Hell week, day three

Some thousand or two feet up, Dave stops to look out over the valley, a collage of streets and buildings and farmlands walled in by mountains. He offers me one of his candy orange slices and I greedily choke it down through the sweat and dust coating my lips.

“No way to ride around here without climbing,” Dave says.

“Nothing wrong with that,” I reply, and we turn toward the thousand more feet in front of us.

We climb and climb and at the top of the mountain is a fire lookout tower. From its base we can see the great Mount Lolo up close, and the valley, too, although its faraway features are becoming more abstract. The lookout himself saunters up with his little dog, Sparky. He tells us the elevation of the mountain is 6,458 feet, and his room with a view is 50 feet higher. He tells us he’s worked the tower for 35 summers, and he hardly ever sees “people ride their bikes up here.” I’m hit with a spark of pride because this isn’t a special occasion; it’s just a Wednesday-night ride, embarked on after full days at the office, and the third similar ride in a row at that. I try to calculate the elevation gain in my head, with the earlier and future rollers, and come up with another night of ~4,000 feet. Just another ride. Day three.

The lookout lingers in conversation. I think maybe his job gets a little lonely up here. Dave points out that the sun is setting and we still have a long way to descend. We pedal to the top of the moto trail, all washed out singletrack and chunk and moon dust, and it’s rugged, and intimidating, and I feel more than a little bit dizzy. But I launch in anyway and hold on tight, real tight, because I have to find a way to survive this thing; after all, I have to do it all again tomorrow.

Fire roads

I crested the rounded spine of Miller Divide and suddenly felt a sensation not unlike sliding my tongue across one of those giant, swirly lollipops. A vast network of rugged roads rippled along the mountains to all sides, and I had just tasted the sweet surface of the expansive bike candy in front of me. I pulled out my map, tried to orient myself and looked back up, entirely bewildered by the possibilities. I had made turns on numbered Forest Service roads that weren’t even on the map, and in turn made more turns on overgrown roads that weren’t even numbered. I left Missoula with aspirations to ride a loop, but realized that if I didn’t turn around and retrace my exact route to this spot, I would be entirely lost. I was going to have to come back here with my GPS and an entire day to burn, maybe days, and I still wouldn’t be able to scrape the surface of possibility in this region, this simple cross-section of Lolo National Forest. And even if I tried, the result probably wouldn’t be unlike trying to finish one of those giant, swirly lollipops — I’d be tired and more than a little sick to my stomach, but satisfied.

Whenever I tell Montana cyclists that I moved here from Alaska, I often get the same response — “Oh, wow, the biking there must have been incredible.” People just assume that because Alaska is big, everything that takes place there must be big. “Well,” I’d reply. “Actually, no. It was pretty limited.” Alaska is incredible for the same reasons the biking is actually quite terrible — it’s largely untouched, almost completely undeveloped wilderness. With a few notable exceptions (such as beach biking), bikes need developed surfaces to function — snow bikes need snowmobile trails, mountain bikes need cleared dirt surfaces, and road bikes need pavement. Alaska is refreshingly lacking in all of these surfaces, even snowmobile trails (although snowmobile trails are by far the most extensive of the off-road options, thus the growing popularity of winter biking in that state.) I grew my passion for cycling in Alaska — specifically mainland Southeast Alaska, which incorporates a tiny sliver of impossibly steep mountains wedged between an icefield and the sea — so the region's limitations didn’t bother me. However, I am only now starting to realize just how limited it really was.

Western Montana is, by contrast, uber-developed (at least relative to Alaska.) As an avid cyclist, this is both a good and bad thing. The road cuts in the mountainsides aren’t exactly aesthetically pleasing, but they do offer seemingly endless possibilities in terms of access. Instead of slogging for days over tussocks and across raging streams on foot to access the backcountry in Alaska, I can race up rocky logging roads at 8 mph and find myself fairly deep in the high country within an evening. And that’s just an evening. If I had a good reserve of energy to tap and enough time to burn, I could travel miles and miles into the “wilderness,” come across lots of wildlife and soak in vast views, and the only sign of humanity I’d even see are the logging roads on which I travel, and possibly the occasional moto (although I have yet to see a gas-powered rider on these roads.)

