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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From the Archives - Odyssey '91

Introduction

While riding over Ebbetts Pass near Lake Tahoe recently, I thought back to a really, really hard ride I did a couple decades ago. Two friends and I had set out to do something epic, something to test our manhood. Something we’d never forget. A week or two before the ride, we’d met in a café, pored over some topographical maps of the Lake Tahoe area, and planned out a route that would be over 200 miles long with around 20,000 feet of climbing. We weren’t bike tourists: this would be a one-day ride. We gave the ride a name: Odyssey ’91.

Odyssey ’91 didn’t go so well, but then that was sort of the point. It was absolutely brutal, shockingly so, and took us to unprecedented depths of suffering. In the week or two following the ride, each of us wrote about the experience. I have tried to find Trevor’s tale and John’s epic poem, but in vain. I also cannot find a single photo from the ride. But here is my original tale, sprinkled with photos from other rides the three of us did around then. Enjoy please enjoy.

From the archives: Odyssey ’91

Imagine this: you’ve got a $10,000 stereo, have a couple friends over, and are playing rock music at full blast. The bass sends shock waves across the floor and through the walls, making your heart flutter. The lights in your apartment, starved of electricity, flicker along with the beat like a flame in a strong wind. You can’t resist cracking a huge grin when the sound, traveling up your legs, vibrates your cajones, which are the center for percussion appreciation in humans. Can you imagine this feeling? The last time I had it I was at the top of Ebbetts Pass, 8,730 feet above sea level, beginning the descent of a perfectly paved single lane road on my bike, 160 miles into an epic bike ride with my friends. 

Odyssey ‘91. Like that spontaneous rooftop concert by the Beatles, it wasn’t hyped and almost certainly left thousands of fans feeling cheated somehow that they weren’t notified. Like that general admission Who concert, somebody could have been killed. Like a 2 Live Crew event, it would shock a nation of concerned parents by arrogantly defying social norms. Two hundred and nine miles. Twenty thousand feet of vertical climbing. Cold rain. Burning sun. Go ride or go home. On August 15 we set out to kick the flyest dope ride the free world has ever known: Odyssey ‘91.

Crossing over the summit of Ebbetts Pass was in every way a high point of the ride, a chance to rekindle our passion for the sport of cycling and enjoy a really blazing descent. But before I let you entertain your own grandiose visions of conquering the vast American asphalt wilderness, I should perhaps take you back to an earlier point in the ride, specifically Avery, California, when we’d been forced by pure exhaustion to take an extended rest stop. By “we” I mean Trevor Thorpe, John Pelster, and I, flying the proud stars‑and‑stripes jerseys we won in the 1990 Collegiate National Team Time Trial Championship. (Not only were these jerseys an aesthetically sound choice, but is at turned out a safe one given the hillbillies we encountered—the type easily rallied to senseless violence by others’ transgressions, such as lack of patriotism.)

Pure exhaustion at mile 114 resulted from poor trip planning and a spate of unexpected climbs beginning around 90 miles into the ride, at which point we’d been descending for like 60 miles. We had expected another 20 miles of gradual downhill before the major climbing would begin. Really? A full 80 miles of descending? Yep—as we rode through a tiny town, Wilseyville, I checked the Odyssey ‘91 Elevation Profile chart that Trevor had made, and it showed a gradual descent from 2,700 feet to 2,400 by mile 110, before a slight rise to Avery, our designated lunch stop.

This was the part of the route we’d guessed at—the gap where two of Trevor’s topographical maps didn’t quite meet up. An accurate altitude profile of this section would look like an electrocardiogram of a heart attack victim getting CPR. Railroad Flat road was anything but. We didn’t mind at first, when we plummeted downhill at 45, all drafting inches from one another like F‑15 fighters in formation. But then the road suddenly went uphill. The G forces hammered my stomach down within the bones of my pelvis and stretched the skin tight over my cheekbones. Not that any of us was fazed, of course. We powered up the climb, out of the saddle, lean and fluid like praying mantises in some wild dance. Sure, you say, there’s nothing natural about insects dancing. Well, I’ll reply, there’s actually nothing natural about a person mounting a rolling steel and aluminum apparatus and putting it into motion like he belonged on it.

I suppose we made it look easy for awhile, until we rounded a bend and realized the hill was more than a short rise, and in fact went on and on. Slouching back down on our saddles, we quickly sobered up to the drudgery of torturing our bodies needlessly. Finally we reached what we expected to be a summit, only to be plunged down again. Descend. Climb. Repeat. Over the next few miles we learned to hate Railroad Flat road, and to resent the seeming innocence of its name.

