Sunday, Pugsley Sunday

This seems to be inadvertently becoming a tradition ... the last day of the week rolls around and I sleep in, eat a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast, finally make an effort to look out the window and note that the weather is actually pretty nice, and head out with Pugsley for a relaxing late morning/early afternoon hunt for rare pockets of snowbiking. A recent long thaw means everything at sea level is pretty much bare. Must climb.

Lake Creek Trail - which in the summer isn't actually a trail, so most everything beneath the snow is undeveloped terrain. Climbing to snow means clearing the myriad obstacles - clumps of frozen muskeg grass, rolling glare ice streams and flake-frosted mud. Much of it involves mountain bike moves as technical as any I've ever tried, on uphill slopes as steep as any I've ever climbed, and yet I try them, despite rather painful falls on hard ground that await me, because I have this delusion that Pugsley is invincible.

I was hoping for more hard crust in the meadows but I guess conditions stayed pretty wintry up there this week. This is my best attempt to ride downhill through the fluff. I'm not sure how much I was still moving when the self-timer clicked.

Elusive winter singletrack. Day-old ski tracks sometimes make great bike trails, but they're so narrow that the swerve-margin is near zero. Skiers usually have dogs that punch deep holes in the track and make it very difficult to hold a straight line.

No matter. Half the fun is in trying. Furrowing my brow, biting my bottom lip and funneling every ounce of available concentration into 30 continuous feet of riding is surprisingly satisfying.

Frost feathers. Today was also the day I discovered that the "super macro" setting on the Olympus Stylus isn't half bad.

But frost has a way of even making the ugliest patches of nutrient-starved muskeg look enticing. The temperature today held steady in the 20s, which feels downright toasty compared to 35 and raining (you'll note in the self portrait that I wore neither a hat nor gloves, at least until I started bombing downhill.) I wish it could be Pugsley Sunday every day.

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First day of sun

Yesterday was Juneau's 51st consecutive day of precipitation. Fifty one wet days. Rain, snow, sleet, slush and snain - sometimes just a trace, sometimes close to two inches of water, sometimes nearly letting an entire 24-hour period pass between squalls, but never completely, not quite. A lot happens in 51 days. Fall leaves wither and disintegrate. Friendships spark and fade. Snow falls and accumulates. Relationships begin and end. Fifty one days.

And then the sun comes out, and it promises not to leave again for a while, and you squint into its glaring light, and you're not even sure how to react, because an entire season rolled over while it flickered noncommitally, and even now that it's set to stick around, it's too late, it's December, it can only linger low on the horizon for six hours a day. No matter. Those of us wedged in the tight spaces between the mountains and the sea don't have the luxury of choosing our sunshine. We take what we're given, and we cherish every second.

My former roommate, Shannon, and I decided to celebrate the first day of sun with a trek up Mount Jumbo. We haven't really seen each other since I left for Utah in April, so it was a good day to get together. We're similarly struck right now, caught between strange hiccups in our lives, holding our breaths a little too long, hoping that when our heads stop pounding and lungs stop gasping, we'll finally breathe easy. When we last lived at the Cliff House in March, life was different for both of us, quieter. I was hobbling around on crutches and Shannon still ate sugar. Now he goes out for 22-mile runs training for nothing and I'm addicted to elevation, otherwise directionless. Five times 51 days.

We did the snowshoe thing, tough work for runners and cyclists alike, but at the same time so mindless that we could spend lots of time commiserating, joking and gaping at golden hints of sunlight against a cerulean sky.

Mount Jumbo. A familiar place, but not so much now. I must have climbed at least the first section of it close to 51 times during my tenure at the Cliff House. But I've never been up here in December, with snow shoved in every crevice and 12-foot-tall trees reduced to nubs. The wind-scoured, hardpacked surface crust kept us off the summit ridge - Shannon only had small running snowshoes and nothing more. So we stopped at the saddle.

No disappointment. On a day as bright as today, it doesn't really matter what you're doing. There are no goals, unless being out in the clear cold air counts as a goal. We settled in a wide spot of direct sun at 2,600 feet. Shannon snapped iPhone pictures and I plied him with king-sized peanut butter Twix bars. "Can I tempt you with refined sugar?" I asked. "Gimme," he said, and devoured two with a wide grin.

We laughed in the stark light as beads of sweat froze solid on our faces and frost stiffened around our fleece jackets. We pulled on coats, hats and gloves, sipped slushy water and fought to linger high on the mountain even as the chill gripped our cores. Sun invited us up and then refused to provide anything but views - cold and uncaring, noncommital to the end.

No matter, we make our own warmth. Sun just gives us perspective, and reason to hope.

