Moab express

I'm planning to leave Tuesday morning for my first bikepacking trip of the year. I'm going to leave Loma, Colorado, and take the Kokopelli Trail to Moab, ride up Potash Road, ride around the White Rim up Mineral Bottom and then back to Moab. I'm giving myself three days to do this. I'm guessing that it will be close to 300 miles riding mostly dirt in the hot, hot desert. It's a fairly ambitious plan for the state I'm in right now, but it needs to be done. You can follow me on my SPOT shared page. This map above also should register the last point sent. The SPOT page is here:

http://share.findmespot.com/shared/faces/viewspots.jsp?glId=0W25MJOgjh2SRim8h06QMXNaRFSXFYFhk

Wish me luck. I'm really nervous so I'm gonna need it.

LATE EDIT: I was setting up my gear at the trailhead when I discovered a loose spoke in my front wheel. I'm bummed I didn't catch it earlier, but it seems like a bad idea to start ~140 miles of remote dirt road and trail with something like that. I detoured to Fruita and plan to show up at one of the bike shops in town Tuesday morning and hope they can fix a wheel fast. But I probably won't be on the trail until late Tuesday morning or early afternoon. This may limit my window to ride the White Rim, but I'll have to play it by ear.

The drive down here was amazingly beautiful, with dramatic lighting on the Book Cliffs and an apricot sunset. But it also gave me five hours to think about just how lonely I really feel right now. In the past, I've really enjoyed the solitude of solo bike tours, but I have a feeling that solitude is going to be a real challenge for me in this trip - maybe even more so than the heat, the scarcity of water, and the 50 mph wind gusts that have been ripping through this part of the world. I'm still optimistic that I'm going to go through with this trip; but, man, I don't think I've ever had such a hard time coaxing myself to go on a bike ride. And I include the Iditarod in this list.

Salt Lake City

Spending time with my family and a few old friends has been a great stabilizer for my state of mind. My family especially has been so supportive, even though I haven't always been as emotionally open with them as I should be. My mom has been feeding me great homemade meals and doesn't even blink when I leave a huge mess of gear in their spare bedroom and head out for six hours of biking. I'm always amazed by how quickly I can settle back into life in Salt Lake, as if the years haven't even passed since I moved away. Most people can't go home again, but I can.

Biking, which often felt depressing and burdensome when I was traveling with Geoff and we were in the early stages of our breakup, has become mostly enjoyable again. It's only mostly enjoyable because biking is really hard here. I've spent most my time climbing canyons and seeking out singletrack. On Thursday I did Little and Big Cottonwood Canyons. Little felt refreshing enough so I picked up the pace up Big, forgetting that the canyon is something like 16 miles long. Just climbing. For 16 miles. It's enough to put a person in that fuzzy place where life almost makes sense.

I've really been sucking wind on the climbs. But my legs feel great, so I'm going to go ahead and blame the elevation. The sun has been kicking my butt as well. Everyone has been telling me that Salt Lake had a cool, wet spring, but oddly it didn't save any of that for me. 70 and sunny every day. I know. Awesome riding weather. But it's amazingly oppressive when you're adapted to 45 degrees and damp cloudy skies. I slather on SPF 50 until my pasty Alaskan skin shimmers and yet still fry, and I can't seem to drink enough water. It goes in and comes right back out, but I'm always thirsty.

The Millcreek Pipeline trail is such a sweet piece of singletrack. I rode it twice. Mountain biking has been battering me, too. I forget that I'm kinda bad at it. I have bruises and scratches up and down my legs, although my left arm is mostly healed from my Marin crash a week ago. The swelling has gone down and the road rash is scabbing over, and it doesn't throb when I hit bumps any more. I've started to go at singletrack more aggressively, with mixed results. Sometimes I clean something and amaze myself. But the other day, I came up on a surprise tight turn and too high of a speed and dipped my wheel in a small ravine. I ended up tangled in a bush 10 feet down a near-vertical slope with the bar-end permanently imprinted in my thigh. I was lucky another cyclist stopped to help pull me out, because it may have taken me a while to get myself and my bike out of that one.

I've done a little hiking as well. Most of the higher Wasatch trails are still snow-covered, so walking is the best way to get good elevation exposure. I climbed Grandeur Peak with my dad and his friend, Tom, on Saturday morning.

