Thursday, January 5, 2012

Bike Trip Gothic, CO to Reno NV: September 2011 (1st and only draft. This Sucked.)

This isn’t what I was supposed to write.  I was supposed to write an entertaining, insightful piece about riding a bicycle from Gothic, Colorado to Reno, Nevada.  But, like the trip itself, writing about long-distance biking seems to look more entertaining and less difficult at first glance.  I found mostly loneliness and monotony on the way through the great desert of the Southwest, and while writing about loneliness can be captivating, writing about monotony is, well, monotonous.  And we’ve all experienced loneliness.  There’s not much I can hope to expand upon that universal feeling, and I’m not writing a touching, tour-de-force novel that expertly portrays humanity’s shared experiences.  So here is the final result of 3 weeks of intense bike riding, and 3 months of writing:  a list of shit I did.

The first leg of my trip was from Gothic, Colorado to Green River, Utah.  While I had put several hundred miles on my bicycle over the summer, I had never done a long distance trip while carrying all of my own gear.  Green River, since I knew the town, and it was a mentally digestible distance from Gothic, was the first checkpoint on my mind’s schedule.  I started out early in the morning from Gothic, the site of the high-altitude field station where I live and work, hung over and already mentally exhausted from trying to organize my life for the next month or so around two wheels and a trailer.  Amazingly, after jettisoning about ten pounds of excess gear, I made it about 80 miles that first day.  Granted, I started at 10,00 feet in altitude and ended up at around 7,500, but still, 80 miles was a bigger push than I expected from myself right off the bat.  I figured I would eventually be doing “centuries,” or 100-mile days, and hitting 80 while hung over on the first day seemed to be a good indicator that my figuring was correct.  However, I still hadn’t gone over my first pass, hadn’t really climbed anything at all.  True, the downhill was exhilaratingly terrifying, but it in no way prepared me for what my body was about to go through over the next few weeks.  I got a good taste of it the next day, though, as I headed over the Cerro summit outside of Black Canyon National Park and into Montrose, Colorado, where I spent the night with my cousins who live in the area.  They gave me a lift to the border the next day, since they were headed that way anyway, and I made it all the way into Green River a day ahead of schedule.  Simple enough, right?  I was tired, but happy, and enjoyed a night of Ray’s Hamburgers and Utah beer.  (Understand, there’s a smiling sort of sarcasm to that.  Ray’s is a dive in Green River that’s great simply because it’s there, and Utah has laws about alcohol that would send any self respecting German into apoplectic shock.)  I had conquered 300 miles and my first stretch of desert.  While hot and sunny, the desert was really a pretty enjoyable place to ride, and if I were to push on like I was and make it to a town every day, there wouldn’t be any problems with water.  And there never were any problems with water.  I only ran out once, much farther along the road.

After Green River, I knew I’d be entering unfamiliar territory.  One of my favorite places in the world is the San Rafael Swell in Utah, and the myriad of desert cliffs and canyons that run through it.  Before my bike trip, I had never been beyond the great mound of sandstone that sits in the middle of Utah like some great, red and white bubble with undulating scars created by the scarce water that falls on it.  This time, I’d be not only riding past it, but OVER it.  First, though, I had to get to the southern end of the edifice, where roads, towns, and rivers converged to make a possible route over the swell.  So I rode.  I rode and rode and rode, past the entrance to Goblin Valley State Park and past Horseshoe Canyon- a canyon that’s now famous since Aron Ralstead chopped off his own arm to escape the desert that I was so blithely riding into.  I had been to these places, but never beyond.  The excitement took hold of me, and I pushed myself hard that day.  Too hard.  I rode my century, and spent the rest of the trip paying for it.  I ended up riding all day without stopping, even through the blistering heat of the afternoon.  Sunburned and exhausted, I crawled into my sleeping bag at the end of the day wondering where I was, who I was, and what the hell I was doing by myself in the middle of the desert.  I hurt, I was already tired of my daily rations that consisted of tuna packets and granola bars, and I was so zonked by the sun that all I could do was cry softly to myself and hope that things would get easier.  Unfortunately, they got harder.