Into December

Today was December 3, the latest in the year I have climbed to Blackerby Ridge.

The weather was marginal and I had been planning on a three or four-hour bike ride. Yesterday I officially signed up for the White Mountains 100, which means by March 21 I have to be well-conditioned for a long, hilly snow bike century in subzero temperatures near Fairbanks. But this past fall left me with an alpine bug I can't seem to kick, and after several lazy morning hours, I was craving mountains. I only had about four hours of daylight left, so I decided to go up Blackerby Ridge. On my way out the door of the house I am housesitting, I noticed fresh bear tracks ambling up the driveway, circling the locked garbage hutch and disappearing into the woods. I took a few photos and went back inside to quickly send them to my friends, the owners of the house, via Facebook. By the time I came back outside, there were new fresh bear tracks, this time heading back down the driveway. I ducked back inside the house and debated how much I wanted to climb today versus risking contact with a black bear that is not in hibernation and therefore probably hungry. Strangely, mountains still won. I pulled my ice ax off my pack and walked outside, swinging it back and forth and yelling "Hey Bear!" until I reached the bottom of the driveway and jumped into my car.

At first, it was hard for me to fathom why Blackerby Ridge held such an appeal that I was willing to take on a garbage bear with only an ice ax as a weapon. The hike was tough. There was bare trail and patchy ice to 600 feet, followed by a landslide or heavily wind-damaged area covered in piles of downed trees and branches (I don't think it could have been an avalanche, because there was no snow among the piles.) Then there was hardpacked, crusty snow, and then uneven cookie-filled snow, and finally enough powder to strap on my snowshoes at about 1,400 feet.

But as soon as I cleared the alpine, all of the drama - the lurking garbage bear, the landslide bushwhack, the slow snowshoe plod, the job angst, the unease - disappeared beneath a pillow of white silence. Such a tranquil place - Blackerby Ridge in a calm December snowstorm. I gazed out toward the indistinguishable transition between white mountain and white sky, and smiled, because it felt like peace.

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Buy my book?

It just occurred to me today that it's the first week of December. Only 22 more shopping days until Christmas! I wanted to take advantage of the holidays to order more copies of my book about the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational and market it again, but I never got around to it. I placed a big order today and I'm hoping I still have a chance.

To be honest, I could use the "author boost." I have been at work on a second book, a sequel to "Ghost Trails," if you will, about 2009. I feel satisfied with how it's going so far, but the going has been slow. I've been at work on it, on and off, since September, and I'm barely through Chapter 4. Still, I'm happy with the way detail and depth is progressing in my writing, but I'm having a harder time separating myself from the events and emotions I'm writing about, which is crucial. So I come to a hard place and I go away from it for a while, sometimes weeks, and find I always return with renewed perspective. What will happen when and if I finish this book, I'm not sure. Maybe another self-published blog marketing project, maybe the traditional publishing route, or maybe I'll put it in a drawer. We'll see.

Until then, if you like this blog and haven't read the book, now would be a good time to buy it. I wrote "Ghost Trails" about my adventure in the 2008 ITI (the year I didn't get frostbite and finished), as well as the different events in my life that brought me to the starting line. What I set out to communicate in "Ghost Trails" is that you don't have to be an amazing person to accomplish amazing, life-changing things. You just need determination, and childlike awe, and love. It's intended to be an inspirational story, about struggling and achieving joy amid tough physical and mental conditions. It's an adventure story about winter in Alaska.

And now ... it's on sale! I was able to get a good deal through my publisher and can sell it for $11.95, which is $4 off the list price. Shipping is $4.80 extra in the states and $10 internationally. Buying more than one does not increasing the cost of shipping, unless you buy more than three, in which shipping increases to $10 for orders of three to ten books. It would make a good Christmas gift for people who like cycling, adventure stories or Alaska. I should disclose that it does not contain any color pictures. There are a few black and white pictures for the purpose of illustration, but it is far from a photo book. It's a story. A good one, really. I've received a lot of positive feedback in the past year.

The first chapter of the book can be read at this link. If you're interested in purchasing a book and you live in Juneau, contact me directly. I won't charge any shipping and can personally deliver to anywhere in town. Because of lead time, this book will probably arrive fairly close to Christmas - as in after Dec. 20. Keep that in mind when ordering. I'm going to do everything I can to have it delivered by Dec. 25. If you would like me to send it directly to another address than the one you're ordering from, just indicate that in the notes.

Purchase a signed copy(ies) for $11.95 by clicking on the button below. Thanks for supporting this well-fed author. Happy holidays!

