Nugget Creek

Today I had to drive out to the Valley to pick up my bike wheels and pay my rent, so I thought I'd hit up the Nugget Creek trail while I was out there. In all of my two years living here, Nugget Creek is one of the few established trails I've never ventured down. It's strange, actually, that I've never seen Nugget Creek before. It's an easy, quick morning hike ... about nine miles round trip, fairly flat, skirting the sideslopes above a stunning (and incredibly hard to photograph) gorge. But I never did it because it was just one of those "eh" hikes. It reminds me of the vacation my family took in Disneyland. We bought three-day passes and my sister and I vowed to go on every *every* ride in the park. We had a whirlwind first two days, but by the third day we were slogging our way through Dumbo and Toon Town. By the time we got to Small World, we stood in line with a sour feeling in our stomachs. Were we really waiting in line for Small World when the Matterhorn was right over there? Just so we could say we'd been everywhere? I guess this is the way I've felt about trails like Nugget Creek.

Interesting thing about deep-woods trails like Nugget Creek is I always have the distinct feeling that I'm inside an amusement park ride. Not an exciting one like the Matterhorn, but an unintentionally spooky one like Alice in Wonderland or Small World. Since I grew up in the West and did most of my vacationing there, my only experience with that rainforest brand of clammy, stagnant humidity was inside those rides. Like inside the Terror Ride - the air was so dense it breathed on you. So now, when I'm slicing my way through the liquid air of the rainforest, if I lose myself too much in my memories, I'll start half-expecting a naked mannequin streaked in red paint to jump out at me. Especially when the trail's destination is this place:

Spooky.

Tagged

Date: July 22
Mileage: 35.6
July mileage: 516.5
Temperature: 52

I was all set to write another grumpy post about cycling in the rain when I clicked through Fat Cyclist's blog and noticed I had been tagged with a new, bike-specific meme. So I will spare this blog my latest summer lament and answer Elden's riveting questions instead:

If you could have any one — and only one — bike in the world, what would it be? Well, of course that bike would be Pugsley. Pugsley is not, as some of my purist cyclist friends like to call him, a "novelty bike." Pugsley is the perfect bike, the only true "everything" bike. He floats effortlessly over snow, sand and mud, bounces joyfully over roots and boulders, and crushes everything else. He's also perfect for pavement. Wait, you ask, how can this be? Well, if you're like me and can't hold a paceline to save your life, now you finally have an excuse! When your roadie friends ask you why you're so slow, just point out the 4-inch tires and say "My bike weighs 36 pounds unloaded. What's yours?" They won't bug you anymore.

Do you already have that coveted dream bike? If so, is it everything you hoped it would be? If not, are you working toward getting it? If you’re not working toward getting it, why not? Pugsley is everything I hoped for and more! Burly, strong, impervious to abuse, handsome ... oh wait, I've said too much.

If you had to choose one — and only one — bike route to do every day for the rest of your life, what would it be, and why? This is a mean question to ask. I was going to say the Golden Circle, but then I realized that I wouldn't want to ride 371 miles every day. Then I wondered if I had to pick somewhere in Juneau, because I'm pretty sure I would rather poke my eyes with sharpened pencils than ride the same Juneau trail daily. But if I had to choose, I'd say Dredge Lake trails in Juneau, and if I could pick anywhere in the world, it'd be a long, fun loop in Whitehorse (preferably one that snowmobiles use and pack nice and smooth during the winter.)

What kind of sick person would force another person to ride one and only one bike ride to to do for the rest of her / his life? I don't know, Elden, maybe the person who thought of this question? Just kidding!

Do you ride both road and mountain bikes? If both, which do you prefer and why? If only one or the other, why are you so narrowminded? Of course I ride both, although it's arguable that the road biking I do is actually just mountain biking on pavement. As to which I prefer, I'll pick hidden door number three: Snow biking! Seriously.

Have you ever ridden a recumbent? If so, why? If not, describe the circumstances under which you would ride a recumbent. I'm fairly certain that I would tip over if I ever tried to ride a recumbent. Then not only would I look ridiculous because I was riding a recumbent, I would look ultra-ridiculous because I would be tangled in said recumbent in somewhere in a ditch.

Have you ever raced a triathlon? If so, have you also ever tried strangling yourself with dental floss? I have raced exactly one triathlon, the 2006 Sea to Ski in Homer, which was a 5K run, an 8K mountain bike climb, and a 5K ski. All the 12-year-olds passed me while I was plodding out my nine-minute miles during the run, so I went ahead and crushed them on the bicycle climb. But when it came to the ski, I was so unbelievably awful that even the 80-year-old ladies on wooden skis passed me. I think I spent an hour trying to scoot out that 5K, mostly by crawling on my hands and knees and dragging my battered skis behind me. After that, I told Geoff if I was ever forced to Nordic ski again, I was going to strangle myself with dental floss. Interesting side note: I'm actually pretty good at swimming.

Suppose you were forced to either give up ice cream or bicycles for the rest of your life. Which would you give up, and why? Ice cream! Ice cream! I'm terrible at self discipline, and could use some real motivation to give it up. As it is, I'm still working on killing the Cocoa Puffs habit.

What is a question you think this questionnaire should have asked, but has not? Also, answer it. If you could race anyone in a mountain bike race, who would it be? I'm going to go with George W. Bush.

You’re riding your bike in the wilderness (if you’re a roadie, you’re on a road, but otherwise the surroundings are quite wilderness-like) and you see a bear. The bear sees you. What do you do? Yeah. This is not all that interesting of a question, if only because this has happened to me on more occasions than I have fingers to count. If I see a bear, and the bear sees me, the bear runs away. Every time. As to what I'd do if the bear didn't run away - now there's an interesting question. I'm going to go with "pray."

Now, tag three biking bloggers. List them below. I'm not even sure they'll see this post, but I'm going to go ahead and pick three burly northern biker grrrls.

Julie
Michelle
And finally, Sierra, who recently posted the best picture of a Pugsley I have ever seen:

Is this a great bike or what?

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.