From the Archives - Death Ride 2007

Introduction

This year marks yet another when I didn’t ride the Markleeville Death Ride. It used to be too hard to get a spot, it being oversubscribed, but now it’s just too expensive. Almost the last time I did the ride was 2007, and this is the story I wrote for my bike team pals at that time. (I did return to the Death Ride with my teenage daughter a couple years ago … click here for that report.)

Death Ride Post-Mortem Report – July 14, 2007

It’s time to report on the Death Ride. This year I rode with five other guys, though we splintered apart almost immediately so I won’t bother introducing the dudes who got all uppity and rode away to prove their dominance. Mostly I rode with my former UCSB teammates John “Cap’n Pelstar” Pelster and Dan “AAA-cell” Wolnick; the others were Dan’s pals from Bend, Oregon (aka Benders).

As usual, the Death Ride was all about the food. You know what they say, a mollusk travels on its stomach. This year the rest stops had miniature energy bars (why miniature? I don’t know!) which, being a bit hard to open, didn’t have a very high calorie-to-effort ratio. Also provided were [Brand X] gels. These were very handy but I can tell you with perfect sincerity that the flavor was absolutely revolting. (I won’t say what brand they were because this company sponsors cycling teams, thus I wish them well.) That people pay money for such a product is astounding to me, especially considering—and again, I say this in all honesty, our EBVC nutrition sponsor notwithstanding—that the [Brand Y] gels are downright yummy, especially the chocolate, which I’ve contemplated putting on ice cream in a non-athletic context.

You can see how insanely popular this ride is by this rest stop, visited after the first and second passes (front and back side of Monitor).

Of the trip of the third pass, the front side of Ebbett’s, absolutely nothing is known. I can neither confirm nor deny that there has been some kind of cover-up of this operation.

Here’s a photo from riding the fourth pass, that being the back side of Ebbett’s.

After coming back down the front side of Ebbett’s we stopped for lunch. This presented a bit of a conundrum. They offered a complete sandwich bar, which is pretty fun, but doesn’t provide the kind of food that exactly fuels you during exercise. I mean, ham? Pressed-turkey-lip-lunchmeat? Cheese? These are protein foods that can rebuild our shredded muscles, but rebuilding comes later, and we’re just trying to get the kinds of carb-centric calories that fuel the muscle shredding process. And yet, it’s a sandwich bar, which means you can choose whatever bread you want, and then put whatever you want on it. Irresistible prospect, that. Peanut butter and jelly on sourdough? Sure, if you’re that kind of lunatic! Ham, turkey, cheese, Doritos, and double lettuce on wheat? Whatever floats your boat! Now, this sandwich bar thing might not seem like a big deal to most Americans, but have you ever tried to get a proper sandwich in Holland or France? You have almost no options in such cases. In France you can have jambon (ham) OR fromage (surely you don’t need me to translate that for you?) but almost never both. If you do get both, it’s probably a tourist-centric place selling out to Americans, and thus crappy. Holland is even worse: they’ll lay out a really nice spread, so you could make a giant sandwich that would make Dagwood proud, but you’re not allowed to. It simply isn’t done—you’re only permitted to select one thing to put between the bread slices. If you add more, you won’t get arrested or anything, but you’ll get plenty of stink-eye, and your hosts will be ashamed of you. It’s like a trap. So as American patriots, we almost felt compelled to make big elaborate sandwiches simply because we could. And as financial custodians of our households, we also faced the classic economic motive: we paid for this ride, we should avail ourselves of every amenity! So we ended up eating big-ass sandwiches even though it seemed they could only slow us down.

(I know, it’s a pretty blurry photo. I blame the kind bystander who offered to snap it.)

After lunch, while still trying to digest, we suffered the indignity of having to pedal up Carson Pass. Just getting to the pass proper is a seemingly endless process, and then Carson itself is a mother. In this photo, the place where the road disappears (up at the left edge of the frame) is pretty much the top.

Of course, seeing the summit and reaching it are very different things. Just ask Rider #486. Oh, wait—don’t ask him anything! He’s completely crazy!

Well, that’s pretty much all there is to tell. Oh, wait, I almost forgot! There was  one other thing. At the top of that final pass, we got ice cream bars! There were no chairs to sit in, and sitting on the asphalt with no shade or anything wasn’t exactly civilized, but still—ice cream! With those little toffee bits and everything! Look how stoked we are! JP is practically smiling through that grimace!

Which brings us to the thrilling climax of the adventure: dinner. This was included with the price of the ride and we ate it outside the ... well, I don’t know what it is, a structure of some kind with a kitchen. A clubhouse, maybe? They had picnic tables. There was a live band doing covers of actual rock groups, and as live bands go I would give them about a 6.5 out of 10 (6 being opera and 7 being a cat getting slaughtered). The band sang—I kid you not—“Total Eclipse of the Heart,” and rather than taking the obvious bait (à la Old School) of singing itironically, they sang it straight, which I’ll admit takes guts. They dispatched their task admirably, though I’m not sure you can exactly screw up a song that is so cloying, maudlin, and downright absurd to begin with.

