Monday, August 17, 2015

Becoming Frozen

Today (August 17) my latest book was released. "Becoming Frozen" is my own story about falling in love with Alaska, after a rash decision to follow my then-boyfriend to the North completely changed the trajectory of my life.

The release coincides with the tenth anniversary of that decision, which was set in motion during the week of my 26th birthday. Coincidentally, I was camping in the Wind Rivers in Wyoming when I had my fateful "why not?" moment, and I hadn't been back those mountains since, until last week. It's funny how life continues turning in circles.

This book is one of the accumulating projects that I finally just had to push out the door. I don't blog much about my book projects, which are part of the day-to-day work I do. (People often wonder what I "do." I'm a freelance copy editor, if you weigh my career by the bulk of my paid contracts. Secondarily I'm an author, and book sales bring in my next largest chunk of income. Then I'm a journalist who contributes to newspapers and magazines. Last, I'm a blogger. Thank you for your clicks.)

Books, however, remain my ambition. I had some encouraging success with "Be Brave, Be Strong," and initially felt confidence that I could bulk up my fish wheel with frequent releases and modest sales, similar to other independent authors I admire. It hasn't quite worked out that way, mainly because I find book writing to be frustratingly difficult. Blogs are a breeze. But books ... they tend to take on a personality of their own that isn't always agreeable. I struggled with "Becoming Frozen." I'll admit that right here. It will be interesting to watch how it's received.

Books are also a challenging market. I saw all this potential with the rise of independent publishing, and it has worked out for me to some extent. I've sold more than 20,000 copies of a book that an agent told me she "loved, but there's no market. Nobody reads books about bicycling." I have three other books that have had reasonable sales. Still, it's difficult to convince people to part with their money for what amounts to low-tech entertainment. So much highly entertaining content is available for free. Even I am guilty of buying and reading only a dozen or so new books per year, and spend many more hours reading newspapers, online magazines, and blogs. I think that's what I struggle with the most in my for-profit projects. Why should/would anyone pay for this?

I've also ventured back into the traditional publishing game to pursue a project about Ann Trason. I've already found a couple of interested publishers, but each has a specific idea of what that book should be. Meanwhile, both my and Ann's ideas about the book continue to shift, and I feel like I'm approaching an impasse. In all honesty, I have no personal interest in traditional publishing. The validation of it does nothing for me, the numbers I've yet seen are not inspiring, and the micromanagement is exasperating. And yet for projects like this one, and others I have in mind, it's really they only way to go.

What's funny about writing is, I don't really believe people should pay me for this. I enjoy writing as much if not more than cycling, and I don't expect to receive payment for the cycling I do. But I do need income, to at least a small extent. Also, Beat is waiting for me to create a million-dollar bestseller so we can retire and move back to Alaska. I tell him I'm way too out of touch to formulate such successful content. I write about what I love. It's pretty esoteric. I'm okay with that. It can still fund groceries.

So with all that, I'm introducing "Becoming Frozen." This book is about the year I lived in Homer, Alaska, and has elements of the typical cheechako tale. A series of random events led to my discovery of endurance racing, and there are also tales of my often humorous "couch-to-100-mile-snow-bike-race" training efforts. For each chapter, I took an excerpt from an original blog post and expanded on it. It was funny to read through all the old entries of a blog I still update and think, "Ah, so young." It also had me wondering what became of readers from the days of yore. If you still check in here and remember commenting on "Up in Alaska" back in 2005 or 2006, I'd love to send you a free digital copy of "Becoming Frozen." E-mail me at jillhomer (at) gmail with your old Blogger (or Typepress, or whatever) handle, and whether you prefer a PDF or eBook file. You'd make my day. (Juancho? Doug? Are you still out there?)

For everyone else, your support is greatly appreciated. I plan to offer signed copies, but I've nearly sold out of what I'll have available before early October. I'll post that link then, but for now you can purchase an eBook (with a free app the file can be read on any device) or paperback at Amazon.

