Never mind that downhill was almost slower, what with the headwind and my lamentable habit of white-knuckling the brakes on the narrower trails.

I've been thinking more about downhill since summer threw me back into this technical groove. What I thought was a great winter of skill-building snow riding turns out to not be sufficient experience for mud, streams and root-studded trails. What's the secret to downhill? (I mean, besides "Better Off Dead" sage advice of "Go that way ... Really fast ... If something gets in your way ... Turn.") Do I practice my bunny hops? Hold my butt over the back wheel and hope for the best? Buy a BMX helmet? Honestly, I'm new enough to this that I still get a big kick out of surmounting a crazy steep climb without putting my foot down. But often I dread the descent. I think it started with the endo I did on a tiny 20-foot-high roller that left me essentially crippled with blood clotting for six weeks. Gravity and I have never gotten along all that great, and adding wheels just seems to aggravate the tension. Has anyone else dealt with downhill-phobia? What did you do about it?

Snow, Hope, Powerline

Date: June 2, 3
Mileage: 76.2
June mileage: 104.8
Temperature upon departure: 60s

Had something of a whirlwind weekend on the road. At three weeks to Kincaid, it really should have been a power-training weekend for me. But there are ways to bypass obligation without regret: enjoy a mud bath on wheels down an avalanche-torn section of the Johnson Pass trail; take a half-century joy ride to Hope, Alaska - still America's "most scenic" byway to nowhere; and read a couple of New Yorker magazines cover-to-cover by a roaring campfire as the midnight sun rests - momentarily - over the Kenai Mountains.

Geoff is working toward this "Alaska Mountain Runners Grand Prix," and today was his first race of the season - The Powerline Pass. We drove up a day early to camp nearby and do the aforementioned mountain bike ride - on a muddy, debris-clogged trail that became entirely unrideable after only four miles (thanks to long fields of soft, punchy snow.) We hiked up another mile and a half before we crossed paths with a runner who warned us of "hordes of bears" at the lake. She was followed by a lone backpacker with a rather large rifle slung over his shoulder and a pasty, wide-eyed expression. I don't know what's more scary - the bears, or the guy with the rifle. Either way, we were ready to turn around.

Later that afternoon, I saddled up my road bike and headed toward the Hope Road junction. If you start from the bike path at the Granite Creek Campground, you have what turns out to be almost exactly 50 miles of scenic, smooth, nearly traffic-free road riding. I must have looked pretty funny out there with my mud-splattered face and legs - as well as and a rather prominent chainring bruise I sustained in an unsuccessful stream crossing - but I felt like a real roadie out there, tucked against my flat handlebars and surging up to 30 mph on a cruise to the coast. The yin and yang of bicycling.

Today was Geoff's race. He was due to start at 10 a.m., so at 9 I took off up the trail with the hope that I'd beat him to the finish line (I did ... barely.) I had a brisk pace going at first ... the whole time thinking, "I could bike this." But then those powerlines just kept on climbing. And climbing. And pretty soon, I was stumbling up snowfields and clawing at loose gravel, on grades approaching 60 or even 70 percent at times. In all, the trail gains about 3,500 feet in 4 miles ... most of it in the last two. And I'm thinking "how could people possible run up this thing?" But somehow, they do. Geoff ended up placing fifth in the race with a time of 42 minutes. It took me an hour and that much, arriving just in time to turn around and snap a few quick pictures of the leaders before the jogging descent commenced.

Watching those guys come up the mountain, hunched over and gasping for more of that rich 3,500-feet-elevation air, made me so glad that I'm not a trail runner. Give me a face full of mud and a chain-ring bruise any day. I'll walk what I can't ride, thank you much.

Sustained climb

Date: June 1
Mileage: 28.6
June mileage: 28.6
Temperature upon departure: 45

I stumbled across an article today about a woman who rode her bike from the Dead Sea to Everest Base Camp and then climbed to the top. The world's longest climb. Pretty cool. Sometimes I wonder how my life would be different if I had it in me to dream big ... crazy big. Given my predisposition to clumsiness and a paralyzing vertigo that I have yet to overcome completely, I'd probably no longer be alive. But if you could pick one crazy big accomplishment to be the first person ever to succeed in, what would it be? I wouldn't mind being the first person to ride my bike across the Bering Sea in the winter - thereby enabling me to literally ride my bike around the world. Of course, I'd have to convert my bike into some kind of paddle boat to cross the Panama Canal. And I'd have to skip Australia altogether. And I'd have to parlay my admittedly terrible sense of direction on ice floes that move faster than I do. But why nitpick? It's a fun dream.

All I have now is my own personal Everest, which is not so much an Everest as a daily bike commute - 1,150 feet elevation gain stretched across four miles (plus two miles of flats) - but it gets easier every time. When I started riding the hill on a regular basis last winter, I was lucky to keep my speedometer above 5 mph. Now I rarely dip below 6 and probably average closer to 7.5 mph - which, despite how slow this still might be, is (I think) a great improvement. I hope to use this hill in the near future to practice sustained climbing - you know, go up, then right back down, then up again. There's potential there to ride some real "elevation" over relatively short distances. I think the hardest battle will actually turning tail at the top of that gut-busting climb: licking the crusted salt from my lips and wiping streams sweat from my eyelids, knowing that my only reward will be the screaming 5-minute descent I use to tear away all that effort before I turn around to face it again.

There's dirt on that trail

Date: May 31
Mileage: 15
May Mileage: 487.1
Temperature upon departure: 47

Today I hit the gym for the first time in weeks to test my endurance near my aerobic threshold (I know. I could just buy a heart-rate monitor. But I kind of enjoy working out while reading trashy magazines such as "People" or "Bicycling" once in a while.) I ran for an hour on the elliptical trainer. I kept my heart rate between 160 and 175 beats per minute, and ended up coveringmore than 10 "miles" (I've always been curious what an elliptical trainer "mile" equals. It's easier than running, but definitely more work than cycling.)