But enough about the ambience. The food was typical Death Ride fare, the culinary philosophy evidently being “why waste good food on knackered bikers?” There was chicken. I’m pretty sure it was white meat. It was coated in barbecue sauce, though this sauce appeared to have been applied after the fact, possibly with one of those frosting dispensers pastry chefs use. I’m not quite sure how the chicken was cooked; it lacked the grill marks of having been barbecued but wasn’t all dried out as an oven would have rendered it. It was eerily tender (though not squishy and spongy like the perfectly cylindrical turkey logs I inherited from the ill-fated and ill-attended century ride that the UCSB cycling team put on as a fund-raiser, or more precisely fund-loser, back in ‘90). The chicken didn’t have a smoky flavor at all, so it couldn’t have been smoked; it may have been gassed. It may actually have been turkey, I’m not sure. The taste was mainly that of metal, though in fairness that’s not the food’s fault; pretty much everything tastes like metal after you’ve ridden the Death Ride.

There were beans. They tasted like baked beans always do. I suppose connoisseurs would argue that there’s a world of difference between Van Camp’s and Bush’s, and normally I would agree, but again, my mouth was not the as sensorially perceptive as a sommelier’s nose at this point. There was also an impressive array of salads: potato, green, and several versions of pasta salad. I avoided all but one of the pasta salads, because they all looked kind of creepy, like you could just tell the little noodle tubes would be limp and slick. The one I did try lacked the pleasant oversweetness that a product from the Safeway deli would have had, that derives its appeal from sheer nostalgia for the sneaked sample of the food that other people’s parents brought to picnics when you were a kid and your parents brought Wasa crackers and tinned sardines. The potato salad was bland, starchy, and eggless—in other words, perfect, as it filled a void in my stomach without causing me any messy spasms. The green salad was unremarkable, having like so many green salads been fabricated from recycled plastic milk jugs, except that it had cherry tomatoes. A regular tomato is so simple, it’s amazing that the agriculture industry has so thoroughly screwed them up (picking them green and hitting them with nitrogen for redness and then freezing and thawing them and somehow thoroughly insulting them until their guts are just mush) but I’ve never had a cherry tomato that was all that bad, so I was cheered to see them in use here. Also on offer were three different salad dressings, none of which appeared to have any chewing tobacco stirred into it, which was a nice plus. I had the Italian vinaigrette, which was neither Italian nor a vinaigrette but which was a perfectly acceptable lubricant for the salad.

There was a roll that worried me very much. It was the size and approximate shape of a giant apple fritter and I couldn’t imagine how I could choke the whole thing down, as my throat was all dried out from the arid air of high altitude and the 100-plus-degree temperatures we’d ridden in. But then inspiration hit: I sliced that bad boy in half like a sandwich roll and put my chicken and my cherry tomatoes between the two halves. This got me through the roll, and prevented me from having to try to cut the chicken with plastic flatware. It’s so easy to break the tines off a plastic fork doing that, and then to eat the tines without even realizing it. My blood plastic levels were thus largely normal (albeit slightly elevated from the gels earlier). Dessert was pudding, which I skipped because I’d already ingested a couple gallons of energy drink, countless cookies, etc. during the ride.

Instead of drinking yet more Cokes so we could stay awake for the drive home, we actually camped another night because the Benders, having a much farther drive ahead, had secured a campsite and brought all the necessary gear. A couple of the guys even found a hot springs to visit but the rest of us were too lazy to partake. We all chatted (and also argued) around the campfire for a while, had a beer or two, and called it a day. We might have even called it a good day. Which I think is about right.

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Ride Report - 2019 Markleeville Death Ride with Teenager

Introduction

I used to ride the Markleeville Death Ride every year, until the registration process became too cumbersome and I started racing the Everest Challenge instead. This year, I was pleasantly surprised to learn that the Death Ride hadn’t filled up, so I signed up with my daughter Alexa. Read on for all the gory details. (Full disclosure: there is no actual gore.)

Executive summary

We ate like supermodels; we ate like kings. It was really hot. The scenery was gorgeous. My daughter set some new PRs. Verdict: EPIC PASS. (Any linguistic shimmer here involving mountain passes is involuntary.)

Here are the elevation profile, basic map, and Deluxe map (with numbers showing what order we rode the passes in).

Short version

Seemingly following my own bad example, my daughter Alexa went into this ride woefully undertrained, at least by the standards of anybody who takes preparation seriously. The Death Ride includes five high mountain passes, but our plan was to tackle just three of them: #1 (west side of Monitor); #3 (Ebbetts); and #5, Carson. We figured this would be about 100 miles with  ~10,000 feet of climbing … but this was just a guess based on nice round numbers.

