Biking the White Rim Canyonlands Trail With Young Bucks

Introduction

Every year or so I get together with my friend Peter to do a monstrously difficult bike ride. This year would have been in celebration of forty years of friendship, except that neither of us actually noticed this milestone at the time. (I did just now.) Just to mix things up, we brought along Pete’s son H— and two of H—’s friends from the Colorado State University cross-country running team. This is a little bit like inviting Godzilla to your garden tea party with his pals  Megalon and King Kong, expecting them to sip daintily and take just a few cucumber sandwiches instead of trampling everything. If you like the idea of me suffering, well, read all about it right here.

This was a one-day assault on the Canyonlands White Rim Trail, which Strava says most riders complete in two to four days. Pete had done it in three days with H— a couple years back, and this spring H— decided it would be a pretty good idea to hammer it out in one. (So honestly, it was me being brought along as an afterthought.)

Executive summary

As I’ve mentioned before in these pages, I’m not a big astronomy fan. The old cliché about staring up at the stars and saying, “Kinda makes you feel insignificant, doesn’t it?” doesn’t seem that profound to me, because all kinds of things make me feel insignificant (like being middle-aged, and an empty nester, for starters). I don’t need to travel to some remote place where there’s no light pollution just so I can feel like a trivial little speck.

Meanwhile, I learned through this exercise that if you travel to a sufficiently isolated place—in this case Canyonlands National Park near Moab, Utah—you can be so dwarfed by giant reddish rock formations towering above you that you never need to see the celestial heavens again, if feeling insignificant is your thing. In the photo above, look how Peter (the farther-away dude, in black) is so diminutive compared to the rock wall next to him. (If you can’t even make him out, click the photo to enlarge, which goes for all the pictures in this post.)

And yet, this being by far the longest mountain bike ride of my life, I feel like my Man vs. Nature battle didn’t come out so very badly. Despite a protracted ordeal in an unforgiving landscape, I find myself “still alive and bitching” (to quote the philosopher king Marshall Mathers). You might be alarmed to know we were out for almost 11 hours with virtually no shade but I barely noticed … we had far bigger difficulties to surmount than that. For example: the CSU brat pack; the relentless pounding of our tires over unforgiving landscape; and the formidable Shafer climb (starting at mile 75). If all you care about is the fact of us pulling this off, congratulations, this Executive Summary is all you need, and you can click here for dessert. Otherwise, read on for the gory details!

Short version

Dinner the night before, at our AirBRB (a nickname I’ve just coined, I think), was De Cecco pasta with trailer-trash sauce. This sauce is made by sizzling some crumbly house-brand Italian sausage in a pan, glugging some jarred sauce in there, and heating it up. Since I drove like a thousand miles for this get-together, I splurged on some weirdly high-end sauce that’s like $10/jar. (Did I pay that? Of course not. I had a digital coupon or something.)

I slept poorly the night before because a) I’d eaten way too much pasta, and b) during the two-day drive out to Moab I adopted an all-taqueria-all-the-time approach to dining, so I had percussive flatulence all night, loud enough to wake myself up (and probably some of the 100 or so species of arthropods we can presume were sharing my room, if this dwelling was typical). Did I regret all that Mexican food? No. Not even considering the long hair I found in one of my burritos, which was from a forlorn taco truck in the middle of a giant dirt lot in a remote part of Provo. I kept pulling on that hair and it just kept coming, like a magic trick. And yes, I did finish that burrito. Think of how many hairs are discovered and removed just before restaurant food is served, or hairs that we actually ate, unawares, because we were eating too fast. (Or is that just me?)

My breakfast on ride day was a seriously overripe banana (peel almost black) with peanut butter, and coffee blacker than the banana peel. The AirBRB had a coffeemaker, but they’d stocked the wrong size filters, so it’s a good thing I brought my own pour-over cone and filters from home (along with my standard-issue ground Peets). These items had saved me at the motel the morning before as well, where the only teabag-style “coffee” they provided for their stupid coffeemaker was decaf. I’m strongly considering bringing ground coffee, my cone, and filters with me every time I leave the house from now on.

During the ride I ate an untold number of Clif and Kind bars, washed down with about nine  or ten bottles of water. Knowing the precise number of bars wouldn’t properly document the actual caloric intake, because there’s a lot of chocolate in a Kind bar, most of which melted due to the desert conditions and couldn’t be extricated from the wrapper. I felt kind of foolish eating these bars because all of my riding pals ate almost nothing but peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. I really need to get in on that.

By the time we finished the ride, showered, limped back out to the cars, and drove into Moab for dinner, not much was open. We hit the Moab Grill which was still hopping. I knew as soon as we sat down that a) I wanted wings, real bad, and b) Pete would refuse to have anything to do with them. He’s above wings, apparently. We’ve argued bitterly over it in the past, sometimes after brutal bike rides such as this, and never order them. (It’s not that I couldn’t eat a whole plate of them by myself with no appreciable dent in my appetite; it’s that they’re meant to be shared. Solo winging would be like drinking alone.)

Of course we had the three young bucks at the table, but what if H— took after his old man with the buzzkill no-wings-ever policy? And what if the other two dudes, G— and T—, were, like, vegans or something? You never know with elite athletes. So I tentatively asked, “Would anyone be into getting an order of wings?” G— grinned and said, “That’s practically all I’ve thought about for the last two hours.” Score! God, those wings were good. Buffalo style, with ranch, of course. I miss them. I just love how you can shove an entire wing in your mouth and then zip the bones out in one motion, leaving all the delicious meat to be exuberantly chomped. I also had a Reuben that was pretty darn tasty, on marbled rye that the waiter specifically recommended, with hella fries dragged through mayonnaise. I also inherited like half of H—’s “Dyablo” burger (jack, bacon, jalapeños, roasted red peppers, hot sauce) that was super good despite the misspelling. I don’t know what is wrong with that kid that he doesn’t even finish his burger after a 105-mile mountain bike ride, but at least he likes wings. And it’s not like I’m complaining about the secondhand food.