Waiting on the sun

It has been a rocky sort of week, and I have been navigating it with about as much grace as I usually exhibit when riding my bicycle across broken stone beaches (which is to say, I'm lucky I don't have a head wound.) Upheavals at work, downheavals elsewhere. I'd like to believe things will even out soon, but there's really now way of knowing what's around that next band of coastal cliffs. So I do what I always do when I am feeling uneasy - I cling to happy sunshines on the 10-day weather forecast. Right now, there's seven of 'em, starting Thursday afternoon. When Juneau's weather forecast calls for "Sunny with 0 percent chance of precipitation," you can all but take that to the bank — because our default setting is rain/snow and forecasters have no reason to show such certainty unless they're actually certain. Now that I've said it, I've probably doomed myself to seven more days of rain. But I like to choose the path of optimism.

Not that the weather or other aspects of the present have been all that bad this week. Yesterday, Sean and I got out for a relaxing walk on the Dan Moller trail, which I've been running on fairly often recently, trying to build up a little bit of a base should I decide to completely throw caution to the wind and enter February's Little Su 50K on foot (this is unlikely, but who knows — nothing in life is certain.) I expected the trail to be packed by snowmachines and told Sean as much, but they recently closed the gate to motorized traffic and then the trail received a foot or more of unconsolidated snow up high. Not so good for running right now, but a great wallow. Sean is usually a skier, so I think he has just about filled up his annual quota of postholing, hanging out with me. Personally, I like postholing. It's endlessly frustrating and invigorating at the same time. I try to stay out of shallow ski tracks. :-)

Today I did some climbing intervals up the Eaglecrest Road. I've added more high-impact cycling to my rides in case I decide to enter the Susitna 100 with my Pugsley (more likely than running the Little Su 50K, but also up in the air.) To say I lack direction right now would be an accurate statement. It's unsettling, having no real training routine or goals, and that uncertainty stretches into other aspects of my life. I have a home I'm never at, a cat I never see, and three bicycles stored in three different places stretched across 15 miles of town. I'm still drifting. I survived the latest round of layoffs at my place of employment, and I'm not even sure how I feel about that. I mean, I'm happy about it, in general. But when I'm deep into a climbing interval, and my thoughts only register in shrieks and groans, I find myself emerging from the haze with a single question — "What if?"

But the sun will come out tomorrow (or late Thursday, or maybe Friday, or maybe not even until Saturday). Regardless, there will be sun.

Rainforest trail

This is where I go when time closes in,
This place hidden away from the seasons.
Too dark for berries.
Too dense for snow.
This is where I go.

This is where I ride when weather closes in,
And sheets of rain fall from the sky.
Sheltered and narrow,
Sun-deprived.
This is where I ride.

This is where I climb when life opens wide,
With choices strewn about a borderless maze.
Endless loop,
Lost in time.
This is where I climb.

Ride to mile 25

I finally switched out the tires on my mountain bike. This is perhaps the latest I've made the switch to studs since I moved to Alaska. As I pumped the front tire up to 55 psi, the valve started to make that horrible hissing noise that indicates I have only seconds to release pressure before the twisted tube explodes (I pop more tubes this way than I'd care to admit.) I frantically grabbed at the hose and valve but it was too late. The tube exploded out of the tire right in my face, and the blast startled me so much that I jerked my hand away from the valve and punched the hub hard enough to bruise the entire backside of my right hand. My cat cowered against the door, horrified. I thought I had screwed up any opportunity to ride the ice-slicked streets, but then I found another heavily patched 29" tube stuffed in an old Camelbak.

This is my fifth season as a holiday orphan. Every year I tell myself that the expense, work hurdles and hassle of holiday travel isn't worth it, and every year the holidays roll around and I miss my family something fierce. I would even like to go with my sister on her Black Friday shopping frenzy, pushing against the roiling masses of humanity and frantic consumerism just for a glittering piece of something I don't need and never wanted. My own personal Hell would probably look something like Black Friday, but that is how much I miss my sister and the rest of my family.

I think about them when I ride, plying the damp streets and chilled air for comfort amid the homesickness. I think about coconut cream pie and ribbon Jello and table cloths that look like flannel sheets. I think about my Grandma lovingly demanding that all 47 of us recite what we're thankful for and I think about my Grandpa smiling as we chatter on about great friends and that super cool concert we went to the week before. I think about the Cowboys on TV and bowling with my cousins and even scoring more than 100 for the first time in my life. I think about Slurpees at 7-11 and sunlight on brown yards and launching sweet air beneath four tires off the train tracks. I find myself lost in memories when I ride around Thanksgiving, every year.

And I think about ways I can get home for Christmas, but I know it's already too late.