Colleen's Journal: Week Ten

What a strange day.  Possibly the weirdest of this trip, so far.

We knew it was going to be.  Today was the single longest stretch we've yet biked in which there were no services - about 56, I think, between Green River and Wellington, to the north.  On some of our maps, Woodside was listed partway through - but given that it wasn't even listed on some other maps, and Cisco was listed on those maps and didn't exist, we inquired as to the reality of Woodside.  We were told it was a gas station, owned by someone who opened it at his own whim.  This information was correct.  The gas station owner was apparently not struck with the whimsy of opening his station today.  Hence, Woodside - which was, surreally enough, marked by an official DOT sign - didn't exist either.

Well, your heroines may be intrepid, but they ain't stupid.  We didn't intend to bike 56 miles on the water that we could carry (aside from all our other gear) in the 98 degree Utah desert.  We flagged down an RV.  (RVs, we deduce, have refrigerators and therefore cold water and maybe even ice.)  They gave us ice water.  It was still 98 degrees, though, and even if it doesn't feel that bad due to lack of humidity, water still gets hot at the same rate.  And the heat was taking its toll: it's very hard to make yourself eat enough when it's that hot, so I was alternating between nausea, hunger, and pain.

Add onto that the fact that, after a half hour break, I got back on my bike and it felt, well, weird.  Exceedingly twitchy and over-sensitive, yet draggy.  I complained and complained about it, Molly suggested repacking my bag so that the weight was lower down, we did that, but it kept getting worse.  Meanwhile, we were heading for the largest hill of the day - over 400 feet of altitude gain at, Molly estimates, a six percent grade.  (I.e., damn hard.)  I slogged my way up it until we reached a good pulling off point, then suggested that Molly ride it a short distance to see if she could discern and diagnose the shimmy-scraping-twitchy problem.  She rode it for about 0.3 seconds and said, "Um, your rear tire is flat."  Er, duh.  It was a relief to have an excuse for biking so shoddily, to know that it wasn't something serious like my headset being loose, but I also felt like a dork for not checking that.  I plonked down, woozy and ill, while Gear Bitch girl worked her wonders.  Yay intrepid fixit girl!

By then, we'd lost so much time that we needed water again.  This was the sad part of the day: no one would stop and give us some.  RVs, while not analogous to hen's teeth, don't come along but every ten minutes or so, and it's really discouraging to have spotted one, selected a spot where it can easily pull off, and be mentally begging it to stop for you, only to have it charge on by.  Truth be told, I think it's rude.  If I saw two girls standing in the desert, waving empty water bottles, I'd pull over, no questions asked.  After a while, we were reduced to waving our bottles generally at passing vehicles, hoping someone would get the point.  Our savior showed up in a pickup with an ATV in the back and ladled us out all the water we could carry, even going to some effort to pour it back and forth around ice hunks to cool it off for us.  He was interesting, too, told us that he liked "playing" in the hills.  Doing what?  Honestly, sixty miles of buttes and hills, very little growth on them, no water whatsoever, all begins to look the same to me.  But I was glad that someone appreciated the land for what it was and took pleasure in being in it.

It was a strange day in other ways, too.  When we pulled into Wellington, it struck me that it was the first time we'd seen a real community since Colorado.  It wasn't that large, but there were residences.  Green River had been nothing but a way-station for tourists: it had the highest motel-to-everything-else ratio I've ever seen, probably about 20 motels, half a dozen gas stations, a couple of restaurants, and the rest, melon stands.  Wellington had houses, though.  Yards.  Sprinkler systems.  It was so bizarre, to see water shooting out of the ground.  Excess water.  It was a farming community, sheep and cows and horses grazing in nearby fields and, in some cases, people's front yards.  Hay piled up in bales.  Green grass and trees everywhere, as if it were completely natural, as if that sort of thing could just happen.  After a few days of desert, the feeling remains, like an afterimage burned into your retina, water must be fanatically conserved, that no one could ever possibly use it for anything but directly sustaining human life.

Today, more than anything else we've gone through, reminded me of how integral water is to life, to any kind of life.  We're just lucky that it was a lesson easily learned for us, that it had no larger repercussions.

What an amazingly fun-filled day!  Especially given that I so expected it not to be.