The really messed up thing is that I’d brought a four-pack of Fieldwork IPA all the way from California to drink with Pete après-bike (or should I say après-vélo?), but we were so shattered from the ride, we just didn’t feel like drinking. And we didn’t. Okay … now are you getting a sense of how hard this ride was?

Long version

This long version is truly long, even for an albertnet post. What can I say? It was a long ride. If you think reading this is hard, go try riding White Rim sometime.

You may have noticed from the map above that there’s almost nothing on it but the crenulations representing topography, and one little actual paved road, that being Country Road 143 that we were on for a few miles. No towns, no trailheads, no warming huts, no bailout roads to civilization. Granted, if the map were more complete it would show the little visitor’s station we stopped at, ~80 miles into the ride. Other than that there was just nothing and almost nobody. But we had each other.

Wait, did I just imply that having each other was a good thing? Honestly, endeavoring to keep up with three NCAA Division I cross-country runners is one of the dumber things I’ve ever done. Yeah, sure, they were on bikes, which is more Pete’s and my thing, but then, fitness is fitness, and youth is youth. Plus, they had their inevitable rivalry, leading to irrationally exuberant accelerations. For the first 40 miles, it was more or less a death march hanging on for dear life behind them. It wasn’t just hard physically (I mean, duh) but psychologically too … I kept thinking, wait, we’re only 20 miles in  and the temperature is climbing and I’m already suffering and shouldn’t I be saving some energy for later, and specifically for that monster climb, instead of accepting this breakneck pace? I didn’t realize until I looked at the bike computer data afterward that these first 40 miles were almost all uphill. That’s because everything is so wide open, you can’t get a sense for gentle gradients. I just thought it was the rough terrain and the pace that were making it so hard.

Obviously it’s only the shallow climbing that’s invisible. It’s pretty hard to miss a steeper climb like this one:

That’s the Green River in the background there, BTW.

Climbing on a road bike, on asphalt, is hard enough, but at least that’s just a matter of turning the pedals. On a really rough trail—and I was surprised how legit and rocky and complicated a lot of this trail was, compared to the dirt road I’d naïvely imagined—you also need to steer around the bigger rocks, bumps, etc. because at such low speed, they can stop you cold. Sometimes you can’t avoid an obstacle and have to use body English to pop your bike over it, one wheel at a time. Meanwhile, the whole time you have to lean really far over the front wheel or else it’ll lift up off the ground (even if only slightly) at which point you lose the steering and your brain shuts the whole operation down so you unclip from the pedals and are dead stopped. Riding with your weight this far forward, you have barely enough traction on the rear tire, so it slips from time to time, costing you priceless forward momentum. Add in that you don’t know how long the climb goes on, and it’s hard to have faith you can make it to the top.

Sometimes we did give up and walk our bikes, which was a major letdown. For example, check out the pitch shown below, coming at the end of a prolonged section of brutally tough climbing. Pete almost made it. I was maybe 2/3 of the way before realizing (or at least imagining) that if I waited until the even steeper bit ahead to bail out, my shoes might slide out from under me. Pro tip: as you start to walk your bike, grab the rear brake to lock that wheel, or the bike will drag you backwards down the slope.

By the way, the shade you see in  the above pic is almost all we got the whole day.

We started getting some nice downhills. I don’t mean the super-steep technical ones where you’re hanging your ass over the rear wheel to keep from face-planting (though we did get those too, and they were glorious) but the more relaxing easy ones where all you have to do is steer around the larger rocks (because who wants a flat tire or other mechanical out in the middle of nowhere?). Unfortunately it’s really hard to take photos or make movies while doing these, but one of the young bucks somehow managed:

It was bumpy enough that I lost five bottles, only four of which I managed to retrieve. Three losses were from the side pockets of my CamelBak. I didn’t use the bladder with it, because I needed room for tools, the first aid kit, food, and five water bottles. (If you’re interested in everything a seasoned mountain biker has in his pack, click here.)

The trickiest part of these downhills was that you’d occasionally hit soft sand, which can sometimes seem to grab your wheel and twist it, so your bike starts to jackknife. Gave me the heebie-jeebies every time.

We stopped for rests periodically, especially in the more scenic places like this chasm we peered into.

Here is our lunch stop. (This happened to be around 1 p.m. but really, every food stop was lunch. It’s like when you’re in the grocery store checkout at like 4 p.m. and the manager says to your cashier, “Go take your lunch now.”) Look at H— peering at his PBJ. He’s probably thinking, “Come ‘ere, you.”

At around the southeastern-most point of the loop, at say 5 o’clock (i.e., the position of a hypothetical minute hand on a clock, not the actual time), several of our phones chirped because we randomly had a cell signal for the first time all day. We stopped and fired off some emails, because after all this was a workday. Kidding! But I did snap the below photo and texted it to my brother, and he actually got it!

By the time I tried to send the same pic to my daughter, the signal had evaporated. Probably it had been bounced off a passing jet, maybe even a spy plane, and was a flash in the pan.

I was about to type a thousand words about how majestic and architectural the landscape was, but instead here’s another photo.

If you’ve ever wondered how these formations got to be how they are, and especially if you’re a female reader, let me explain (or mansplain) it all from a geologic perspective. Wait! Come back! I was kidding! I have no idea how this land got to be this way. I’ve had it explained to me half a dozen times over the decades but I never listened. It’s complicated. Something about sedimentary, igneous (or is it Ignatius?) deposits, once submerged by an ancient ocean, or was it crushed by a glacier? I actually have no idea.

