Clinging to summer

The bank sign read 59 degrees just after 5:30 p.m. Monday.

"Ah, it's still warm," I thought. Golden sunlight cast long shadows on the streets. "And it's a beautiful evening."

I put on a long-sleeved jersey, shorts, and a thin pair of gloves, and set out toward the mountains. The subtle warmth of the low sun caressed my skin, and sweat began to bead on my forehead as I climbed Pattee Canyon. I felt particularly strong, perhaps because it had been several days since I had ridden a bicycle, or perhaps because I was finally getting into singlespeed shape. I ramped up the pace, veered right on a narrow logging road and churned up the steep gravel as twilight descended. I crested a saddle and continued climbing toward the Miller Creek Divide, as night opened the sky to an expanding spread of stars and a sliver of the moon. I felt amazing. I love to climb and climb. I'd climb into eternity if there was a mountain high enough. But the Miller Creek Divide eventually crests out and drops into a bewildering maze of logging roads, and it was there, at 8 p.m. or so, that I finally slowed to a stop.

A rush of cold air struck me like a freight train out of the darkness. I gasped and insta-frozen breath swirled in the beam of my headlamp. I shined it down on my feet and saw hints of sparkle on the grass. Was that frost? The chill needled in before I could investigate. It was cold! How did it get so suddenly cold? I opened my frame bag to confirm what I already knew - that I had failed to bring an extra layer. Because it was summer, right? No, no it wasn't summer. The temperature was near freezing and plummeting. And there was nothing I could do but descend 3,500 feet of elevation - on a spun-out singlespeed, no less - into the frigid night.

Unpleasant would be a kind word I could use to describe that descent. I tucked into my handlebars if only to glean off my own body heat, and dropped into black canyon. My dim light turned the gravel road into a flicker of shapes and shadows as the icy wind stung my bare legs. My fingers lost sensation first, then my toes, and then the windchill worked its way into my arms, legs, and finally butt. I am blessed with what I think is uncommonly good heat retention in my core - especially in dry cold - so I managed to stave off shivering. But my limbs were for all practical purposes frozen. I was a statue on a bicycle, a blur in the dark night with only the tears in my eyes to reveal any sign of life.

By the time I reached the bottom of the canyon, I still had to pedal home, but my legs absolutely refused to move. My hands were so numb that when I went to adjust my helmet strap, I found it completely impossible to even unbuckle it, so I just placed the frozen stumps back on my handlebars and strained to push every ounce of warm blood I still had in my core toward my legs, on the off chance I still had muscles to move. I wasn't sure, because I certainly couldn't feel them. I creaked robot-like toward home, then fumbled with my keys for nearly 10 minutes just to get the door unlocked. After that came the shower of much punishment: 10 minutes of hot agony as the thousand invisible needles pricked my skin back to life, followed by 10 more minutes of numb recovery, still trying to make rigid fingers work.

Ah, the early season. Have to respect the annual lesson in the importance of warm clothing.

But the truth is, it's been difficult for me to accept that Missoula has any other seasons besides summer. When I moved here, summer had just begun, both literally (it was June 21) and figuratively (the long spring rains finally let up, and haven't really come back since.) It's been four months of sunshine and long evening rides and warm nights. I can't even really imagine Missoula any other way. Until Monday, cold nights seemed to be a long way off. Winter felt like another lifetime.

Then I woke up this morning to thick frost on the grass and porch, and I knew it was probably time to start saying so long to the summer, for real this time.

But not yet. Not quite yet. Tuesday was Dave's last night in town. He, Bill and I rode up the Lincoln Hills and worked our way up to a particularly challenging series of singletrack trails called the Larch and Sidewinder families. We climbed into fading light and dropped into expanding darkness, losing the rest of the twilight to a 20-minute stop to saw a fallen tree in half. I launched into the darkness with wide eyes. All the obstacles seemed more insurmountable, the trees more foreboding. I struggled with this trail when it was still summer, and with the early night, my headlamp cast it in a new, even eerier light. The air was still, the temperatures falling, and the city lights of Missoula sparkled like a sea below us. But my apprehension began to diminish as I tucked into the turns. I smiled with the warmth of my fledgling confidence, because I've experienced much in the past four months, and those are the remnants of summer that will never fade.

