Hell week, day gone awry

We were 16 miles outside of town, rolling a flat, paved road as a stiff tailwind rushed us along, when I started to bonk.

"I thought you said this was going to be a short ride," I said to my co-worker, John, who had promised me one of those infamous "three-hour tours." We were more than an hour into it and we hadn't even hit the climb yet.

"Do you want to turn around?" he asked.

"Maybe," I said, sounding more irritable than I probably needed to. "I feel crappy."

"I didn't think you were such a wuss," he replied with a smile.

"That' a common misconception people have about me," I said. "I'm actually a huge wuss. Anyway, I need at least one easy day in Hell Week."

Still in heavy whine mode, I began to rattle off the symptoms I was feeling, all common signs of overtraining. "You know," John said, "what you're doing is probably not actually helping you much. In a way, it's probably hurting you. Now, if you were train a little more scientifically ..."

"I know, I know," I interrupted. "But this is how I like to do things. Some people are physical riders, but I'm more of a mental rider. I like to train because I like to go out and have adventures, and push my limits, and learn more about life and myself in a process. Some people ride for performance; others ride for experience. I think they're both valid reasons. Riding a lot of strung-together, long, hard days is how I trained for Tour Divide, and I don't regret it.

"Anyway, you're not going to see me doing regular hill repeats up Pattee Canyon any time soon," I continued with a laugh. "I'm too much of a wuss for interval training."

We turned off the I-90 frontage road onto a rough dirt doubletrack that looked more like somebody's driveway than a road, and started up the long ascent. I choked down a granola bar and drank a lot of water, and began to feel better. Long climbs are my favorite kind of riding, and even when I'm just a little overtrained and fighting off a bonk, long climbs are where I'm happiest. My good mood was short-lived, though, because just before we reached saddle, I slurped up the last bit of water from my bladder. I had brought my two-liter bladder to the office because I had believed John when he said we were headed out for a "mellow" three-hour ride after work. But already nearly three hours had already gone by, and we were a long way from anywhere, and I knew it.

"Crap, I'm out of water," I announced.

"It's OK," John said. "It's mostly downhill from here. There's a bar on the highway not far from where this road comes out."

"I have iodine," I said. "Are there any streams?"

"I don't know," John said. "But we'll reach the road before long."

The bonk began to creep up again so I ate a Power Bar and told John my story of the time I ran out of water on the White Rim in Utah and experienced my closest brush with dangerous dehydration. We began the descent into an entirely different drainage. The sun set to the west as we moved north into a large swath of mountains and forest. I saw no sign of a valley, or civilization, and I started to feel a little bit stressed.

A few miles down the rough, rocky road, John got a flat. He stuck in his spare tube and we continued down the road, but not more than two miles later, he flatted again, this time on both tires. He was riding a cross-bike with relatively skinny tires, and had snake-bite pinch flats in both of his tubes; one tube had snake bites in two spots. We dug through our kits and both discovered that neither of us had a functioning patch kit. I especially was cursing this stroke of bad luck, because I always carry a patch kit, but lately have been shifting my stuff between two mountain bikes on a regular basis, and sometimes things get inadvertently left behind.

We spent 45 minutes dealing with the problem. We wrestled my 2.1-inch mountain bike tube into John's tiny tire, working together to lever in the large chunks of rubber that repeatedly tried to burst free. John tied a big knot into the tube with the smallest snake-bite holes, and wrested the now substantially shorter tube into the rim. He pumped up the tire and the tube burst. He tied another knot into the second tube. This one seemed to hold air for a short time, but still had a fairly swift leak. Meanwhile, the sun set and darkness started to fall. I had lights, but only my tiny commuter headlight and a helmet-mounted headlamp whose batteries were nearly dead. John had no lights at all. A chill started to seep in. I put on my only extra layer, a rain jacket.

"How far is it to the highway?" I asked.

"Pretty far," John said sternly.