You might be wondering: does Canyonlands have anything to compete with the amazing pupfish of Death Valley? Well, not that I saw, but there were occasionally these darling little cactus flowers. (Bike tire included for scale.)

I count at least two or three species of insect in there. It’s like a big bug party in the desert!

While we were stopped for that photo and some chow, an SUV rumbled slowly by. A puffy middle-aged woman was in the front passenger seat and gave us a bored glance. She was wearing one of those ring-shaped neck pillows people use on long airline flights. Perhaps she was just doing this drive for the commemorative bumper sticker and couldn’t wait for it to be over (though that’s exactly what she was doing).

At around mile 60, an inventory of pain had assembled itself in my brain and my inner voice was whining. My back hurt (mainly from the strain of climbing). My right collarbone hurt where the strap of the (overloaded) CamelBak was pressing down, because of the heads of the screws holding the plate in there that fixed my once-broken collarbone. All my toes felt broken, which tends to happen on really long rides (despite my excellent footwear). Perhaps most of all, my hands hurt from my bike’s continuous impacts with rocks and hard-edged slabs we kept bumping up on and down off of. I’d brought long-finger cycling gloves and short-finger ones, the former without padding and the latter with gel, and ultimately opted for the long-finger. I don’t know what I was thinking … they’re just what I normally wear mountain biking, for protection against poison oak. But was I going to find that here? (I can sense you shaking your head.) I couldn’t switch to the padded gloves because G— had forgotten his gloves and was thrilled I had a spare pair. Would it be a dick move to demand that he trade with me now? Yeah, it would, dang it. So my palms were really raw. Have you ever gotten a little overexcited while tenderizing a pork chop, working out some demons perhaps, and you realize the meat has become so roughed up and soft it’s almost like moss? That’s how I imagined my hands had become.

Eventually we made it to the base of the dreaded Shafer climb. G— and H— took off ahead, ostensibly to make it to the ranger station before it closed. We didn’t actually know its hours, and it was already 4:30 p.m. with zero chance of getting there before 5 anyway, but the young bucks were out of water and thus desperate. Here’s Pete looking back at me as if to say, “Okay, they’ve got enough of a head start. I’m going hunting … see you at the summit.” The look I returned, as I snapped this photo, said, “Release the hounds!”

(Full disclosure: Pete’s look back surely meant nothing of the kind, nor did my return glance. I’m adding these subtexts only now, to give this report some drama and the shimmer of fiction.)

In the photo above, if you look straight up from the top of Pete’s head (zoom in!), you can see the switchbacks we would have to face.

Pete’s chase was swift and ruthless. The climb was ruthless but not swift, not for me. This next photo is from two minutes later. Not only has Pete caught H— but look how far ahead he is of me! I think I even used my camera’s zoom for this shot!

I rode my own pace, having released myself off the back on my own recognizance as I so often do. I know better than to try to run with the bulls. Here’s a little video documentary I made.

If you pause video that near the beginning to look at my bike computer readout, you’ll note I was going only 4 mph. Go ahead, mock me … but also consider the grade was 14%. (See what I mean about the wide open topography making the grade look shallower?)

Almost twenty years ago, my wife and I did a mountain bike vacation in Moab and, for shits and giggles, took a sunset river cruise narrated by a quasi-historian. The script he read from was cheesier than all-you-can-eat fondue. Our favorite line, delivered toward the end after a long pause (calculated to build suspense, I suppose), was, “And now, in the darkness of night, we ponder the legacy that is ours.” So pompous, and so meaningless! My wife and I like to trot out that utterance from time to time. And perhaps pondering our legacy is what G— was doing when I came around a bend to see him stopped.

Or maybe he was just enjoying the shade and taking a breather. I’d kind of been counting on these runners to eventually tire so they’d ease up on us. I’d asked beforehand how long their longest event is; it’s the 10K which takes them like half an hour. Obviously their training runs are longer, but then nobody runs for eight or nine hours at a stretch … and yet this kind of duration is typical for Pete and me on our monster rides. (Our 2022 slogfest took 8:37:47 and our 2023 gravel adventure took 8:37:32.) H— , T—, and G— are like greyhounds, whereas I’m more like a lobster lumbering across the ocean floor. As I distance cyclist I am kind of made for this, or more to the point I kind of made myself for this. We’d only ridden for six or so hours; I was just starting to find my groove.

I could still see Pete and H—, utterly dwarfed by the canyon wall.

The landscape was so literally awesome, so  sublime, that I kept trying—but always in vain—to  capture its grandeur with my phone camera. Perhaps my best effort is this accidental video, that was supposed to be a still photo. Though it’s obviously pretty sloppy camerawork, I think it captures the feeling of this climb better than any of my stills.

Switchback after switchback, the climb went on and on. Obviously I was suffering hugely, but at least the trail was smooth here and I settled in to a rhythm of sorts. If you read my posts from my epic French Alps cycling “vacation,” you’ll understand my point when I say this kind of suffering is the devil I know. (If you missed that series, cancel all your meetings and click here.) I felt like I could pedal like this all day, and probably would. At least it was easy to appreciate the progress I’d made, as shown by this photo. (SUV and T—, or maybe it’s G—, included for scale.)

Just before the summit of the climb, I caught Peter and H—. (The only explanation for this is that H— was hurting and had slowed down, and Peter hung back for some quality father/son time, to witness the lad’s suffering.) At the top, H— wobbled off the trail, set down his bike, and lay down on the ground to rest. Pete and I rode a couple miles to the Visitor’s Center to see about water. It was closed but had a spigot and we filled all our bottles. Bringing them back to the young bucks gave me a welcome paternal feeling, and I reconsidered my earlier plan to file charges of Elder Abuse against them.

