Snain in July

Date: July 21
Mileage: 12.1
July mileage: 480.9
Temperature: 49

I shuffled across yet another petrified snowfield, rain-washed to an icy sheen and so slippery I was sure my soon-to-be-horizontal body was destined to slam into a tree. But I kept it vertical and splashed down into yet another puddle, beginning the climb anew atop foot-repellent roots and glistening boulders. The weather forecast had called for a 20 percent chance of rain - 20 percent! Which in my experience means little to none, and I dressed for it. But now my thin shell felt about one ounce of liquid away from dissolving completely, my polyester pants were saturated, my toes and fingers were numb beyond usability, and still the rain came down. It showed no signs of letting up. If anything, the rain was picking up velocity, and the temperature was dropping, and I was woefully underdressed. And why was I still climbing Mount Jumbo in the rain, when the storm was so socked in I couldn't see beyond the next boulder and the footing so treacherous and tentative that I couldn't even count it as good exercise? I think I was afraid of the mild chill already creeping into my core, which only promised to get worse once I stopped climbing. And the snowpack wasn't as bad as I'd feared and I was making good time, so there was still a chance of making the peak. And after everything I've put up with while hiking this month, I deserve a peak.

But then I started to feel a strange sensation on the back of my neck - still like driving rain, but with an edge. A sharp, icy edge. I looked up from the slippery trail to see thick, spear-like drops shooting through the air, mostly gray but with flecks of white. They hit my skin like needles, like daggers, like ... could it be? ... that icy mixture of snow and rain that plagues this place for much of the winter? Snain? Snain in July? Even at 3,000 feet, I could hardly believe it. But my reaction was swift and decisive. Peak was out of the question. I will now forever call my arbitrary turnaround spot "Snain Summit."

And I will return to hike another day. I am not going to let this anti-summer month beat me.

Motivational poster

This one is for Geoff ...

Glug, glug, glug

Date: July 20
Mileage: 30.4
July mileage: 468.8
Temperature: 48

Was it really just two weeks ago I was singing the praises of riding in the rain?

Yeah. I'm over that now.

I totally called it

Date: July 19
Mileage: 31.1
July mileage: 438.4
Temperature: 49

I think it was about a week or so ago when I woke up mid-dream - a rare occurrence for me - with the images still lingering in my mind.

"I just had this dream that you took fourth in Crow Pass," I said to Geoff, who was sitting at the computer.

"Huh," he said, completely disinterested. As my friend (who has a 6-month-old daughter) likes to say, 'No one cares about your babies or your dreams.'

But still I persisted. "Yeah. You were on the Crow Pass trail. It was really snowy. Almost winter-like. There was snow on the trees. You ran across the finish line and you were in fourth place."

And Geoff, who at one week before the actual race was still sleeping 10-12 hours a night and had struggled through only a handful of short training runs since the end of the Great Divide Race, just laughed. At that point, one week before the actual race, he wasn't sure he was even going to bother starting. "If I do," he told me. "I'm going to run it as a slow training run. I'm not going be anywhere near the front."

Today Geoff called me to report that he not only started, but actually finished the Crow Pass Crossing. In fourth place.

He actually remembered me telling him about my dream. The first thing he said when I answered the phone was, "You were right."

All said and done, Geoff had a really good race. He finished in 3:17:53, which is about 10 minutes slower than his winning time last year. But the conditions were tougher this year - a ton of rain yesterday made the trail pretty wet, and there also was a lot more snow at higher elevation. The winner's time this year was 3:09. Considering the Geoff was almost ridiculously undertrained and still complaining about physical fatigue left over from the GDR, going into Crow Pass with a plan to race it was huge risk. But he said he felt good during the race, and doesn't feel too bad in the aftermath.

"I felt like I didn't have a low gear and I didn't have a high gear," he said. "I didn't have much for the climb. And then at the flat stretch at the end, when everyone in the pack started to break away, I couldn't keep up."

Although I wanted to scold him for pushing his limits when he was just barely starting to show signs of real recovery, I'm glad that Geoff did well in Crow Pass. It's one of his favorite races - the kind that he'd put A-game focus on in any other year. Plus, I think this will give him a good mental boost as he starts training for the Wasatch 100. He was pretty despondent after the GDR, and I was worried some of his passion would slip.

The article about the race is here.

And the ADN did a preview article in Saturday's paper.

On the home front, we've had 2.93 inches of rain fall since Friday morning, which is nearly an inch more precpitation than the rain that fell in all of June. It's been a bit soggy. Yesterday, as some friends and I huddled inside during our summer "barbecue," my friend Libby said, "I have this terrible feeling that summer is over." "Oh, it's bound to get better," I said. But then I thought about it. The 10-day weather forecast doesn't offer any optimism, and that takes us through the end of July. In 2006, Juneau was dark and cold and rainy during the entire month of August. And by September and October, sun optimism belongs only to the religious and the crazy. Summer really could be over.