I woke up by myself.  Of all the impressions I have left in my brain about this bicycle trip, that’s the one that keeps playing over and over in my head.  Different places, different times, but always I woke up by myself.  There was nobody to complain to, and nobody to tell me to stop or slow down.  So I didn’t stop, and I didn’t slow down, and I kept crying myself to sleep and waking up alone.  And I was in it beyond extraction, too.  The desert, I mean.  My choices were to ride on or abandon all of my possessions and try to hitch-hike southern Utah in spandex shorts.  I chose the easier path.

The next day I rode only 60 miles, the shortest distance of my trip.  I wandered through sand-blasted canyons on little used roads, always uphill, until I made it to Capitol Reef National Park.  I didn’t know the park was there, so it was a bit of a surprise when tumbleweeds and jackrabbits turned into noisy tourists gawking at the sensuous red rock formations that I felt were refolding my brain while I was alone.  This wasn’t an unwelcome surprise, and I stopped by at the park office to call my parents and to try and plan the second half of Utah.  I also found an old orchard that the park maintains, and that it allows visitors to eat freely from!  It was all I could do to not load my pack down with apples and pears.  Even now, I can taste the first golden apple to touch my lips.  I can feel the juice running down my chin in the red afternoon of Utah’s canyon-lands.  If only those moments were more forthcoming, I may have had a completely different experience.  I pushed on to the next town, Torrey, where I blew my entire trip’s budget on a cabin for the night, Mexican food, and a six pack.  Looking back, I still think it was totally worth it.  On top of getting to feel like a human being again, I met a couple of people and got a little social interaction.  My waitress, Lynsay, also ran the Torrey Greenhouse, and I had a fantastic time talking with her and trying her nectarines, peaches, lemon-cucumbers (delicious!), and plums.  I was the greenhouses only visitor, so eventually her husband and dog came to join us, and for the first time in what seemed like ages, I went back to my cabin and fell asleep somewhat content. 

The next day I felt great, and I had topped the swell, so the next hundred miles were pretty much downhill.  I pegged all hundred of them and resumed my life of misery in the sand.  After going through a couple of towns that were barely more than a filling station and a cattle pen, I made camp and got ready to push on to Cedar City, my final destination (I hoped) in Utah, before getting to flat (I hoped) Nevada. 

What followed was hell.  My map was a road map, not a topo, and I was judging my climbs and descents by the switchbacks in the road and the rivers that it followed through canyons.  I had no way of knowing that I was going to climb, and descend, 8000 feet in one go.  I really hadn’t.  It took me two days to get through Panguitch, Utah and up to Cedar Breaks National Monument, where I topped out the highest pass between Colorado and the Sierra Nevadas in California.  The road just kept going up, and up, and up.  It was infuriating.  There were no switchbacks, there were no towns, no alternate routes or indications of humans at all, and all I could do was climb.  Finally, I got to the top and, shuddering with exhaustion and mild heat stroke, took a couple of the only pictures I managed to snap through the whole trip.  Then I grabbed my brake levers and didn’t let go of them for 20 miles.  When I got to Cedar City, my brake rotors were bent and the frame of my beloved bicycle had cracked right next to the rear dropouts- where the wheel attaches.  What little happiness, and what little money I had left were instantly drained.

I holed up in Cedar City for a couple days at a cheap motel run by the only non-white people in the whole Great State of Utah.  Somehow I managed to scrape together enough cash to get the bike frame welded and make all the other necessary repairs to my rig that I needed to get through the rest of Utah and Nevada.  No bicycle can really come back from a cracked frame, and both the welder, and the bike repairman who recommended him were absolutely shocked when I put the wheels back on and the whole thing seemed to work.  Nonplussed by their amazement at their own work, I promptly got stung by a bee and headed out of town.