Lima Peak

The squelch of soft mud beneath my shoes was suddenly eclipsed by a loud "humph."

I stopped in my tracks and strained to see through misty curtains of rain. "Humph," the grunt increased in volume as a moose emerged from the brush less than 10 yards in front of me. My breathing stopped and my eyes froze open as the moose lowered its ears and took a couple of steps toward me. Instinctively I took several quick steps backward and stopped near a tree. I couldn't take my eyes off the moose long enough to observe the tree, but I contemplated the possibility of climbing it.

"Humph," the moose grunted again, and out of the woods stepped its nearly full-grown calf. I thought the moose must be a female, but she confused me because she had one antler, only one, twisted and deformed on the right side of her brow. On the left was a crazy eye, cloudy and bright at the same time, and it struck me that I was actually close enough to see the eye of an angry moose.

"Humph." She took another step toward me. "I'm sorry moose," I said in a strange, calm voice that didn't sound like my own. "I don't want any trouble, really I don't."

The moose seemed to glower at me, one normal eye and one crazy eye fixated on my pale face. I couldn't remember if eye and voice contact was a good thing or not with moose. I took one more step back and quickly glanced at the tree. Its branches were high and surrounded in thick needles. I would need adrenaline to climb this particular tree, probably lots of it. I looked back at the one-antlered, crazy-eyed cow moose and waited for her to force my hand. She huffed one more time, turned, and galloped back into the brush. Heart racing, I reached in my pocket and pulled out my camera. I took one shot when she was already far away, still retreating, still looking back at me. There was nothing left to say, if there even was anything said to begin with. But in the lingering electricity of our short interaction, I felt a real communication had taken place. The moose said, "This is my property," and I said, "I agree with you, but may I ask your permission to trespass, just this once?"

I am weary of I-15. Five times since July, I've made the drive between Missoula and Salt Lake City, and three of those times were a rushed effort into emotionally charged, difficult weekends. I had to drive down this weekend to bury another grandfather, my mother's father. There was much about the prospect I was not yet ready to face, and the drive was first on the list. Several people who have become my good friends in Missoula were throwing a goodbye party for Dave on Thursday night. I had planned to attend, but at the last minute decided I needed to drive instead. When I told my friend Bill - who I have confided a lot in recently - that I would have to miss the party, he said, "It seems like you have been dealing with a lot of stuff lately, and so far it appears that you're doing it on your own. Just let me know if you ever need anything."

I felt gratitude for Bill and the way he reached out, and it was difficult to explain that spending a little time on my own was an important part of my grieving process. There was just something I needed to do. I couldn't quite explain it, even to myself. But I had to visit the mountains. The mountains of I-15. The mountains that rose like a fortress above the sagebrush desert of southern Montana, broad pillars of rock so distinct and forceful that they demanded attention from even the most road-weary drivers. I had passed them four times in the last three months and vowed to climb them every time. On my fifth drive, I was going to try.

I veered off the Interstate just north of Lima and camped on the bank of Little Sheep Creek. I awoke, later than I planned, to heavy rain and a thick gray veil over the mountains. My fleece pullover soaked quickly and lead-like layers of mud stuck to my feet as I slogged up a faint two-track mining road. The two-track dipped into a creek and faded to nearly nothing, so I followed the creek drainage, pushing through the cold mist and drenched tree branches. It was there I met the moose, and when she retreated down the drainage I decided continuing forward was the best course of action. The raindrops became thick, then turned to slush, and then snow. White flakes clung to my saturated fleece and polyester pants, but still I continued forward because I was not cold and not yet out of time.

I climbed out of the drainage to a bench already white with fresh powder. My heart was still thumping, my head still quiet after the encounter with the moose, and I felt no emotion as I looked at Lima Peak, now looming in startlingly close proximity. I climbed up a grassy ramp and crawled onto the face, which was less like a solid mountain and more like crumbling rockfall of basketball-size boulders. My gloves became soaked as I scrambled up the slope like an awkward quadruped, trying to balance my body over the loose, slippery stones.