And though mountain bikers often decry the boringness of doubletrack, I rather enjoy it myself. It’s a more peaceful, reflective sort of riding than singletrack, it tends to offer more real travel possibilities (rather than just riding loops around a small area), and can still be technically challenging in spots. And interesting! Just before I took this photo, I saw a flash of brown fur race across the trail about 100 feet front of me. It was too small to be a bear, too big to be a rabbit, but too fast to be a beaver (and too high up on the ridge for the third possibility to be likely.) My first thought was “wolverine!” but I’m pretty sure there are no wolverines in this area. I’m still a little flabbergasted about that animal, but it’s experiences like that — small but transcendent in their own ways — that really make this kind of “training” worth it.

As far as my Tuesday training ride, I ended up with four hours and fifteen minutes of pedaling, I’m not sure how many miles and about 3,800 to 4,000 feet of climbing, based on my map and some up-and-down explorations I did along the ridge. Good day, and my legs are starting to feel it already, but I’m hoping to rally at Blue Mountain tonight. Maybe this time, I’ll even bring my GPS.

Time to train

I was just about to send my friend Jen a text message, asking her if I could come out and visit her in Idaho this weekend, when the guilt crept in. Trans Rockies starts Aug. 8, which means I should really spend this week beating myself up on a bike, not lounging next to a lake with my non-cyclist friend. I put the cell phone down and packed up my bike for day one of a training week I hoped would mimic seven days of hard riding in the Canadian Rockies, in scope if not breadth. Monday evening’s objective was TV Mountain, a 6,800-foot peak that incorporates about 3,900 feet of climbing and 36 miles of pedaling. Not a bad “after work” ride.

A 30 mph wind blew directly in my face as I churned out of town. I took a break to reposition my helmet and briefly considered quitting, but I talked myself out of it. I turned up Grant Creek Road, for a while leaning hard into the crosswind, until it shifted, and suddenly I felt like I was being rushed up the mountain by a massive tailwind. The gravel road snaked up the mountainside, turning north, east, west, every direction imaginable, and the tailwind inexplicably followed me, racing sunset to the peak. At the top, the wind tore through the television towers with such velocity that they vibrated; I could no longer hear my iPod over the jet-engine roar, and I struggled to keep my balance amid the gusts as I walked along the edge overlooking Snowbowl, searching for possible singletrack trails (none were found.) I turned the bike downhill and the tailwind followed with a breathtaking blast of cold speed. Down, down, down, 3,500 feet down, and it wasn’t even yet dusk when I popped out eight miles from town and raced home. I made myself a dinner of egg and turkey spinach salad — because I am trying to up my protein intake — and marveled at how I good and rested I felt, like I was making dinner after a slow day at the office, not a three-and-a-half-hour-long mountain ride. I might as well not have even gone for a training ride, I thought, because I certainly couldn’t feel it.

“That crazy tailwind was something else,” I thought. “How could it possibly have followed me almost the entire way, in all directions?” And then I smiled, because I realized there was a good chance I was crediting the wind with what was more likely just a very good day, one of those rare “untouchable” days where nothing fazes me and I can do no wrong.

“I feel awesome and I just climbed 4,000 feet,” I thought. “Who needs training?” I picked up my cell phone and thought about texting Jen, but stopped myself again. “No, I need this week,” I thought. “Because the only way it will be a good peak training week is if it ends with me feeling absolutely shattered.”

Yes, Monday night was an awesome ride. And it may sound crazy, but I look forward to the goal of tearing it all apart.

Butte ... Montana!

It was one of those moments I was never going to be able to explain. We nudged deeper into a sea of sweaty bodies as the salsa band's drummer stirred the beat toward a fever pitch. The horn section built to a crescendo and the three singers suddenly dove into the crowd with their microphones, not even missing a note as dozens of outstretched arms pulsated around them. Then the brass musicians plunged in next; the trombone player plowed right into the heart of the crowd and paraded through the mass, stretching his instrument high like the leader of a frantic marching band. It echoed a hundred moments of youth when the collective energy of a group hit a ceiling so high, with a peak so unified, that it felt like the entire sky would burst open. The singer yelled "Butte!" and the crowd answered in a deafening roar, "Montana!" "Butte!" "Montana!" "Butte!" "Montana!"