Dinner the night before was at a somewhat pricey Italian joint in South Lake Tahoe. I had an appetizer of stuffed mushrooms and then chicken saltimbocca over homemade fettuccine. The portions were woefully small. I could picture Kate Moss across the table saying, “Oh my God. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing. I’m such a cow.” It was pretty tasty, though I could show their cook a thing or two about making hand-cranked pasta; theirs was a bit limp. I inherited some of my daughter’s entrée because she got tired of it … the spiciness pretty much overwhelmed everything else.

Breakfast was supposed to be instant oatmeal, but our morning went totally awry (details below). We ended up scarfing a Clif bar apiece instead. It was a new flavor I’d never tried: Apricot Lunacy. Wait, that’s a Luna bar flavor. Or should be. But it was apricot, anyway. Pretty yum, in a wow,-my-hundred-thousandth-lifetime-Clif-bar kind of way.

During the ride I ate a banana-and-trans-fat mini-muffin; hundreds of Kettle-style potato chips; gobs of orange slices; about a dozen really poor robot-made chocolate chip cookies; a cup of weak instant coffee, black; five Pepsis; an electrolyte placebo capsule; three V-8s; 1.5 Cups-O-Noodles; several gels; ice cream bars; blah blah blah (all the usual nonsense ride foods) and a couple big ham & cheese sandwiches.

The post-ride dinner, which did not come with our $160 (apiece!) entry fees, was supposed to be at a far-flung restaurant (out of spite), but in the end we caved and had the onsite $10-a-pop burger plates: two burgers each (replete with trimmings, though the patties were cold), some admirably non-vegan baked beans, and hella potato salad.

Full report

We camped on the ground at Turtle Rock Park, a Death Ride tradition. It was surprisingly—almost eerily—easy to find a spot compared to years past. I almost wondered if we had the right weekend.

We carpooled to the ride with Chris, a fellow Albany High mountain bike coach, who was also one of Alexa’s teachers last semester. (Alexa got an A- in the class; any lower and this coach/teacher would not have been welcome in our group. Just kidding. Actually, if she’d scored lower, he surely wouldn’t have deigned to go with us.) Chris asked if we should set an alarm for the morning, and I explained the Death Ride organizers’ tradition of blasting the Jimi Hendrix performance of “Star Spangled Banner” at party volumes at 4:30 a.m.; i.e., no alarm needed.

Not far (enough) from our tent was a large party of jackasses who decided to hit the road at 3 a.m., which meant waking up at 2 (or maybe they never went to bed) and making a big breakfast in their stadium-lit compound. They talked incredibly loudly, like a bunch of drunks, so I couldn’t sleep. Without any knowledge of their leave-at-3 strategy, I kept waiting in vain them to turn in, and finally gave up and went over to tell them to quiet down. Most of them were so immersed in their 100-dB chitchat they didn’t even see or hear me. What a bunch of tools. My take is, if you have until 8 p.m. to finish a 125-mile ride, and you still need to start at 3 a.m., you’re not a real cyclist and should go try some other sport, like cordless bungee-jumping. Fortunately, they did quiet down, because my Plan B was to send them home to Mother in a cardboard box.

At 5:30 a.m., Chris woke us up. Evidently the 4:30 a.m. Hendrix wake-up call is no longer a tradition. He was just heading out (for all five passes) and we eventually got going at 6:30. Here is the “before” shot.

The ride begins on a descent and we froze our asses off … a Death Ride tradition that will never change. As the sun made its way up past the ridge to the west, things warmed up a bit.

Monitor Pass is a bear. So is taking father/daughter selfies with my ice-cube-slippery phone, especially when a scorpion is crawling toward my neck.

The scenery was as breathtaking as the altitude, notwithstanding fire damage.

The first rest stop wasn’t nearly as mobbed as in years past, which was fine by me. They no longer have energy bars or gels available, and the energy drink is either weak or diabetic-friendly depending on which volunteer you overhear. But they have weak instant coffee now, which is a plus at least from the hydration standpoint. You can tell Monitor was a tough climb because my daughter is a bit surly here.

Here she’s a bit perkier, no doubt due to the dueling V-8 juices she quaffed. Chris took this photo; after descending the backside of Monitor and climbing back up, he encountered us at the rest stop.

Wondering what ebvc is, on our jerseys? It’s just another way of saying EBVC. Does that help? No? Okay, here.

Here’s the official summit marker. Monitor is the lowest of the Death Ride passes, but not by much.

Not shown: the descent of Monitor. I don’t own a GoPro, or even a StayAm. If that doesn’t strike you as funny, it’s because I’m trying to avoid amusing even myself, due to my sunburned lips. If I were to smile too much they’d crack. Maybe you’d think that’s funny.

