Category: 2016 Northern Tier: The ride

In the mountains, it is difficult to think.

Your mind is focused on one thing: forward.

Your thoughts can’t swell inside you, budding and blossoming the way they can in the valley.

In the valley, your thoughts can wander through the hillside, sift through the grass and meander with wildflowers. They can swell in the troughs and roam among the spine.

It is much easier to think in the valley.

—

I saw the purplest lavender, the largest dandelion, the coldest snowmelt stream and the driest stone. The valley shows you all of these, as you descend.

—

A few years ago, we took Callie through the White Mountains in New Hampshire. We stopped with her at a small trailhead along the side of the highway, a trailhead I had crossed many years back hiking the Appalachian Trail. South of us lay Mt. Moosilauke, with a steep ascent—think climbing up boulders using rebar pounded and bent into the stone as a ladder. We took Callie into the woods and followed the spongy path with its white blazes lighting up trees south through the low and wet foot of the mountain. The trail wove along a rushing stream, water rolling over smooth stones. After a mile or so, the boulders started to burst through the ground and the trail became steep. All the while, it followed the water’s edge. Sometimes, the rushing stream fell down just beside the path, so close that it made the trail wet from splashes.

Callie bounded up each rock, getting closer to the rushing stream and falling water then we liked. She would pause, looking down at us as we heaved our way up the steep boulders. Then, when we had come just close enough, she would bound forward, leaving wet paw prints on the stone.

We’ll be riding that same highway on our bikes this fall. We’ll be passing the same trailhead. I wonder, will we stop? Will we go for a hike southbound, beneath those brilliant, white blazes? Will we see her there, at the top of a boulder, waiting for us to get just close enough? Will the stone still be wet with the print of her paw?

—

In the valley, I’ve teared up twice. My thoughts begin to breathe down here. They respond to the bird calls, they roll with the dust trails.

There are spots, though, where the mountains close in on each side, where the rock faces stare across at each other, squeezing the lavender and grass and wild flower, squeezing the thoughts clenched deep inside of me.

—

Sometimes, I think she’s laying in my back trailer. She was about the right weight as what I’m carrying. 49 pounds, up to the end. I think she’s laying back there, curled up, cleaning her left front paw. If I look back real fast, she’ll look up at me with those brown eyes, her ears slightly perked.

I want to look back.

—

If I tilt my head just right, and look back through the rearview mirror attached to my helmet, I can see the clouds behind me.

Sometimes, in the afternoon, the sun reflects through that same mirror, blinding my left eye.

With that same mirror, I shout “Truck,” letting Jodi know there’s one approaching.

We can always hear the courteous ones, crossing the rumble strip to the far side of the road, giving us space in the valley.

 

Yesterday morning, climbing to Loup Loup Pass, I was dying. I was on the kind of uphill even your car hesitates before climbing. My thighs were on fire. My lungs were screaming. I was struggling to move far enough forward that my bike wouldn’t roll backwards beneath me.

Every meter of pavement was a hard win, a conquest of earth and space and rocks and sweat. I cranked on the pedals, this strange and simple mechanization of circles on air, of a dream to move forward, repeated and repeated. I began to round a curve and, there, just off the pavement and nestled in rocks I saw the small tombstone. It was no larger than a bottle and read one word: Peace. A small motorcycle headlight lay beside it, intently refracting light onto this small patch of space. I wavered there, in between pedal strokes. My lungs burned, firing away a million tiny fireworks, quivering like the quaking Aspen. For longer than gravity seems to allow I hung there, in this space, on this earth, before pressing down and moving uphill.

I have begun to have a very acute perception of space. The space beside be, the space below me. The space between this car and me, the space between me and the guardrail. The mountains have a different space. Their space adds definition to the sky, it slices through and rounds out the different shades of blue, the different textures of clouds. As we have moved through the river valleys and into the mountains, we’ve clung to this new space, ruffling its sheets to release the fresh scents of pine, overturning its rocks to see if its hollow inside.

At first, the mountains were a white tear in the sky. The snow-shrouded peaks were all that existed against the blue skies of our first days. They were like a glacier, only revealing the very top, hiding the large mass beneath. As we began to approach them, cycling through the low hills of western Washington, the blue below began to take shape, began to differ from the blue above. The blue below began to fill up like a balloon. It was as though the snow-packed peaks were taking deep, full breaths, revealing lungs of depth and shape and shadows. Soon, their space swelled into our world, adding nooks and folds, glacial memories and spikes of Douglas Fir. Soon, their space became all we could know, all we could learn.

—

Sometimes, it can be difficult to tell if you’re going uphill.

Everything inside you sees a downhill. Or, at the very least, a flat slab of pavement up ahead. But, despite what you see, you keep slowing down. It is as though your bike was braking.

“It is as though my bike is braking,” you think. And so, you check. You check your brakes, you check your tires, you check that you’re not dragging a conifer-branch, having become an untrained and underpaid sidewalk sweeper recruited into service by some mountain troll wreaking high jinks on weary travelers.

But, nothing is stuck, nothing is dragging, not one of your tires is flat. You are just going uphill.

