There's no way to write it down

My day on Blackerby Ridge, Dec. 11, 2009

Modern Romance, part 2

A couple of months ago, on a sunny Tuesday morning in October, I hiked up Thunder Mountain and wrote a blog post called "Modern Romance." This is its continuation.

Headlights run together in a pale yellow stream as commuters make their way through the morning fog. A school bus stops and everybody waits. Children in thick coats sprint from dark houses and clammer onto the bus. Flecks of ice swirl through the billowing plumes of exhaust - frost or flurries, I'm not sure which. I'm taking a gamble that somewhere beyond the fog, it's a nice day. But the morning is kind of ugly, thick and gray, and grumpy because I couldn't sleep, so here I am, joining the pre-dawn commute. They'll go to work and school, and I'll go to Thunder Mountain.

(It's been a tough week. A relationship I had been cautiously optimistic about hit a dead end. These things happen. Nothing I can do about it, but it's hard not to feel frustrated and wonder what's wrong with me. I gave myself some time to feel bad about it and haven't been able to sleep much, but the weather's been gorgeous, as ideal as December weather can be, sunny, just below freezing, and no wind. That's the formula for stunning winter beauty, and spending as much time as I can afford to spend out in it really does keep me grounded, comfortably, somewhere between mania and depression.)

I'm dripping sweat all over the freshly frosted trail when Geoff calls, somewhat randomly, at 8:18 in the morning. He's been in San Francisco all week for a big race, a big race that went well, and he placed second, still ahead of the old course record, and won $4,000. I had decided earlier in the week that I was hurt that he hadn't called me about it, but that emotion didn't stick. It's hard for me to believe it's been eight months since we broke up. It does not seem like that long. I burned through my anger on the Great Divide, made my peace, and came home knowing he was right about the whole thing. Since then, we've had an amicable if somewhat distant friendship, based on reserved kindness and a whole lot of honesty. On the phone, we talk about his race, about our old friends, about his girlfriend. I'm sleep-deprived and gasping up a virtual wall of roots and frozen mud, so I don't feel a whole lot, but I'm glad he called.

Very slowly, I start to climb out of the fog. At first I see streaks of brighter light through the gray, and then the ice-glazed snow starts to sparkle. It's still early enough for orange light, burning hot through a hole in the clouds, and then I push through the hole, and there's nothing beyond but blue sky. The snow-coated mountain ridge is surrounded by a sea of clouds, everything shimmering gold beneath a low winter sun. Beauty like this brings me instant joy, no matter how ugly I feel inside, every time.

I reach the ridge and strap on my crampons. I weave up and down the slope so I can practice spike-walking in places where the consequences of falling aren't too disastrous. Learning the daunting art of mountaineering is something I really want right now. I'm not even sure where this desire came from. I've never felt this way about it before. I always saw mountaineering as this highly risky sport that required more skills and guts than I could ever possess. But now I see mountaineering for what it is at its surface - a way to go farther into these places I truly love, the mountains.

I stop for a moment at the edge of the ridge and look out over the shrouded city. A roar of sound fills the white spaces as though there were three feet of vertical space between us instead of 3,000. I hear vehicles streaming down the highway. I hear planes taking off. I hear machinery moving earth. I hear trucks backing up. I hear everything as though I were down there, among the din of traffic, but all I see is a wilderness of mountains and clouds.

As I work my way down the ridge, I see small tracks from a mountain goat, so I follow them. The goat went where I want to go, following the friendly side of a cornice, all the way to the edge of a knife ridge. I work my way up to my point of no return. There is an exposed traverse on this ridge that involves a scramble up loose talus. It frightens me even in the summer, when it's warm and dry. No way am I going up that section through the snow, with my limited skills, alone, unroped, in the winter. I notice the mountain goat didn't go that way, either. It turned right, scrambled along an even more exposed edge, skittered across a wall of barren, icy rock, and rounded the next corner out of sight.

I turn and look back at my own tracks - big, awkward, not at all like the goat's. I can't remember the last time I felt so much envy toward another creature. Mountain goat didn't need crampons. It didn't need an ice ax. It didn't need to spend years trying to figure out what it was doing. Mountain goat didn't traverse this ridge because it was restless, or wandering, or searching for clear answers to foggy questions. Mountain goat traversed this ridge because it was the most natural thing for it to be doing. Somehow, in this frozen wasteland, it had access to food, it had a home, it had a life. I wish I could be like mountain goat.