I looked out into the blackness. I could forge on ahead and seek vehicular help, but I had no idea where we were or where we were headed. We were in the middle of a veritable maze of logging roads - gated ones at that - and my chances of finding the way out on my first try, alone, were slim to none. I was dependent on John for directions, which meant we were both going to have to walk out. My throat was parched and dry. John gave me a sip of his gatorade, but he was nearly out himself. We had no water. We were down to a Gu packet and a crumbled up Odwalla Bar for food. My emotional reaction at this particular moment struck me as significant. A few years back, before I embarked on my non-scientific, experience-driven endurance training, I would have panicked, and probably started to cry and made the situation even worse. I know this, because I have reacted that way before in less daunting situations. But now, just a few years later, I felt like laughing out loud. It was the perfect storm, and the universe had smacked us hard for being complacent, because the universe does that sometimes, and we were just going to have to deal with it.

John filled the front tire again and decided we could probably roll one to two minutes at a time before he flatted, so that's what we did. We crept gingerly around the big rocks strewn all over the road, through the overgrown grass and flowers, making our painfully slow descent one minute at a time. I rode the brakes and stayed beside him, craning my neck to shine my dim helmet-lamp beam over to his side of the road so he could see at least a little. We ducked beneath deadfall. We swerved around obstacles spotted at the very last minute. A herd of elk startled and raced down the road beside us. An elk fawn darted in front of me and we nearly collided. John and I passed a stream. I announced I wanted to collect water, but John promised we were at that point less than a half hour from the highway, so I'd get water sooner if I waited (because iodine takes a half hour to kill all the bacteria in water, it can't be consumed for at least that long.) I didn't necessarily believe him, but I knew every minute we wasted not rolling would burn valuable time in which John's tube was still slightly working - time we may not be able to get back.

About an hour and many tube refills later, we reached the highway. It was 11 p.m. The bar John spoke of was closed, but there was a pump outside where we could refill our water. I drank what felt like an entire two-liter bladder worth, choked a bit, and then refilled my bladder again. I felt a sudden rush of new optimism. The bleak darkness of the evening seemed to fade into warmth and light, because I had water in my body, and all was going to be OK.

"I'm sorry I couldn't buy you a drink at the bar," John said. He was already accepting a lot of the guilt for our misadventure, although I attributed it to bad luck that just happened to hit him harder than it hit me. We were both guilty of being underprepared.

"I got exactly what I wanted from that bar. Water." I let the beautiful word linger on my tongue. Life is really so simple. Food, shelter, water. After a few years of experienced-based endurance training, it doesn't take much to make me happy.

A few miles down the highway, John's front tire stopped holding air. He tried to retie the knot in the tube, and it exploded. He tied a couple of knots in his final, double-flatted tube, and ripped it in two pieces in the process. "Well," he said, "I'm f%$@^&."

We agreed that he would continue walking down the highway and I would ride ahead until I obtained cell phone reception, where I could call John's brother, Chris, who was visiting from out of town. If I didn't get ahold of Chris, I would simply ride all the way back to Missoula, still some 16 miles away, grab my car, and return.

About six miles down the road, my phone finally caught reception. It was after midnight. I called John's home number, and Chris answered on the tenth ring. He sounded sleepy. I told him our story. "Where are you?" he asked.

I paused. "Um, that's a really good question that I'm not sure I can answer," I said. "Shoot. I'm really new to town myself. I don't even know exactly where we are. But I think John said this was Highway 200. I've seen freeway signs for Highway 200 before. I think you head east on I-90, and near the town of Bonner - that's about seven miles east on the freeway - you'll see an exit for Highway 200. Then head up the highway; I'm pretty sure the direction is east, northeast or so. Hopefully you'll see me riding down the road with my lights on. John's a few more miles back and doesn't have any lights."

Not more than five minutes after I hung up my cell phone, I heard a horrible ker-chunk, followed by a hissing noise. I stopped and watched in disbelief as all of the air quickly left my rear tire. I ran my hand along the flat tire and pulled out a four-inch-long nail, embedded all the way to the rim. Finally, I was ready to laugh out loud. My semi-delirious cackling rang out in the still air.

