Time for a vacation

Date: Nov. 21
Total mileage: 15.0
November mileage: 212.9
Temperature upon departure: 18

This seems to happen every year. The onslaught of winter arrives hard and fast. I have a minor freak-out and do something nutty like buy tire chains or decry the beautiful barrage of snow. There’s a short period of confusion when I wonder how in the world I ever learned to steer in powder or spend less than 30 minutes dressing to go out. And then suddenly, without even focusing, everything becomes clear. Images of green leaves and flowing water fade into the recesses of my memory, and the monochrome world in which I move becomes a place of beauty and ease. I throw the tire chains in the trunk, slap on random pieces of clothing, and go for a bike ride.

I’m finally completely comfortable with winter. So it’s a bit funny that I’d pick this time of year to take a vacation home. No self-respecting Alaskan heads south at the beginning of winter. But it is Thanksgiving, which is at least a semi-legitimate holiday, and since my employer has decreed that I will work Christmas, it’s now or never.

So I’m headed to tropical, sunny Salt Lake City for the next week. My plan is to eat without remorse all the turkey, cranberry sauce and homemade coconut cream pie I can stuff down (and skip all the other crap.) Then I will try to burn off all the T-day guilt with an ill-conceived run. Then I will spend the better part of a day trying to overhaul my little sis's old 10-speed. I will use it for most of the week to get around town, until a massive failure of the bottom bracket will force me to abandon the bike near the mouth of Big Cottonwood Canyon, where I will then hitchhike up to Brighton and finally get around to doing some real snowboarding. Yup. That's probably what'll happen. I can't wait.

I'll let you know how the 10-speed tune-up goes. Until then, Happy Thanksgiving all.

I stop being such a wimp

Date: Nov. 20
Total mileage: 36.0
November mileage: 197.9
Temperature upon departure: 19

The first rays of the 8 a.m. sunrise nearly filter through a mass of featureless gray that has become the sky; it's nearly cold enough to ensure hardpack and it hasn't snowed in nearly four hours, so it seems like a good morning to ride.

I swerve across the unplowed street as my gray-faced neighbors dig through mountains of snow. Some are looking for their newspapers, some for their cars, some for their kids. Most regard me with surly grimaces, but the few smiles I see are like a shot of Red Bull. It is early, and Monday at that. I head north beyond the idling garbage trucks, the hulking snow plows, chained-up tow trucks and the cars they're pulling out of ditches. After eight miles, I'm far enough north to be almost completely alone.

Blocks of ice and chunky snow keep me on my toes, but I ride as hard and as fast as the drifts will let me because the cold sweat against my skin feels good. Thick clumps of snow drip off tree branches like gooey cake frosting; across the flat muskeg, powder mounds remind me of air-puffed marshmallows. It doesn't surprise me that I'm thinking about sugar, but I do wish I remembered about they way water bottles can freeze shut in a nanosecond. So instead of dwelling on thirst, I think about the way the landscape reminds of my childhood, walking through a Christmas tree lot with row after row of white evergreens, the kind coated with spray-on permafrost. I laugh about the way the real thing makes me nostalgic for the imitation.

A man in a big truck stops just to ask me how I can ride through the snowy shoulder. I show him the studs on my tires and explain that with one-wheel drive, the thin powder actually adds traction over the glare ice on the road. "Yeah, but you can't do any hills, can you?" he asks, and I tell him that I just came down a 1,300-foot drop from the ski resort, and I still have the gravel in my teeth to prove it. He doesn't seem to believe me; he probably still thinks I'm crazy, but I think our short conversation will leave him with a different understanding about the ease of winter travel.

On the way home I still see people digging out their cars, and I start to think that I'm not the crazy one after all.

Uncle! Uncle!

Sunday: Snow...Heavy at Times...Windy. Snow accumulation of 12 to 19 inches. Highs around 32. East wind to 25 mph with gusts to 45 mph. Decreasing to 20 mph in the afternoon. Chance of snow 90 percent. (courtesy of National Weather Service)

OK, winter. Good joke. We're all laughing. 45 inches of snow? In a week? In Juneau? We thought it was pretty funny. We broke out the moldy snow shovels and rusted-out plows and all had a hearty chuckle about how you got us pretty good. So why are you still here, lingering, threatening a seemingly unending barrage of snow? I say, winter, there's no need to be a bully. Enough is enough.

