Why?

Folks....look away...there is nothing to see here....this is just another, run of the mill bikepack on the AZT. These pictures are rather un-extraordinary in that they're just my normal routine, my normal pace and my normal expectations for another weekend on the bike. I apologize if this post fails to offer up any insight, epiphany or any other realization.  What once was extrodinary to me is now matter of fact....but I keep coming back.  To me, this is just another boring bikepack post.....and still I ask the question why I keep coming back.....Do you know?  If not....perhaps you should ask too.....and if you do know, I'd sure like to hear from you why you keep coming back.

Running the Crazy 88 route in reverse, I set out from the command center on west Route 66 and head out to Fisher Point.  The golden tops of grass growing below Fisher Point reach higher than usual obscuring most of my ride......flowing through the fields at speed, the soft gentle brush of grass with every pedel stroke a gentle reminder of something....but what?

Climbing up to the rim of Walnut Canyon; the southern facing, north rim welcomed me with the warm expressions of plants with a singular purpose....to aim their barbs south towards the suns arcing path...and by ridiculous circumstance......towards me....

Riding on to the east....seemingly towards Winslow....the rim became more arid and chocky. The colors of a second spring rising up around me, growing upwards and away from the bone-like expanse of limestone, kept me limber in the saddle.  Listening to a new Panic show, the song 'Stop-Go' serendipitously played in my ears during my drive-and-pause pace of exploration....

.....how apropos this all is....it's often like this on these rides which last for days....a piece of music will fit into the scenery and experience like a keyhole, opening up a world that transcends what I feel, see, smell and taste.  I detour at at every viewpoint to explore the rim, peering down at the incised lower canyon which was framed in eolian forms left long ago.....my fingertips feeling at the grainy edge of the cliff as I crawl nearer to peer below....my toes firmly planted into the chunky limestone searching for a positve purchase as I look deeper and deeper......

As I transitioned off the rim and head lower into Pinon Country, the pleasant smell of spring filled my nose.....the bountiful monsoon this year has blessed us with a prodigal resurgence of wildflowers.  I'm amazed at how the land smells....this part of the ride makes me feel as if I'm riding in May and not mid-September.....

Similar scenes make me drunk with adulation.....and in my solo state, I loose my lens cap.  Wandering about forever trying to find the thing I recently lost.....I later realize what I just lost would never be regained.....so I left it out there in the beauty of the field, tied my arm warmers into a lens cap and moved on.  The peaks in the background were calling me as they always do......but they remind me that there are a lot of hard miles between now and then....I move on....

Hours later.....I start to crack....I realize that I started to bonk when I lost my lens cap....but the physical manifestations have just now reared their ugly heads....an evil hydra of physical exhaustion, mental malaise and dehydration have turned my emotional and logical mind into a cold-hard lump of HTFU.....I press on.....in the absence of counteractive stimulation I become obstinate.....

Obstinate has drawn me from the depths of the pit and brought me home....Obstinate is why I'm still here....Obstinate is my savior....I am become Obstinate.  An hour later after the first of two major pitches.....I realize that my bonk is not going away despite a 30 minute rest in the pines and well wishes from those that love me......so I take out of reserve a weapon I rarely use.....Red Vines......downing two at a time, I ride....a vine every 5 minutes or so...mainlining the corn syrup, I catch momentary glimpses of a rally......but I lag on in between.......painfully slow I climb into the late afternoon..... curmudgeonly and obstinate......

Making my way to camp via a tepee constructed of sticks signling a turn after an aspen grove west into a non-descript fern forest by a friend who might no longer be there....I make my way to a smiling group of friends who offer me a beer and a chair......a rare treat and respite from the normal bikepacking days end.....but a planned one at that since we have night pictures to take....

I normally crawl into my pack soon after the light fades from the horizon and spend the rest of the night admiring the sky until I fall asleep....this time, I stayed outside and admired the sky until I had to retreat to my bag.....asking my friend DurtGurl to capture a scene for me.....I retired to my bivy below my bike and fell asleep to the stars as I often do....dreaming of the future and asking a critical question....Why?

Photo by Kathleen Kingma

The next day I did it all over again.....am I obstinate because I do it, or do I do it because I'm obstinate?

Chiens retraite dans les montagnes

Not all progress is defined by forward movement.  A sore knee after continuous forward progress on the bike occasionally forces me to slow down and stop all together. This is a lesson I'm still painfully learning years after I first realized it....I'm just slow to fully accepting it.  By slowing down, we sometimes make more progress.  We get to take in the world in ways we don't normally see and at a pace we are unaccustomed to moving.  One such way of moving and seeing is through the eyes of a dog...1 foot off the ground, looking up and out in wonder and curiosity, full of joy in the simple beauty of it all.  A moments view from another vantage point is often all that is needed to completely change your perspective on what otherwise feels like a forced retreat.......

Stooping down to view things, we still wonder and count how many years have passed before us...this was the year we did this, this was the year we did that...what about now....what about tomorrow?

I've climbed on my bike by this spot hundreds of times, usually in an anaerobic state, and have failed to notice the beautiful moss growing in the indescribable luminosity of late-afternoon...

The colors of transition are beginning to show at ground level.

Even though the future will shower the path ahead of us with countless transitions...we carry the one we last experienced as a reminder of things to come in the future....

No longer confined to the singletrack which only goes in one of two directions; we roam directionless in fields awash in colors of late summer....

Colors which fight to carry on after the bracken has turned to rust....late bloomers will always stand out....

With the days end coming sooner and sooner, our dinner of El Serrano and Bean Burritos is met by a moonless night where the stars appear between bony tree trunks......