My dad surprised me at the peak with a cold can of Diet Pepsi. At least my dad loves me. :-)

The Corner Canyon trails begin less than three miles from where my parents live. Lots of fun potential here, although I'm learning that I prefer to net real distance rather than loop around a mountain bike park. That's probably why my singletrack skills are so dismal.

American Fork Canyon. That makes five canyons I've climbed to the top of this week. All within a short afternoon's ride from Draper. And I didn't even hit Emigration or City Creek yet.

Mount Timpanogos. My plan now is to head south to the desert on Monday afternoon for a three-day solo bikepacking trip. The purpose of the trip is to determine whether I have the physical, mental and, most importantly, emotional fitness to continue with my original summer plan - to ride all or at least part of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route starting in mid-June. The logistics are going to be more difficult without Geoff to help me gear up for the long trip, and I have to admit I'm not loving the company of myself right now. But there's something too important about this trip to give up on it just yet. I hope to know more by the end of this week.

I wanted to say thanks to everyone who shared their stories and offered words of support in my last post. That's helped a lot, too. Life goes on, and it's always good to be reminded of that.

Reality

I took this picture on Saturday morning in the Marin Headlands. I took it shortly after I had a little meltdown. Actually, it wasn't as much a little meltdown as it was a big meltdown. I came to after about a half hour, stood up from where I had been huddling beneath a bush, set the self timer on my camera, and took this photo. I took it because I wanted to remember what I went through. I took it because I chronicle my life. It's just what I do. Good and bad.

I've been trying to figure out how to approach this subject on my blog, or whether I'd mention it at all, or if I'd just go ahead and kill the blog altogether as part of a resolve to start anew. But I finally decided that in everything I've dealt with in the past three years, being open about my feelings and experiences on my blog has in the end been helpful.

Geoff broke up with me two and a half weeks ago. It happened 52 hours before we were supposed to board a ferry south for a summer trip we had been planning for several months. It happened for many reasons. It happened just when I thought things were going really well for us. And as the ferry departure inched closer, it became more obvious that it really happened. I probably shouldn't have gotten on that boat, but I did, because I wanted to at least try to salvage eight years of friendship and partnership. And I wanted to salvage a summer adventure I had really been looking forward to. I wanted things to be the same.

But of course, they haven't been. We did a lot of talking on the drive, and most of what was said was hurtful and discouraging; but I kept my head above the water and kept the wheels moving south. I visited my friends and did my bike rides and at times had a lot of fun. I didn't talk with anyone else besides my family about what was going on between me and Geoff. At times, when I was alone on my bike rides, I'd feel a rush of intense loneliness. But I'd push those feelings back. I'd tell myself it was for the best. I'd remind myself that in many ways, I'm better off alone.

Last Saturday, Geoff ran the Miwok 100K race. He had placed a lot of our summer trips' capital on finishing well in this race. Months ago, I had promised to help him with checkpoint-to-checkpoint race support. We left our friends' house Friday night and drove to Marin in a windy rainstorm. We set up camp and went to bed early. I woke up at 5 a.m. and drove him to the race start, carried his cold-weather layers as he shed them on the way to the starting line, and raced back to camp to take down the tent in time to reach the first checkpoint before he came through. Then I drove to the checkpoint, waited in the cold rain with an armful of stuff until he ran by, and then drove to the next checkpoint to do the same. After that chore was complete, I had four hours to kill before he came through again, so I set out for a bike ride.

The weather was damp and cold, with fog so thick that everything appeared blurry and washed in dirty gray. I climbed up a fire road and bombed down the other side, my head filled with resentment and anger, coasting faster and faster in a spray of gravel and mud, my heart pumping gray cold blood and my eyes so blinded by the fog that I failed to notice a metal pipe sticking out of the gravel road. I launched over it at 25 or 30 mph; the rear wheel slid sideways along the wet surface and the bike slapped me on the ground like a hooked fish. I never even had time to hit the brakes. My left arm hit hard, followed by my head, and I could hear the dull crunch of my helmet followed by grinding rumble of my body sliding over loose gravel.