Don't get me wrong. I'm on your side. A "winter" person through and through. I can do snow anyway you send it - love the powder for snowboarding; love the wet stuff for snowshoing; love the crusty, icy stuff for snowbiking. But in all things, moderation. Sinking up to my thighs and becoming stuck in wet concrete snow, spinning out on newly plowed roads, and scaling snow berms taller than me is not moderation, winter. Oh, and biking? That hobby I have that keeps me (mostly) sane? Playing Chicken with SUVs in the ice-coated bobsled run between neck-high snowbanks is not moderation, winter. I believe in Russia they called that Roulette.

At least the ski-area season-pass holders are happy. Keep it up, and they'll be able to slip down the slopes until July. In the meantime, I'm learning one of those life lessons about a little too much of a good thing.

I miss the rain.

But don't ever, ever tell anyone I said that. I'll vehemently deny it forever.

In the meantime, winter, can't you lay off a little? Just a little cold sunlight, a little settling, a little freeze-over, just to get me back on the trails, on my bike, where I belong?

Thanks again.

- Jill

Monochrome

Isn't it interesting how uncannily black and white this picture looks? It's not. I uploaded the photo in its raw capacity, with no special camera settings and no photo editing software to speak of. This is how my camera saw the world this afternoon. The more I scrutinize it, the less color I see. Sometimes life is like that.

Four hours of cross-country skiing today - most of it on unbroken trail through deep snow - was extremely hard. I emphasize the superfluous adverb I can go out and ride a bicycle or hike for four hours like it's a pleasant walk in the park, but for some reason that much skiing has me scanning the snow for a final resting place. It doesn't make much sense because I was never working hard enough to even break a sweat. I may have used more upper back muscles than I'm used to, but I'm not sore now. So what gives? Why does skiing cause so much fatigue? I thought maybe I just had low blood sugar, but I don't know. I joke about this alot, but maybe my body is willing to admit what my mind won't ... maybe I really do hate skiing.

If it doesn't snow six inches tonight like they say it's going to, I might be able to go for a bike ride tomorrow. I could go just the same, but only the plowed roads are rideable right now. And with four-foot-high snow burms spilling out over already narrow lanes, I'd likely be killed. I guess it beats skiing.

This is just the backyard

I haven't attempted to ride my bike at all in the past few days. I have a hard enough time walking when I go outside. The district closed school both yesterday and today (which I think is a bit wimpy for a measly two feet of snow.) Still ... they told me it never snows in Juneau. They told me it would be ice and rain all winter long. I know I've only lived here three months, but, looking out my window over my whitewashed backyard, I think it does snow in Juneau. Maybe even often. So I have to wonder ... what does this winter hold in store for me?

I finally took my car in to have the studded tires installed today. I always procrastinate things until they become not only an annoying but also inconvenient chore, so I was more than a little irked when a walk-in showed up five minutes before me and stole my 11 a.m. slot. But my conversation with her was an excellent example of how I think so much more like a cyclist these days.

She told me that her studs were already on rims, and she changed them herself earlier this week, not realizing that they had all leaked out most of their air over the summer.

"I drove around for two days on nearly flat tires," she said. "I didn't even realize it."

I think she expected me to laugh. I just nodded and - without really thinking it through first - replied, "That's probably the best way to run them in this kind of weather."

And I was about to launch into an explanation about the way low-pressure tires create a lot more rolling resistance, how the rubber grips better to slippery surfaces and the how the increased surface area floats more easily over deep snow, but her furrowed-brow look of confusion snapped me back to reality.

So instead I just mustered a half-hearted laugh as though I had just made a bad joke.

She ignore it entirely and said, "Yeah, I thought I'd be here all day, but it's just a quick fix so they got me right in."

I went to the gym for an hour and then walked back to pick up my car. I drove away with four 14" studded tires running at a full 35 psi. I listened to the oh-so-familiar crackle of carbide on sheet ice and wondered what might happen if I ran them at 15.

Cat blog

A few days ago, a commenter asked me about the status of my transient cat, who joined me in Juneau about a month after I moved here. I just wanted to report that the cat who hates to travel (and I mean really hates to travel), and who has lived with me in four different houses across a span of states more than 3,000 miles apart, appears to be happy at home.