"No way! No %*$%&@^ way I just got a flat!" John had my only spare tube in his rear tire. I had no patch kit. I just kept laughing, because it was so perfectly hilarious, like a comedy of errors, right there, on day five of my hardest span of physical effort in more than a year. And then I did the only thing I could do. I started jogging. I decided I would jog until either Chris - this man I had never met - somehow found me, or until I reached Bonner, where I could call a cab. Bonner could have been as little as two miles away, or as many as ten. I had no idea. As I jogged, the fatigue and delirium set in hard. It's often called the "sleep monster," that overwhelming urge to crawl into a bush off to the side of the road and pass out. I fished out my iPod and turned it on full-volume, hoping a blast of raw noise would keep me from falling asleep on my feet. And I ran.

I came to an opening in the canyon and could see the lights of Bonner in the distance when Chris found me. As we loaded my bike on John's car, the flashing lights of a police car and ambulance raced by. My stress-level, long subdued, hit full-tilt, because I knew John was back there walking down the shoulder of the highway with no lights. Only a couple cars had passed me since we parted and I knew traffic was quite light, but I worried something bad had happened. Happily, we found John several miles up the road, unscathed except for a lot of scuffs on the bottom of his bike shoes. I could barely keep my eyes open during the ride home, and repeatedly nodded off for a couple seconds at a time. Chris dropped me off at home and I collapsed in bed without even bothering to eat anything, even though my stomach was so empty it seemed to gnaw at my sides.

"Wow," I thought as my eyes drooped for a final time. "Now that was a good training ride."

Hell week, day three

Some thousand or two feet up, Dave stops to look out over the valley, a collage of streets and buildings and farmlands walled in by mountains. He offers me one of his candy orange slices and I greedily choke it down through the sweat and dust coating my lips.

“No way to ride around here without climbing,” Dave says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I reply, and we turn toward the thousand more feet in front of us.

We climb and climb and at the top of the mountain is a fire lookout tower. From its base we can see the great Mount Lolo up close, and the valley, too, although its faraway features are becoming more abstract. The lookout himself saunters up with his little dog, Sparky. He tells us the elevation of the mountain is 6,458 feet, and his room with a view is 50 feet higher. He tells us he’s worked the tower for 35 summers, and he hardly ever sees “people ride their bikes up here.” I’m hit with a spark of pride because this isn’t a special occasion; it’s just a Wednesday-night ride, embarked on after full days at the office, and the third similar ride in a row at that. I try to calculate the elevation gain in my head, with the earlier and future rollers, and come up with another night of ~4,000 feet. Just another ride. Day three.

The lookout lingers in conversation. I think maybe his job gets a little lonely up here. Dave points out that the sun is setting and we still have a long way to descend. We pedal to the top of the moto trail, all washed out singletrack and chunk and moon dust, and it’s rugged, and intimidating, and I feel more than a little bit dizzy. But I launch in anyway and hold on tight, real tight, because I have to find a way to survive this thing; after all, I have to do it all again tomorrow.

Fire roads

I crested the rounded spine of Miller Divide and suddenly felt a sensation not unlike sliding my tongue across one of those giant, swirly lollipops. A vast network of rugged roads rippled along the mountains to all sides, and I had just tasted the sweet surface of the expansive bike candy in front of me. I pulled out my map, tried to orient myself and looked back up, entirely bewildered by the possibilities. I had made turns on numbered Forest Service roads that weren’t even on the map, and in turn made more turns on overgrown roads that weren’t even numbered. I left Missoula with aspirations to ride a loop, but realized that if I didn’t turn around and retrace my exact route to this spot, I would be entirely lost. I was going to have to come back here with my GPS and an entire day to burn, maybe days, and I still wouldn’t be able to scrape the surface of possibility in this region, this simple cross-section of Lolo National Forest. And even if I tried, the result probably wouldn’t be unlike trying to finish one of those giant, swirly lollipops — I’d be tired and more than a little sick to my stomach, but satisfied.