I glanced out over the city lights below the outdoor stage. They shimmered with a surreal intensity that I had seen before. It was another one of those moments I could never explain. When people asked me about my favorite descent during the Tour Divide, I would often think for a second and then answer, "Coming into Butte, at midnight, in the pouring rain, on I-15." They would always look at me with that incredulous smirk, as though to say, "You mean to tell me that you rode a mountain bike 2,800 miles across the country, and that's the most fun you had? On an interstate?" But I couldn't convey to them how cold I was, how tired I was after a 16-hour day, how hard the rain was falling and how long I had been pedaling through a bleak and black wilderness, only to crest over Elk Park Pass and plummet toward Butte, hitting 30 mph, 40 mph, with rain and wind roaring in my ears like a freight train, and the blurred city lights so bright, so inviting, so full of warmth and hope, that the whole world seemed to wrap its arms around me in a welcoming embrace.

And then I felt that embrace again, during the National Folk Festival, in this random town that was once the Superfund toxic cleanup capital of America, in front of a random salsa band who I had never heard before and whose name I didn't even know. I was never going to be able to explain it.

Geraldine and I headed out Saturday morning for a girls' weekend in Butte. Geraldine organizes Climate Ride. We would have been introduced through mutual friends in Anchorage, but we just happened to meet first in a more organic way - we participated in the same 50-mile solstice mountain bike ride. The plan was to ride singletrack in the morning and take in the 72nd National Folk Festival in the afternoon. Both of us had about the same level of experience with Butte and its biking. But instead of doing any kind of prior research, we just decided we'd pull off I-90 somewhere and hope we got lucky.

We did get lucky. Oh wow, did we get lucky. We just happened to turn off at the Homestake trailhead of the Continental Divide Trail. At the trailhead, a group from Bozeman told us it was their favorite ride in all of Montana, and it was easy to see why. The narrow trail climbed steeply, but not heartbreakingly, to a narrow ridge and then followed the Divide tightly on an undulating roller coaster trail that snaked through a maze of erratic boulders and sweet-smelling pine trees.

We topped out at about 8,000 feet and dropped into the next canyon through the lupine and pines, then curved around the highway and looped back through a rockier, chunkier "beaver pond" route. (I saw no ponds. Only rugged slopes.) Montana is quickly making me much better at rounding switchbacks (though still not good.)

While mashing our way up the beaver pond route, a classic Continental Divide storm bulldozed in and soaked us thoroughly. I am not entirely stoked to be back in the region of thunderstorms. Lightning is one of my biggest fears, and thunder booms always set off an adrenaline-charged stress reaction, especially when the thunder is booming as I pedal a metal bicycle, wholly exposed at 8,000 feet on the Continental Divide. That said, all of that adrenaline sure does make for a memorably epic descent.

Then, the National Folk Festival. It was an impressive event - six stages and tens of thousands of people milling around the turn-of-the-century brick buildings that dominate the downtown area of this old mining town. We met up with Geraldine's friends and ate horrible festival food. I thought of my former roommate in Juneau, Shannon, who spends his summer traveling around North Dakota with a gaudy corn dog stand. I was a little disappointed not to find him at this Folk Fest. It was fun attending the festival with other women, who we could giggle with about how sexy the 50-something Moroccan singer was, and no one would roll their eyes at us.

We left the festival late and didn't get into camp until close to 2 a.m. We didn't even camp at a real campground, just the Highland trailhead where we planned to ride the next morning. So we were more than a little dismayed when two vehicles full of drunk men and women showed up after daybreak at 6 a.m., parked literally 15 feet away from us, and proceeded to build a fire and party for two hours in the loudest way possible. One of the women repeatedly screamed "Wake up!" toward our tents, and started talking about "kicking in the doors" of "those dumb biker bitches." (How she knew or assumed we were women, I don't know.) I was genuinely afraid but I had left my bear mace in the car, so I just huddled in my tent and hoped they didn't choose to actually engage us, as I'm pretty sure Geraldine would have knocked in a few faces and I would have run frantically for my life. It always amazes me that people focus all of their camping paranoia on bears. I would take a bear in camp any day over a drunk Montanan, which seem to be much more commen.

We had wanted to get on the trail sooner, but we both didn't want to get up until the drunk people either passed out or left, which they mercifully did at about 8 a.m. We headed up the Continental Divide Trail again. This section was much different than the Homestake section. Steep switchbacks, mud, and more mud ... a little bit of Juneau in Montana.

The views were still incredible, though. I felt like roadkill, which I blamed on festival food and less than four hours of sleep followed by two hours of fearing for my well-being, which would sour anyone's stomach. It was still an awesome weekend! Yeah for Butte, Montana.