As I climbed, the fog sank in until visibility was just about gone. I crawled until the boulders started to slope downward, and, remembering that this peak was shaped like a triangle when I had seen it from the saddle, decided I was at the top. I sat down and pulled off my soaked glove to eat a Honey Stinger Bar, and then I remembered that I had planned to write a note to my grandpa. I had done so on Lone Peak a week before my father's father died, on September 4, and it was a comforting ritual. When my Grandpa Johnson died on October 4, I couldn't help but think about what I would write to him in a note at the top of a mountain. It found it was difficult to form meaningful words. The death of my other grandfather had been a surprise, and I missed him terribly. But the death of my mother's father was more difficult to reconcile. I loved my Grandpa Johnson, but during the last decade of his life, much of his existence was marked with pain and anger, and he had a fair share of struggles. I think most of my family viewed his death as a merciful release for him. It was time.

But he was my grandfather, and my mother's father. His blood pumped through his veins and his memory filled my life, from the Easter eggs he hid for us as children to the shelter he provided me when I was training for the Tour Divide. The night I spent at his house in Saint George in May 2009 stands as one of my favorite memories of him, because by then he was so weak and frail that just getting dressed and eating breakfast was a huge struggle, but so stubborn that he still lived alone and took care of himself. It was the first time I had spent more than a hour with him in six or seven years, so it was eye-opening to see just how difficult simple day-to-day living had become. During the day, I took off on my mountain bike, riding a loop that turned out to be a lot harder and longer than I had planned. I called him from the top of a ridge and said, "Grandpa, I'm sorry, but I'm going to be home late." When I finally came back to his house, he was still awake, more than an hour past his bedtime, waiting up for me. I felt worse than horrible about this and tried to apologize, but he just interrupted me and said, in his usual gruff grumpy voice, "It's OK. I always stay up late. I don't mind." But I saw a hint of sparkle in his eyes, and understood that he really did care.

On the fog-shrouded summit of Lima Peak, elevation 10,700, I pulled out the pen and paper that I had carried for the task and wrote the note that I had planned to write. Because it was so difficult to put sincere emotions into words, I wrote a variation of a lyric by Iron and Wine, from "Upward Over the Mountain:"

"So may the sunrise bring hope where it once was forgotten;
(Grandpas) are like birds, flying always over the mountain."
For my Grandpa Johnson, Love Jill. I will see you tonight. October 8, 2010.

I stuffed the paper between two rocks, covered them in snow, and stood up. A specter of the round silver sun began to show through the fog. I thought from its placement in the sky, I could discern the direction west, so I turned to face it. The ridgeline of the Lima Peaks is also the Continental Divide, the border of Montana and Idaho. I have a special affinity for the apex of the Divide, because it feels like a great beginning to me, the place where flakes of snow join droplets of water, which join trickles, which join streams, then creeks, then rivers, then great rivers, until everything flows into the bewildering expanse of the ocean. I thought of my friend in California, far away on that ocean, and felt a sudden urge to send him a text from the snow-flecked spine of the Divide. I turned on my phone. It said the time was 11:19 a.m., and my heart nearly stopped.

11:19? How did three and a half hours pass since I left? How? It was baffling, but when I thought about it, I had to admit it made sense. I had climbed 4,000 feet, and the last 1,000 were severely slow and technical, but I didn't notice the passing of time, didn't realize it. My grandpa's viewing began at 6 p.m. I had hoped to arrive in Ogden at 5:30, and it was still a four-hour drive from Lima, at least, and that was before my planned shower stop. My car was at least 30 minutes out from Lima, and my body was 4,000 vertical feet and five or six miles from my car. The math didn't leave much time for my body, and I was hit with a rush of remorse that felt worse than the time I came home late from my bike ride. I would rather be stomped by a moose than miss my grandpa's viewing. My mother would be so disappointed. So that wasn't an option. I was guilty of overshooting my turnaround time by more than an hour, but I sensed that with enough adrenaline and a little bit of luck, the descent could be done in an hour or so.