I glance at my watch and yelp. I am spending far too much time on this mountain. I reluctantly start making my way back down. The sun blazes, bright and warm. It's probably close to freezing up here. It may even be above. I feel cozy and comfortable. I have a down coat in my backpack, and a bivy sack. My cell phone has full reception. I wonder what my boss would say if I called him up, told him that I wouldn't be coming to work any more, that I would be moving to the top of Thunder Mountain, to become like mountain goat.

He would probably just laugh. I reluctantly follow my tracks back, thinking about freedom and happiness. Up in the open air, it's very easy to believe that I can just "follow my bliss," if only I knew what that was. Travel around on my bicycle? Find a better-paying job, acquire a house? Give away all of my possessions save for my bicycles and my hiking gear and move to a small cabin and become a starving writer? Work for a struggling newspaper and find freedom in my surroundings, these beautiful, incredible surroundings? It's a moot thought exercise because the only place I truly believe in change is up here, and when I return to life below, the fog always seems to fill in these hollow hopes.

I reach the junction of the ridge, where the route drops back into the murky grayness. Traffic is still roaring. I frown, because I am not ready to go back. Sweat pours from my forehead. The temperature is rising. It feels like it's 80 degrees. I dump by backpack with the snowshoes and coat dangling off of it; I fling away my ax and my trekking pole. I strip off my gloves and fleece, and I take off up the other side of the ridge, running, as fast as my crampon-weighted feet will carry me, running into the calm winter air and white, bright snow. I run until I can not breathe, and still I keep running. I get carried away with the emotion of it; it feels like strong happiness, happiness as strong as love. I feel like I'm in love, but only with Thunder Mountain. Again, just Thunder Mountain.

And I wonder, I wonder about that emotion. If a person is in love with cold and desolate places, does that make them a cold and desolate person? I think it's a valid question.

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This sparkly world

My shoulder is feeling much better today. Still a little stiff and sore, but the "electric shock" pain is gone. I know the prudent course of action would be rest and relaxation, but I have this inability to waste good weather. Call it sun mania. As long as at least three of my limbs are functioning, I am going to find a way to get outside. I will of course dial it back if pain returns, but so far I can't find any evidence that this sleep injury is all that serious. So after a relaxing morning of rotating and rubbing it, I went trail riding.

Last week's rain showers took away most of our town-level snow, which is great, because it means that dirt's back. I have a whole singletrack routine that I like to loop in the Mendenhall Valley, and now that I live out there, the ride doesn't involve the exhaust fumes and highway drudgery of a 20-mile-round-trip commute from Douglas. In fact, once I leave Fritz Cove Road and connect with the Auke Lake trail, I can ride for a few hours on different trails while hardly touching the hard stuff (pavement). Dirt in December. Sometimes I forget about all the little things I have to be thankful for.

Of course, December dirt isn't exactly like August dirt. Frosted and mud-free, it's actually both smoother and grippier than the summer stuff. Then there's the beaver floods. In the summer, they must be avoided at all costs lest you end up waist-deep in foul-smelling sludge with a seized-up bottom bracket. In the winter, they add a whole new level of fun ... on ice! Seriously, you haven't lived until you've connected a couple of studded tires with sheets of frozen floods, squealing like a 2-year-old girl while the thin veneer shatters like plate glass beneath your wheels.

Then, once you clear all those beaver floods you were never willing to splash through during the summer, you find a whole new network of singletrack that you've never ridden before, swooping through a maze of ice-encrusted branches that sparkle like diamonds in the low golden sun.

And cyclists don't like winter? Seriously, I just don't get it.

Dodging the pain

Have you ever pinched a nerve? I think I may have, last night, while I was sleeping. I was tossing and turning in semi-awareness of a murky dream and then I bolted wide awake, vibrating with excrutiating pain that radiated out of my lower right shoulder blade. After several seconds, it went numb, but as soon as I moved, the searing pain shot through my body again, as though my shoulder was hooked up to electric cables triggered by movement. It was early, about 7 a.m., five hours after I went to sleep. I got up and paced around my room, reaching over with my good arm and massaging my back, trying to coax away the streaks of pain that would leave me frozen in place, moaning out loud. If I relaxed, the numbness returned, but not for long. I laid back down. I sat up. I paced some more. Nothing I did brought me any kind of comfort.