I hope I don't have a dream about that.

Granite Creek Basin

Date: July 17
Mileage: 16.0
July mileage: 407.3

I rolled into the Rainbow Foods parking lot covered in mud and soaked to the skin with melted snow and rust-colored creek water. Geoff was sitting outside with his cell phone, trying to clear up yet another FedEx bike shipping debacle. Since FedEx is the only bike-shipping option in town, we just have to put up with the prospect of sending our bicycles into a delay vortex where there is always that 3 percent chance they may never emerge. We have learned to take it in stride, like the weather, although the sun hasn't come out, once, since before Geoff returned to town on July 4. "But it was so nice in June," I protested, to deaf ears. That frightening "M" word, Moving, is seeping into our conversations with increasing frequency. There isn't much I can do about it, so I take it in stride.

Geoff asked me how my ride went, and I told him the Perseverance Trail was fun as always, but the ride was really more of a commute to a hike than anything. "How did that go?" he asked.

"Well," I said, "I wandered around lost for a while. And then I kicked up some snow fields. Then I wandered around lost some more. Then I found the approach to the ridge. Then I wandered around blind in the clouds for a while. Then I found what I was pretty sure was the frozen lake just before the ridge. But since I could no longer tell steep from flat, or up from down for that matter, I opted against climbing any higher. Then I turned around. Then I slipped on some ice and fell a long way down a snow field. Then I wandered around lost. Then I finally found the trail to my bike, and then I rode here."

I had to laugh at myself, because the summary made it sound so awful. It was true that all of that happened. The stubborn, lingering-into-late-July snow fields did make the route particularly hard to navigate. I could see where I wanted to go, but never knew if I was going to end up at the bottom of an unclimbable cliff or beside a raging stream hidden beneath the rotten snow. I did lots of turning around. When I finally did find my way to (well, near) the top, I couldn't tell the ground from sky. Everything was gray snow and gray fog, interrupted by streaks of black that were either rocks or drops into a deadly void. And when I did finally drop below the cloud level, I stepped on a frozen-solid patch of snow and went hurtling down the mountain on my butt at an uncontrollable speed, frantically digging my bare fingers into the hard, ice-shard-studded snow until I finally stopped. Then I wiped the slush off my clothes with my bleeding hands, and from that point on took every step very tentatively. It took me forever to baby-step back to the basin, where I would wander around lost looking for the trail until the bitter end.

And yet I was feeling great when I finally reached Rainbow Foods, muddy and soaked just in time for dinner. A day's hard effort was behind me, and that felt good, despite the truncation of my original plans. I thought about the break I took, crouching down on a snow slope just above the Granite Creek Basin. I ate my Power Bar and listened to the roaring streams and wind echo through the valley. Clouds crept up from the lower canyon and closed in around me while little gray birds hopped around on the snow near my feet. Everything about that moment felt right, and earned, and I don't think I would have traded it for a sunny day on perfectly dry trails.

I love it here. I love hiking here. Even when the weather is crap and fog chokes the sky and its starting to rain and there's no end in sight. I love these places, and the adventure of getting to them.

Although I really do need to obtain an ice ax and crampons.

Getting my road legs back

I basically just shot this silly photo to illustrate that, despite my retro-grouch pretensions, I am capable of wearing full-body spandex and clipless pedal shoes.

Date: July 15 and 16
Mileage: 42.2 and 53.8
July mileage: 391.3

I spent the last two months exclusively riding my mountain bike. I did so because: a. I was spending a lot of time on trails; b. I was training for a mountain bike race; c. My road bike was in poor, poor condition. Now that a. The trails are soaking up water again; b. I feel like I am killing time while I wait for a good weather window so I can go nuts on the hiking season; c. My road bike has been upgraded to poor condition ... it seemed like a good time to tempo-ride on pavement.