Bright streaks of sunlight broke through the clouds until the fog had cleared up entirely. Suddenly I could see the whole colorful spread of the valley before me - the sagebrush desert, the golden foothills, the snow-dusted peaks, the tiny oasis of Lima, the thin vein of I-15. I started down the rocks but frequently lost my balance on the slippery, uneven surface. I rolled my ankle twice and decided that breaking it was a real possibility, and a broken ankle would really put me in a bind. I dropped to my butt and started skittering down the mountain on my hands, butt and feet, sliding down the tumble of the sharp stones like a deranged crab.

My hands and butt were bruised and tingling by the time I reached the saddle, but there was no time to slow down. I tightened my backpack straps and started running. I ran as fast as I thought I could run and not lose my footing on the rocks and grass clumps that covered the trailless mountainside. The sky opened wider with bright patches of blue, and my legs carried me down the slope like tiny wings, light and free. In smiled at the rush of freedom and the ways I am falling in love with running - learning that a good run feels every bit as fun and freeing as riding a bike down perfect singletrack, except for running isn't limited the way bikes are, bound to wheels and trails. Feet can go anywhere they want, any time they want, even when they are attached to relatively skilless runners.

I sprinted past the point where I saw the moose and slowed, but heard nothing. I picked up the pace again and arrived back at the car with the bottom of my right foot absolutely throbbing, but my phone said it was 12:42. Yes! I ripped down my tent, climbed in my car and gunned the gas all the way down the narrow gravel road. I arrived in Lima just after 1, in time to call my dad and tell him I was still going to make it to the viewing on time.


I merged onto I-15, my head still spinning with the dynamics of the morning - the moose, the rain, the snow, the fog and emerging sunlight, the slippery rocks and the running. The pavement rushed beside me and the majestic Lima Peaks faded into my rear-view mirror, and above it all was the memory of my grandpa, flying upward over the mountain.

As if cycling wasn't hard enough

I was finally able to go for my first "run" since the Bear 100 — about an hour, mellow page, on smooth dirt singletrack. The plan was to test my right foot for impact pain, but I was too busy focused on complaints from other body parts to really make an honest assessment. Tired quads. Aching shoulders. Shredded abs and hip flexors. All common maladies of a brand new singlespeeder.

I can't say I completely understand the appeal yet, but I will say I have a whole new respect for singlespeed mountain biking. It demands nothing less than full attack mode on uphills and hip-flexor-tearing RPMs upon descent. More experienced singlespeeders tell me one-gear Zen requires patience more than power, but whenever I set my feet to my rapidly spinning platform pedals, all I can see is red. It doesn't help that the Karate Monkey is the only bike I've ridden this week, and some of those rides were really ambitious — climbing 5,000 vertical feet on Lolo mountain, for example. No wonder my abs hurt.

I decided to take a break from it all with a mellow road ride after work on my commuter, which is a fixed-gear bike. That bike's single gear is quite a bit taller than my mountain bike, but I've only ever ridden it on the meandering bike path into downtown, and a few roads here and there, and once on a gravel rail trail, so I never had any real comprehension of how my fixie could be more work to operate than any other bike I own. I spun easy toward Hellgate Canyon and started cranking harder as the grade turned slightly higher than flat. Missoula's endless availability of quality off-pavement riding has spoiled me to the point that I find riding with traffic to be completely intolerable, so I took the first opportunity I saw to turn off the main road — Marshall Canyon.

The road grade shot skyward and I stood in the saddle, pressing hard on my sore quads and straining my aching abs for the torque I needed to continue moving forward. It was hard singlespeed work again, but it felt really good, moving up a steady grade on a smooth surface. I worked harder. Sweat poured down my neck and drenched my jeans. When it came time to turn back, I took a break to catch my ragged breath and look with satisfaction far down the canyon and all the elevation I had gained. And then I started downhill.