Thank you to Tonya Simpson for editing, and David Shaw at Wild Imagination Photography for the cover photo.

And thanks for reading!


Wednesday, August 12, 2015

This one time at Fat Camp

A few weeks ago, while I was nursing weak lungs and a festering disappointment about my failed Tour Divide, I received a text from my friend Danni in Montana, who I've missed and haven't seen in at least two years. She asked if I wanted to join a group of friends for a backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains of Wyoming, playfully dubbed "Fat Camp." I was unsure about my health and the logistics of wedging another trip into this already-packed year, but at the last minute decided I couldn't bear to miss it. 

"I SO want to join you," I replied. "Otherwise this will be the worst summer ever, seriously." 

"I'm really pathetically fat and out of shape, so don't worry even if you still have pneumonia," Danni wrote. 

I couldn't ask for better backpacking companions — self-contained and capable women from a variety of backgrounds. There's Amber, a fish biologist and fast mountain biker/skier from Kalispell, Montana; Lora, another biologist/skier/climber in Corvalis, Oregon; Danni, a lawyer/mother who is not fat and out of shape, but is understandably too busy to spend much time on recreation; me, with slightly asthmatic and decidedly clumsy tendencies who arguably doesn't bring a lot to the table on a trip like this; and Meghan, a fiercely fit trail runner who floats effortlessly up steep boulder fields, lives in Moab, Utah, and co-manages the popular ultrarunning news site, iRunFar.


 It's a natural and yet unique dynamic — five thirty-something women in the woods. With no husbands or boyfriends in sight, we were an anomaly, and nearly everyone we spoke with made some sort of comment along the lines of "wow, all girls." Calling the tradition "Fat Camp" is something of a play on this, I think. Fat Camp refers to the perpetual hunger one often experiences in the backcountry, but also alludes to the stereotype that the only reason women engage in physical activity is to lose weight.


I hate going hungry, more than I hate struggling under big backpacks, so I packed an enormous amount of food. I thought my supply was reasonable for five days, but I was still thinking more in terms of the Tour Divide, when I was mowing through 5,000-plus calories a day. Out here, even with difficult terrain that pushed our 11-mile days into the 5- to 9-hour range, 3,000 calories were about all I could stomach. I ended up with nearly three days' worth of extra food, but it's nice to know I can carry what I need for a week or more in the backcountry.

At the airport, my pack weighed 28 pounds before I added water, bear spray, electronics, and fuel. It was an unwieldy thing, and I have been spoiled by bikepacking, which lets the bike do the carrying and only requires extra leg work from me. Having all that weight on my upper body threw me off kilter. I stumbled and fell a number of times during the first two miles, which descended 2,000 feet into the Long Lake valley. Near the bottom I fell hard on my left arm, spraining my wrist. This minor injury would bother me a lot for the next two days, but healed just in time to negotiate the most difficult scrambles of the route.

Volatile thunderstorms greeted us on the climb up Pine Creek Canyon, and then it proceeded to rain for the next ten hours. We constructed a small tarp shelter and cooked soggy dinners before setting up our tents. My Big Agnes Seedhouse 2 is now six years old and leaks in a few places, but the two-person tent allowed enough room to keep my sleeping bag centered in the dry spot as it rained and rained through the night. It would have been more of a hazard if I'd shared the tent with someone else. Unfortunately I left my backpack in the collapsed vestibule, and most of my other gear got wet.

 Day two took us from our camp on Trapper Lake to the Highline Trail, and deeper into high country. The Wind Rivers are a spectacular mountain range, rising abruptly from the high desert of central Wyoming. During the Tour Divide, I rode along the foothills of these mountains en route to the flat expanse of the Great Divide Basin. That section of the GDMBR isn't particularly exciting, and from a distance, the snow-capped peaks of the Winds are merely pretty. I didn't really know what to expect going into this trip, but I now understand why this range is a backpacking paradise. Just one day of travel from any trailhead will put you deep into craggy alpine terrain, almost entirely undeveloped and mostly above tree line, with the soaring skylines of 13,000'ers all around you.