Today was pretty elemental.  We biked up for about 32 miles and then we biked down.  It was also elemental, in the sense that all of the elements were rather present.  Earth, wind, and fire, plus a blattering or three of rain.

Earth - well, duh, we biked over big lumps of it.  As it seems to strike me over and over in the mountains, there's just an infinite variety of the ways the earth can be mounded up and covered with vegetation.  Yesterday, we were buttressed by mountain ranges all day long, as if they had been plowed into existence and the road was just in a furrow - and once or twice had to bike over them.  Today's mountains, though, were more like what I'm used to, all higgeldy-piggeldy, lump lump lump lump biglump BIGLUMP.  As we found to be the case in the Rockies, our road followed both a mountain stream and a river, so we were pretty reassured that we wouldn't be going up over any of the BIGLUMPs.  It was a long, fairly slow ascent to Soldier Summit Pass, 32 miles almost entirely up.  Not terribly steep, mind you, nothing like Loveland Pass or even Vail Pass - we did it handily with our trailers, and even I barely had to flop down into my lowest gear.  Just chugged up a couple thousand feet, mostly going over low rounded hills with lines of jagged rock veining through them.  There were some trees and large bushes, unlike yesterday's hike through the desert, which made me ponder what differentiates the desert from the desert-like mountains: is it the amount of rain an area gets? the content of the soil? the drainage, such that moisture does or does not stick around very long? the underground streams that may be seeping through?

We saw our first free range cattle today, about 10 of them, including several calves.  Hanging out by a river, and easily spooked.  The critters are surprisingly scarce, given that all the roads we bike, for the last couple of states, are lined with barbed wire fence, presumably to keep them off.  (Doesn't always work.  Yesterday we passed roadkill cow.  Whoa.)  We also passed ATVs and and plenty of trains.  And what we guess was a coal mine.  While I disapprove of coal mining from an ecological sense (c'mon, y'all, put some of that money into developing solar energy!), I can't help but be glad that the trains are still running, and if they're primarily running to haul coal around, oh well.  They're just that cool.  I'm glad that feats of engineering from bygone eras still exist and work and are used as the basis of current feats of engineering.

On the way up, my rear tire gave out again.  This time, I didn't even feel the draggy "Ugh, I'm biking so poorly" quality first; I was just doing my little-engine-that-could thing up the mountain and not questioning whether it was the steepness or equipment problems that determined my progress.  But I recognized the poor-handling shimmy from yesterday, so we plopped down to fix it.  This time, I got to be Gear Bitch!  Yay me!  I was proud of my time in changing the tire and getting back going.

We hit Soldier Summit Pass at about 4:00, having averaged 5.8 mph on the way up, including breaks.  We heard from a cool local about all sorts of things, including the road ahead (almost all down, aside from "Billy Mountain," which I suspect was a local's joke, because it SO wasn't a mountain compared to the one we'd just climbed), the industry of the area (which included shepherding), and the weather-to-come.  It was clearly threatening to rain, and we deliberated on whether we should camp a few miles down or try to make it 35 more miles, to where there would be lodging.  Camping in the rain is very unappealing.  Biking in the rain, especially in the mountains, where it tends to get cold, and when it's already fairly dark, is equally unappealing.  We finally decided on making a break for it and set off, figuring we'd get a wetting but that we'd get dry beds.  What we didn't figure on, though, was the incredibly zippy descent.  For our second 32 miles, we averaged 17.4 mph, including breaks and a small amount of up and a good bit of construction to slalom through - almost exactly three times our upward speed.  (And I made a really good guess, with a little info about the grade at one point, as to how many feet we lost in X amount of time.  1800, and it was 1680.  Ooh, cee can play with math!)

It was, I must say, damn fun.  Very much a "we earned this" kinda feeling.  I hit my record speed (well, except for one brief time in, like, New Hampshire), 36.5 mph.  Now, I know that's absolutely nothing compared to the times that are regularly achieved by professional bikers, but it gave me a taste of what it can feel like.  Lance Armstrong, during his sprint during the Tour de France, averaged 32 mph - uphill and down, through the mountains.  I can't really imagine what that must feel like, but I got a taste, a hint, a corner of it.  It was fabulous.  I had this grin that was somewhat puckish and somewhat maniacal plastered all over me, this smirk of "oh yes. this is my descent. this mountain belongs to me."  The thing is, we never see other bikers.  Except for locals, in the towns.  We are so obviously the only people doing this, despite my ludicrously persistent hope that we'll meet other touring cyclists with whom we can swap stories.  So it really does feel like the mountains are ours.  The speed, the air, the rush of wind, the constantly changing space - nobody else is experiencing them quite like we are.  There's a fierceness to it, an instantaniety, the ever-present and ever-immediate knowledge that each second, you have to evaluate the terrain ahead and make tiny decisions - twitch or lean or almost breathe differently so as to affect the trajectory of your bike, hurtling down on two little narrow wheels, the air like something living rushing around and with and through you.  It really is spectacular.