Maybe I had to leave

Every morning, the still-unfamiliar sound of my alarm clock blares through the sweaty stillness of deep sleep in a hot room. I slouch out of bed, turn my bleary eyes to the bright sunlight streaming in the window, and brace for it ... the sadness, the homesickness, the cold realization that I have left the place that I loved. I brace for it every morning, because I expect it will hit any day now. But this morning, like yesterday, and the day before that, there is only anticipation, the electric buzz of possibility igniting a day where anything can happen.

I make my breakfast and scrape away the last of the peanut butter in the jar I hauled all the way down from Alaska. I pause for a minute before throwing it away, but the sadness doesn't come, and I toss it without regret. I take a slightly cool shower and squeeze remaining drops from big shampoo bottle that took the ferry ride from Juneau before making its way to Anchorage, then road trips, then south. There's a tiny bit left, so I save it, just to be sure.

I walk into the sun-drenched morning and hop on my bike. I'm wearing all my work clothes already because around here, heavy fleece and rain gear isn't an automatic prerequisite in July. I see a new, interesting street and I take it, and then I get lost. I forget I don't know my way around yet.

The work day flies by quickly. I take midday walks to the coffee shop and the sandwich place. There is still much to take in, but little to stress about. It still feels strange, not having a deadline bearing down on me every day. Suddenly, it's late afternoon, and time to go for a ride.

I like to ride alone. I'm used to it, and I enjoy having all that time to think. But around here, there is something new and exciting going on nearly every night, and it's difficult not to ride with others. I especially like Thursday nights, and the Thursday Night Riders, a group ride that appears to attract a fun combination of unpretentious fast people, longtime Missoulians and intermediate mountain bikers like myself, looking for a challenge. Today is the "Hayduke Ride," an ambitious one, 3,400 feet of climbing all on singletrack. I start from town, which makes it more than 4,000 for me.

Heat wafts off the pavement as I ride down Orange Street. I pass a digital thermometer that reads 95 degrees. My pasty still-Alaskan skin cells look for a retreat but find none. My jersey is already so wet and sticky that it feels like it would take my skin with it if I tried to peel it off. I suck down huge gulps of warm water from my Camelback and think fondly back to the days when I needed fleece and rain gear to ride in July. Honestly, right now I'd rather gouge my eyes out with icicles than ride my bike, but I tell myself I'll warm up to the task at hand, somehow.

I arrive at the trailhead just as the group is riding up the road and seconds away from leaving me behind, just like last week. I kinda wish my timing wasn't so good, because I've only ridden seven miles and already I feel like my head is swimming in a pool of lava. "I'll acclimatize to this eventually," I tell myself, but then I remember that I grew up in Salt Lake City and somehow never adapted to summer. Some of us were just born for ice and snow. That doesn't mean we don't love the sun, but we love it in weaker doses. I dig for energy beneath my overbaked skin. The group starts up and I lag behind. I figure I'll catch up when evening does.

We climb and climb and climb. I catch up to a few riders and mostly talk about how I miss Alaska and fleece gloves in July. But all around me, the world is opening up. There are wildflowers on the hillsides and sweeping mountains on all sides; the sun casts bright streaks of color across the sky and there are a lot of mountain bikers laughing and smiling. Elevation and evening creep up on us, and I start to perk up. Maybe it's because the temperature eased up a little, but more likely it's my view of much of what is right and good about the world.

We reach the 7,100-foot summit and gather, a dozen strong, to look out over this right and good world and anticipate our well-earned reward. Two hours of climbing disappear beneath a swift and blissful descent. We're tired but there's more adventure to be had, so we veer up another climb and turn on a winding piece of singletrack down a brush-choked hillside.

After a mile or so, the group halts. I skid to a stop behind a cluster of riders. Not more than 20 yards in front of us is a black bear, with hair bristling like needles off her shoulders and back, standing and pacing and fretfully retreating. Her tiny cub, no larger than a six-month-old baby, is wrapped around a tree that we have to ride right by. They're the fourth and fifth bears I've seen on trails since I arrived in Montana less than three weeks ago, and are now officially more black bears than I saw in all of 2009 and 2010 in Alaska. Someone turns and says, "It's your fault, Alaska." I'm gaining a reputation for being something of a bear magnet among the Missoula mountain bikers. I'm not too worried about this one because our group is massive and momma bear obviously knows we're here and hasn't charged yet. But just to be sure we cluster tighter and roll slowly away from the young family. We breath relief and drop into the deepening sunset, then ride home in the dark.