It’s a long run-up to Ebbetts Pass, with the temperature climbing along with us. I would like to take a moment to point out that I have done this pass with individuals (whom I won’t name) who whined the whole time, and I didn’t exactly blame them: it’s a steep, long climb. But my daughter didn’t whine at all. I’m not sure why this is. Maybe because no hill climb could ever compare to Mount Evans, which she rode three summers ago. (Though come to think of it, she didn’t whine then, either. At the time I chalked this up to lack of available oxygen.)

There’s a lake. Actually it’s Kinney Reservoir. This is at 8,350 feet elevation—so we’d already broken the climb’s back. It’s it amazing how you, gentle reader, barely have to exert any energy to journey up these passes with us, and yet you still complain about how long and arduous my blog posts are. Man, you’re not just humorless … you’re downright grumpy.

Due to California’s modern all-precipitation-all-the-time winter/spring format, there was still snow up there. It’s not hard to spot the snow in this photo, but I’ll bet you can’t find Waldo.

To mark our progress I would tell Alexa how much vertical gain we had left to go, but expressed as Berkeley-area climbs. For example, “We have 1.5 Spruces to go” or “We have 1 Wildcat to go.” My bike computer was understating the elevation, though, so I’d just announced half a Spruce to go when suddenly we reached the summit. Surprise!

This next photo doesn’t perhaps look very interesting, but that’s only because my arm isn’t like eight feet long and my phone’s “lens” isn’t very wide-angle. The point is, Alexa was so knackered, she had to lean her back up against me for support. The position I had to sustain for this made my back hurt quite a bit, proving what many of you already know: parenting is even harder than cycling.

Amazingly, I didn’t get the song “Lean On Me” in my head after this little exercise. Sometimes life is surprisingly merciful.

Check out this bag of chips. I wonder how high you’d need to take it before it actually exploded?

In other news, what’s with the watermelon? I mean, why offer what’s essentially a calorie-free food to hungry cyclists? Frustratingly enough, this is almost all Alexa felt like eating. I had to plead with her to eat more food. This is one area where you can’t “listen to your body.” Your body is a freaking liar!

Here is the requisite elevation shot. For the second time, Chris made the summit—his fourth, our second—right around the time we did. Incidentally, Ebbetts Pass is 62 feet higher than the Col du Galibier, which is the highest point in this year’s Tour de France. Does this mean Ebbetts is harder than the Galibier? Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha. The Galibier is way, way harder. It’s a beast. But Ebbetts is hard enough.

We safely descended, had a nice lunch at the base (I grudgingly ate Alexa’s sandwich), and then the day got really, really hot: over 100 degrees for well over an hour! We tackled the seemingly endless Category 2 climb toward Carson Pass, and then it tackled us. It’s hard to describe how tedious and strenuous it was so I won’t bother. Eventually we arrived at the last full rest stop before the Carson summit. The Gu people were there handing out free product, which probably rescued Alexa from total blood sugar collapse. She loves herself some gels, especially their vanilla and their salted caramel. The Gu-sters also gave me some electrolyte capsules, which I took a) just to be nice, and b) as a placebo. I don’t doubt that these capsules are slightly useful, but potato chips have plenty of sodium, and orange slices have plenty of potassium, and that’s all there is to it.

While at this stop, some random woman came up to me and said, “Look at this! Somebody put his water bottle in my cage! What am I supposed to do with it?!” I was utterly perplexed. I mean, why tell me about it? Do I have a sign around my neck saying, “Come to me with all your problems”? Before I was able to come up with a response, I glanced at the bottle and discovered that, in fact, it happened to be mine. I have no idea how this happened; nor does Alexa.

Here is Alexa about to mount her bike for the final slog. If her expression is sanguine, that’s only because I hadn’t yet told her we had ten more miles to climb. On the map, we are at Picketts Junction where the boxed-in R is.

Beautiful meadow, snow-capped peaks, brisk headwind. Seconds after I snapped this, Alexa asked me to take the lead again. She certainly got to practice her drafting on this ride.

Up, up, and up.

Finally, finally we made the summit, then descended to the final rest stop, which shimmered like an oasis. (Full disclosure: it didn’t really shimmer, and I’ve never seen an actual oasis. But still.)

I knew there would be ice cream up there but I couldn’t find it. I looked around for somebody who had some. The first guy I saw was wearing a triathlon national champion jersey. He was eating a Drumstick. I pointed at the Drumstick and said, “Excuse me, but … where did you get that?” He replied (somewhat haughtily, I thought), “National championships.” As in, “This jersey you cannot buy.” I said, “No, I mean the ice cream.” Ouch … I felt a twinge of vicarious embarrassment. The champion pointed toward a huge truck with these vault-like doors on it which contained all manner of ice cream bar. You can imagine how tasty these were.