 We thought our plan to average 11 miles per day would give us lots of time for lounging, and it did. But travel wasn't easy — there was lots of climbing and the terrain was rocky, even when we had a trail to follow. We did manage enough extra time in the evening for a scramble above the Green River, where Danni and I laughed about being ill-prepared with Hokas. They're great shoes for running and all-day walking, but less ideal for shorter bouts of ankle-rolling, crack-wedging, boulder-hopping hiking.

 Day three took us to the end of the Green River Valley, over Shannon Pass, and then up the steep face of Knapsack Col. I once rafted a long section of the Green River across Utah, and it was fun to visit its topmost headwaters, where the wide, muddy river I know and love is just a clearwater trickle beside bursts of wildflowers.

 Scaling a steep boulder field toward Shannon Pass.

 Looking back down the Green River Valley. Those cliffs even remind me of the Book Cliffs north of Green River, Utah.

 Skirting the edge of Peak Lake.

 Starting the 2,000-foot climb up Knapsack Col. Here we met our first northbound CDT thru-hikers. They warned us of a tricky descent off the backside, and we could see weather forming on the pass. This especially made Meghan nervous, as she harbors a particularly sharp phobia of lightning. I'm also scared of electrical storms, but my greatest sources of terror in mountains are tricky descents in slippery, wet conditions.

 We worked to pick up the pace as best as we could, acknowledging that our not-quite-alpine start of 9:30 a.m. didn't serve us well. Above 11,000 feet I started to feel my airways tighten. I took a hit from my inhaler, which helped, but it was obvious that slow and steady is the only pace I have right now. We climbed increasingly steeper scree slopes as the sky darkened.

 The forbidding crest of Knapsack Col, elevation 12,280.

 Happily, rain and lightning held off, but the descent was indeed tricky — a 42-percent grade boulder field where the footing was anything but secure. Lora and Amber opted to walk/boot ski down the loose talus to the side of the boulder field, but I didn't feel confident enough in my balance to attempt this (a fall there had the potential to rip my pants, as one of the better outcomes.) Instead, I ended up in a minefield of extremely loose boulders, so I veered over to a snowfield to butt-slide. This proved to be a poor decision. From above, the snowfield appeared to end in scree, but in actuality the lower slope was glare ice covered in a thin layer of dirt. It was too steep and slippery to walk, and more sliding amid the ice-covered rocks would certainly rip up my pants — and likely the flesh on my butt and legs. With trekking poles still stashed in my pack, I had to balance my clown shoes on tiny protrusions of rocks, tip-toeing sideways toward the open scree slope, knowing any fall would result in torn-up legs — and I had already taken a lot of falls during this trip, on much easier terrain. It was nerve-wracking! Backpacking is stressful! But I made it without incident.

 Descending the talus amid the once-proud remnants of the Twins Glacier. The map I'd looked at before the trip made it look like the glacier filled the entire basin, enough so that I routed my GPS track around it, over a small pass and down a much steeper gully. (Meghan and Amber designed the loop, and I took their descriptions and created a GPS track that proved to be fairly accurate. This was a source of pride for me, as I'd drawn the track by looking at topo lines on an electronic map devoid of trails and names, and guessing the most logical route. Of course, I was the only one who cared, as I was the only one carrying a GPS.)

 Descending into the Titcomb Basin. The cold wind and rain finally picked up, and we shared a frigid lunch behind a boulder, shivering but starving. This was proving to be a tough 11 miles! Our day stretched out for nearly nine hours, and there wasn't even as much stopping as other days.


 Still, I'd be lying if I didn't admit there was lots of leisure. Even when things were a little cold and scary, we never failed to have lighthearted fun, giggling over the biceps of sleeveless climber boys and discussing all the ways Danni can condition her 17-month-old daughter to want to join her for a thru-hike of the CDT someday.

 Looking back at an imposing skyline — Mount Woodrow Wilson, The Sphinx, and Bonney Pass. This is just a few miles south of Gannett Peak, the highest mountain in Wyoming.