At first, the road grade favored my desired speed, but the descent quickly took a turn for the steeper. The pedals churned faster and I touched the front brake ever so lightly, loathe to resist any free distance that gravity was perfectly willing to provide. The bike simply responded by charging faster, yanking my knees up and down with revelry as I strained my oh-so-sore quads against the pedals' care-free spin. I squeezed on the brake harder and braced my leg muscles more rigidly, but momentum was winning. My hip flexors responded angrily ... "We thought you were done with this nonsense." "It's not my fault," I muttered feebly. I fought an urge to take my feet off the pedals — fixie coasting — but resisted because I had no idea what lie around the next canyon bend and how fast I'd have to brake to avoid hitting it. So I just gripped the front brake, ducked in, and let the pedals rip my legs to little shreds all the way down to the relative peace of Hellgate Canyon.

I have GOT to get at least one of my geared bikes repaired.

On the bright side, I really think my foot is well on the mend. I am looking forward to running again, which will probably feel easy in comparison.

Three pictures

Dave is moving north

Busy purging all but the

Barest essentials

Riding Deer Creek Sneak

As rich evening light gives chase

So early these days

Commuting to work

Droplets of mist cling to jeans

Wish for more miles

Chasing the rain

"Wow, where is everyone?" I muse as Bill and I ride into the Rattlesnake trailhead. On Saturday afternoon this same parking lot overflowed with dozens of vehicles. Now it's Monday evening, the weather is cool and damp, and the lot is completely empty.

"People in Missoula don't come out in the rain," Bill says. "They use it as time to catch their breath and regroup."

Catch a breath and regroup. Something I could use now more than ever. The death of my grandfathers. The emotionally draining trips to Utah. The constant traveling. Adapting to Missoula. New apartment. New job. Biking. Training. Running. Friends. Relationship. Breathe, breathe, breathe.

Bill splashes through cold mud puddles and I race beside him. I only have one speed and tonight it is not a slow one. Pumping, breathing, crackling leaves, breathing, grinding rocks, breathing, while the mist-shrouded mountainsides close in around us. Golden aspens, green hemlock and larch trees crowd the narrow corridor. The mostly unseen river gurgles nearby. Bill and I talk about life and love, patterns and chaos. My lungs burn amid gulps of moist, cool air. The sky imperceptibly fades to darker shades of gray.

"Sometimes I really miss riding in the rain," I say. "Not that I want to do it every day anymore, but sometimes it just feels right, and real." We stop at the Sheep Mountain trailhead and stare longingly at the scar that cuts deep into the wilderness. When I look back down the canyon, all I see is curtains of fog draped along the treetops. The vista resembles Southeast Alaska, and makes me feel deeply homesick in a way I sometimes still feel. "I can't believe I've never been up the corridor before," I continue, more quietly. "I plan to come back often."

Bill suggests going farther, so we continue forward. The grade steepens and my legs struggle. Darkness sets in. Bats and grouse flutter through our headlamp beams. Elk bugle eerie songs into the night. When I look back, I can no longer see any reflection of city lights from Missoula. The sky is black. We rode far. I am tired. I am really tired.

Breathe, breathe, breathe. We look out over the darkened valley and search for the shadows of elk and bears. My breathing slows and quiet sets in. Night cloaks the canyon in mystery, a release from homesickness and a spark of new energy. The sweet autumn air is rich with possibility, and I breathe it all in.

Last weekend of summer

Fall is generally a season of dynamic change, and right now I feel like I am perched on a precipice, bracing myself for a big leap. The same could have been said about my summer 2010, and spring as well. For all of its unrest, 2010 is shaping up to be one of the more dynamic years of my life. In fact, when I think back to February and March, and the mornings I ran alone across the wind-scoured crust of Thunder Mountain in Juneau, I can hardly reconcile that the person in that memory was me, let alone me mere months ago. In many ways, I am still the same person. But in others, I am irreconcilably different, in a way that I almost miss her — Jill from Juneau — and the small, if breathtakingly beautiful, world in which she lived.