Whenever I tell Montana cyclists that I moved here from Alaska, I often get the same response — “Oh, wow, the biking there must have been incredible.” People just assume that because Alaska is big, everything that takes place there must be big. “Well,” I’d reply. “Actually, no. It was pretty limited.” Alaska is incredible for the same reasons the biking is actually quite terrible — it’s largely untouched, almost completely undeveloped wilderness. With a few notable exceptions (such as beach biking), bikes need developed surfaces to function — snow bikes need snowmobile trails, mountain bikes need cleared dirt surfaces, and road bikes need pavement. Alaska is refreshingly lacking in all of these surfaces, even snowmobile trails (although snowmobile trails are by far the most extensive of the off-road options, thus the growing popularity of winter biking in that state.) I grew my passion for cycling in Alaska — specifically mainland Southeast Alaska, which incorporates a tiny sliver of impossibly steep mountains wedged between an icefield and the sea — so the region's limitations didn’t bother me. However, I am only now starting to realize just how limited it really was.

Western Montana is, by contrast, uber-developed (at least relative to Alaska.) As an avid cyclist, this is both a good and bad thing. The road cuts in the mountainsides aren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, but they do offer seemingly endless possibilities in terms of access. Instead of slogging for days over tussocks and across raging streams on foot to access the backcountry in Alaska, I can race up rocky logging roads at 8 mph and find myself fairly deep in the high country within an evening. And that’s just an evening. If I had a good reserve of energy to tap and enough time to burn, I could travel miles and miles into the “wilderness,” come across lots of wildlife and soak in vast views, and the only sign of humanity I’d even see are the logging roads on which I travel, and possibly the occasional moto (although I have yet to see a gas-powered rider on these roads.)

And though mountain bikers often decry the boringness of doubletrack, I rather enjoy it myself. It’s a more peaceful, reflective sort of riding than singletrack, it tends to offer more real travel possibilities (rather than just riding loops around a small area), and can still be technically challenging in spots. And interesting! Just before I took this photo, I saw a flash of brown fur race across the trail about 100 feet front of me. It was too small to be a bear, too big to be a rabbit, but too fast to be a beaver (and too high up on the ridge for the third possibility to be likely.) My first thought was “wolverine!” but I’m pretty sure there are no wolverines in this area. I’m still a little flabbergasted about that animal, but it’s experiences like that — small but transcendent in their own ways — that really make this kind of “training” worth it.

As far as my Tuesday training ride, I ended up with four hours and fifteen minutes of pedaling, I’m not sure how many miles and about 3,800 to 4,000 feet of climbing, based on my map and some up-and-down explorations I did along the ridge. Good day, and my legs are starting to feel it already, but I’m hoping to rally at Blue Mountain tonight. Maybe this time, I’ll even bring my GPS.

Time to train

I was just about to send my friend Jen a text message, asking her if I could come out and visit her in Idaho this weekend, when the guilt crept in. Trans Rockies starts Aug. 8, which means I should really spend this week beating myself up on a bike, not lounging next to a lake with my non-cyclist friend. I put the cell phone down and packed up my bike for day one of a training week I hoped would mimic seven days of hard riding in the Canadian Rockies, in scope if not breadth. Monday evening’s objective was TV Mountain, a 6,800-foot peak that incorporates about 3,900 feet of climbing and 36 miles of pedaling. Not a bad “after work” ride.