Finally we reached Sheep Ranch road, which we were certain would be an improvement. I checked the profile chart again. Sweat had penetrated the plastic tape coating it, making the ink run precisely where the chart was radically incorrect. The chart gave me no warning that the next twelve miles would be absolutely brutal, nothing but up and down—a microcosm of the pathetic, wretched human condition with its illusory peaks and crushing depressions.

Pedal stroke after pedal stroke, we writhed like tortured animals, little understanding our suffering and powerless to bring it to an end. Suddenly, I was no longer on a bicycle. I was in the ring with Mike Tyson, a turnbuckle wedging its way into my back, pressing deeper into me with every body blow. I had a mental picture of blood running freely down my chin, out of my nose, out of every pore, my teeth flapping uselessly on ripped strands of gum. My sight gone, I strive only to sink to the mercy of the mat, except the constant beating is holding me firmly against the turnbuckle. Suddenly, the bell rings and my coach is telling me don’t worry, kid, you’ve only got ten rounds to go.

The vision faded out and I realized I was descending again. This only meant a new, lower low and severe penance for my momentary, ill-gotten relief. We learned to loathe descending more than climbing itself, as the harbinger of future torment. For you to truly understand the Hell that is Sheep Ranch Road, you must read this paragraph over again and again. Keep reading it until you hate it. Then read it some more. Remember that it is only the literary rendition of what we actually faced on the road.

Terrible things happen to the mind when the body is inflicted with incessant hardship. Take, for example, the Donner party and Alfred Packer, people who ate one another when locked in by harsh winter storm. Or consider desperate animals who chew their feet off to escape a steel‑jawed trap. Or women who set about tooling men to somehow get revenge for the horrible pain of their high heels. I suppose every mind develops some kind of psychosis when starved of food, oxygen, or common sense. On Sheep Ranch Road, my own derangement must have seemed harmless enough to the others; I never went completely berserk or tried to kill anybody. Rather, the mental firestorm manifested in an incessant incantation that reverberated through my brain, a thousand voices chanting an old ditty from summer camp:

Green Mountain, we’re the very best.
The best camp in the west.
Whenever we go out, 

The people always shout: 

There goes Green Mountain,
And the very best!
Da‑da da‑da da da da
[Repeats, over and over again]

The next thing I knew, I was waking up. Not in my nice warm bed, realizing it was all just a horrible nightmare, but on the toilet of a public restroom in Avery, halfway through a dazed defecation and wondering how long I’d slept. I was trying to sort out the dream I’d had, which somehow involved getting back the Bear Creek Elementary t‑shirt, the mottled brown one with milk‑chocolate sleeves that my mom chose out for me in the sixth grade. It was in perfect condition and gave me strength somehow.

I didn’t want to move. The dream was slowly replaced in my mind by the memory of the last half hour, during which time I struggled to wash down an XL‑40 Chocolate Truffle Bar with the last of my Exceed Fluid Replacement And Energy Drink. The roof of my mouth still ached and my throat was raw from the dry friction of the gagging reflex when I choked down the last of the dry energy bar. My stomach was churning now, from the lunch I bought at a convenience store: two‑thirds of an Entenmann’s orange cake, lubricated prudently with a Pepsi and a Dr. Pepper.

I left the restroom, found JP and Trev, and that was the end of our rest stop. The prospect of another 100 miles, with another nine thousand feet of climbing, stopped me cold. I couldn’t bear to mount my bike. But what else was I gonnna do? I’d dug my own grave.

Over the next twenty miles I heard the jeering voices of those who told me I was a fool to attempt Odyssey ‘91: “You’re crazy.” “Why the hell are you gonna do that?” “You’ll never make it, you haven’t even been riding.” I couldn’t feel my legs anymore, they just turned around slowly, and my arms could barely support my upper body. Holding the bike in a straight line became like a drunk driving test I couldn’t pass. A few times I bumped into John, and finally the impulse to drift overcame my body and I veered off towards the center of the highway.

Trevor called for a break and we pulled over. Trying to rest my arms on the handlebar was futile. I kept sliding off, my arms bathed in a queer sweat that had my whole head swimming despite the mild sixty‑five degree day. Trevor announced we’d need to make seventy miles in the next four hours; I honestly doubted I could make even seven miles. When we set off again, I resolved that even if I somehow survived this ordeal, I would never ride a bicycle again. The next dozen or so miles reinforced this depressing resolution.