We woke up H—, topped up everyone’s bottles, and set back out for what we thought would be a 20-mile descent, the first five miles or so being on actual asphalt. Instead it was rolling (if mostly downhill). That might not sound too bad, but each time the road tipped upward, it was like a slap in the face. Our group broke apart and regrouped a few times and over the last few miles I did some quality wheel-sucking behind T—, who’d caught a second wind at like mile 95. At one point I actually hallucinated and thought I saw buildings, like a small town, in the distance, indicating that we’d made a horrible navigational error and were screwed. “Do you see those buildings down there?” I asked T—. He looked at me as though I were crazy, which I suppose in the moment I almost was.

Eventually we reached the cars, our ride actually done, and busted out the cooler. There were only three Cokes, which were snapped up by the lads, but Pete and I were happy to make do with beers. Here is our official post-ride Beck’st:

Fortunately Mother Nature had put out some nice furniture to relax on. I love how, in this final photo, H— appears to be deep in thought, doubtless pondering his life choices and how he ended up here.

I can’t wait to return next year. With an SUV. And a neck pillow.

Stats

• 105.1 miles
• 8:44:05 ride time
• 12 mph average speed (really not bad for mountain biking…)
• 7,283 feet cumulative elevation gain (based on Pete’s Strava, presumably more accurate than the bike computer value shown above)
• 6,207 feet maximum elevation
• 120 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 4,316 kilocalories burned

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Ride Report - Gravel Riding in the Rockies

Introduction

My friend Peter and I don’t race regularly anymore. This doesn’t mean we race oddly, or in a constipated way. I mean we might do a race but only once in a while, just to remind ourselves why we don’t race. And yet, we somehow like to suffer, or maybe do so out of duty. Thus, every year or so we get together for some brutal epic rides. This past week we did a five day stage-non-race we called Death Fest. It was no more deadly than it was a festival, but it was hard. This report details the best/hardest/worst day, representing 113 miles of the 269-mile total.

To make things extra hard this year, both physically and fiscally, we (mostly) eschewed asphalt and tackled dirt and gravel roads, with occasional single-track, on gravel bikes.

Executive summary

My $8,000 rented gravel bike (final use cost: a bit over $2/mile, ouch!) was brilliant other than its saddle, which was designed for a Big & Tall Man who has a keel descending from his bottom, and its handlebars, which were designed for a masochist with small hands. My rented helmet was designed, apparently, for Ernie, from “Sesame Street,” but my head is evidently shaped more like Bert’s, so the helmet slid forward on the bumpy descents, mashing my sunglasses into the bridge of my nose, unless I tightened the bonnet hard enough to threaten a gradual concussion and/or some sanded-off forehead flesh. The CamelBak that I borrowed, due to a dearth of bottle-filling opportunities, malfunctioned (due to user error) and became useless. The weather was hot enough that we’d have complained about it except that the terrain dwarfed its significance. We kept a stiff upper lip, which in my case meant a chapped, sunburnt, almost cracking upper lip since I’m not used to the dry air at this altitude (starting at about 8,500 and topping out at 10,400 feet). We ate like kings, or at least like kings who’d seen what happened to Henry VIII and decided to not eat very much.

Short version

This year, I did something novel: I decided to actually train for this. I knew that the back-to-back days of long rides, the increased rolling resistance of gravel roads, and my advanced age would make this an extra hard week, and I’m not stuppid. (I spelled it that way as a tribute to my brother Geoff, who in his first-grade “My Book About Me” assignment answered the prompt, “Something special about me is …” with “My name is Geoffrey, not Geoff, and I am not stuppid.”) So I went into the week confident, which proved a mistake. Our first ride, the day before this epic one, was only 45 miles, with only 4,340 feet of vertical gain, but it kicked my ass. There were loose dirt climbs with grades reaching 24%, where we’d lose traction and spin the rear wheel despite being in the saddle. By “we” I mean Pete. I had fatter tires, perhaps not as low a gear, and certainly less power, so my incremental progress on these grades was kind of like riding the clutch in an underpowered diesel Volkswagen Dasher. In other words, I wasn’t manly enough to peel out. After that brutal slogfest we dined on commercial (i.e., non-hand-cranked) pasta made with jarred sauce that was sexed up with hot Italian sausage. It hit the spot and would prove to be the only “homemade” meal we would have the energy to prepare during the week.

Breakfast on the big ride day was yogurt and Open Nature granola. This brand might be organic or something but it’s mainly just cloying. (I just fact-checked this and an Amazon reviewer wrote, “Bummer this is not organic. No taste, got mussy quickly.” I didn’t find it mussy, whatever that means, but it was way too sweet.) We ate breakfast merely to appease the ride gods, who might think fasting a cheeky move. During the ride I ate two or three energy bars (and probably expended most of their calories tonguing the bits of nut and flax and assorted shrapnel from my teeth) along with most of a big-ass Coke and my go-to Hostess Cupcakes, chocolate-flavored with polyunsatured sugar-flavored white filling. At the end of the ride I found myself with a leftover Hostess fruit pie, which has never happened before; during the ride, I just didn’t feel I had the mouth strength to eat it, and guessed (accurately) that I could make it home on nothing but fumes.

Hydration was achieved via one bottle of Gatorade, three bottles of water, plus whatever amount of water I was able to absorb through my skin after a freak CamelBak accident. For details you’ll have to read the long version of this report.