A couple hours passed. I read a book, standing, pacing, leaning against the door. The sun came up. The sky was clear and beautiful, and I was annoyed, because I really wanted to get out today. The pain was subsiding, with longer periods of numbness, but discomfort lingered, as did the periods of acute burning sensations. I sat on the bed and tried every position I could think of. I stretched and flexed. I held out my arms and clenched my fists, and as I started to sense a level of comfort, I realized I was perched in a position that was very similar to the one I make while riding my bicycle.

So I went for a bike ride. It will sound totally crazy but standing, sitting, even laying down caused me pain, but I didn't feel a thing as I pedaled up the road. Sometimes I would stand out of the saddle or lean hard into a turn, and the pain would streak through, but as long as I held steady, I felt comfortable. The temperature was 25 degrees - cold therapy. And since I suspected my injury was more annoying than serious, I kept at it, all three and a half hours I had left until I had to get ready for work - about 45 miles.

I'm not saying I believe the bike ride actually helped. As soon as I stepped off the bike at my front porch, the resulting streak of pain was so intense that for a minute I thought I might black out. And I couldn't muster that wherewithal to ignore the pain long enough to actually lift my bike up on the porch, so I just wheeled it behind the house. But I don't think the bike ride necessarily hurt, and it gave me several hours of much-needed relief. I popped some painkillers and my shoulder continued to throb, but the pain subsided over the course of the day. Still not sure what is causing this injury ... maybe it is a delayed reaction to a crash I took onto hard ice on my snow bike yesterday, or maybe I really did pinch a nerve in my sleep.

But the lesson here is, I think, as I work out the kinks in my life, my body is telling me to stay on the bike.

Sunday, Pugsley Sunday

This seems to be inadvertently becoming a tradition ... the last day of the week rolls around and I sleep in, eat a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, finally make an effort to look out the window and note that the weather is actually pretty nice, and head out with Pugsley for a relaxing late morning/early afternoon hunt for rare pockets of snowbiking. A recent long thaw means everything at sea level is pretty much bare. Must climb.

Lake Creek Trail - which in the summer isn't actually a trail, so most everything beneath the snow is undeveloped terrain. Climbing to snow means clearing the myriad obstacles - clumps of frozen muskeg grass, rolling glare ice streams and flake-frosted mud. Much of it involves mountain bike moves as technical as any I've ever tried, on uphill slopes as steep as any I've ever climbed, and yet I try them, despite rather painful falls on hard ground that await me, because I have this delusion that Pugsley is invincible.

I was hoping for more hard crust in the meadows but I guess conditions stayed pretty wintry up there this week. This is my best attempt to ride downhill through the fluff. I'm not sure how much I was still moving when the self-timer clicked.

Elusive winter singletrack. Day-old ski tracks sometimes make great bike trails, but they're so narrow that the swerve-margin is near zero. Skiers usually have dogs that punch deep holes in the track and make it very difficult to hold a straight line.

No matter. Half the fun is in trying. Furrowing my brow, biting my bottom lip and funneling every ounce of available concentration into 30 continuous feet of riding is surprisingly satisfying.

Frost feathers. Today was also the day I discovered that the "super macro" setting on the Olympus Stylus isn't half bad.

But frost has a way of even making the ugliest patches of nutrient-starved muskeg look enticing. The temperature today held steady in the 20s, which feels downright toasty compared to 35 and raining (you'll note in the self portrait that I wore neither a hat nor gloves, at least until I started bombing downhill.) I wish it could be Pugsley Sunday every day.

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First day of sun

Yesterday was Juneau's 51st consecutive day of precipitation. Fifty one wet days. Rain, snow, sleet, slush and snain - sometimes just a trace, sometimes close to two inches of water, sometimes nearly letting an entire 24-hour period pass between squalls, but never completely, not quite. A lot happens in 51 days. Fall leaves wither and disintegrate. Friendships spark and fade. Snow falls and accumulates. Relationships begin and end. Fifty one days.