The human body is an amazing machine. Without warning, relief began in my head, in the form of optimism, and slowly drained through my body like gasoline filling the empty tank of a previously stranded car. I could feel my spine straighten as if invisible hands were lifting me by the armpits. My vision returned as though I’d put in contact lenses. By the time we reached mile 140 and Big Meadow, which turned out (like so many stops along the way) to be less a town than a roadside outhouse, I was back from death’s door and began to feel positively powerful.

Unfortunately, at this point John’s face became sunken and pale and he seemed to fall under the deadly spell of a wasting disease. At Bear Valley, we stopped at a gas station and he didn’t have the physical strength to effectively chew his Coke, much less the dreaded energy bar. Slouched up against a gas pump, he complained to Trevor, “I wish I was dead.” Trevor nodded in agreement and started to say something—but John stopped him and said, “No. I’m not just using the expression. I mean it, I really wish I was dead right now.”

John, too, eventually recovered and although Trevor never experienced the Grim Reaper effect, he was obviously fatigued during the four‑mile, two thousand foot wall from Hermit Valley to the top of Ebbets Pass. I felt positively fresh, although in retrospect I think I had merely become accustomed to the strain; my frame of reference was skewed. Now I could maneuver around and capture the moment in pictures with my little Minolta. Not that I could get Trevor to pose for the camera: he was locked into a fierce struggle against the mountain and the thin air of over eight thousand feet of altitude. Only on the ensuing descent did we all experience the euphoric feeling I described in my opening passage. Only then did we begin darting around like the bats that occasionally seemed to fly at our heads from out of the evening sky.

At Markleeville, we stopped for the night. Not because we were bedwetters, and not because the unexpected climbs had worn us out, nor because we’d realized our own physical limitations (since we evidently had none). The real problem was a tactical error we made in planning the ride: our itinerary just wasn’t sound. We planned to average about sixteen miles per hour, to take a certain number of rest stops, to spend between fifteen and eighteen hours on the bike, and to cover the distance in one day. We failed to figure in the amount of daylight available to us. Even with the horrors of Sheep Ranch Road, we kept to our original pace, perfectly, but we left at 7:00 a.m., which found us in Markleeville at 8:30 p.m., just as the sun had dipped out of sight, with about thirty‑five miles to go.

We could have made it if we were near civilization, but Lake Tahoe has its own style of darkness. It doesn’t mean reduced visibility with enough light pollution to get by. It means there is no difference between having your eyes open or closed. We had to get a motel room and park the bikes. We were too late for the restaurants in Markleeville, so we found a little store and picked out our dinners, which were very simple: John got Doritos corn chips, Trevor got Ruffles Sour Cream ‘n’ Cheddar, and I chose my favorite, Cool Ranch Doritos.

We ate at the motel. My third handful of chips tore the roof of my mouth like a cheese grater and I gave up on eating. A shower washed off the outer layer of my full body grime. You know the old cliché, “He was asleep before his head hit the pillow?” Well it didn’t apply in Markleeville. Too much pain was buzzing through our limbs to allow sleep. We all basically waited a bunch of hours for the sun to come up, while lying down with our eyes closed. The next morning, we climbed begrudgingly back on our bikes and hit the road. The climbing started immediately. Three hours later, Odyssey ‘91 was history. And so, of course, were we.

Final stats: 209 miles, 20,000 feet of climbing, 16½ hours, 15.7 mph average speed.

Non-Death-Ride Non-Warmup

I found myself in the Lake Tahoe area just prior to this year’s Death Ride. That ride is so popular it’s hard to get in, and when dudes started scalping spots on craigslist I gave up on it. But this year, a couple days before it, since I was in the area I did a hard ride over Luther Pass (a former DR pass) and Ebbetts Pass, which is the granddaddy, en route to another campground. If everything went fine I wouldn’t have much to report.

My plan was to ride from South Lake Tahoe, where my family was camping, over the west side of Luther Pass, down the east side, through Markleeville, and over Ebbetts Pass and on to the campground some 25 miles farther on where we were meeting up with my wife’s friend and all her in-laws. The road to this place isn’t on Google Maps and my smartphone battery was dying, so I only had verbal directions. I love a point-to-point road ride—it’s the furthest thing from riding a trainer. You really feel like you’re getting somewhere.