Dinner was at this little dive Mexican joint in or near Winter Park. It’s the first restaurant I’ve eaten at since COVID hit that’s not brutally expensive; I think my three-item combination plate was like $12. The menu even said, “First basket of chips is on us!” If I had a sharpie I’d have added, “Second basket is a really bad idea … think of your health, for god’s sake!” (If you’re a polytheist, feel free to move that last apostrophe.) The beef enchilada was generous, and the pork tamale had the right ratio of meat to cornmeal (sometimes a tamale is like 99% corn), and the chile relleno was made with won ton wrappers, which is fun. (I haven’t had such a Mexican/Chinese fusion relleno since The Original Mexican Café in Denver folded.) We ran out of salsa, and I didn’t have the energy or patience to summon the waiter, so for my handcrafted burritos (a side of tortillas was only fifty cents!) I just shook hundreds of drops of Tapatio hot sauce on there, which I almost couldn’t even taste. The food was all good, but the flavor was a bit metallic, which is surely on me. I might nevertheless post a one-star review: “My friend and I rode 113 miles and were parched and undergoing some kind of complicated fat-burning process involving ketones, so the food tasted odd, and the waiter didn’t have enough background in organic chemistry to understand, so I’m absolutely livid and will never eat here again. Oh, and you have to pay for your second, third, and fourth baskets of chips!”

Long version

We got a kind of late start, almost 10 a.m., but we’d wisely planned this ride for the longest day of the year so we wouldn’t be racing nightfall like last time. We started on some single-track which for me was kind of a (literally) rocky introduction to the gravel bike. Then we had asphalt for a mile or two through town until we reached a proper dirt road. Being off the main roads, away from cars, is of course the main joy of gravel riding (or “groading,” in MAMIL/hipster parlance). The scenery was particularly good all day, because Colorado (like northern California) had the wettest winter and spring on record (-ish). Very green hills and all the distant peaks were snow-covered. The first climb came almost right away but it wasn’t all that hard.

The scenery at the summit was brilliant. (This might have actually been the second summit … the ride was over a week ago, which already seems like the distant past.)

We turned at some point onto a paved highway and had to deal with cars and the rumble strip. We also had a pretty stiff headwind, and I sucked Pete’s wheel shamelessly. Serves him right for being a better cyclist (and frankly a better person).

There would be only one place to get water (etc.) the entire ride, so Pete had loaned me a CamelBak. I use a similar pack for mountain biking but without the bladder. The hose was whipping around all over unless I tucked it under some D-ring that seemed ill suited to the purpose, and on the first big descent it popped loose and started dribbling on me. (Looking back, I wonder if this was due to the increase in barometric pressure?) Pete had advised me that if this happens, you can blow a bit into the hose. This didn’t really work, so I tried something really stuppid. Have you ever seen a motorist losing traction in the snow when trying to get rolling, and he floors it and just spins the wheels uselessly, polishing the ice under the tires, making things worse? What I did was even stuppider: I blew really hard into the hose. This inflated the bladder so the water started to gush out. When I opened my mouth to cuss, the little valve blew off under the pressure and was lost, and I had a full-open hose on my hands. By the time I got the bike to a stop on the road shoulder, I was pretty wet and really pissed. It was a warm day but (as lamented here) that can change fast in the high mountains. Plus, I’d lost most of my water. I topped up my bottles from the bladder and drank the rest. (Note to self: quit cycling—Dad was right, I’m too stuppid for this.)

We passed a dam that was absolutely roaring with water.

We took a small detour to hit the only town of the entire route, the small and somewhat sparse burgh called Kremmling. On what I took to be the main drag we encountered a Dollar General, a Family Dollar, and a Down To Your Last Dollar. (Okay, I made up that last one.) We stopped at the Kum & Go (fondly known as the Jizz & Go among the locals, surely) where we got the requisite bottled tap water, cold Cokes, and cupcakes. Pete favors gummy bears for some reason; it’s probably just a flex, showing off how he has the jaw strength to chew the damn things even sixty miles into a gravel ride.

A short while later we were back on the dirt and making our way along a rolling bit towards our final climb. My hands hurt more than my back so the transition to sitting up—ouch!—was worth it.

There was a lake. I can’t be bothered to know the name. In fact, although I’d forwarded the route map to my wife via email before we set out (in case we went missing), I didn’t even look at it. I didn’t want to know any more than it would be a hella long ride with three big climbs. I mean, if vacation isn’t about giving up entirely on logistics, what is it for? I wanted to pedal dumbly for hours with no conception of navigation, expectation, execution, or anything else. I wanted to do this ride from the neck down.

We began to climb. I came to realize that my phone had made some noise at some point. The home screen indicated a work colleague had texted me. Wasn’t he paying attention? Didn’t I just say I didn’t want to think during this vacation? I tried to unlock my phone. The screen was too grubby for the fingerprint scanner to work. Over and over I tried to manually enter my passcode, until the phone indicated that it was getting ready to “brick” itself (i.e., wipe all data in case it had fallen into the hands of a thief or a moron). I took a little break from trying to unlock it, and a few miles later it dawned on me that I was so brain-dead, I’d been leaving out the first digit of the passcode. I finally unlocked the phone, answered the query, and resolved to stop thinking entirely for the rest of the day.

The road tilted up and clouds gathered, apparently conspiring to dump on us.

It was a long climb, something like 13 miles, and it was so scenic I felt it inappropriate to whine about how totally knackered I was, etc.

Damn, the climb just went on and on, and the pain in my body grew and radiated everywhere. Of course my legs hurt, and not just the standard lactic acid burn, but a strange combo of ache and poke, like they were injured. My hands were tired and painful and cross. All my toes felt broken. My neck and shoulders hurt. My ass hurt because the bike saddle, though overstuffed like an armchair, also felt like a two-by-four. The helmet was digging into my head and my sunglasses into my face. My eyes stung like they’d been scrubbed with powdered glass. My breathless panting, as we approached and passed the 10,000-foot mark, was completely out of touch with my relatively low heart rate (i.e., 120s), as though my legs and lungs were too overwhelmed to make the heart work hard. The climb was just a pure beat-down. At one point I felt overcome with despair, like I could not continue, but I ignored that little voice and recalled having felt this way before without it meaning anything, and within minutes I was back to pedaling away brainlessly, largely emotionlessly, like an automaton, which is to say riding (and suffering) properly. And eventually we crested the summit, at about 10,400 feet above sea level, with no fanfare. I don’t know what I’d been expecting—a ticker-tape parade? a sniper? a kiosk with some dumbass telling us to turn around?—but the big moment felt anticlimactic.