The next two days were the happiest I spent on the trip.  My bike was broken, I was broken (and broke,) and really, there was nothing else that could go wrong.  I was about to cross another state line, and finally my body was catching up with my determination to keep going, whatever the cost.  I felt fit and fatalistic- a common thread to many of my life’s transcendental moments.  Heading north out of Cedar City, I was making my way back to Highway 50, the road I had started on, and had to abandon because in Utah, it doesn’t go through any towns.  I guess that’s why it’s called the loneliest highway, but I’m not going to test that moniker, at least not on a bike.  Also, this part of Utah was relatively flat, and pleasant in a non-epic sort of way.  Most of Utah is very epic, with grand edifices and unreal rock formations as far as the eye can see.  This part, however was flat and dull, and that suited me just fine.  It was also during this part of the trip that I met the only other cross-country traveler I ever encountered.  His name was Alan, and he for some reason had gotten it in his head to walk from San Francisco to Boston, pushing a handcart.  We had a nice chat, and for the first time since Torrey I felt like I was actually relating to another person.  That night, I found the only trees in that part of the country- and they were close enough together to hang my hammock!  And I was only 80 miles from Nevada!

I limped into Baker the next day, one of the only clear memories I have of Nevada.  I stayed for free behind a restaurant that caters to cyclists, and met a number of interesting people.  I also helped out in the kitchen for lack of anything better to do, and in return got gloriously drunk on the proprietor’s private Scotch collection.  Somewhere during that time I also got offered a job running the restaurant during the winter months.  I politely declined.

After Baker, Nevada was a blur.  I found out that Nevada, while often thought of as a flat desert state, is the most mountainous of all 50 states, with 54 distinct ranges, most of them directly in my way.  They weren’t high mountains, by any means, and conveniently spaced with about 10 miles of perfectly flat land in between them, but they were still mountains, and I had to climb them.  Somewhere outside of Ely- and I’m not sure if it was 10 miles or 100- my bicycle broke again.  The wheel was coming loose, and it appeared that there was nothing to be done about it this time.  So, I reverted to what I knew and stuck my thumb out, bicycle, trailer and all.  Serendipitously, I was picked up by Keith, who was a groomsman in my friend Kirsten’s wedding.  Weird, right?  Also serendipitously, he was headed all the way to Austin, Nevada, a destination that would cut 3 days out of my trip, had my bike been working.  We pulled into Austin, where he works as an archaeologist under assignment from mining companies who are required by law to check out future sites for any archaeological interest.  I got to hang out and drink with a dusty bunch of archaeologists and learn what it was like to be a real Indiana Jones.  While the glamour of archaeology in movies is obviously exaggerated, these folks looked the part with their giant Bowie knives and dusty, wide brimmed hats.  They also shared a common theme with Indiana Jones in that they worked for people who didn’t want them to succeed.  The companies who paid them didn’t want them to find anything, as any significant finds would limit the possible areas to be mined.  So, their work consisted mostly of trying to glean what little information they could out of insignificant (by who’s rating, I don’t know,) sites and put together some kind of story before all of their data got systematically destroyed.  While I can’t imagine their day-to-day lives in dealing with their employers, I’d guess it must be a pretty frustrating job.  In any case, they were fun, hospitable people, and I’ll certainly be going back to pay them a visit some time I can do so properly. 

After Austin, I limped into Reno, spending the night at a truck stop in the middle of nowhere once before getting there.  When I got to Reno, I pitched camp at a state park in the middle of a howling storm, and waited out the last night of my bike ride.  When I woke up, the Sierra Nevadas lay before me, gleaming white and covered in impassable snow.  This was the end of the line for me and my broken bike.

So that’s it.  I got a room at a Casino in Reno and ate some sushi with a couple of strangers.  I called my friends in California and broke down and asked them to help me get the hell out of the desert- and they did.  In two days time I was getting off a Greyhound bus in Arcata, California and into a car that I had last seen parked outside the Dining Hall in Gothic.  A whole new adventure began after that, but the misadventure of Denny Brown in the Desert was over.  At least until I get another bike.