Your perspective is wrong and gravity doesn’t care. It just keeps pulling you back, pulling you down.

Those uphills are the worst.

—

Two days ago, I saw two dead songbirds. They lay in the grass, slightly covered, wearing a yellow the color of newborn spring. They looked like porcelain ornaments, placed lightly in their grassy nests, undisturbed beside a world moving too fast to hear their song.

—

Our first major descent tasted like cheap whiskey.

Having reached the top, we pedaled forward, a sign reducing the mountain to a triangle. STEEP GRADE, it welcomed us. We rolled forward and the space in front of us opened up. The mountain had folded in on itself, like a cat curled up beneath the hot sun. Our descent was immediate. A guard rail was opposite us. The road curved to the right and at the bottom, there was another guardrail where the curve began. But directly in front of us, there was no guardrail at all. There was just emptiness. The space that we clung to disappeared at this curve and there was no hidden glacier beneath the snow-packed peak. There was no shadows of blue below the tear in the sky. There was just air, sharp and hot. We rolled down towards this curve, our entire world reduced to the space between our brakes and our handlebars, the millimeter of difference a little more pressure would make.

Stepping away from the saddle, it must have looked comical. Such tiny wheels, such tiny people, on such a large road, on such a large mountain, rolling down white-knuckled and in uncloaked fear. But the taste of that absence had a sharp bite. It had saturated our lungs, had extinguished the million tiny fireworks bursting inside, had shown us a space so large, we could slip into its absence and vanish completely. There were no songbirds on this exposed rock. There was no mountain troll, playing harmless high jinks. There was only a small motorcycle headlight, refracting a single beam of possibility into our eyes, filling our lungs with intended purpose, shining a show of shadows against a blank wall.

 

ODE TO THE GRANNY GEAR!!!

Our friend Chris Darby asked, “Do you ever think you’ll need to use your highest and lowest gears?” And after now riding over our second pass (Loup Loup Pass at elevation 4020) I am confident that the only way I was able to make it up these beautiful passes is because of my granny gear. Traveling a tiny it faster than walking speed, I’m at my lowest gear cranking the crap out of the petals. This sweet, wonderful Granny Gear lets me spend 4 hours of climbing to cover 12 miles. Without this gear, these passes would not be possible.

After being on the road since 6:30am and working to get up the pass, we had finally made it and started another long descent of a 6% downhill grade into Okanogan.  We stopped at a historical sign that explained a fight in the early 1900’s when sheep were introduced into the area and how it disrupted the local cattle ranchers and their free ranged cow herds that had long taken over the rocky hills. It ended badly for the sheep, for where the historical sign stood, 100’s of sheep were slaughtered in one night. I enjoyed the last statement that summed up all too many environmental/animal rights debates. “The dispute seemed to stem more from the ranchers themselves, than between the actual cows and sheep.”

We headed into Omak to fill up water at a gas station before we headed the 9.5 miles to our campsite, but after getting back on the bike, my knee started shooting with pain and I was barely able to cycle it through each stroke. We headed towards a store to get a knee brace and some ice. After icing it for 30 minutes in the parking lot, we decided our day would have to end here in Omak. We are taking a zero day tomorrow due to wind and 80% chance of rain, so this will allow my knee plenty of rest before our next two climbs.

Over the last four days, Jodi and I have biked from Anacortes, Washington on the Pacific edge of North America, to Winthrop, Washington, a small, rustic town tucked into the shadow of the Pacific Crest. We’ve traveled 167 miles, with long, steep climbs up to Rainy and Washington passes in the North Cascades. The roads have been lightly traveled; along several, it would be 15 or more minutes before a car would pass. A heat wave has passed through, and the days have been in the mid-90s with cloudless blue skies. Luckily, we are both familiar with being outdoors on hot, sunny days, so we made good progress into the mountains.

The internet has been spotty at best; photos have been difficult to upload. We’ll provide a longer recap at the earliest convenience. Look through the portfolio photos for a recap of the last several days!

I feel like we could call this a zero day. It was short mileage between Winthrop to Twisp. We were able to resupply at the grocery, pick up denatured alcohol at the hardware store, upload photos at the library, call home to loving parents, and head to the post office. I decided to send my two front panniers home, since all of my gear could fit in two and be able to switch them out in the middle of summer. Matt decided since I was losing 5 lbs he would also join in and send home his backpack and some camera equipment. His fit nicely into a flat-rate box, but I ended up having to bike back to the grocery, pick up some paper bags and wrap the panniers like a present, under the advise of the postal worker. After about an hour my package was ready and I walked back up to the counter and the postal worker said, “that a girl, it’s quite the professional packing job.” I was not so convinced that my panniers would make it in one piece by the blob of tape and paper bag ball that was before me. We quickly headed out of town and road the last 9.5 miles into Twisp. Tonight we are staying for free camping in the yard of the Sports Motel. They even are allowing us to take showers with towels (instead of the bandana, I’ve been using) and do laundry. It has been 13 days since we’ve washed clothes, but like Matt always says, “we smell perfect.”