And then the sun comes out, and it promises not to leave again for a while, and you squint into its glaring light, and you're not even sure how to react, because an entire season rolled over while it flickered noncommitally, and even now that it's set to stick around, it's too late, it's December, it can only linger low on the horizon for six hours a day. No matter. Those of us wedged in the tight spaces between the mountains and the sea don't have the luxury of choosing our sunshine. We take what we're given, and we cherish every second.

My former roommate, Shannon, and I decided to celebrate the first day of sun with a trek up Mount Jumbo. We haven't really seen each other since I left for Utah in April, so it was a good day to get together. We're similarly struck right now, caught between strange hiccups in our lives, holding our breaths a little too long, hoping that when our heads stop pounding and lungs stop gasping, we'll finally breathe easy. When we last lived at the Cliff House in March, life was different for both of us, quieter. I was hobbling around on crutches and Shannon still ate sugar. Now he goes out for 22-mile runs training for nothing and I'm addicted to elevation, otherwise directionless. Five times 51 days.

We did the snowshoe thing, tough work for runners and cyclists alike, but at the same time so mindless that we could spend lots of time commiserating, joking and gaping at golden hints of sunlight against a cerulean sky.

Mount Jumbo. A familiar place, but not so much now. I must have climbed at least the first section of it close to 51 times during my tenure at the Cliff House. But I've never been up here in December, with snow shoved in every crevice and 12-foot-tall trees reduced to nubs. The wind-scoured, hardpacked surface crust kept us off the summit ridge - Shannon only had small running snowshoes and nothing more. So we stopped at the saddle.

No disappointment. On a day as bright as today, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. There are no goals, unless being out in the clear cold air counts as a goal. We settled in a wide spot of direct sun at 2,600 feet. Shannon snapped iPhone pictures and I plied him with king-sized peanut butter Twix bars. "Can I tempt you with refined sugar?" I asked. "Gimme," he said, and devoured two with a wide grin.

We laughed in the stark light as beads of sweat froze solid on our faces and frost stiffened around our fleece jackets. We pulled on coats, hats and gloves, sipped slushy water and fought to linger high on the mountain even as the chill gripped our cores. Sun invited us up and then refused to provide anything but views - cold and uncaring, noncommital to the end.

No matter, we make our own warmth. Sun just gives us perspective, and reason to hope.

Into December

Today was December 3, the latest in the year I have climbed to Blackerby Ridge.

The weather was marginal and I had been planning on a three or four-hour bike ride. Yesterday I officially signed up for the White Mountains 100, which means by March 21 I have to be well-conditioned for a long, hilly snow bike century in subzero temperatures near Fairbanks. But this past fall left me with an alpine bug I can't seem to kick, and after several lazy morning hours, I was craving mountains. I only had about four hours of daylight left, so I decided to go up Blackerby Ridge. On my way out the door of the house I am housesitting, I noticed fresh bear tracks ambling up the driveway, circling the locked garbage hutch and disappearing into the woods. I took a few photos and went back inside to quickly send them to my friends, the owners of the house, via Facebook. By the time I came back outside, there were new fresh bear tracks, this time heading back down the driveway. I ducked back inside the house and debated how much I wanted to climb today versus risking contact with a black bear that is not in hibernation and therefore probably hungry. Strangely, mountains still won. I pulled my ice ax off my pack and walked outside, swinging it back and forth and yelling "Hey Bear!" until I reached the bottom of the driveway and jumped into my car.

At first, it was hard for me to fathom why Blackerby Ridge held such an appeal that I was willing to take on a garbage bear with only an ice ax as a weapon. The hike was tough. There was bare trail and patchy ice to 600 feet, followed by a landslide or heavily wind-damaged area covered in piles of downed trees and branches (I don't think it could have been an avalanche, because there was no snow among the piles.) Then there was hardpacked, crusty snow, and then uneven cookie-filled snow, and finally enough powder to strap on my snowshoes at about 1,400 feet.

But as soon as I cleared the alpine, all of the drama - the lurking garbage bear, the landslide bushwhack, the slow snowshoe plod, the job angst, the unease - disappeared beneath a pillow of white silence. Such a tranquil place - Blackerby Ridge in a calm December snowstorm. I gazed out toward the indistinguishable transition between white mountain and white sky, and smiled, because it felt like peace.

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