In the photo above, look at that little plastic strip bisecting the middle vent on my helmet. It gave me the stupidest tan lines of my life. No, I won’t be posting a photo of that. It sure sucks losing my hair.

And here’s the elevation photo. I suspect the height of the pole is to make the sign readable when the snow is incredibly deep … but if so, why is the Ebbetts Pass elevation sign so stubby? [Update: an alert reader has informed me that Ebbetts doesn’t need a tall sign because it’s closed in the winter.]

Descending Carson is an absolute blast. My brother Max, during a long-ago Death Ride, passed a cop car at over 60 mph. We took it a bit easier.

There’s one last uphill slog just before the finish, which is tolerable only because the excitement of being nearly done always gives you a final burst of energy. Alas, when we reached Turtle Rock we were at 96.6 miles with 9,750 feet of cumulative vertical gain. It goes without saying we had to keep riding, just so we could round out our ride at 100 miles and 10,000 feet of gain. Two miles of downhill, then two grueling miles back up. Here is Alexa stoically grinding out the last stretch.

I made a surprisingly unexciting video documenting the culmination of Alexa’s first full-on century ride.

Here is the “after” shot. I cannot account for my totally overblown expression. My only theory is that my crows’ feet are so deep they were causing me physical pain, and that my crazy grin is actually a grimace.

Here is our dinner. I cropped Alexa from the photo because the camera caught her mid-blink and you know how awful those shots can be. She didn’t touch the burger, by the way, so I got it. She was oddly un-hungry for someone who’d just conquered the longest bike ride of her life.

I’m sure there’s more I could write, but now it’s time to apply another coat of Carmex to my poor lips.

Ride stats

Here are the stats based on my old-fashioned bike computer. 

• 100.2 miles
• 8:49:47 ride time
• 11.4 mph average speed
• 10,249 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 40.1 miles total climbing
• 42.8 miles total descending

Further Death Ride reading

Death Ride Frequently Asked Questions

From the Archives – Death Ride ’99

Non-Death-Ride Non-Warmup

Ride Report – Sierra Nevada “Almost Death Ride”

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Ride Report - Sierra Nevada “Almost Death Ride”

NOTE:  This post is rated PG-13 for mild strong language and frontier violence.

Introduction

You might not have known this about me, but I’m one of those big-shot bike racers on an elite racing team. Wait, that’s not quite right. More of a shot, baggy-eyed bike geek in a book club. Wait, that’s too harsh. I’m somewhere in the middle: an ageing former racer on the East Bay Velo Club. EBVC is a group of classy old veterans, some of whom still race and make the podium regularly, and all of whom love big food, good coffee, biking, and race reports (roughly in that order).

Well, I did race once this year but that was off-road and probably doesn’t count. So in lieu of a glory-filled tale of my peloton-crushing exploits, here is my food-filled tale of crushing myself on an epic mountain ride in the Lake Tahoe region with my EBVC pals Craig and Ian.

Executive summary

It was brutally hot. The climbs were brutally hard. Ian, Craig, and I are brutally old. We ate brutally well. Hydration was a problem. Mother Nature treated us brutally. Verdict? Epic PASS. We got in touch with our inner brutes.

Short version 

• Ride stats: 117 miles; 8 hours 3 minutes ride time; 12,080 feet of climbing over 32 categorized climbs (at least, as categorized by Strava), including Monitor Pass (category 1) and Ebbetts Pass (HC)
• Pre-ride dinner: huge plate of pasta, BBQ chicken & peppers, French bread, salad, one “hydration” beer (Stella Artois)
• Breakfast: bowl of cereal that was organic but 90% sugar; bowl of fake Cheerios; 1% milk; banana; 1 NoDoz
• During ride: 2 or 3 energy bars, 1 gel (2x caffeine), 3 sleeves shot blox, 2 Hostess cupcakes, 1 20-oz. Coke, about 10 bottles of water
• After ride: 3 “Greek” wings, pita bread, baba ghanoush, ½-pound lamb burger with feta, big pile of seasoned fries with aioli, 3 huge glasses of water

To make the ride especially hard, we all failed to train properly. We also added on two more weekend rides as garnish: a 35-miler on Friday evening just to wear ourselves out, and a 67-mile “insult to injury” ride on Sunday. We modeled the main (Saturday) ride loosely on the Markleeville Death Ride, but did two trips over Luther Pass instead of the backsides of Monitor and Ebbetts so we wouldn’t run out of water.

The average temperature was 90 degrees. For long stretches, it was well over 100. The campground 2/3 of the way up Ebbetts Pass, where we’d planned to get water, was oddly dry. Nevertheless, we avoided heatstroke and completed the ride, though we were pretty well hobbled by the end. High spirits and sophomoric humor dominated the proceedings.