A 30 mph wind blew directly in my face as I churned out of town. I took a break to reposition my helmet and briefly considered quitting, but I talked myself out of it. I turned up Grant Creek Road, for a while leaning hard into the crosswind, until it shifted, and suddenly I felt like I was being rushed up the mountain by a massive tailwind. The gravel road snaked up the mountainside, turning north, east, west, every direction imaginable, and the tailwind inexplicably followed me, racing sunset to the peak. At the top, the wind tore through the television towers with such velocity that they vibrated; I could no longer hear my iPod over the jet-engine roar, and I struggled to keep my balance amid the gusts as I walked along the edge overlooking Snowbowl, searching for possible singletrack trails (none were found.) I turned the bike downhill and the tailwind followed with a breathtaking blast of cold speed. Down, down, down, 3,500 feet down, and it wasn’t even yet dusk when I popped out eight miles from town and raced home. I made myself a dinner of egg and turkey spinach salad — because I am trying to up my protein intake — and marveled at how I good and rested I felt, like I was making dinner after a slow day at the office, not a three-and-a-half-hour-long mountain ride. I might as well not have even gone for a training ride, I thought, because I certainly couldn’t feel it.

“That crazy tailwind was something else,” I thought. “How could it possibly have followed me almost the entire way, in all directions?” And then I smiled, because I realized there was a good chance I was crediting the wind with what was more likely just a very good day, one of those rare “untouchable” days where nothing fazes me and I can do no wrong.

“I feel awesome and I just climbed 4,000 feet,” I thought. “Who needs training?” I picked up my cell phone and thought about texting Jen, but stopped myself again. “No, I need this week,” I thought. “Because the only way it will be a good peak training week is if it ends with me feeling absolutely shattered.”

Yes, Monday night was an awesome ride. And it may sound crazy, but I look forward to the goal of tearing it all apart.

Butte ... Montana!

It was one of those moments I was never going to be able to explain. We nudged deeper into a sea of sweaty bodies as the salsa band's drummer stirred the beat toward a fever pitch. The horn section built to a crescendo and the three singers suddenly dove into the crowd with their microphones, not even missing a note as dozens of outstretched arms pulsated around them. Then the brass musicians plunged in next; the trombone player plowed right into the heart of the crowd and paraded through the mass, stretching his instrument high like the leader of a frantic marching band. It echoed a hundred moments of youth when the collective energy of a group hit a ceiling so high, with a peak so unified, that it felt like the entire sky would burst open. The singer yelled "Butte!" and the crowd answered in a deafening roar, "Montana!" "Butte!" "Montana!" "Butte!" "Montana!"

I glanced out over the city lights below the outdoor stage. They shimmered with a surreal intensity that I had seen before. It was another one of those moments I could never explain. When people asked me about my favorite descent during the Tour Divide, I would often think for a second and then answer, "Coming into Butte, at midnight, in the pouring rain, on I-15." They would always look at me with that incredulous smirk, as though to say, "You mean to tell me that you rode a mountain bike 2,800 miles across the country, and that's the most fun you had? On an interstate?" But I couldn't convey to them how cold I was, how tired I was after a 16-hour day, how hard the rain was falling and how long I had been pedaling through a bleak and black wilderness, only to crest over Elk Park Pass and plummet toward Butte, hitting 30 mph, 40 mph, with rain and wind roaring in my ears like a freight train, and the blurred city lights so bright, so inviting, so full of warmth and hope, that the whole world seemed to wrap its arms around me in a welcoming embrace.

And then I felt that embrace again, during the National Folk Festival, in this random town that was once the Superfund toxic cleanup capital of America, in front of a random salsa band who I had never heard before and whose name I didn't even know. I was never going to be able to explain it.

Geraldine and I headed out Saturday morning for a girls' weekend in Butte. Geraldine organizes Climate Ride. We would have been introduced through mutual friends in Anchorage, but we just happened to meet first in a more organic way - we participated in the same 50-mile solstice mountain bike ride. The plan was to ride singletrack in the morning and take in the 72nd National Folk Festival in the afternoon. Both of us had about the same level of experience with Butte and its biking. But instead of doing any kind of prior research, we just decided we'd pull off I-90 somewhere and hope we got lucky.