Anyway, I thought I'd come home from the gym completely worked, but I felt surprisingly refreshed. So I talked Geoff into an evening mountain bike ride, which we didn't end up leaving for until it was nearly 9 p.m.

We headed up the Homestead Trail toward our old winter haunts - now stripped of snow and layered in an interesting mix of deep ATV ruts, moose-trampled mud and sinkhole sand. The result is a double-track that's decidedly more technical than it was in December - but it's still low-level technical, and definitely a lot of fun. We spent the last three miles on nearby single-track, with a strange and difficult detour on what used to be a ski trail (and is now a pillowy, effort-absorbing cushion of matted grass). It was, for all practical purposes, my first trail ride of the year. I think, given the 9-month hiatus (based on the fact that snow riding's so different on nearly every level), I didn't do so bad. Of course, there are some that will argue that if you don't have a spectacular crash at least once during the first ride of the year, you didn't do so good, either. But after my hard run, just feeling up to a two-hour mountain bike ride is a good sign for me.

Forgot camera again ...

Date: May 30
Mileage: 43.4
May Mileage: 472.1
Temperature upon departure: 58

... so I'm posting yet another Utah shot, with the Twin Peaks dominating the Wasatch Skyline. I travel so light now that the point-n-click regrettably must be left behind so I can make room in my seatpost bag for lesser things ... spare tube, patch kit, tire levers. These days, even the Power Bars stay home. To tell you the truth, I kinda miss wearing a winter coat.

While dodging the endless parade of RVs and the kite-wielding, roller-blading traffic around town, I thought there are a lot of reasons why I miss winter altogether. The white silence. The solitude. The sunsets. Of course, there's a rich beauty in all of this drenching green and a pleasant camaraderie in the sudden surge of energy - not to mention the fact that it's warm, and that should make any breathing human being happy. But as I pass the bleached tent city now sprawled across a mile of beach, foggy with campfire smoke and commotion, there's a part of me that feels strangely out of place. Strange because I'm a former hot-climate desert dweller and tourist from the 'burbs. But out of place because the Alaskan in me was baptized by lonliness and winter.

A few days ago, I had the interesting experience of watching twilight turn to dawn without any transition into night. I kept waiting for stars to come out as the clock clicked away the wee hours. But after a while, I realized that it was no longer becoming darker - it was becoming lighter. Within a few minutes of that observation, the orange glow of sunrise crept over the north-eastern horizon.

And as I marveled to myself about the earth's skewed axis and the way it creates an amazing juxtaposition of time and place, a larger voice in my head told me I really need to start getting more sleep.

I ain't scared

Date: May 29
Mileage: 21.1
May Mileage: 428.7
Temperature upon departure: 61

This isn't shaping up to be so bad a month, mileage wise, even though it feels like I haven't invested near the bike time that I have in previous months.

Still ... I haven't been training at any kind of a level even close to to what I had originally hoped for. That's OK. After all, I really only have two distant hell-days to face in a summer full of hiking and barbecuing and halibut fishing and scenic tours. In one month, I have the 24 hours - and, well, 24 hours is 24 hours no matter how you slice it up, right? In two months, the Soggy Bottom 100 - 10,000 vertical feet. If you break that down, that's about two vertical miles in 100. On one hand, I could obsess about the gut-wrenching switchbacks and tear-inducing drops of the Resurrection Pass trail. Or I could instead - through the magic of statistics - iron it all out for a gentle average grade of 2 percent. I feel better already.

I'm OK with my ride. Really.

I did it for the views

Date: May 29
Mileage: 30.8
May Mileage: 407.6 (inc. 19.4 on May 24)
Temperature upon departure: 67

My dad likes to participate in the well-tread ritual of calling home from the top of a prominent peak. Like drink 'n' dial - this is hike 'n' dial. He usually lands an exasperated comment from my baby sister ("You calling from some peak again?") or a utilitarian conversation with my mom. Still ... there is something cathartic about sharing that triumphant moment (or covering up failure with a little white lie, as we overheard from a group in retreat just shy of the peak: "We're at top. It's beeeee-autiful.") So, as we stood atop Mount Olympus on Friday afternoon, he dialed a quick call home.

That's something I love about my dad. Even though no one else in my family is remotely interested in clawing their way up a 65-degree slope strewn with loose scree, he still tries to include them in the reward. Of course, it's impossible to understand unless you're standing there, on top of the mountain, looking out over the colorful sprawl of the Salt Lake valley. Some hikers like to spout off the numbers: One-way distance: 3.75 miles; Elevation gain: 4,060 feet; Elevation at peak: 9,026 feet (Low, but still surprisingly free of snow.) For them, the reward is in the journey. But I like to take a picture of what matters: the view.

There are varying degrees of effort one has to expend for a good view. This second shot, an overview of Chugach State Park, only took a dead-sprint from Gate B62 to gate B28 in the Denver Airport to catch a connecting flight to Anchorage. Then there's the other extreme - the weeks of hard mountaineering one as to go through just to see the top of the highest point in North America - Mt. Denali - as Geoff's friend "Ed the Head" did on Thursday. But there are perspectives that you work and claw and fight for, and then there are perspectives that matter.

Ed was set to visit us upon his return from the peak; we haven't heard from him since his accident, and it's hard to say now if he will come to see us. But there are the views that life saves only for the luckiest and most humbled - perspectives hidden even from those who stand atop the highest peaks or within the deepest wilderness. I have a feeling that Ed's seen the full 360-degree panorama.