The 30-mile ride along Douglas Highway and back has taken me as long as three and a half hours to pound out. Those rides were among my most exhausting - rolling the balloon tires through six inches of unplowed snow into some ungodly cold windchill. In the summer, on a good day, those same miles are nearly effortless. The way to inject effort into them is to crank up the speed - something I'm not good at focusing on for any length of time because I too easily slip into daydreams and find myself riding on autopilot (my autopilot is slow.) But when I noticed a light wind and strong-feeling legs Tuesday morning, I thought I should try to crank out a faster-than-normal pace. Those tiny (28 mm) tires coasted over the tarmac, and after I crested above Douglas City, I was able to keep the speed over 20 mph for most of the eight miles to the Eaglecrest cutoff. After that, I fell off my pace a few times while daydreaming, and dropped a bit more climbing the last hill and then turning to face the wind ... but when I rolled home the odometer still clocked an 18.2 mph average. I was back in an hour and a half. Certainly not blazing fast by roadie standards, but not a bad start. I began to have crazy ambitions about time-trialing the route and establishing a standard that I can laugh at longingly as I launch back into my three-and-a-half-hour slogs this winter. But before I get any ideas about road time-trialing, I should probably think about getting a bike with some drop handlebars ... one that doesn't have a rear rack ... or fenders ... or fork-mounted bottle cages ... and weighs less than 28 pounds.

But I still felt good about the Douglas ride, so I set out today for more road riding out to the Valley. I made a few stops so my average speed wasn't as high, but I did take a lot of silly pleasure in leapfrogging a single city bus for most of the 12 miles between Auke Bay and downtown. Every time I passed it, I would look up at the windows and try to catch the eye of one of the bored passengers trapped inside. I hoped they see me and think, "Wow, this bus is so slow that even a person on a bike can stay ahead of it. Maybe I should ride my bike to town next time." Yes, I do have a rich daydream world.

White silence

Date: July 14
Mileage: 8.1
July mileage: 295.3

When I woke up to rescue my drenched and crying black cat from the windowsill, I knew today was not going to be my lucky day. The sky was washed in liquid gray and clouds had crept down almost to sea level. The weather instantly drowned ambitions to wake up early and climb up Blackerby Ridge. Who wants to climb into soggy, foggy nothingness? I went back to sleep.

Later, some hours later, I woke up, again, groggy from too much sleep, and tried to reassess my morning plans. It seemed another damp bike ride was in order, but I could not get excited about it. When I'm in bike mode, the weather doesn't bother me as much. But lately, all I want to do is climb, higher, and it seems every day the weather hangs over my ambitions like a gray curtain.

But it's summer, short summer, and its briefness nags at me. I have so much I want to do and such a short time to do it, I might as well work on getting in shape so I can take full advantage should a good weather window ever open. The hike to Gold Ridge seemed good because it's short and well-defined and nearly impossible to get lost, even in the thickest, soupiest fog. As I rode my bike across the bridge, I saw four cruise ships moored at the dock. Not as bad as seven - but four ships definitely promised a traffic jam near mid-mountain, where the Mount Roberts Tram releases hundreds of tourists who tend to straddle the trail with cameras and generally block forward motion. Still not deterred, I pedaled up to the trailhead and set my watch. I wanted to reach the tram in a half hour.

I still can't run up this thing, but I can maintain a brisk, 4-mph pace. Even still, my heart pounded and my thoughts zoomed in on the rhythmic steps. I hardly noticed that the fireweed had started to come out, the blueberry bushes glistened with dew and the cow parsnip was nearly shoulder-high. This short summer is streamrolling by me, and I have to hike as hard as I can to keep up with it.

After two miles of seeing nobody, the trail above the tram, as expected, was packed. I try to be as courteous as possible but I often feel like I'm swimming upstream amid a swarm of lethargic salmon. So I weaved and expressed my apologies for cutting through and sometimes heard the funniest questions. One woman who did not seem to want to cross a snow field asked me if her feet would get wet. Another man said, probably to himself, that the wildflowers here weren't nearly as good as the flowers in Montana. Then, as the trail wound higher and the clouds really started to settle in, another man asked me if I thought the view would be any better at the top. "I really doubt it," I said. He seemed to waver in that spot, uncertain whether he should turn around. The view-seeking tourists thinned out. I charged higher.

The fog becomes interesting when it gets so thick that you can look down and your feet are obscured. It bunches and flows, so sometimes windows open up to points thousands of feet below, and sometimes you can't even see around the next bend. Fog makes the mountain a different world, even as dreamlike as the world above treeline is, fog takes that dream and cloaks it in colorblindness. It has no smell and no sound; it mutes the tourist chatter and masks the inferior flowers. It dampens the air to the point of equilibrium and covers every feature in papery flatness. It's a world without senses - a white silence. As I kicked my way up toward Gastineau Peak, the noise from my steps in the snow was shattering against that silence. So I stopped for the few short minutes I had left, to soak in my view of nothing.

In my memory I knew there was a real view out there, sweeping along the ridgelines, touching the ice field and Admiralty and Douglas Islands, dropping into the city and along the Channel some 3,200 feet down. And I knew that just on the other side of this curtain there were stark snowfields and spiny little tundra plants and stacked boulders. But today at the top there was only the white silence, and I can't believe I nearly missed it.