We did get lucky. Oh wow, did we get lucky. We just happened to turn off at the Homestake trailhead of the Continental Divide Trail. At the trailhead, a group from Bozeman told us it was their favorite ride in all of Montana, and it was easy to see why. The narrow trail climbed steeply, but not heartbreakingly, to a narrow ridge and then followed the Divide tightly on an undulating roller coaster trail that snaked through a maze of erratic boulders and sweet-smelling pine trees.

We topped out at about 8,000 feet and dropped into the next canyon through the lupine and pines, then curved around the highway and looped back through a rockier, chunkier "beaver pond" route. (I saw no ponds. Only rugged slopes.) Montana is quickly making me much better at rounding switchbacks (though still not good.)

While mashing our way up the beaver pond route, a classic Continental Divide storm bulldozed in and soaked us thoroughly. I am not entirely stoked to be back in the region of thunderstorms. Lightning is one of my biggest fears, and thunder booms always set off an adrenaline-charged stress reaction, especially when the thunder is booming as I pedal a metal bicycle, wholly exposed at 8,000 feet on the Continental Divide. That said, all of that adrenaline sure does make for a memorably epic descent.

Then, the National Folk Festival. It was an impressive event - six stages and tens of thousands of people milling around the turn-of-the-century brick buildings that dominate the downtown area of this old mining town. We met up with Geraldine's friends and ate horrible festival food. I thought of my former roommate in Juneau, Shannon, who spends his summer traveling around North Dakota with a gaudy corn dog stand. I was a little disappointed not to find him at this Folk Fest. It was fun attending the festival with other women, who we could giggle with about how sexy the 50-something Moroccan singer was, and no one would roll their eyes at us.

We left the festival late and didn't get into camp until close to 2 a.m. We didn't even camp at a real campground, just the Highland trailhead where we planned to ride the next morning. So we were more than a little dismayed when two vehicles full of drunk men and women showed up after daybreak at 6 a.m., parked literally 15 feet away from us, and proceeded to build a fire and party for two hours in the loudest way possible. One of the women repeatedly screamed "Wake up!" toward our tents, and started talking about "kicking in the doors" of "those dumb biker bitches." (How she knew or assumed we were women, I don't know.) I was genuinely afraid but I had left my bear mace in the car, so I just huddled in my tent and hoped they didn't choose to actually engage us, as I'm pretty sure Geraldine would have knocked in a few faces and I would have run frantically for my life. It always amazes me that people focus all of their camping paranoia on bears. I would take a bear in camp any day over a drunk Montanan, which seem to be much more commen.

We had wanted to get on the trail sooner, but we both didn't want to get up until the drunk people either passed out or left, which they mercifully did at about 8 a.m. We headed up the Continental Divide Trail again. This section was much different than the Homestake section. Steep switchbacks, mud, and more mud ... a little bit of Juneau in Montana.

The views were still incredible, though. I felt like roadkill, which I blamed on festival food and less than four hours of sleep followed by two hours of fearing for my well-being, which would sour anyone's stomach. It was still an awesome weekend! Yeah for Butte, Montana.

Maybe I had to leave

Every morning, the still-unfamiliar sound of my alarm clock blares through the sweaty stillness of deep sleep in a hot room. I slouch out of bed, turn my bleary eyes to the bright sunlight streaming in the window, and brace for it ... the sadness, the homesickness, the cold realization that I have left the place that I loved. I brace for it every morning, because I expect it will hit any day now. But this morning, like yesterday, and the day before that, there is only anticipation, the electric buzz of possibility igniting a day where anything can happen.

I make my breakfast and scrape away the last of the peanut butter in the jar I hauled all the way down from Alaska. I pause for a minute before throwing it away, but the sadness doesn't come, and I toss it without regret. I take a slightly cool shower and squeeze remaining drops from big shampoo bottle that took the ferry ride from Juneau before making its way to Anchorage, then road trips, then south. There's a tiny bit left, so I save it, just to be sure.

I walk into the sun-drenched morning and hop on my bike. I'm wearing all my work clothes already because around here, heavy fleece and rain gear isn't an automatic prerequisite in July. I see a new, interesting street and I take it, and then I get lost. I forget I don't know my way around yet.