Pre-ride meal was Red Hut in South Lake. Great place, where the cops go. Whenever I’ve gone this place has offered a special called The Usual which is eggs, real hash browns, and a biscuit and gravy. I love hash browns and despise home fries. I can kind of make home fries at home, and except for the ones at the dearly departed Spaghetti Western restaurant in the lower Haight, I’ve never had very good ones. It’s easy to screw up hash browns too but I admire a place that tries, and love a place (like Red Hut) that nails it. I got most of my wife’s hash browns but my kids successfully fought me off from their French toast and pancakes.

I almost doomed the ride before it even began by wearing the wrong shorts. The awful chamois of modern bike shorts is a topic I’ll have to tackle as its own post one day. Suffice to say the modern chamois is less like a little pad and more like crotch upholstery. Giant thick thing and they’re bigger every year. This year’s shorts have a chamois the size of a basketball. Paul Bunyan could use it. And where traditional chamois had a little terry-cloth section where your unit goes—we always called it “the penis patch”—these latest ones have full thick chamois all the way up practically to the navel so there’s no ventilation. It feels like you’re riding with a book shoved down the front of your shorts. I’d actually put them on before I remembered their cursedness. Had I ridden in those, this would be the story of a crotch done wrong and maybe of a mid-ride suicide.

My second choice of shorts were last year’s, with all the seams done in bright orange. It’s a really lame Spiderman kind of look, especially the bright seam running right up the front of the crotch, and my wife has said they’re downright lewd. My kids get embarrassed when I wear them. I’d have blown all this off, except that (though I’d met only one of them) I knew the men we’d me meeting up with for camping would all be real men: big strong guys with trucks and boats and biceps. (Not that they’re lowbrow; they know how to make non-grey, non-slimy hash browns and how to roast an entire pig on a spit.) I pictured them sitting around a campfire drinking beers when this skinny little bike guy shows up with obscene orange-piped shorts: not a good first impression. So I had to wear the shorts I’d worn a couple days before during a 55-mile ride over Luther and Carson Pass.

I hit the road a little after 1 p.m., a few minutes after my wife took off in the car with the kids. (She’d have lunch before driving to the campground and would pass me on the road.) It was 95 degrees. The west side of Luther Pass is much harder than the east side that used to be a Death Ride pass. It starts at about 6,500 feet and winds up at 7,740. I could really feel the altitude and my bad leg felt heavy and kind of stiff. The climb is long and straight and there’s no shade. Plus, I had a headwind—not the kind that’s at least refreshing, but the angry hot wind that just parches you. But Luther is not that big a deal and soon enough I was cruising down the east side, then down through Pickett’s Junction and Markleville where I refilled a bottle at a cool old drinking fountain right alongside the road.

My family passed me at the base of Ebbetts. They acted like I was some kind of hero. Then they drove on, and I began my suffering. Ebbetts is a pretty brutal climb. It’s got some switchbacks of grotesque gradient. I’d never ridden it solo before—it’s a lot easier when it’s the Death Ride and you’ve been training and have excitement and camaraderie working for you. Plus, I really didn’t know what else awaited me after the summit. I imagined it would be around thirty miles of gradual descent, but had to keep something in the tank in case the ride turned out a lot longer and/or harder than I expected.

About halfway up I was really suffering, and running low on energy drink. The air was cooler but also thinner. My gearing was just barely low enough. I weaved like a paperboy. The grade blocked the wind most of the time, but in sections it would return and rush in my ears trying to shatter my morale. There is a human impulse to complain even if nobody is around to hear it; I fought this. Ebbetts has a lot of sudden downhills that slam you into another steep uphill section. All they do is screw up your rhythm and undo some of the progress you’ve made toward that 8,736 foot summit.

Finally I reached the top. There were already port-a-potties set up for the upcoming Death Ride. I took a leak and started the descent. The road is steep and twisty and I was so tired my hands were hurting just working the brakes. In very little time I’d reach Hermit Valley, which is around 7,000 feet above sea level. This is where the Death Ride has you turn around and climb the south face of Ebbetts. From this point on I had little idea what to expect from the ride but was still shocked to find myself climbing again. Not just a little roller or two, but serious grades, one melting into the next. Eventually I realized that Hermit Valley wouldn’t be a valley if it didn’t have a grade on either side of it. I’d literally never considered this before in my life. I’m not very bright.

As I toiled away, trying to be like a robot (and thus incapable of misery) some guy in a jeep drove down toward me. He slowed down and asked, “How far is it to Hermit Valley?” Of course he didn’t deserve scorn, and of course this is a reasonable question, but at the time I felt true contempt. What—is your foot getting tired on the pedal? Is this drive boring you? Are you in a rush?