I am setting anchors in Missoula. They're just small things — like buying a couch — but they feel significant to me. I am trying to do the best I can at my job, even though it is not coming as naturally as I hoped (my week in Vegas is a glaring example of this, and my need to develop better people skills to go along with my love of bicycle travel, writing, editing and design.) My friend Dave is moving to Kalispell. We haven't known each other (in person) all that long, but he's been a good friend and I'm really going to miss him, even if Kalispell is only two hours away. And my last living grandfather — my mother's father — died this morning. His death was not as much of a shock as my father's father, because he has been quite sick for a long time (most of my adult life, but he remained surprisingly robust despite heart disease and kidney failure.) Still, I have lost two grandfathers in the past month, and it's difficult to comprehend that they're really gone from my life.

Then there's Beat, the Swiss-German ultrarunner who lives in Los Altos, California. I like this guy — it seems relevant for me to admit that, and Beat would probably be OK with me broadcasting it in my personal public forum. In fact, I think the only thing we're not OK with right now is the fact that we live 1,100 miles apart. "Minor complication," he calls it, but he did manage to fly out to Missoula this weekend with seemingly few complications. Then Missoula doled out what was perhaps the most beautiful weekend of the summer — in October — with warm sun, clear bluebird skies and temperatures in the 80s. I wanted to take Beat on a weekend tour of the "Best of Missoula," which (in my limited experience) includes coffee and live music at an outdoor cafe on Higgins Avenue, a slice at The Bridge, Big Dipper ice cream (mmm, pumpkin. I love fall.) And, of course, a mountain bike ride in the Rattlesnake.

Problem is, Beat doesn't mountain bike ... yet. So what did I do to try to convince him to take it up? Well, I'm still having trouble cobbling together a working bicycle among the five I own. I managed to fix my snow bike's flat tire, but it still has a worn-out front brake rotor, a seized seatpost and a host of other smaller problems (Pugsley is a year overdue for its winter overhaul, meaning it's been viciously neglected since early 2009.) The other choice was a singlespeed. So I offered to let Beat ride my geared bike — the 37-pound Pugsley with a saddle several inches too low for him, no suspension, and not much front brake. And, if that wasn't enough, I also failed to tighten down the rear skewer all the way when I put the rear wheel back on. It loosened and the wheel shifted and rubbed against the chainstay, to the point where the wheel was barely turning. We didn't notice it for nearly five miles (Beat: "I was wondering why it seemed so hard.") After several assurances that I was in fact not intentionally trying to kill him, we met Dave and rode the Wallman Loop, which includes a healthy climb. As I churned up the steep switchbacks in the sweltering October heat, I occasionally moaned phrases such as "This is the worst pain ever" and Beat — who as a runner regards intensity-caused cycling pain as quaint —just laughed at me. Singlespeeds make 5 mph climbing so much more strenuous than it needs to be ... which is interestingly what makes it so intriguing.

My friends Danni and Brad were also visiting from Kalispell over the weekend. I tried to convince Danni that since Dave is moving to Kalispell, she should move to Missoula and that would be a fair trade. I don't think she accepted my reasoning, but she did agree to join our ride as a runner with Brad's dog, Zella. We waited short periods of time for her at the trail junctions, but for the most part I am becoming ever more cognizant of the fact that mountain bikers (at least this mountain biker) are not all that much speedier than runners.

On Sunday, I made Beat ride Pugsley again, this time on a snaking gravel road that starts in the community of Lolo and steadily climbs 3,000 feet in eight miles on a washboarded, rocky, dusty, sun-exposed grunt of a road. He was not too stoked on that ride, but took it in good humor, even as his back ached while I spun beside him and made comments such as: "I love gravel road climbs. They're so relaxing, like Zen biking." The plan was to ditch the bikes at the start of the singletrack, but I am still having pain issues with my right foot, so I decided to haul my mountain bike as far as I could (wilderness boundary) to minimize foot usage. I could only ride short sections of the singletrack before I hit "Worst Pain Ever" mode, but we still pushed the bike to 8,000 feet elevation. (He actually pushed it most of the time, because I'm too slow.)

We ditched the bike just below Carlton Ridge. As we crested over the saddle and started down, I looked out over the blazing gold streaks across the mountainsides and immediately became crestfallen. "I can't believe all of these trees have died. All of this was green in August." Only later did I realize that these conifers weren't dead. They're larch trees, which turn golden and drop their needles in the fall.