The work day flies by quickly. I take midday walks to the coffee shop and the sandwich place. There is still much to take in, but little to stress about. It still feels strange, not having a deadline bearing down on me every day. Suddenly, it's late afternoon, and time to go for a ride.

I like to ride alone. I'm used to it, and I enjoy having all that time to think. But around here, there is something new and exciting going on nearly every night, and it's difficult not to ride with others. I especially like Thursday nights, and the Thursday Night Riders, a group ride that appears to attract a fun combination of unpretentious fast people, longtime Missoulians and intermediate mountain bikers like myself, looking for a challenge. Today is the "Hayduke Ride," an ambitious one, 3,400 feet of climbing all on singletrack. I start from town, which makes it more than 4,000 for me.

Heat wafts off the pavement as I ride down Orange Street. I pass a digital thermometer that reads 95 degrees. My pasty still-Alaskan skin cells look for a retreat but find none. My jersey is already so wet and sticky that it feels like it would take my skin with it if I tried to peel it off. I suck down huge gulps of warm water from my Camelback and think fondly back to the days when I needed fleece and rain gear to ride in July. Honestly, right now I'd rather gouge my eyes out with icicles than ride my bike, but I tell myself I'll warm up to the task at hand, somehow.

I arrive at the trailhead just as the group is riding up the road and seconds away from leaving me behind, just like last week. I kinda wish my timing wasn't so good, because I've only ridden seven miles and already I feel like my head is swimming in a pool of lava. "I'll acclimatize to this eventually," I tell myself, but then I remember that I grew up in Salt Lake City and somehow never adapted to summer. Some of us were just born for ice and snow. That doesn't mean we don't love the sun, but we love it in weaker doses. I dig for energy beneath my overbaked skin. The group starts up and I lag behind. I figure I'll catch up when evening does.

We climb and climb and climb. I catch up to a few riders and mostly talk about how I miss Alaska and fleece gloves in July. But all around me, the world is opening up. There are wildflowers on the hillsides and sweeping mountains on all sides; the sun casts bright streaks of color across the sky and there are a lot of mountain bikers laughing and smiling. Elevation and evening creep up on us, and I start to perk up. Maybe it's because the temperature eased up a little, but more likely it's my view of much of what is right and good about the world.

We reach the 7,100-foot summit and gather, a dozen strong, to look out over this right and good world and anticipate our well-earned reward. Two hours of climbing disappear beneath a swift and blissful descent. We're tired but there's more adventure to be had, so we veer up another climb and turn on a winding piece of singletrack down a brush-choked hillside.

After a mile or so, the group halts. I skid to a stop behind a cluster of riders. Not more than 20 yards in front of us is a black bear, with hair bristling like needles off her shoulders and back, standing and pacing and fretfully retreating. Her tiny cub, no larger than a six-month-old baby, is wrapped around a tree that we have to ride right by. They're the fourth and fifth bears I've seen on trails since I arrived in Montana less than three weeks ago, and are now officially more black bears than I saw in all of 2009 and 2010 in Alaska. Someone turns and says, "It's your fault, Alaska." I'm gaining a reputation for being something of a bear magnet among the Missoula mountain bikers. I'm not too worried about this one because our group is massive and momma bear obviously knows we're here and hasn't charged yet. But just to be sure we cluster tighter and roll slowly away from the young family. We breath relief and drop into the deepening sunset, then ride home in the dark.

I tend to look for signs that I made the right decision about moving - the weather, the sunlight, the recurrences of amazing sunset rides for days and even weeks unbroken. Then I see the bears that remind me of Alaska most of all, and I really think the universe is reaching out to me, telling me that home is wherever I make it, and that's OK. I don't have to be homesick, if I'm home.

