Last day of the year

Date: Dec. 31
Mileage: 21.0
December mileage: 811.1
Temperature upon departure: 8

12:03 a.m., Dec. 31. The squeak of my snowshoes on cold, packed snow grates against an almost impenetrable silence. Both seem out of place. 24 hours from now, 12:03 a.m. will ring and scream into the cold night, but now, all is silent and still. I feather a plummeting thermometer in my mitten and plunge it into my pocket. I walk across my street, climb a snowbank and take slow, squeaky steps to the Mount Jumbo trail. I shift the weight of my backpack - alarmingly light, it feels - glance back at the golden glow of town lights and step into the darkness.

The squeak becomes a crunch, muffled and lonely. To each side of the trail, ghost trees lurk and snow monsters prowl. In my peripheral vision I catch a single-eyed gaze, wild and hungry. A monster's mouth seems to open and its big ears rustle in the breeze as it curls its branches toward me. I put my head down and walk faster.

I reach the open muskeg and stamp down a spot where the cold wind whisks spindrift around stunted spruce. I need to experience this wind, like I need to experience the art of sleeping outside, so here I make my home for the night. So close and yet so far away from my warm bed. The thermometer reads zero. No accounting for the wind, the chill, which always needles through protective layers in a way "real" temperatures never could. I unroll my bivy and crawl inside. Pockets of cold air settle amid the fluff and I scold myself for not bringing a pillow, because I'm not about to take anything I'm wearing off to use as a substitute. Body heat begins to fill empty space. It takes a while to fall asleep.

I wake up several times in the night, thrashing around to extract myself quickly from multiple layers of nylon and down. I scold myself again for going to bed so well hydrated. A body immersed in cold doesn't want to waste calories keeping unnecessary liquid warm, so I have to step out into the cold. At 3 a.m., it's calm and the thermometer reads 5 below. The sky is an explosion of stars. At 5 a.m., the wind has picked up with blowing snow and a dangerous-seeming chill when the thermometer has jumped to 10 above. At dawn, it's back to zero. I crawl out of my sack feeling strangely refreshed, but my peace has been hard-won through hard experience, because I've ventured deeper into the danger and I know now that 5 below isn't too cold for a good night's sleep.

Back at my apartment at 9 a.m. with hot coffee and cold cereal. The radio's on and I don't want to listen, because I feel like I should still be out. I lace up my boots and, still wearing what I wore the night before, head back out into the wind and ice for a bike ride. But there's a feeling of well-being and warmth in the sun. The wind blows in variable, powerful gusts as I ride along the frozen shoreline of the Channel. One catches me from directly behind, carrying a small tsunami of spindrift over the frozen sand. My huge coat catches the gust like a sail and rockets me forward with surprising acceleration. I ride the snow tsunami in a surreal pocket of silence, because the wind and I are moving the same speed. I feel like I'm surfing, powder boarding, coasting on a cloud, or all of the above. It's absolutely thrilling.

Geoff and I have lunch and decide to spend the afternoon Nordic skiing. I rescue my skis from dust, fairly certain I haven't used them in nearly two years. I've avoided the activity because there's so much other fun stuff to do in snow - snow biking, snowboarding, snowshoeing, snow camping ... pretty much snow-anything that doesn't involve strapping needlessly slippery sticks to my feet and shuffling around in pre-set circles.

Well, that's what I always thought of skiing. But today at sunset on the Mendenhall Lake, the themometer's back to 5 below and the snow is crisp and cold. It binds to the fish-scale bottoms of my budget Nordic skis and allows me to mindlessly, effortlessly glide into the gold-tinted expanse. The track's set nearly four miles around, a relaxed hour, and we extend it by veering off into the maze of the moraine trail system. I scout the hardpack for future snow biking excursions. Geoff's eyelashes grow white and long. We glide in silence amid the snow ghosts and tree monsters, which seem jovial and friendly at this hour. Soon it will be midnight again and another day will fade into the darkness, an amazing day, an amazing year.

Happy New Year.