As soon as I came to a stop, I quickly stood up and nudged my overturned bike to the side, terrified that someone else would come bombing down the hill and run me over. My arm throbbed with intense pain and I held it tightly to my side. At least a couple long-sleeve layers were torn and I was too scared to look at my skin. I was partly convinced that I had broken a bone. As the pain coursed through my arm, a much deeper and darker feeling bubbled up from my core. It was as though the rush of pain from the bike crash ignited an explosive release of everything I had been feeling over the past two weeks, but had bottled up for reasons of fun, peace and a sense of normalcy. As those feelings rushed to the surface, I was surrounded by a darkness so complete that it blocked out all the rain, the fog, and the warm blood trickling down my arm. The darkness needled through my pores, filling my body with hopelessness, anger, fear and unfocused physical pain that was worse than the worst moment of rewarming frostbite. I felt helpless to even move. There was nothing I could do but curl up beneath a nearby bush and let it filter through. I was finally ready to accept the depth of my emotions. I was finally willing to admit my heart was broken.

When I finally pulled myself together, I still felt horrible. I had decided my arm wasn't broken, but it still hurt enough to prevent me from putting any pressure on it, which meant I couldn't ride my bike. I held the stem with my right hand and trudged six miles back to the race checkpoint. The moment I reached my car was the exact moment Geoff walked up after dropping out of the race. He had been sick and looked weak and disappointed. He was shivering in the damp cold. For me, that was the final painful moment of truth, because both of us needed comfort so badly, and neither of us could provide it to the other.

It's hard to write about this in general - especially on a blog that so many people see. To my friends, I'm sorry if this is the way you found out. I've considered making individual phone calls to our many mutual friends to break the news, but this is still hard to deal with in the open. The blog feels less personal and less open, so it seems a good first step. Geoff and I are working to make the break as friendly as possible. We want to make sure our friends feel they don't have to take sides. And I recognize that relationships end. It happens. It's part of life. And I'm still a full person on my own. But it hurts to be rejected and it's scary to be alone, and right now that's the lens I'm looking through to take my next steps.

Where those next steps will take me, I'm still not sure. I wanted to rush back to Juneau and my cat and the safe monotony of my job, but I'm still down here because I feel strongly that this sabbatical is an important part of the journey, even if it doesn't go the direction I had planned. I'm not even sure where the sabbatical will take me, but I remain open to new things and willing to accept that the paths of life are mostly unknown.

San Fransisco

I spent the past four days in San Fransisco with good friends. It was quite the reunion. At one point, six of us who once lived together in a house in Salt Lake City gathered from all corners of the West to scarf down sourdough bread and soak in lots of San Fransisco dampness (my friend Paul, who lives there now with his wife, Monika, said "Honestly, it's hardly ever this crappy here. It must be you."

Our friend Jen flew out from Utah just to visit everyone. She and I wanted to do "touristy" things. We convinced the others to ride the ferry to Alcatraz Island.

The audio tour guide told us that 1,500 prisoners were housed there during all of its days as a notorious prison. As a tourist destination, that island must see about that many visitors in a handful of hours. Honestly, after visiting there, I don't see what was so bad about it. It's kind of a cozy little spot. :-)

The fog started to clear on the ride home.

It brought the most sunshine I had seen in days, and for a couple beautiful hours I could see San Fransisco.

Jen and Monika are on a boat; it's as real as it gets. (There guys, I said it.)

Fishermen's Wharf was certainly good for laughs, and much more palatable than the Juneau docks.

The Mission neighborhood also is good for laughs, and has much better food.

In between soaking up city life, there was still a little time to soak in some mist and miles. I'm not a huge fan of biking in cities. If I knew the city well, I'm sure I could find some great routes to ride in San Fransisco, but most of the time in city limits I felt like I was inching through traffic - green light, sprint; red light, stop. I did some hard interval climbs in the hills of Noe Valley. But when I finally had time for a longer ride, I dodged morning rush hour traffic and cable cars down Market Street, coasted beside the shore and crossed the Golden Gate Bridge. The fog was so thick I could barely see the cars on the street next to me, let alone the bridge or any of the famous views. But once I was back in Marin County, I felt more at home.

After looping over the ridge a couple of times, I crossed back over to the city and found some great trails in the Golden Gate park. Later, I became hopelessly lost in the northwestern corner of the city and somehow landed on Haight Street. My San Fransisco experience was nearly complete.