We took the direct route to Lolo Peak, a strenuous scramble up a steep boulder field. It was hard work, but not quite to a "singlespeed worst-pain-ever" level.

The peak and ridge walking were fantastic — warm and high with very little wind. I couldn't believe we could sit out in the open above 9,000 feet in Montana in October wearing only shorts and a T-shirt. Forecasts for later in the week call for rain and low temperatures in the 30s and the potential of snow. Beat found the peak registry and handed it to me. I looked out over the golden landscape and wrote: "Today is the last day of summer. 10-3-10."

The longer I live in Montana, the less it reminds me of Juneau. But every once in a while, I cross a marshy valley and feel an abstract connection to places that once filled my life with clarity.

The steep downclimb was punctuated with one last 500-foot ascent, but at 4 p.m. I was back at 8,000 feet with a bicycle and nothing left to do but lose 5,000 feet of pure elevation. I dropped into the rugged singletrack as Beat followed right on my wheel. I bounced over rocks, shoulder-checked larch trees and cornered tight turns just to keep him from catching me. Eventually the trail smoothed out and I picked up exhilarating speed, weaving through the trees and whooping gleefully as the bike bucked down a continuous ripple of roots. Four miles and 15 minutes later, I stopped at a junction to wait for what I assumed would be at least 20 minutes, but not three minutes later, Beat sprinted past doing at least 12 mph. Jaw dropped, feeling satisfyingly inadequate with wheels and gravity, I accelerated toward him and drafted off his legs.

We rode together from the trailhead with nowhere to go but blissfully downhill. Down, down, down, into the wending road, into the dried grass rustling on the hillside, into the yellow aspens and alders, dropping into encroaching fall and winter with a strong sense that the superlative summer is finally over. And that's a wonderful thing — because the shifting seasons can only bring more dynamic change.

"Gears disability"

"Sorry for your gears disability," Bill said as he pulled up on his bike in front of my office. "Would it be better if I only rode in one gear?"

I looked down at my newly singlespeed-converted Karate Monkey. "Well, it couldn't hurt," I said. "At least then there's a chance I'll keep up with you on the road."

Bill observed my cadence as we pedaled down the street, then shifted his gears to match mine - 32x20. "This is pretty low," he observed.

"Tell me about it," I said. "It's downright tedious on flat pavement." We spun and spun and spun, until we hit hills that suddenly seemed to throw the pedals backward. I stood and strained and grunted and sometimes I made it, but sometimes I didn't. The ride hadn't even started yet.

At the trailhead, I made a point to remark to the other Thursday Night riders that I was singlespeeding today - not because I've suddenly become one of those boorish one-gear sandbaggers (though I may have come off that way), but because I didn't have a clue what I was doing and needed to warn potential wheel-suckers in advance.

We started up the trail. I struggled to find my cadence amid a paceline of geared riders. Bill stayed up front, chugging away at the 32x20, although Bill is a much stronger rider than I am. I churned, then faltered, then churned again. The grade steepened. I stood up and wrestled with my handlebars like they were fighting back. I mashed the pedals until my abs burned. My abs! "This is a really good core workout," I said to the woman in front of me. She shifted into granny gear and suddenly I couldn't keep my own bike from tipping over. I set my foot down, and just like that I was walking. Other riders spun past and regarded me with quiet pity. It was a really easy hill.

I coasted the entire descent, except for when I forgot to coast and laid into my pedals until the egg-beater motion spun my legs out of control and spit my feet forward. After experiencing steep climbs and leg-throwing descents, I vowed to put clipless pedals on my singlespeed. I dislike clipless pedals and haven't used them for a year, but you basically can't get away with platforms when you only have one gear.

On the way home, Bill, Norman and I passed a speedometer. Bill and I frantically spun our tiny gear, legs pounding like overheated pistons, until we coaxed the radar to 25 mph. "Yeah, 25 mph!" I called out. I slowed my legs. That's when I realized that every muscle in my legs hurt, every single one, throbbing with an alien sensation that must arise when one's RPM rises above 200.

"What do you think of one gear?" I asked Bill as we ambled toward home.

"I like it," he said.

I smiled. "Me too."