For some reason (in accordance with the willful ignorance mentioned above) I thought we had a short, maybe 8-mile descent, back to the condo, but that doesn’t make any sense as we were still in the middle of nowhere. In reality we had over 20 (albeit mostly downhill) miles to go. I love a good descent, but this is perhaps where gravel bikes shine the least: it’s not the smooth, swift rocketing around you get on a road bike, nor the joyous bashing along you get on a proper mountain bike with its plush suspension. You sort of get hammered, which can get old (particularly when your crappy helmet is trying its level best to collapse into your face). Eventually we made it back to the condo and—get this—we were so destroyed we didn’t even feel like drinking beer. The humanity!

Ride stats

• 113.16 miles
• 8:37:32 ride time (a full 15 seconds faster than last year’s slogfest!
• 13.11 mph avg (actually not that bad for groading)
• 8,051 feet vertical gain (from Pete’s more expensive and presumably more accurate bike computer)
• 112 bpm average heart rate
• 157 bpm max heart rate
• 3,488 kilocalories burned (supposedly)

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Ride Report - Steepest Mile in CA

Introduction

Every few years I get together with my friend Peter for a few days of epic bike riding. We shoot for something brutal and long and, if the weather cooperates (which it didn’t in 2016), we generally achieve it. This year, Pete came all the way out here from Colorado to ride in the Santa Rosa area, where he used to attend training camps. We did four rides and this was the hardest of them. What seemed like a fairly straightforward 108-mile cruise with a mere 11,000 feet of climbing turned out to be much worse, in the best (i.e., worst) way. Read on and slake your thirst for Schadenfreude!

Executive summary

We confronted some lousy weather, a lot of climbs, and then one particular climb that in difficulty not only far exceeded anything we could have imagined, but included the steepest paved mile in all of California and the third-steepest in the country. At the summit was a douchebag in a kiosk who made us turn around, due to a road closure unknown to the Strava route planning app. This dead end cruelly lengthened an already savage ride, as we had to hammer our asses off to make it back to Santa Rosa by dark. Fortunately, we ate very well before, during, and after.

Short version

To make these rides extra epic, Pete and I largely forego training. In the month before his visit, my longest ride had been a mere 76 miles; his, even shorter. This unwise behavior gives our endeavor an extra bit of frisson; after all, anyone could pull off a really long and hard ride by actually preparing for it.

Breakfast was a leftover slice of pizza from Cibo Rustico in Santa Rosa. To be precise (and I’m fact-checking via my receipt), it was “Italian Sauage Muchroom” pizza. (How do you pronounce “Sauage”? Sewage? And much room for what?) The pizza was pretty good, even though our stinky room at the Motel 6 didn’t have a microwave oven. In fact, the fridge cost $6 extra per night … that’s how barebones this place was. And when I say “stinky” I’m not just talking about us stinking it up; it came pre-stank with the odor of stale cigarettes and the chemicals they use to mask the odor of stale cigarettes. (Yes, it was technically a non-smoking room, but when the property overall is basically a giant ashtray, the stench permeates everything.)

Now, I don’t really like cold pizza. I know many people do, but the congealed grease etc. just isn’t my thing. Fortunately, we had large cups of steaming Peet’s coffee (since our motel room also lacked a coffee maker) so I took a trick from the Dutch playbook and warmed my ‘za over my coffee cup like they do with their stroopwafels. It was slow going but worked pretty well.

Is that enough breakfast for such a long ride? Of course not, but then, what would be? The buffet court at Sizzler? So we set out on the ride knowingly undernourished. The weather threatened to be cold and overcast the entire time. (During our 47-mile ride the day before, the sun never did show its face.) Look how much clothing Pete is wearing. (I myself neglected to bring leg warmers because I was foolish enough to trust the weather forecast.)

But then, two hours in, after a couple of painful climbs, the sun came out. Things warmed up, and we did a few more climbs, and then hit the big climb—oh my god, that climb—and that’s when shit got dark. I don’t mean it got literally dark, until it literally did, but that was hours later. First we had a lot of hammering to do. In case you only care about food, I’ll save the details of the climb, and its horrific aftermath, for the full report. Let’s talk about dinner now.

Having seen Los Molcajetes Bar and Grill from the road, and having decided it looked lively (since Cibo Rustico the night before had been a bit quiet), we headed over there to refuel. This was of course after a palliative beer, showering (without shampoo, this being the Motel Sux), and a sufficiently long rest that we could walk again. Los Molcajetes was pretty well hopping, but the music was terrible. It’s not like I’m a snob, but this sounded like somebody’s five-year-old pounding on the keys of a piano, or perhaps a harpsichord. It was a tune of maybe seven or eight notes repeated ad infinitum. And the waitress was powerless to recommend a beer … perhaps she doesn’t drink. She could have just lied and said, “Oh yeah, the Farting Fathers Brewing Scuzzy Suds & Saliva Ale is amazing,” or she could’ve hedged and said “Well, the Locker-Room Lager is popular,” but she seemed almost embarrassed to be asked at all. So we tossed the dice on beers from Laughing Monk and I don’t remember a thing about them. We were pretty out of it, honestly.