I tend to look for signs that I made the right decision about moving - the weather, the sunlight, the recurrences of amazing sunset rides for days and even weeks unbroken. Then I see the bears that remind me of Alaska most of all, and I really think the universe is reaching out to me, telling me that home is wherever I make it, and that's OK. I don't have to be homesick, if I'm home.

One year past

At half past 5 on Monday, July 6, 2009, I rode through the sun-baked desert toward a shimmering clump of trees called Antelope Wells, which would make today (Tuesday, although late, still technically July 6) the one-year anniversary of the day I finished the Tour Divide. In this year's race, since the only woman out there is still making her way toward the Mexican border, that means (I think) I held onto the TD women's record for one more year. Hooray! It actually still strikes me as humorous that I have my name attached to something like that - you know, the women's record holder of "the world's toughest mountain bike race" (don't mock me! This phrase just occurred to me and I think I'll use it as the lead in my book proposals.)

But still, regardless of my feelings about my own experience out there, as my dad pointed out, it's still something to be proud of. While this year's Tour Divide progressed, a lot of people asked me if I would ever ride the course again. The answer is "probably, in several years from now, if by some strange stroke of fate I'm in a good position to return when I'm 35 or 40 years old." The better question is whether I'd return to the race, or to an effort to reclaim the record. I of course recognize that my 2009 time is full of holes. I lost full days to mechanicals and injury in Wyoming and northern Colorado. I lost full days to mental anguish and mud in southern Colorado and New Mexico. And, of course, I opted for comfort over distance whenever the opportunity arose. But as I said to John Nobile when we stopped early one evening in Elkhorn Hot Springs, Montana: "This is three freakin weeks of my life. I'm going to enjoy myself." I still feel that way. Maybe more so now than last year. So while shaving days off my time would be easy in theory, it would be much more difficult in practice.

Speaking of this year's race, I was telling my mom about the strange parallels between Kent Peterson's race-ending mechanicals, and my own in the Great Divide Basin. Like Kent, my freehub began sticking as I crossed the bone-dry, remote sinkhole between Atlantic City and Rawlins. Kent and I first experienced our problems in almost the exact same spot, about 25 miles east of Atlantic City. This is just a few miles beyond a historical marker dedicated to Willie's Handcart Company, a group of Mormon pioneers who crossed the Basin in 1856. The company suffered major setbacks while crossing the plains, and dozens of pioneers died when winter caught up to them in Wyoming. Historynet.com had this to say about the Willie Handcart Company:

"The farther west the companies marched the more problems they had with axles and wheel hubs. In the humid Midwest, the climate better preserved the green wood, but as the air became drier, the unseasoned material dried too quickly and cracked."

As I told this story to my mom, she informed me that I actually have direct ancestors who traveled to Utah with the Willie Handcart Company. When my freehub began to fail, I was lucky enough to be able to coax it into Rawlins. Kent wasn't so lucky, and had to push his bike dozens of miles to Jeffery City. Now, I'm not superstitious ... and I by no means intend to imply that the spirits of my pioneer ancestors are out there exacting wheel revenge on unsuspecting cyclists ... but, if I do happen to write one of those "true life" ghost stories someday, you'll know why.

I just returned to Montana from my short weekend trip to Utah. My dad and I were able to get out for another hike on Monday morning - this time one that is arguably the best route in all of the middle Wasatch Range - the Pfeifferhorn via Red Pine Lakes. It's been at least a decade since I climbed up here. The view is as stunning as ever.

Pfeifferhorn is quite the majestic peak, guarded by crumbling knife ridges that are full of fun scrambling.

Looking out toward the Salt Lake Valley and the Twin Peaks, which my dad and I tried to climb on Saturday. If you squint, you can actually see the snow-filled couloir we decided not to ascend. Looks pretty much vertical from this perspective.

The big mountain in the distant center is Lone Peak, which is still listed on some of my early Web sites as my favorite place in all of the world.

My dad and I on top of Pfeifferhorn, at about noon Monday. The elevation is 11,326 feet - the highest I've been since the Divide. And, yes, I could feel the altitude.