 We found a beautiful, secluded spot just below the lower Titcomb lake to set up camp for the next two nights.

 We kept it cozy.

It was a great breakfast spot. Every morning I ate oatmeal, a dollop of peanut butter, and coffee for breakfast. Lunch was salami and cheese on a tortilla, and dinner was Mountain House — a variety of the less-desired meals from the remnants of Beat's Iditarod stash. I also had lots of hot chocolate and tea — because what purpose is there to camping without hot drinks? What I brought far too much of was snacks. I couldn't even convince my friends to eat my granola bars, cookies and candy, even though Danni was only packing about 1,200 calories per day (she takes this Fat Camp thing seriously.)

On day four, we hoisted light packs for a day hike up Indian Basin.

 More boulder hopping. My quads and glutes were quite sore by day four, and I wished I had easier access to mountains like this. The Sierras are still reasonably far away from my home, but I'm pretty sure I'd at least lessen my clumsiness if I had more opportunities to develop mountain-specific fitness.

As you can see, it's hard not to spend the whole time looking up, which translates to tripping over things.

We climbed along the sad remnants of Harrower Glacier as we boulder-hopped our way to Indian Pass, at 12,200 feet on the Continental Divide.

On the pass, Danni found a cozy nook out of the cold.

 Lora and Amber found a high perch amid the blasting wind.

 Another group shot from Indian Pass.

The eastern Wind Rivers are almost entirely undeveloped wilderness, stranded between the Continental Divide and the Wind River Indian Reservation. In the Fitzpatrick Wilderness, most peaks and lakes are unnamed, there are very few trails, and tricky terrain and route-finding would keep one necessarily focused on the immediate present at all times — no cruiser daydreamy hiking here. Someday I would love to return to the Winds with ten days of food, a good map and compass, several self-made GPS tracks, real hiking boots, and the exuberance one can only feel while moving slowly and steadily through a truly wild place.

 Looking west again, a small tarn provides a splash of color beneath Knife Point Mountain. Still a wild place here, even on the popular side of the Divide.
 
Fremont Peak and flowers. So many flowers!

 In the evening, I went out for a stroll to take photos of the mountain paradise surrounding our camp.

 This place is just unreal.

On day five, all we had left to do was connect the loop.

 The previous day had been the only consistently sunny one, and rain returned for the last day. Overall, though, we lucked out with the weather — the only drenching rain came as we slept, and cold and lightning were minimal. As we hiked out, we heard reports of a massive storm approaching the area, set to bring heavy rain and snow to the higher elevations. Sure enough, as we drove away from Pinedale on Saturday, apocalyptic-looking clouds were approaching at breathtaking speeds.

"It looks like a Japanese painting," Danni said of the scenery as we raced raindrops out of the high country. We moved quickly to ensure enough time for hot-tubbing and copious amounts of fried food in Pinedale. It was a wonderful trip and a rare opportunity to get to know a fantastic region and a great group of women a little better. I'm a lucky girl to have had the chance to attend 2015 Fat Camp, even if I didn't lose any weight.

Thanks again, ladies! 
Monday, August 10, 2015

Getting my lungs back

After I left the Tour Divide, I spent the next week convalescing at my parents' house and feeling half dead. Temperatures in Salt Lake City were well into the 100s, and I could understand why weather services issue heat warnings for the elderly and infirmed. My body was so weak that I could barely cope with anything. I slept up to twelve hours a day, wheezed when I spoke, and became desperately winded while walking with my mother across a Target parking lot. An albuterol inhaler helped, but two different antibiotics didn't seem to do anything. After I returned to California, my doctor speculated I'd developed a viral pneumonia. My resting heart rate was still in the 90s, and he was alarmed that I'd damaged my heart. Several tests confirmed normal heart function, and enough time passed that concerns about pulmonary embolism also declined.