Long version

Who are Craig and Ian, anyway? (Since this post is destined to be a cult classic like Deliverance, The Osterman Weekend, and The Blair Witch Project, I suppose I should develop my characters.) Craig is a big friendly giant, who used to play football and now drags us around in his slipstream across the flats, never bothering to draft us because that would just slow things down and anyway he never needs to rest. Craig can climb like the dickens, which has never made sense to me given his size.

Ian, on the other hand, is not a giant, but he’s from England and has that cool accent that makes him sound all intellectual and authoritative, and he has that overseas vibe that makes you feel automatically inferior as a cyclist. Vague impressions aside, Ian holds a 5th-place Strava KOM—just behind four-time national champion Freddie Rodriguez—on the legendary Lomas Cantadas climb. Needless to say, I went into this ride very worried that my pals would hate me by the end for slowing them down so much.

I should also point out that my normal road bike was out of commission for this ride so I was riding my backup bike, which is pretty decent except the oversized aluminum tubes transmit all the road shock right the way up to make my ass and hands super sore, which causes whining. On the plus side, this bike has a really cool head badge. (I pointed it out to Craig, who said, “Oh, a photo of when your kids were younger and still loved you!”)

For a summary of our route consult Appendix A. The climb up Luther Pass was a decent warmup. It’s not that hard a climb, gaining 1,359 feet to a summit of 7,740. It was a beautiful day, with no rain forecast (a pleasant change from my last would-be epic ride).

After a short descent we made our way up Carson Pass, braving a headwind. I’m not complaining, mind you—the wind actually made it easier to suck Craig’s wheel.

It was weird doing Carson so early in the ride … every other time I’ve ridden it was toward the end of the Death Ride, when I was already worn out. The temperature was perfect at this point. Still a fair bit of snow at the higher elevations. In case you were wondering, this pass is named for Kit Carson, an illiterate trapper and frontiersman whose idea it was to pioneer this route through the snow (against the advice of local Washoe Indians), causing the expedition to have to eat their dogs, horses, and mules for lack of game.

At the summit we fared better than that expedition had. Though there was no running water, the visitor’s center sold us bottled water for the low, low price of $0.50. I feel bad for all the wasted plastic but I guess it’s better than eating our pets.

Here’s the requisite glamour shot. The real point of this photo is the elevation sign over my shoulder. It’s a little too small to read, but the summit elevation is 8,574 feet. I’d have liked to get a better shot of that sign, but Ian and Craig seem to have some problem with standing out in the middle of the road and getting run over. These signs meant a lot to me during the ride, because they were my only indicators of progress: my backup bike has no computer and I wasn’t even wearing my watch.

After Carson we descended for a glorious 15 miles, then had some rollers through Markleeville. Is there anything interesting to be said about this little town? Well, it’s named after Jacob Marklee who lived there for many years before dying in a gunfight. Also, according to Census data, 100% of Markleeville’s population live in households, 0% live in non-institutionalized group quarters, and 0% are institutionalized (at the moment). That photo of my bike (above) shows this town in the background. (Yes, that’s pretty much all there is to see.)

It started getting really hot as we headed south on Highway 89 towards Ebbetts Pass. Ian’s bike computer registered 104 degrees, Craig’s 106. I think we had a bit of a tailwind as well. My energy bar was sweating in its package and came out covered in a snot-like film. Melted frosting, maybe. Not that I minded. What I do mind is how so many modern energy bars are full of seeds. My kid has swiped all the basic flavors from our stash, leaving me with the weird ones, like “Berry Pomegranate Chia” which is mostly chia seeds.  Worse, I have all these “Nuts & Seeds” bars that have actual pumpkin seeds in them, as though people actually eat those other than after carving Jack-O-Lanterns (in which case most of the seeds end up on the floor anyway).  After eating one of these modern bars, I spend the next five miles running my tongue around dislodging all the seeds from my teeth.  A tired, sore  tongue is just that much more suffering I don’t need.

See that sign in the distance? That marks where Highway 89 heads east toward Monitor Pass, which we’d hit later. But first we went straight to take Highway 4 up Ebbetts Pass, our hardest climb of the day. Ebbetts Pass is named for John Ebbetts, another pioneer, who naively recommended this route for the transcontinental railroad because he mistakenly thought it didn’t get much snow, based on his one visit there. He planned a second trip but was killed in a steamboat explosion before he could go. I get the impression lives were more exciting, and shorter, in those days.

Ebbetts Pass is a beautiful and very hard climb. My backup bike lacks a compact crank; I thought the ensuing boost to my mojo would help me handle the grade, but it did not. (At least both my legs were working right … last time I did this climb, I was recovering from a broken femur and dealing with asymmetrical power delivery.) At times my gearing limited how easy I could take it on a steep pitch, thus this photo.