Finally I reached a sign: Pacific Grade Summit, Elevation 8,050. Only then did I vaguely recall seeing that on a map. Now, though, I figured it must be all downhill to the campground. But it wasn’t. The road continued to roll up and down and put the fear into me. How much longer could I hold out? Strength aside, there was the matter of fuel. I had some gels left but nothing to wash them down with. I encountered a lodge at Alpine Lake and topped up my bottles. When I got back out to the main road, I suddenly wasn’t sure which direction to go in. My brain was that muddy. I figured it out but wasn’t completely confident.

It took me forever, still fighting the wind, to get down to 7,000 feet. Fortunately I didn’t miss the single sign to the little uncharted road leading to the campground. It was at this point I realized two unsettling things. One, my assumption that by the end of the ride I’d have logged as much vertical loss as gain was erroneous. That rule only holds true when you start and finish at the same place (i.e., home). There is of course no guarantee of this when you don’t know the elevation of the destination. Second, I realized why it had seemed like I’d done more than my fair share of climbing over the last 40 miles: it’s because after climbing Luther, I’d gotten more than my fair share of descending. Markleeville is more than a thousand feet lower than South Lake Tahoe. I’d dug myself into a hole I’d have to climb out of. So maybe point-to-point rides aren’t such a great thing after all.

So yeah, there was one more brutally steep grade to get over, a few miles and maybe 600 more feet of climbing. I made it. Hardest ride in ten months. I guess there’s not much more to tell.

From the Archives - Death Ride ‘99

Introduction

De Ronde van X recently got me thinking about the Markleeville Death Ride. The Death Ride is one of the most famous organized rides in California, covering about 125 miles with over 15,000 feet of climbing. I've ridden it twelve or thirteen times, and used to have a tradition of riding it with all three of my brothers. Click to zoom in on the map:

Alas, I won't get to ride the Death Ride this year. Registration is on the lottery system, with so little chance of getting in that my brothers and I no longer bother to try. But to motivate anyone among my readership who is doing the upcoming Death Ride (or any similarly tough ride), and as a companion piece to De Ronde van X, I present to you my Death Ride '99 Postmortem Report. I didn't bring a camera in ‘99, but to enliven this post I‘ve thrown in photos from the 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2007 editions.

By the way, there is a literary gimmick lurking in this tale. I will give a prize to the first reader who e-mails me at feedback@albertnet.us and correctly identifies the gimmick. (To my brothers and friends who have seen this report before, obviously you are not eligible.) Enjoy!

Death Ride '99 - The Postmortem Report

Bryan and I drove to Markleeville on Friday, July 9, the day before the Death Ride. That night we went to a Mexican restaurant in South Lake Tahoe for dinner, and man, we really packed it in. Then it was a short drive down to Turtle Rock campground, more or less at the starting line of the ride, where we pitched our camp on a brambly dirt patch, next to our car, just at the last hour of the dying day.

The stars came out, and we gazed for awhile, pondering tritely our own insignificance in the face of the infinite beyond. Soon we tired of contemplating our mortality, and managed to fall into a light, fitful sleep (which was all that was possible given our cramped quarters in the tent).

For the next hour or so campers continued to arrive, fitting themselves into smaller and smaller patches of rocky, lumpy ground (there are no actual campsites per se in Turtle Rock park), chattering boisterously, and it seemed to take forever before the noise finally died down. Earlier, I'd really enjoyed the rare treat of seeing the stars, without them being drowned out by city light, and now I savored the dead silence. Not even the chirp of a cricket or the croak of a frog could be heard.

The night passed for me in a series of catnaps, and along toward four o'clock, as I was finally achieving a peaceful slumber, my long-sought rest was cut down in its prime by the most foul, heinous sound you could possibly imagine. At first I almost panicked—I didn't know what in the hell the noise was. It was a terrible screeching, as though an animal were being slaughtered. I finally realized it was music being played over the loudspeaker—or, more accurately, an ill-fated attempt at music by some deadbeat rock band. All I knew for sure was that it was four in the morning, a full half-hour before I'd planned to be awakened by the alarm on my Timex Datalink watch (which I'd set up to beep in its nefarious "step-tone” way while scrolling the word "DEATH!” across its LCD face). I'll probably never know what the first "song” was, but finally the "singer” let out his last gasp and another song, much less irritating, came over the PA. We decided it was pointless to try to continue sleeping, and succumbed to the cruel Death Ride wakeup call.