With its harsh symptoms and recovery, the "Tour Divide lung crud" is as sick as I've ever been. Admittedly I harbored jealousy about other Tour Dividers who bounced back from their respiratory illnesses as I struggled through a slow walk around the neighborhood, clutching an inhaler and frequently stopping to catch my breath on the day I'd hoped to finish the race. It's humbling to realize how quickly fitness can be reduced to zero, and this illness has been a reminder to never take health and vitality for granted. Physically moving through the world is my greatest source of joy, and it's also a gift that could be snatched away at any time, without warning.

I don't need to go into detail about how I spent the month of July, but it was a slow recovery that got a boost once I started running again. I wore a heart rate monitor and went for lethargic jogs. At first I couldn't breathe when my heart rate spiked to the high 130s. But before too long I didn't become winded until the 140s, and then the 150s. My usual tempo pace falls into the 160s, and I first achieved that about three weeks ago. Every run felt like an improvement to my lung health, while a couple of bike rides set me back. It was more difficult to control my exertion levels on the bike, and I had an asthma attack while mountain biking in Santa Cruz with my friend Jan. This prompted me to cancel a backpacking trip the following weekend, and I thought I would probably lose the rest of summer to the lung crud.

Still, I continued to make improvements with running, and boosted my mileage as I clung to hope for late summer adventures. I received an invitation to join friends on a five-day backpacking trip in the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming. Concerns about the altitude and other commitments prompted me to say no, but at the last minute I decided to go. It was a wonderful trip that I'll post about soon, but felt especially encouraged by a couple of outings in Salt Lake City that I tacked on at the end. It was just five weeks ago that I couldn't walk along a flat sidewalk without gasping. By Aug. 8, I felt strong enough to attempt Lone Peak.

Lone Peak is my childhood mountain. I used to gaze up at its higher slopes while walking to school. Looming over the southeastern corner of the Salt Lake Valley, Lone Peak is a broad massif with a prominent point 7,000 feet above the valley floor. If you start from the valley, you have to climb all of those 7,000 feet, and the loose-dirt trail that gains 1,200 feet per mile is the easy part. At 9,000 feet elevation the trail effectively ends, and the next 2,500 vertical feet entail difficult route-finding up a boulder-choked cirque, scrambling up rocky gullies and traversing a tricky knife ridge. I've summited Lone six or seven times in my life, and I forget how hard it is, every time.

Although it was 90 degrees in the valley, the air at 11,000 feet had a sharp bite. Still, the sky was clear, and there was almost no wind. I hesitated for long minutes over the tricky maneuvers of the knife ridge, trying to work up the nerve to wedge my Hokas into a crack or swing my whole body over a yawning couloir while clinging to an overhanging slab. My heart continued to beat steadily, as though it understood that adrenaline spikes might trigger a breathing attack that would not help the situation. I was surprised how easy it was to breathe up here. For weeks my lungs felt as though they were clogged with silt. For lack of a real medical explanation, the silt analogy is the best I have. Tight airways forced shallow breathing, but slight increases in effort seemed to help break up the "blockage." Progress was so gradual I hardly noticed, but this day was the first my lungs felt almost clear. I scrambled onto the table-sized boulder that forms Lone Peak, steadied my legs to stand amid the dizzying drops on all four sides, took a deep breath, and smiled. Then I quickly dropped back to squatting position, because damn, this peak is exposed.

After nine hours of steep hiking and scrambling on Sunday — not to mention the five days in the Wind Rivers before that — my legs were sore and creaky on Monday morning. But my lungs felt great, which is basically the same as being well-rested. I still had eight hours to kill before I needed to be at the airport, so I joined my dad for a nice jaunt up Mount Raymond and Gobbler's Knob, two 10,200-foot peaks in the heart of the Wasatch.

Dad said Mount Raymond was a bit of a scramble. It was fun scrambling, of course, and not too exposed. But my hamstrings felt shredded from lots of over-stretching on Lone Peak, and my legs were covered in cuts and bruises from less-than-graceful maneuvers. Breathing, however, remained steady. I was thrilled. What a gift this is — the ability to move through the world.

I won't take this for granted again.