Year in miles

January: 833.8
February: 647.7
March: 636.3
April: 789.6
May: 1,188.4
June: 822.1
July: 747.0
August: 748.3
September: 893.3
October: 587.0
November: 831.1
December: 790.1
Total 2008 bike mileage: 9,514.4

I finally got around to tallying up my 2008 mileage. I just used the numbers that I kept track of on my blog, with a few approximate additions of the Iditarod race (about 350 miles) and the 24 Hours of Light (120 plus 25 of extra riding around Whitehorse, probably on the low side.) The total surprised me. I had no idea I was that close to 10,000 miles. If I kept track of all of my human-powered mileage, including hiking and (limited) running, I almost definitely would have a 10,000-mile year behind me. Not bad.

The high-mileage month by far was May, although it certainly wasn't the most difficult. That designation would have to go to February, the third shortest month in terms of miles. After that, I'd probably throw in a bunch of other winter months and of course September and put May in sixth or seventh place. Ah, those lazy days of summer.

It's been a fun, harrowing, amazing year on the bike, and certainly not at all about the mileage. But there's a more-than-small part of me that wants to up the ante in 2009.

I eat snow for breakfast

Date: Dec. 28 and 29
Mileage: 36.3 and 31.1
December mileage: 790.1
Temperature upon departure: 19 and 15

For the past few days, biking conditions have been tough. Really tough. Like fishtailing-in-sandy-sugar-snow- punching-through-postholes- being-blown-by-wind- into-deep-snow-drifts tough. And that's just in the road shoulders! All the trail riding I've tried has been an abysmal, bike-pushing failure. Every other person in the entire city is up at the ski resort, lining up to battle for first runs through two feet of fresh power. And while I don't necessarily want to be doing that (ski crowds: ugh), I am still a little unclear about why I am trying to ride (and often walk) a bicycle in the worst of conditions.

Yesterday, I was wading through a still-unplowed bike path when I came to a mountain of chunky snow that had been deposited by a highway snowplow driver. The pile was at least six feet high. It was over my head. On one side of the path is a chain link fence; on the other, a deep trench. The bike path is the only way through. I picked up my 35-pound bike and hoisted it over my shoulders, holding the seatpost in one hand and the handlebars in the other, and stepped into pile. It was littered with ice chunks and sand. The first step engulfed my knees; the next, my waist. I threw the bike to the side as I kicked and struggled to extract myself. Then I crawled and flailed my way across more precious inches of progress, stopping briefly to catch my breath and drag my overturned bike those same few inches forward. After about five minutes I was finally somewhat free, having moved all of six feet down the path, with only another half mile of 2 mph bike pushing to go. Once I was past that obstacle, all I had to look forward to was more unplowed road shoulders, more fighting of drifted sugar snow and sand, more crawling over loose piles of snow to avoid swerving into traffic; and after that, the impossibly deep trails that were my actual destination.

Then today, I did it all again, minus the submerged bike path.

And as I churned along the North Douglas Highway amid a swirling ground blizzard and breathtakingly cold cross-winds, I realized that beneath my face mask, I was smiling. I was enjoying the high drama of it all, relatively safe in my cocoon of clothing layers and riding as far away from the light flow of traffic as I could manage. I was working hard, and I was having a tough time just moving forward, but I was happy.

And, of course, I asked myself, "What's wrong with me?"

I think the answer lies in the reality that all cyclists, from the fast to strong to the "crazy" among us, need a challenge. For some, the challenge is losing weight. For others, increasing speed or distance. And then there are those who simply want to clean that impossible move or crush other cyclists in certain races. We all have different motivations, but we're all connected by one thing: the reward. If we meet our challenges, our brains reward us with happy thoughts and a fair dose of endorphins.

So what's my challenge? My challenge is tough. That's it. The tough stuff. Rides that are tough to me. Rides that are tough to most. I'm an atypical cyclist in many, many ways. I don't care about speed. I've tried. Really, I have. But in the end, I could never develop an interest in watching a clock and calculating fractions of fractions of numbers to chase that ever-elusive edge over arbitrary standards. And I don't care about distance. I like to ride far, but what I like to do most is ride long, in terms of time, and do the best I can with the hours I have.

So if I don't care about fast and I don't care about far, what does that leave me with? Really, after that, there's only tough. I'm left with tough. And riding a bike in the winter in Juneau, Alaska, is tough. And the tougher it gets, and the better I get at it, and, yes, even the faster and farther I can go in tough conditions, the happier I am.

That's my excuse. I'm not crazy.