But the salsa was good … there were two kinds and they were nice and fiery (or was it just my scorched throat?). There was also some cheese goo that hit the spot, though our motor control was barely up to the task of dipping our chips in it. My chille [sic] relleno burrito was huge and very tasty. (What is it with Santa Rosa restaurateurs and their spelling?) There was this odd orange sauce, almost like a romesco, over the top which was tastier than I’m making it sound. Pete had the carne asada plate and although the idea of meat made all kinds of sense, I almost always get a chile relleno burrito if it’s on offer.

Long version

A couple of hours in, when the gloom lifted, I put on my vest and we descended in the sunshine for a bit. A little over 50 miles in we reached a little gas station convenience store near Lower Lake and I indulged in a couple Hostess cupcakes (chocolate with trans-fat “kreme” filling) and a large can of Coke. At checkout I encountered this big biker guy (well, he looked like a biker, anyway; I didn’t happen to see his hog). This dude had tattoos on his face. The tats were words, and I was really curious what they said, but I was afraid to look at the guy for long enough to read them. I could well imagine him saying, “What the fuck you lookin’ at!” and slamming me into the Doritos display. So I just moved along. Pete told me later that the dude was friendly with the cashier and they were chatting out by our bikes. “Look how skinny those bikes are!” she said, and he replied, “Yeah, those dudes look super fit.” But probably that was just the meth talking.

Okay, that was inappropriate. I really shouldn’t assume someone’s a meth-head just because he has tattoos on his face. He might have been a really nice guy. His tats might have said something like “I’m thankful” or “Love wins.” In fact, maybe it was Pete who was on meth. Or hell, it could’ve been me! No, no, no, take none of this seriously. We did this ride pan y agua! Shoot, I should probably delete this whole paragraph, but I never edit my ride reports. It’s too much hassle.

Clear Lake is pretty.

After Clear Lake we hit a hard section that was mostly uphill for about 13 miles, gaining over 1,500 feet. The scenery was nice and my tasty cupcake snack was serving me well, but I have to admit, the climbing was starting to get old. And then we hit Socrates Mine Road.

Let me say first that we had no idea what we were getting into. Even though I’m the Californian, I did nothing to contribute to the route planning. Pete used this fancy feature of Strava where you tell it how many miles you want and what kind of terrain (e.g., flat, hilly, super hilly) and it gives you several options. There was no disclaimer like “This route includes a climb that will have you PUKING FOR DECADES.” Yeah, we knew we had some vertical gain left to accumulate, but never expected anything like Socrates Mine Road.

This climb is bad enough on paper: as detailed on the PJAMM Cycling website, it climbs about 1,800 feet in 3.5 miles. Discounting a couple short downhill bits, it boasts an average gradient of 10%. But that’s not what makes it so hard; neither is the fact that we started on it over 70 miles into our ride. The tough part is that 26% of the climb is between 10-15%, 17% of it is between 15-20%, and 5% is more than a 20% grade! The steepest mile of the climb averages 16.3%, making it the steepest paved mile in California. Look at this schematic from PJAMM:

Increasing the brutality was the totally crappy condition of the road: it was cracked into rough cubes, like a pan of over-baked brownies. If you rumpled this road just a bit it’d be like the cobblestones of Paris-Roubaix. The poor surface could have been due to a big fire some years back. There’s not much scenery unless you like looking at burnt trees.

Fortunately, there’s nobody up there so you can hear a car coming from really far away. (No more than two cars passed us the whole time; in fact, maybe it was just one and I hallucinated the other.) Pete’s gearing was a pretty stingy 34x25. I had a 27 cog in the back; between that and my lugubrious cadence (between 20-40 rpm), I was well off Pete’s pace. (This is always the case when the going gets tough.) At one point Pete stopped for a bit so he could snap photos of me weaving my way back and forth across the road, which was the only way I could keep from tipping over.

God, such misery. Of course I knew I’d suffer on this ride, but who knew a climb could actually be this awful? Climbs I used to think of as hard, like Mount Diablo and Mount Evans, now look, in retrospect, like playgrounds. How long could this go on? I had no idea. It seemed that forever wasn’t out of the question. Fortunately, I knew better than to pretend I had any choice in the matter. I pondered (non-verbally) this sentiment from my Everest Challenge “Pep Talk” post: “The trick is to pretend you have no choice and to take one pedal stroke at a time, riding like a robot.  Climbing stupid, you might say.  Not ‘climbing stupidly,’ which I would never recommend, but ‘climbing as though you were stupid.’” I proceeded with the mindset of pure fatalism, as though it could never occur to me that this climb, this route, this ride, indeed this very sport, were actually optional.

Have my arms ever been worked so hard while cycling? Absolutely not. I logged over two miles more than Pete on this ride, and that’s probably because I was weaving so much. It was ridiculous: I was barely making progress toward the summit. If this description is getting tedious, good—so was the climb. At least you, albertnet reader, don’t have to fucking pedal! You’re just sitting there, feeling all butt-hurt that I’m going on so long about this—but at least your butt doesn’t actually hurt, and you can just close your laptop or toss aside your phone and go do something more fun. I was trapped on that damn climb and everything hurt. If those cracks in the road had been any deeper they’d have stopped me cold and I’d still be out there.