Breakfast

We'd elected to buy the optional pre-ride breakfast, provided by some volunteer group, though to my dying day I'll never understand why. The food is abysmal—rubbery pancakes, clammy eggs, and sweaty oatmeal, the kind of food I imagine they'd serve on death row. As is becoming a tradition, one of us forgot his ride number, which is the only way to prove to the cafeteria cashier that you don't have to pay at the door for your meal because you already bought it when you registered for the ride. While Bryan went back to the car, I stood in line and killed time talking with other Death Riders. We chattered away in the most breezy and carefree way, as if to deny the grave difficulty of the day's undertaking. Bryan arrived at just the right moment, and we moved through the chow line, which was manned by volunteers offering their hellish fare with cheerful enthusiasm. One volunteer, a rather attractive young woman, I found particularly perplexing: she was holding up a plate of plain, unbuttered, and untoasted bread, which left her very little to do but stand there and do her best to look drop-dead gorgeous. The other volunteers were much busier, and I have a feeling this gal was supposed to be making toast for us, which I would have liked—but I digress, and though I could spend an eternity complaining about the food, I should hurry up and tell you about the ride itself.

First climb

There must have been cloud cover at some time during the night, because it was less chilly that morning than I've ever experienced before on this ride—a pleasant change, but it made us worry a little about how hot it would get later on in the great adventure. The weather looked so promising, we decided for the first time ever to pass on the jackets we would normally have carried in our jersey pockets. Still, it wasn't very pleasant slathering ourselves in sunscreen, but since my once gloriously suntanned skin is now closer to deathly pale, I'm forced to resort to SPF 15 to keep from getting horribly sunburned. Needless to say Erin would kill me if I came home looking like a lobster.

We started the ride at exactly 6:00 am, with a brisk descent—not as bone-chillingly frigid as in years past, but cool enough that when we started the first climb, up Monitor Pass, our legs were totally stiff. The road was thronged with riders — the field limit this year was 2,500, and it had been reached—and yet as many riders as we saw, we know others had started much earlier than we and had probably already crossed over to the other side of Monitor Pass. As always, we marveled at the wide range of body types represented on this ride—sure, we saw plenty of examples of the lean, ripped, almost skeleton-like breed of cyclist, but every year there are also people on the ride who are, well, not so fit. In fact, I'll come right out and say it: some participants are flat-out obese—heart attacks waiting to happen. By the third pass these ones would be goners, but you had to admire their spunk.

The front side of Monitor isn't all that tough, climbing only 2,813 feet in nine miles for an average grade of about 6%, and given the freshness of our legs we were able to dispatch the climb without too much suffering. At the top we each received our first-pass sticker: the way they keep track of who did all five passes, versus the majority of riders who don't make it, is to put a different sticker on your number for each pass you conquer. After the brief (five-second) sticker ceremony, we took our picture next to a very fitting landmark: a tombstone, basically, engraved with the name and elevation (8,314') of the pass, placed there and dedicated (to nobody in particular, apparently) in 1954. We also filled up on energy drink; bananas, a potassium-rich favorite; boiled new potatoes, an unlikely but very welcome Death Ride staple; and this year's innovation, Wheat Thins, which I'm normally not all that fond of but which, under these circumstances, were just to die for!

First descent

The descent down the backside of Monitor is probably the most dangerous part of the ride; although nobody's every actually died on this ride, this would be the place to do it. It drops 3,274 feet in just 8 miles, for an average grade of almost 8%, and because it's so early in the ride, cyclists are still bunched closely together (not like lemmings exactly, but almost). This fact, combined with the breakneck speeds possible (over 50 mph is a given for Bryan and me), mean that this would be a thrilling descent even if there weren't cattle guards. But of course there are, which caused me to ponder, as we flew down the mountain, what happens to the especially stupid cows who fall into them and break a leg . . . after all, isn't it standard procedure to shoot any horse that breaks a leg? Assuming cows are treated no differently, isn't the cattle guard like a Doomsday device for any cow stupid enough to wander into the road? Then I remembered that the whole purpose of most cows is to be slaughtered anyway, so there's no point worrying about it. Anyway, the game Bryan and I play is to see how often we can make it over the thin steel strip, maybe an inch or two wide, that crosses perpendicularly over the pipes of the cattle guard, so as to avoid that annoying series of bumps each time your tire crosses the bars.