It’s kind of a funny story how I ended up with this cat. I’m not a typical pet owner and never really set out to become one. I was living in a little studio apartment by myself in a quiet little town called Tooele, Utah. Geoff and I had spent the day mountain biking in the Stansbury Mountains, and we were unloading a slew of bike gear when this little cream-colored furball streaked into the kitchen through the open door. She had a dirt patch on her face and looked so small and frail that I felt compelled to rifle through my cupboard until I found a can of tuna.

“Don’t feed it if you don’t want a cat,” Geoff said.

“It’ll just be this one can,” I reasoned, and popped it open.

“Congratulations, you now have a cat,” he said.

I just laughed. She polished off the tuna and disappeared out the door. I thought I’d never see her again.

That is, until I found her waiting patiently on my porch when I came home from work the next day. I gave her an old can of pink salmon and shut the door behind her. She ate the entire can of greasy fish and left again.

But then she kept staking out my porch every day around 5 p.m. She’d sprint toward my car as I rolled into the driveway, meow loudly and trot behind me as a walked into the house. After I ran out of cans of meat, I began to give her bites of my dinner - macaroni and cheese, chicken, cherrios, goldfish crackers - there wasn’t anything she wouldn’t eat. Soon I found myself purchasing a little box of cat food at the store, and then a big bag of cat food, and then tuna treats, and then a litter box and cat bed - and before I even realized it, I had a cat.

For the longest time I called her “Kitty,” and sometimes “Sadie,” which is the name of my parents’ cat. So when it finally came time to admit that I had adopted her, several months after we first met, I finally gave her a name - “Cady.”

I nearly lost her when I moved from Tooele to Idaho Falls. She still spent most of her nights outside, sometimes disappearing for days at a time. I couldn’t find her when I made my final move, so I drove away from my empty apartment, convinced I’d never see her again.

I was so depressed about it that about a week later, my parents drove more than an hour one way just to look for her. It was probably a small miracle - but didn’t seem to be at the time - that they found her parked right in front of my house as if I had never abandoned her.

My parents have said that she’s the one who adopted me, and she must have not realized what she was getting herself into. Every time I move, she has to endure a painful transition of being stuffed in a cat carrier and carted across epic distances, refusing to eat or drink for an entire day and crying the entire time (and I mean the entire time). But every time we arrive in a new place, she acts as if she’s never been happier. I think she’s a lot like me.

It’s hard for me to predict how many more times Cady and I will move away, how many more new cat enemies she we make and how many more vole populations she will eradicate. But I do believe this - that if she could go back to that summer evening in Tooele, with the sickly sweet stench of apricots rotting in the hot August air and strange creatures hoisting scary metal contraptions into a dark cave of an apartment - that she’d still pick me.

Big snow

Date: Nov. 13
Total mileage: 10
November mileage: 161.9
Temperature upon departure: 27

A storm moved in today that has so far dumped more than a foot of snow. It could dump another foot before the clouds move on. That’s great weather for weaving a fleece-blanket cocoon, curling around two cozy cats, and soaking up steam from a big cup of hot chocolate. It’s also good weather for biking.

We went out for a ride this morning when the storm totals were closer to 4" - enough to send cars swerving all over the roads, but not enough to bog down the bike paths to the point of walking. It's a fun adventure to go out for a ride when the snow is coming down that hard. Familiar scenery disappears behind a veil of white static. And during rare breaks in traffic, with metal-tipped tires disappearing beneath soft powder, the silence is nearly absolute. I, of course, forgot my googles, so I spent most of the ride focused on abstract tracks in the snow.

Every single flight in and out of Juneau was cancelled today - in a twist of luck, stranding in surrounding airports all of the state legislators who were coming to town for a special session they didn't want to attend - and, in a twist of poetic justice, also stranding the Lt. governor who was partially responsible for the unwanted session in the first place. In the sweep of the storm, we were effectively cut off from the rest of the world. With nowhere to go and nobody but Juneau to answer to, residents closed offices early, ran errands on skis, went sledding down paved roads, and pedaled snow-caked bikes across town. And just like the lip-biting children praying for "snow day," I know we're all going to be glued to our radios tomorrow morning.