But, eventually, we did reach the summit. Now the ride would get really good: one more climb (surely easier than this one), and it’d be flat or downhill for the final 25 miles. A well-earned victory lap, you might say. But that’s not what happened. Instead, just as the road tipped downhill, we came upon a closed gate with a kiosk and this big dumb kid sitting in it. “You can’t go,” he said (and these were probably the first words he’d uttered all day). We asked why not. “Not allowed,” he said, after managing his second thought of the day: another salvo in his battle against mental bankruptcy. We assumed the road blockage had something to do with a geothermal power plant up there; maybe they’re afraid of terrorists or something. But Google Maps and Strava had both indicated the road was open to through traffic. Pete asked the kiosk wizard if he had a map. “Of what?” the cretin asked, dumbfounded. Pete replied, “Of your ass. I want to see if I can find your head in there.” No, Pete didn’t actually say this, he’s far too much of a gentleman. Of course the guy had no map of anything. So Pete started looking at his phone, trying to figure out another route. “I’m going to have to ask you to move along now,” the dunce said (and this might have been the longest verbal utterance of his life). I guess he considered our very presence a dire threat to the geothermal operation. And so, contrary to all human impulse, we actually turned around and headed back down Socrates Mine Road.

It wasn’t a very fun descent because we had to brake so hard. Pete’s brakes eventually started hissing even louder than mine. Even at the speeds that naturally result from such a grade (and I note that the road boasts three runaway truck ramps), the descent seemed to take forever.

(A few final footnotes. One: a photo on the PJAMM site shows a “NO OUTLET” sign at the base of the climb, which obviously would have been helpful; our theory is that this sign burned down in the fire. Two: another sign, also no longer extant, warned that “This area can expose you to chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects … including arsenic, benzene, asbestos, crystalline silica, and radionuclides.” Three: I’m assuming that on top of all this, every time a cyclist rides up Socrates Mine Road, God kills a kitten.)

Well, shit. Now we had about forty miles left to go, and two major climbs. Of course we hadn’t budgeted any time for this, so making it back to the Motel Sux by nightfall was going to be a major challenge. Exhausted as we were, we had to hammer. Into a headwind, of course.

“Get on my wheel,” Pete said. “Go as hard as you can. If you start to fall off, yell out and I’ll slow up [a tiny bit, just enough to put you on the absolute rivet so you won’t slow us down too much, you wanker],” he said. (No, he didn’t say the stuff in brackets; my brain filled that in. Accurately.) Damn, it was like a team time trial except I was too lame to even take a turn at the front. And it went on and on. I was no longer capable of pedaling in anything like a circle. Instead my legs took turns throwing punches at the pedals … and I punch like a girl. (Note to my daughters: I didn’t know you ever read my blog! And I’m just kidding! I know either of your could totally kick my ass!)

Our last big climb was 2.2 miles at 6.3%. At the base, some jerk in a pickup truck, in the opposite lane heading toward us, angrily yelled, “Fuck YOU!” I really don’t know what his problem was, other than presumably feeling that the existence of other, probably superior, people on this planet is automatic cause for maximum outrage. “I’m not angry at you … I’m just disappointed,” I did not say to him. It’s actually too bad his outburst didn’t anger me, because anger might have helped fuel my effort. That climb, short and shallow though it truly was, hurt so bad. Amazingly, we made pretty good time up it, staying right around 10 mph. At the top we stopped briefly to split an energy bar. Straddling my bike, I wasn’t even sure I could stay upright. I collapsed onto the handlebars, my arms on the brake hoods, my head dangling between them. Naturally, Pete laughed at me. You would have, too.

We set off again, and I have to say, only in hindsight do I truly appreciate how well Pete and I get along, even under circumstances like this. When he told me to ride as hard as I could so I wouldn’t get dropped, I could have said, “Oh, easy for you to say, Mr. Big-Shot-Former-Pro, with all your talent and strength and character! You’re nothing but a big bully!” and that’d have been well within spec for a knackered middle-aged cyclist with a 40% hematocrit. Meanwhile, Miss Manners would’ve surely forgiven Pete had he said, “Oh, boo-fucking-hoo, poor Mr. Parasite is all bent out of shape because he has to pedal harder than he wants to even though he’s getting a free ride without having to fight this damn headwind for even five seconds because we both know he’s too much of a pussy!” Instead we just grimly, and silently, got on with it. I acknowledged to myself the gift of this draft, no matter how unpleasant the pace was, while Pete presumably thanked his lucky stars I’m not even more weak and worthless on a bicycle.

So, what more is there to say? We hit another convenience store, right around dusk, and I wondered if it might make sense to summon a Lyft car from there (Uber is dead to me), and have one of us stay behind with the bikes while the other fetched my car from the motel. But there was a big sign that said something like, “ABSOLUTELY NO LOITERING. GET YOUR STUFF AND GET OUT OR WE’LL SEND YOU HOME TO MOTHER IN A CARDBOARD BOX.” Plus, we’re not quitters. So Pete ate some more of the little gummy bears he favors, I inhaled two more delicious Hostess cupcakes, and we headed back out. Somehow we made it over Petrified Forest Road (1.4 miles at 9.1%), notwithstanding our petrified legs.

And, eventually, as civil twilight gave its last gasp, we homed in on the Motel Sux. Needless say, in the final mile Pete’s rear tire blew out—PCCCCHHEWWW!—and he didn’t even flinch. Just rode it in.

Well, you know the rest. For $6 a night, at least the 100-decibel motel mini-fridge did a good job of keeping our beers cold. These were Racer 5s, just right for relaxing our destroyed muscles. Here is the obligatory post-ride Beck’st. Note that I’m not in any way mugging for the camera here. This is as close to a smile as I could manage.

So: was this ride even worth it? Of course. This is the kind of ordeal that case-hardens a person. And we’re going to need that hardness as we continue our descent into middle age and, eventually, decrepitude. Wish us luck, and check back in a year or two for a full report of our next exploit.

Ride stats

• 119.37 miles
• 8:37:47 ride time
• 13.8 average speed (ouch!)
• 11,896 feet cumulative elevation gain
• 117 bpm average heart rate
• 151 bpm max heart rate
• 67 rpm average cadence
• 3,886 kilocalories burned

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