Second climb

It was a totally killer descent, reminding us why the climbing is always worthwhile, and before beginning the long haul back up the backside of Monitor, we stopped only briefly to got some more energy drink and, of course, our second-pass sticker. The backside of Monitor is much harder than the front, not just because it's steeper, but because our vigor had been deadened somewhat by the first climb. Soon enough, though, our spirits were lifted by the appearance of what I could only describe as the ride's only full-motion water stop. This Death Ride institution, manned by a skeleton crew of tireless volunteers, apparently has as its charter the filling of every single empty bottle without a single cyclist needing to stop. A volunteer sprints like a hundred meters down to you, takes your empty bottle, and then practically kills himself running back to the water jugs to get the bottle filled in time to hand it back to you as you ride by. It's an inspirational thing to witness—those guys are out of this world!

The remaining six or so miles of the second climb passed away uneventfully, albeit with the standard-issue suffering that, although long dreaded, always somehow manages to astonish me with its intensity. It's always kind of demoralizing to reach the top of Monitor for the second time, feeling significantly worn out, and realize you have almost 100 miles and 9,000 feet of climbing to go before the ride finally comes to an end some ten hours from this moment. I'd also managed to develop a saddle sore (only the second one in my entire life); it barely hurt as we dismounted at the rest stop, but was positively killing me as we got back in the saddle after filling up on food and drink. I pondered, bleakly, how Laurent Fignon believed it was a saddle sore that cost him the 1989 Tour de France (a loss from which his professional career never recovered). I cheered myself up by recalling LeMond's inspirational victory that year—his big comeback after a near-fatal hunting accident a couple of years before.

Second descent

I wish the mother of the kids across the street growing up—who earned the nickname "Mrs. Trapdoor" for her constant safety warnings such as "Bicycles are deathtraps!"—could have seen us descend the front side of Monitor. The riders were more spread out by this point, so we had more of the road to ourselves and hit what would end up being the top speed of the ride, a seemingly death-defying 53.8 mph. Don't worry, though, this was really a very safe and reasonable speed—my self-preservation instinct has increased dramatically since I set the all-time Death Ride land-speed record of 60.5 mph back in 1993 (or perhaps 1995, I can't remember for sure). Glorious as it was, though, our swiftness only served to bring us that much sooner to our greatest nemesis: Ebbetts Pass, the climb that every year claims hundreds of riders—as if they were veritable human sacrifices to this diabolically steep, winding, asphalt shrine to suffering.

Third climb

Remember "deadlegs"—the sudden punches to the thigh that bullies inflicted on you with impunity, knowing you couldn't show the bruises to parents or teachers without lowering your pants? Well, imagine feeling that kind of acute thigh pain for over an hour, and you'll begin to understand why Ebbetts is such a killer. As we labored up monstrously steep grades, negotiating switchbacks that practically stop your bike cold, all conversation ceased, kaput. We became pedaling zombies. We were too close to breathless to utter more than an occasional moan, groan, or whimper. This is the part of the ride when it's dangerous to think about whether or not you'll make it to the top of Ebbetts, much less complete the whole ride. The best way to motivate yourself at this point is to look at the relative novices around you, who never did a race in their lives, the Fuji Road Look set who seem criminally unaware of how hard this is, whose presence on this climb make you deny how difficult Ebbetts is—in short, you succumb to a totally unspoken, tacit peer pressure, and chastise yourself for thinking this is hard. You almost want to turn it into a race and charge to the top ahead of everybody—but all you can do is hold on for dear life and try to keep your composure.

At the top of Ebbetts, elevation 8,730', we were toast. We were spent, gone. We were completely knackered—shadows of our former selves, ghosts, spectres. We were history, we were in the archives, we were lemures—in fact, you might even say we'd had the stuffing knocked out of us. Fortunately, the Death Ride provides the best support of any ride I've ever done, because we were in grave need of calories. Specifically, we needed that miracle elixir of life—no, not energy drink, I mean plain old Coca-Cola Classic. Of course they had it, ice-cold, and we chugged it greedily as we sprawled on a grassy hillside, our lifeless legs spread out before us like dirty laundry.

A fellow rider was deliberating aloud about whether or not to cash in her chips, so I told her what I thought was an inspirational tale about a 65-year-old man who told me, under identical circumstances atop Ebbetts during my first Death Ride, "You finish the first three passes on ability, and the last two on guts." She stared at me like I was some kind of imbecile, which I supposed I was, or am. But then, she departed for the backside of Ebbetts, so either my little speech got to her, or she'd simply decided not to be outdone by such a wanker. After a short rest—well, okay, a fairly long rest, something just short of eternal rest—we headed down the backside of Ebbetts ourselves, fortified with carbonated water, sugar and/or corn syrup, natural and artificial flavorings, caffeine, caramel color, phosphoric acid, bananas, oranges, cookies, and What Things (a fine nickname for Wheat Thins, if you ask me).