Later on Monday, Monika, Jen and I "climbed" the San Fransisco Twin Peaks, a couple of bald spots on top of a 900-foot hill in the center of the bustling city. Of course there was nothing to see, but with wind gales blowing the misty rain sideways, it almost felt like the top of a real mountain.

Jen and I drove to Salt Lake City today. Geoff flew to New York to visit his family. I've been working on a post about his Miwok race and my future plans. There is much to tell.

Yreka to San Fransisco

We spent Wednesday night in a random town along I-5 called Yreka. No, I can't pronounce it. I did some quick Google Maps research in the budget hotel room and decided to try a ride called "Gunsight Peak." Doubletrack and lots of climbing. And despite the hazy day, good views of Mount Shasta.

It was pretty hot out. And when I say hot, I mean it was 60. I'm going to have a tough time getting used to summer.

I topped out at about 6,300 feet. I'm embarrassed to say that as I sat on the gravel pumping up a flat tire, I could feel it. I'm going to have a tough time getting used to elevation.

We continued south to San Fransisco, where we're staying with friends in the city.

I got out for some gravel trail riding today in the Marin Headlands. 3,800 feet of climbing in 24 miles! And this is one of the more mellow portions of the region.

As you can see, the weather was quite lovely. Low 50s, steady rain and high winds. I've been feeling pretty homesick lately, and riding in these wet coastal areas has helped lesson the sting - both by helping me feel closer to home, and helping me miss home that much less.

Geoff is running the Miwok 100K early tomorrow morning. The only reason he even dragged me on this road trip is to do car-based race support, and our friends are meeting us here in the afternoon. But I hope to get out for more Marin riding if I can.

Ashland

We made what was essentially a three-hour stopover in Ashland, Oregon, so Geoff could run with famous people ... Hal Koerner, Kyle Skaggs' brother, et al ... I guess Ashland is a mecca for ultrarunning. It's not hard to see why. It's dry, warm but not hot, and the trail system is amazing.

My time window for riding was fairly short and of course I started out having no clue where I was going, but I managed to find a Pacific Crest Trail access route. First dirt singletrack of the year! Yeah!

Holy cow, I'm rusty on dirt. At least I was never very good to begin with. I have a feeling I'm going to be dusting myself off a lot this summer.

Add another town to my ever-growing list of "Places I Could Live."

Portland

It was 46 degrees and raining when I left the house this morning. The air smelled like apple blossoms, fresh grass and dirt, but it felt like home. I started somewhere in southeastern Portland. Somewhere ... where, I didn't know. I didn't know that it mattered. I haven't been to Portland since the 90s and I've never had any talent for feeling my way through a city - map, directions or nothing at all. So I figured I'd ride blindly into the late-morning chaos and I'd have to end up somewhere ... where, I didn't know.

I wandered south for a while, picking my way through connecting bike routes and trying to stay cognizant of where I had been. Finding my way back in a strange place is always a big concern for me. It never comes naturally. About an hour passed just wandering the streets of the greater Portland area and figuring I'd never find my way out of strip mall suburbia. That's when I stumbled onto the Columbia Gorge Highway. A lucky find for sure. I was suddenly immersed in a deep canyon with light traffic and spring exploding everywhere.

Once the highway threatened to drop down to I-84, I veered off on an even smaller road ... Larch Mountain Road. The rolling hills along the Sandy River became a steady climb. Lots of logging roads intersected the pavement. I ventured out a couple of doubletrack roads, but they were severely muddy to the point of terminal tire suck. And, anyway, I was more interested in figuring out where this Larch Mountain Road went. I hoped it would be somewhere high.

I went up until the road became impassable at 3,500 feet. Oh yes, I did find snow.

I ended the ride with 84 miles and 4,700 feet of climbing. I guess I haven't really been keeping track of my recent mileage, and may not for a little while. It's been hard to quantify my rides since I left in Juneau because they've been so interspersed with travel and everything else that has been going on. I consider biking my down time, time to reflect and try to make some decisions. I forget that I'm still technically working out, and never really think about it, so I can honestly say that I'm not sure whether I've been feeling physically strong, normal, or weak. But it's been rewarding to travel so many new places on two wheels, especially when fate spits me out somewhere like this.