"Billy Mountain" turned out to be under construction.  As in, three lanes closed and being paved and all the traffic being funneled into the two remaining lanes.  We tried to bike along the narrow strip next to the big traffic cones for a while, but finally said, aw heck, there's three lanes of naked unused space beckoning us over there, and switched over.  Then, though, we had to negotiate the occasional construction equipment (what were they doing, paving on a weekend night?).  On top of this, the storm was chuckling evilly over us again; and as a cherry on the top, we had winds converging, oddly, from every direction.  I can verify this mostly because the wind all but braided my wispy bangs, by the end.  Even all this, though unnerving, was exhilarating.  Ha ha, I get to play chicken with the dump trucks!

We emerged from that with our tailwind intact; in fact, it seemed to have come to a truce and joined forces with all the other winds.  I don't think we've biked in anything so strong since the Day Of Insane Hurricane Tsunami Winds in New York, but this time, they were directly behind us.  The wind, gauging how quickly things were flying alongside us, was going at least 20 mph, probably faster.  And the mountains seemed to have changed shape again, in the course of a single range.  First up rounded hills, then across a plateau of what were barely hillocks (we maintained the same altitude for about 10 miles before we reached Soldier Summit), and then down the other side - which were more like classic craggy, brooding, jagged mountains.  Something you could ski on, if you cleared away the trees.  Something that has more clearly been shoved around and carved out by time, as if time were a gigantic accordian.  To top all that off, we finally got a glimpse of the forest fires that we've been hearing about for a couple of weeks.  Really dramatic, with smoke billowing across an entire cardinal direction's worth of our vision, pluming off the mountains (the flames themselves looking like pyres or signal fires) and then washing out the backdrop for dozens of miles.

And guess what?  On top of everything else, we're ahead of schedule.  We'll get into Salt Lake City a day ahead.  We're so cool.

A day early, if not a dollar over.  (One of the questions we get occasionally about the trip is, "Isn't that expensive?"  Well, um, yeah.  Most things are, if you spend three months living off your savings.  I'm sure there are adventures one can have that require little funding, but I never expected this one to be.  And a good thing, too, because any budget I started off with was shot a few days in when I went to the hospital.)

It wasn't a particularly enthralling day - nothing much we hadn't done before, a good bit of kind of unpleasant biking.  But we got here, and that, of course, feels great.

The day started on a low note, with my rear tire being flat again.  It doesn't take Einstein to figure out that there's a problem with the tire, but we'd checked the tire both previous times, like good doobie intrepid chicks, and had found nothing.  I grumped off to patch the tube and Molly located what must've caused all the punctures, a tiny tiny piece of wire.  Still, I was paranoid all day.  Patching tubes makes one feel butch and handy to begin with, but that quickly subsides down to grungy and ill-tempered.  Then we biked into the wind.  This was the same wind that had pretty much flown us to our destination at the end of yesterday, and we had to backtrack for four miles to a road we could use, up a steep hill and directly into it.  Whee.

Things got somewhat better after that, as we reversed direction and headed north.  We had the wind across us or at our backs for the majority of the time, one of the good things about the day.  You don't notice a tailwind as much as you do a headwind, until you stop, at which point you offer up blessings to random deities that you're not biking into it.  For the record, 1) no, the wind of yesterday and today is not normal, so thank you very much Utah, and 2) okay, I believe I can now say definitively, whoever thinks they know that "prevailing winds" head east across America obviously hasn't biked west across America.  I have.  We have encountered strong headwinds in one state.  ONE.  New York, of course.  Everywhere else, it's been mostly from the north and south, with a large percentage from the southeast, to our relief.  Mountain winds are highly unpredictable, as they often change within a few miles, but Tony Jordan explained how they tend to blow up the mountain, which explanation I have promptly forgotten.  Go become a meteorologist if you want to know.  Anyway, if you're planning a cross-country trip and you want to do it east to west but are intimidated by the big ole conventional wisdom that you'll hit headwinds every pedal stroke of the way, discard it and plan your trip however you want.