Then, about nine hours later, I was here - 20 miles north of Dillon, Montana, making my way back to Missoula. I needed to pee something fierce but I raced past Dillon because I could see pink sunlight starting to emerge below the rain clouds, and I wanted to round the western mountains in time to see sunset. I was not disappointed. A six-hour, high altitude hike followed by an eight-hour drive certainly did make for a long day Monday, but it was all worth it.

Closer to home

I think it was Wednesday afternoon when I first found out about the holiday weekend. "Holiday? What is this thing you call a holiday?" Newspapers don't have holidays. We worked midnights, weekends, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and we especially worked on July 4, a day when their tends to be a lot of news opportunities between parades and fireworks and inebriated revelers. But nonprofit organizations are not like newspapers - they seem to think that people should celebrate America's independence by not coming into work. Which is just crazy talk, really, but this announcement brought up a new urgency to figure out what to do with my three-day weekend.

A quick search of Google maps revealed that Salt Lake City is a mere 500 miles from Missoula. Since my new location suddenly puts me "close" to home, I decided a trip to see the fam was in order. A July trip meant I could do some hiking with my dad, gorge on my mom's cooking and visit my sister and nephew - who has nearly doubled his size since I saw him last, and at 4 months weighs nearly 20 pounds. It also would give me an opportunity to visit my grandpa, who has dealt with a string of struggles recently, and, not to put it too delicately, probably won't be alive the next time I see him. These opportunities in life never come twice.

When people ask me where I got my adventure spirit, I always reply, "My Dad." It's not that my sisters and I grew up doing crazy outdoor adventures. In fact, I still find myself joining in the commiseration when they bring up that time he dragged us on an "insane death march hike" that was actually a mere six miles through a burnt-out forest in Yellowstone. But my dad has always been athletic and has always loved the outdoors. When I was 15, he began inviting me on his longer hikes in the Wasatch Mountains. My first big one was Mount Timpanogos. We walked 18 miles, through aspen groves, flower-carpeted meadows and high-alpine moonscapes to a wind-pummeled weather tower in the sky. If I had to pinpoint a day I fell in love with the outdoors, that was probably it.

I still love to get out with my dad whenever the opportunity arises. At age 57, he's as strong as he ever was. He and his friend, Tom, were already planning to spend Saturday hiking to the Twin Peaks when I called to let him know I was driving down for the weekend. He actually brought an ice ax for the occasion. Although he's an avid hiker, he usually just does the sensible thing and waits for the snow to melt before he heads high. Still, the window of no snow is a small one in the high country, and he's looking to expand it.

My dad has always been my mentor and teacher in the outdoors, so it was an interesting experience to stand on the other side of the divide - the one where I'm a bit more comfortable and experienced than him at something. In this case, trekking on steep snow terrain. Not that I'm all that experienced. I just bought my first ax last October. But the experience is there. Tom and I explained the self-arrest and glissading techniques. I tried to stay out in front, but around 10,000 feet, I started to struggle. My lungs just couldn't keep up with my legs, so every 50 steps or so, I found myself gasping for oxygen that just wasn't there, and I had to stop moving until I could breathe normally again. It was as though the mountain was sucking fitness right out of my body. I surrendered to slowing down, concentrating on my breathing, and absorbing the stark beauty of my high-altitude surroundings.

Around 11,000 feet, we came to the crux move of the route. As we expected, the 60-degree couloir was filled in entirely with snow. The snow was crusty and hard. Dad and Tom talked it over and decided they weren't comfortable continuing up terrain that steep. I felt more insistent. I offered to forge ahead and cut individual steps in the snow with my ax. They pointed out that climbing a couple hundred feet that way would take a fair chunk out of an afternoon that was already growing short. I finally agreed that it wasn't realistic with our equipment and experience, but it's funny how disappointed I felt about it. After all, I came to Salt Lake to hike with my dad, not climb the Twin Peaks. I have to remind myself about that - it's about the journey, not the goal.

We had a fantastic hike just the same, beautiful and challenging, and the elevation - both climbing and altitude - left me feeling sufficiently downtrodden by the time we geared up to see the local fireworks show (in Utah, most communities celebrate Independence Day on July 3 when July 4 falls on the Sunday. Yeah, it's funny. But it's my home.) I went to see my grandpa today. He was in good spirits, but it's still difficult to witness firsthand what the end of life often means - that it's slow and painful and strips away a person's vibrancy and even personality before it finally takes their body. I feel even more grateful that I can live my life now, doing the things I love, with the people I love. Thanks, Dad.