For the most part I couldn’t keep up with Ian and Craig, but could at least keep them in sight. Here, I’d planned a scenic photo with my pals in the distance, but by the time I got my camera out, they’d rounded the bend.

There’s a campground about 2/3 of the way up that we were counting on for water, but none of the spigots worked. We asked a couple of campers about it and they said, “We know nothing. We’re so stupid we don’t even know our own names. Please bother somebody else because we’re about to cry. We just don’t know what else to do.” (I’m not sure I heard this right, but it’s the gist of their response.) We found the camp host, who was hiding in a giant RV and pretended not to hear Ian’s salutations, despite his commanding accent. Finally the host mumbled, “No water, go away, I hate you,” or something to that effect. He had this giant water tank but offered us nothing because his misanthropy and selfishness were limitless. Note: we were not bitter.

Near the summit of this pass is a beautiful lake, Kinney Reservoir to be precise. This reservoir was dug in 1896 by frontiersman Joseph Kinney, who never got to see it filled, as he was fatally garroted with fishing line by his six-year-old nephew in a freak fishing accident. (Okay, I made that up.)

We thought about filling our bottles in the lake, but it’s full of filthy, drooling, peeing fish such as brook, rainbow, and cutthroat (!) trout.

At the summit of Ebbetts we encountered a friendly biking couple in their 60s who had parked their car at the intersection of Highway 4 and 89—that is, the start of Monitor Pass, our next big climb—and offered to meet us there (after we all descended Ebbetts) to give us water. The nice couple also snapped this photo.

Zoom in all you want, you still can’t read the elevation on that sign. It’s 8,730 feet, which is higher than the summit of the Col du Galibier, the highest point in this year’s Tour de France.

Ebbetts is a glorious descent. I must say, it was really nice riding these roads without all the Death Ride throngs: safer, and quieter, and less chaotic. Of course I wasn’t able to get many photos—just this one.

Along the way down we stopped to fill up bottles at a fast-running section of the creek. That is, Ian and Craig did. I am far too afraid of waterborne parasites to drink anything that doesn’t come from a tap. With creek water there’s a giardia risk, of course, and I particularly had in mind this description by Anthony Bourdain of the aftermath of ingesting an amoeba: 

It slammed me shut like a book, sent me crawling to the bathroom shitting like a mink, clutching my stomach and projectile vomiting. I prayed that night. For many hours. And, as you might assume, I’m the worst kind of atheist.

I should point out that when fact-checking this, I discovered that it was a bad mussel that made Bourdain sick, not an amoeba. But that doesn’t change the fact that during this ride I was more willing to risk dehydration than waterborne illness.

Monitor Pass was a mother. The heat, which had subsided somewhat on the higher elevations of Ebbetts, was back into triple digits. A long, straight section of 10% grade felt like it would never end. What with my tired legs and old school gearing, I had to weave quite a bit. Fortunately, there’s absolutely nobody up there, so you can hear a car coming from a mile away. (Okay, maybe not actually a mile, but a right fur piece anyway.)

This section of highway is one of the newest in the Sierra Nevada mountains, having been paved in 1954. According to Wikipedia, “The highway project was promoted by Robert M. Jackson of Markleeville, who worked for the Alpine County Public Works Department for more than 30 years until he perished in a grisly wood chipper accident.” (Yeah, I embellished that.)

The summit of this climb marked a milestone for at least two of us: we were now 80 miles into this ride, making it the longest we’d done since the 2014 Everest Challenge. This gave us a sense of accomplishment, sure, but also dread, as we had 37 miles left to go.

Craig got a front flat. His tire had developed a hernia. We had to boot it, using a rubber boot I had and a duct tape one from Ian. To be extra safe, Craig put only 70 or 80 PSI in his tire. The point of this photo, of course, is the sweat salt on Craig’s jersey.

Craig kept dragging us along. Even 90+ miles into the ride, I honestly don’t think he’d drafted either of us once. Drafting him all day must be what it’s like to be Chris Froome ensconced perpetually in the womblike slipstream of Team Sky (except I’m not jacked up on performance-enhancing drugs).

As we rolled along I had an in-my-body experience: this sudden full realization of living my life right now, moment by moment—that what I was seeing before me wasn’t a dream, a memory, a flashback, an illusion, or a vision of the future.  Gone was the sense that my life is all cerebral and abstract; I was aware during that moment of being a living organism processing and reacting to immediate stimulus. I know this all sounds obvious, but actually this real-life sensation, this sense of bearing real-time witness to my own currently unfolding experience, is for me the exception and not the rule.  I experience this feeling from time to time, and find it exhilarating. (I’ve talked to at least one person who finds it terrifying.)