We soon encountered the fact that there is something rotten in the state of Utah.  Whoof!  Much of the day smelled horrible, an unplaceable odor, not as absolutely horrendous as the hog farms and trucks but a close runner up, something like manure and apples blended and fermented.  Smells can often be one of the cool things about biking - fields of wildflowers, the smell of rain, of loamy earth, the sharp smell of cold in the mountains, it's all much more immediate than when you're in a car.  Pretty much the same as everything is.  But this, which we encountered both south of Provo and a few miles south of Salt Lake City - !  I hope the locals have lost their sense of smell.

Most of today seemed to be biking through, um, metro Salt Lake.  I'm sure the residents of Provo and Orem would bristle at the notion, but really, most of the state population seems to consist of the suburbs and offshoots of Salt Lake.  About 95% of the population resides in a corridor alongside I-15 (which we didn't bike, we had to take smaller roads around it, as bikes aren't permitted, sensibly enough).  So we did an awful lot of biking through an awful lot of traffic today, and really, biking in the city just ain't that much fun to me.  It's kind of nerve-racking, knowing that there are so many more chances for a bad driver to really foul up your day.  I must admit, Utah drivers are extremely courteous.  They gave us a wide berth and, the whole of today, never once honked irately at us.  Still, stoplights are a pain, turning vehicles are a pain, and there's not really enough  inherently in these cities to distinguish them, that I'd rather be seeing them from the seat of a bike.

Salt Lake itself was, um, big.  And under construction, like any city.  Road chewed up.  Which presents more problems for a bike than for a car.  We looked for the Tabernacle, since we were on North Temple street, but never really saw it (apparently passed it, it's behind a wall).  Saw the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints Conference Center, which was...HUGE.  Could easily have been the Temple, for all I could tell.  Otherwise, it was just like any other city.  I can't tell a Mormon by sight, personally.

The final bit of our day, heading for the home of our host, Chuck, was even more unpleasant than the beginning.  We were warned that we'd be going up a Heartbreak Hill.  A vast under-exaggeration.  Chuck lives up the side of a mountain.  Apparently this section of the city was built first, because the water is most readily available here, a very important factor before modern plumbing and canals to route the water into the desert-plains below.  For your intrepid heroines, though, this meant that we abruptly encountered a road that was steeper than anything we'd seen since the first day of biking in New York.  It was ludicrous.  Impossible.  Like, wild guess, a ten or twelve percent grade.  Biking was absolutely out of the question.  I was bent double just to get the leverage to push my bike up.

We were exceedingly happy to stop, to have some homegrown peach smoothies, to visit with our host and talk through some arrangements for the next few days.  And, as reward for ascending that monstrous unthinkable hill, to have a spectacular view down on the city and of the lightning storm spearing and tossing purple about.

This ends my journal for the next two weeks or so.  Molly will probably continue entries for four or five days, but I'm incommunicado.  I'll be in off-road, preparing for and participating in Burning Man, which you will not receive a blow-by-blow account of because I will not have a computer; because it would not be adviseable to use a computer on the playa (the dust of which is utterly ubiquitous); because if we were either foolhardy or resourceful enough to use a computer on the desert, there would be no way of uploading entries; because there are so many better things to do at Burning Man than sit around trying to capture the experience in words; and finally, because even if I tried, it would be a futile and perhaps laughable task.  Burning Man is not captured in words, or in pictures.  It is an ephemeral experience, the collusion and collision of minds and magic and serendipity, of the beautiful and the bizarre and the scary and incomprehensible.  It is the lunatic fringe peeled away from the rest of society, nourished on ambrosia, psychedelics, and Miracle Gro, beaten senseless, left for dead, and revived by a kiss from the love child of Tank Girl and Loki.  I'll tell you some highlights afterwards, I'm sure, but I just want to make it clear now, the whole thing is a cosmic joke, and you had to be there.

See y'all after Labor Day weekend.