Fourth climb

Of our climb up the backside of Ebbetts and passing back over the top, absolutely nothing is known.

Fourth descent

We descended the front side of Ebbetts with jubilance, carving up the serpentine roads and drinking in the slide show of scenic vistas overlooking the great beyond. There is an impulse, on such descents, that has nothing to do with suicide but everything to do with the repressed desire to deliberately miss a turn, to fling yourself and your bike off the edge of a drop-off and whoosh your way along in perfect freedom through open sky. Needless to say, I resisted the temptation, or you'd be reading a much briefer Death Ride report—in the obits.

Final climb

On the way to the fifth pass, my bike suffered what is proving to be an epidemic of broken spokes. If I couldn't find the technical support truck, I'd be doomed to ride a drunken, wobbling, ungainly bike for the next 42 miles. At mile 90, we were told tech support was nine miles and a scant 1,500 feet of climbing away, at Pickett's Junction (who Pickett was I have no idea, unless it's the General Pickett of the ill-fated Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg, in which he lost three fourths of his Confederate troops). Since fixing the bike could take some time, and Bryan's legs were even deader than mine, I charged on ahead—well, okay, I limped on ahead—solo.

Sure enough, technical support was there, and my bike was fixed in record time by a mechanic who looked exactly like Alfred Packer, the survivor of an ill-fated mountain expedition who ate his fellow explorers, and who appears on a mural at the University of Colorado's Alfred Packer Grill (motto: "have a friend for lunch"). From Pickett's Junction to the final summit, Carson Pass, is only nine miles with 1,573 feet of vertical gain, for a paltry average grade of 3.31%, so for the life of me I can't explain why it's so hard. Much of that nine miles is a "false flat," meaning it's not really a climb but rather a diabolical stretch of road that looks flat but feels like a climb. When it begins to get steep, it's almost a relief, because the cause of your hellish suffering is at least more obvious.

For awhile, our spirits improved as we realized the end was near, and we took some pictures in which we're actually smiling. The top section of Carson is really steep, though, and in the last mile our jubilance died down and we settled into a rhythmic pedaling drudgery. We were dead to the world by the time we rounded what we believed was the final curve (but without optimism, because there are so many false summits on a ride like this one). But sure enough, the Carson Summit sign was dead ahead, and our suffering was finally near its end!

I turned and looked over my shoulder at Bryan, who was about fifty feet behind me, intending to congratulate him on surviving Carson and to suggest we stop for a photo-op. Imagine my shock to see him sprinting, all-out, hell-bent on beating me to the summit! Nothing could have motivated me to sprint at that point—nothing, that is, except the mortification of being beaten to the summit despite having a good head start and a lighter and more expensive bike. It was a sprint to the death, and to this day Bryan insists I wouldn't have beaten him but for my Dura-Ace 9-speed STI, which enabled me to shift into a higher gear, under full power and without taking a hand off the bars, to nurse a little more speed out of the mighty Guerciotti and eke out a victory.

Final summit

At the rest top atop Carson, we grabbed more Coke and the long-awaited ice cream bars (another Death Ride tradition), and headed for some lawn chairs to rest our much-abused nether regions. At the time, we were vaguely aware of the difficulty of what we'd done, and certainly unable to calculate some of the statistics I'll now quote: roughly 16,000 feet of total vertical gain; .2244 horsepower (167 watts) average on the climbs (.2480 horsepower, 185 watts, for Bryan, who's heavier); four hours and forty minutes of climbing to end up here; 8,573 feet closer to heaven than our earth-bound peers back home. Our achievement was overshadowed, though, by that of another Death Rider: a man in his seventies, thinning hair white as snow, had finished all five passes! I would kill to be that fit when I'm his age!

It's hard to recall the full gravity of our suffering now, as I sit in a comfortable chair at home, and even harder to describe it. Suffice to say we were wasted, spent, totaled, used-up charcoal briquettes, mere smears of ash, quivering masses of protoplasm. But we had survived, and what's more, as we sat on top of Carson, which seemed at the time the top of the world, we had twenty-one miles of descending ahead of us.

Finish

A glorious descent it was, too, the highlight being when we blew this guy away, rode him right off our wheels. Then, we returned to the parking lot and enjoyed the hard-won opportunity to go to our reward: the poster signing ritual, a privilege granted only to those who finished all five passes. Even as we realized we were finally done, though, we were already contemplating our return to Markleeville and to the suffering in the California Alps, every year to our dying day.