One year past

At half past 5 on Monday, July 6, 2009, I rode through the sun-baked desert toward a shimmering clump of trees called Antelope Wells, which would make today (Tuesday, although late, still technically July 6) the one-year anniversary of the day I finished the Tour Divide. In this year's race, since the only woman out there is still making her way toward the Mexican border, that means (I think) I held onto the TD women's record for one more year. Hooray! It actually still strikes me as humorous that I have my name attached to something like that - you know, the women's record holder of "the world's toughest mountain bike race" (don't mock me! This phrase just occurred to me and I think I'll use it as the lead in my book proposals.)

But still, regardless of my feelings about my own experience out there, as my dad pointed out, it's still something to be proud of. While this year's Tour Divide progressed, a lot of people asked me if I would ever ride the course again. The answer is "probably, in several years from now, if by some strange stroke of fate I'm in a good position to return when I'm 35 or 40 years old." The better question is whether I'd return to the race, or to an effort to reclaim the record. I of course recognize that my 2009 time is full of holes. I lost full days to mechanicals and injury in Wyoming and northern Colorado. I lost full days to mental anguish and mud in southern Colorado and New Mexico. And, of course, I opted for comfort over distance whenever the opportunity arose. But as I said to John Nobile when we stopped early one evening in Elkhorn Hot Springs, Montana: "This is three freakin weeks of my life. I'm going to enjoy myself." I still feel that way. Maybe more so now than last year. So while shaving days off my time would be easy in theory, it would be much more difficult in practice.

Speaking of this year's race, I was telling my mom about the strange parallels between Kent Peterson's race-ending mechanicals, and my own in the Great Divide Basin. Like Kent, my freehub began sticking as I crossed the bone-dry, remote sinkhole between Atlantic City and Rawlins. Kent and I first experienced our problems in almost the exact same spot, about 25 miles east of Atlantic City. This is just a few miles beyond a historical marker dedicated to Willie's Handcart Company, a group of Mormon pioneers who crossed the Basin in 1856. The company suffered major setbacks while crossing the plains, and dozens of pioneers died when winter caught up to them in Wyoming. Historynet.com had this to say about the Willie Handcart Company:

"The farther west the companies marched the more problems they had with axles and wheel hubs. In the humid Midwest, the climate better preserved the green wood, but as the air became drier, the unseasoned material dried too quickly and cracked."

As I told this story to my mom, she informed me that I actually have direct ancestors who traveled to Utah with the Willie Handcart Company. When my freehub began to fail, I was lucky enough to be able to coax it into Rawlins. Kent wasn't so lucky, and had to push his bike dozens of miles to Jeffery City. Now, I'm not superstitious ... and I by no means intend to imply that the spirits of my pioneer ancestors are out there exacting wheel revenge on unsuspecting cyclists ... but, if I do happen to write one of those "true life" ghost stories someday, you'll know why.

I just returned to Montana from my short weekend trip to Utah. My dad and I were able to get out for another hike on Monday morning - this time one that is arguably the best route in all of the middle Wasatch Range - the Pfeifferhorn via Red Pine Lakes. It's been at least a decade since I climbed up here. The view is as stunning as ever.

Pfeifferhorn is quite the majestic peak, guarded by crumbling knife ridges that are full of fun scrambling.

Looking out toward the Salt Lake Valley and the Twin Peaks, which my dad and I tried to climb on Saturday. If you squint, you can actually see the snow-filled couloir we decided not to ascend. Looks pretty much vertical from this perspective.

The big mountain in the distant center is Lone Peak, which is still listed on some of my early Web sites as my favorite place in all of the world.

My dad and I on top of Pfeifferhorn, at about noon Monday. The elevation is 11,326 feet - the highest I've been since the Divide. And, yes, I could feel the altitude.

Then, about nine hours later, I was here - 20 miles north of Dillon, Montana, making my way back to Missoula. I needed to pee something fierce but I raced past Dillon because I could see pink sunlight starting to emerge below the rain clouds, and I wanted to round the western mountains in time to see sunset. I was not disappointed. A six-hour, high altitude hike followed by an eight-hour drive certainly did make for a long day Monday, but it was all worth it.