We stopped in Markleeville again for water and goodies. At this point I still had an energy bar on me, but it was a “Cloves, Peppercorns, Grape Nuts & Gravel” variety and I couldn’t bring myself to eat it. I also had a gel, but it was an expired tangerine flavor that is the wrong kind of sour and should really be called “Tangerine & Stale Cigarette.” I was really craving a Hostess fruit pie (which packs like 600 calories) but the general store didn’t have any. Fortunately, I got something almost as good.

The first ingredient in these Hostess cupcakes is sugar, but don’t worry, they also contain high fructose corn syrup, along with “vegetable and/or animal shortening.” These cupcakes are sold as “Pingüinos” (i.e., penguins) in Mexico. Could these actually have penguin fat in them? Possibly. But the point is, they’re light and fluffy and really easy to eat, unlike a standard energy bar, which is hard to chew when you’re 100 miles into a ride and knackered.

Craig ate an energy bar and a small bag of potato chips, one or both of which, as we headed toward Luther Pass, started to mess up his stomach. (I momentarily wondered if it was the creek water, except Ian’s stomach was fine.) The upshot of this was that Craig no longer felt like dragging our asses along into the headwind we found ourselves facing. Fortunately, I finally started to feel pretty good. Clouds had appeared and it was a bit cooler, and I think I’d hit that perfect level of dehydration: not enough to affect my power, but enough to cut my weight by several pounds, improving my power/weight ratio.

My gearing still wasn’t as low as I’d have liked, so I had to dig pretty deep in the long run-up to Luther Pass.  Strava calls this stretch “Death Ride Carson Pass Part 1” and reckons it a category 2 climb. I guess that’s about right, especially since we had a headwind. It was a real slog, but my legs did this odd thing they sometimes do really far into a ride:  they just kept turning, as if unbidden, surprising me with their tenacity.  Their motion was utterly without pause, as if the turning of the rear wheel was dragging them along instead of the other way around. I was kind of mesmerized watching them go, wondering things like “How are you doing that?”  My legs didn’t even hurt that bad, though my butt, feet, and hands were in agony.

After a subdued final descent (subdued owing to the low pressure in Craig’s front tire) we reached the car, triumphant because we’d conquered a seriously hard ride without having really trained for it. Yeah, we’re fricking old, but maybe we’ve still got some heat left in our coals. Here I’d thought winging it was the privilege of the young ... but it turns out the cussedness of age is highly compatible with reckless ambition.

Here is the requisite “after” shot. The point of this photo, of course, is the pair of ridiculous dents in my forehead from my helmet.

Look , I know this report would be more exciting and fun if our ride had been a disaster, like this one, but things turned out really out well, especially when it was time for dinner. Due to poor planning, we had no bike lock for the car rack, so were restricted, when choosing a restaurant, to a place that looked out on the parking lot so could see our bikes. Fortunately there was a Mediterranean place with a picnic table out front, which was doubly handy because when Ian’s hamstring cramped and he cried out in pain he didn’t scare anyone. Check out these kind vittles:

On that note, I just realized I’m starving, having been on the South Beach diet for two weeks (excepting this Tahoe weekend, when I ate like a king). Time to go eat some squash and other assorted vegetable nonsense.

Appendix A – route and climb stats 

• Parked at the junction of Highway 50 and 89 (elevation 6,381 feet)
• Rode up the west side of Luther Pass (a category 3 climb, summit elevation 7,740 feet)
• Turned right on Highway 88 and headed up Carson Pass (cat 2, elevation 8,574)
• Turned around and descended to Woodfords, where we turned right to stay on 89 and headed to Markleeville (elevation 5,489)
• Continued on 89 and then Highway 4 and climbed Ebbetts Pass (huis categorie, aka HC; elevation 8,730), failing to get water along the way
• Turned around and dropped back down to the junction of 4 and 89, elevation 5,827 feet
• Turned right and headed east on 89, climbing the west side of Monitor Pass (cat 1, elevation 8,314)
• Turned around and descended back to Markleeville, then retraced our route along 88/89 to the Luther Pass junction (this bit is listed as a cat 2 climb)
• Turned right on 89 and climbed the east side of Luther Pass (cat 3, elevation 7,740)
• Descended back to the car

Appendix B – What does “Almost Death Ride” mean?

I say “almost” because our ride was almost as hard as the Death Ride. And it was better because we didn’t have to fork out $125, share the road with thousands of others, and endure all the fuss of registration, etc.

In case you haven’t heard of it, the Markleeville Death Ride is a popular century ride (not a race) that traverses five mountain passes over its 129-mile length. I’ve ridden it 12 or 13 times, and (as described here and here) always very much enjoyed it. These days, the main purpose of the Death Ride is to make people like me feel old. I first rode it in 1993, half my lifetime ago, and last rode it in 2005, a quarter of my lifetime ago. Where has all the time gone?

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