Peering overhead to the southeast where the dog star Cyrus will soon appear....an appearance heralding the season of snow....our wonder focuses on the visible arms of the milky way.  The next spiral out from where we are is far beyond us and most often times out of sight...until the moment we fix our gaze on it and decide for ourselves that we will continue to grow, to learn and to move beyond where we are now....

Waking up to another beautiful day, our footsteps are deadened by a cool dew in the forest as we sniff around for this years harvest of Lobster Mushrooms....these will make some fine ravioli....

Breaking camp, we transition to the sub-alpine fields off of the AZT.....

 ......and lounge in a spot with full command of the terrain around us.

Saying hello to friendly strangers who also come to enjoy this place, shortcuts are taken at will......

....play is had..................

....and butterflies are chased from flower to flower.

The sunny fields of late summer inspire many emotions.....wonder in beauty.....

.....joy and laughter......................

...contentment and peace.

This time of year is when I often look past the waning summer in anticipation of falling snow....but days like this make me want to stay put....and like a dog, roll in the rays of sun for the pure joy of it all.  My mistress winter will come soon enough, but for now....I don't want summer to end.

Perfection

As I follow the sinuous curves of her, dropping away and out of my immediate focus; I let go of the handlebars and float for a time.  Precariously balanced between grace and disaster, I release myself back to the only force that truly controls me....that controls all of us.  I've wrestled with these concepts but have so far been unable to put them into practice. I finally succumbed to the idea that I’m truly not in control….I’ve written about it for a while, but I’ve struggled at it as we all do.  For better or for worse, we’re just here….floating along….our efforts unrecognized by all others except for our narcissistic selves.  Each year goes by just the same as the last…the water flows by you if you choose to sit on the side of the river…or you can jump back in and let the river take you where it may.  Either way the river is there, and it does what it does, with or without you.

Sometimes this means that your best efforts at cleaning and overhaulling your bike are met the next morning by a torrential downpour.  Sit it out and keep a clean bike, or dive in and get wet…..

I still get smitten when I see perfection…but what is perfection if not the voice of a thousand songs being sung together in disharmonious unity.  The world is a cacophony of imbalances that meld together, inconceivably, into balance.  The sad song and the happy song, the sorrowful and the joyful tale, the melancholy and the joyous moods of daily life….the one without the other is just a single point of view…..you have to be open to experiencing it all.  A clean bike may look good…but only because you can see the art and thought that went into the making of such a beautiful machine; a beautiful machine that exists to make fun and not be clean....a machine that screams, "Let's sling a little mud, Girl"

And by extension of that thought, the dirty bike is equally beautiful.  Take into context the thoughts and feelings I felt as I rode this clean and spotless machine through the forest to create this new look….

Think of the natural beauty I sat and pondered as I ate my lunch…..contemplating the concept of perfection…..

Perfection I see in the frozen raindrops on an Aspen leaf, holding the mornings rain well into the overcast afternoon….soft ripples of a breeze not enough to erase the sign that beauty happens here daily as the forest is reborn from the ashes.

And from those ashes I see the irony in the bike that I ride which holds the symbol of the Phoenix…..

.....me, riding this bike as a phoenix is not lost on me….me riding this bike in a place that is, also, rising from the ashes, is not lost on me…hell, me being born in Phoenix is not lost on me.  My friend SuLing reminds me that Resonance is something to be mindful of....and I am.  To wit.....We are all Phoenicians as we climb our way out of the ashes to a place that is beyond us now...a place where our dreams and hopes reside......

 

And in this state of progression towards dreams, we are all in a constant state of loss and renewal…it's not all forward progress.  It’s up to us to find the renewal when all we can find is loss because there is a balance that exists beyond us...beyond our comprehension at times......too far away to find....too far away to see...and if you search for it, it just gets further away.  And one day when you give up the search….you realize that it was always there....you were always on the river.....that sometimes you are being pounded into rocks and at other times you are in an eddy, going in circles.  Other times, you are taken by the flood waters of a tempest only to be deposited high above the river....forced to watch the waters go by.  But all things return to the river eventually.....as it rained during my ride...the mud that I accumulated early in the day was washed free and returned my bike to a cleaner state.....

As I ride through this place with friends, I’m strangely attracted to the starkness of death around me that once filled my heart with gloom...a time when I looked up at the sky and I could only see the forest in flames. I now see it in the context of the renewal that is springing up all around me as a consequence of that death.....perfection.

In this I observe the beauty of balance.....the death of one thing and the subsequent birth of another.  In this, I see perfection, I see hope, I see potential….the 4 foot tall saplings of Aspen rising to cover the bases of the previous generation; white stalks standing as tombstones in what was once a mature forest.....

I see the Evening Primrose at midday, fighting against the precocious sun which is losing out on this overcast afternoon.  The Primrose now thrives in the daytime and carbon rich soil within the burn area….flowers on this day stay open for me to see...all because, it's overcast and gloomy above.....

But as we climb through the burn area towards 10,000ft, we enter back into a higher zone protected from the harshness of the burn.  

As I look around me, I see the ski lines of seasons past….dry and barren, without the protective sheath of winter to offer a contrast from the rock spires swept barren by the harshness of wind.....  

.....and still the lines exist in my mind as well as those that I ride with…these are lines that will always be etched there….if you fail to see them, it’s no matter.  They’re there…we skied them…they exist….and so it is.

As we travel on this river, we run into other travelers who sometimes join us on our ferry.  They travel with us for a short time and sometimes a long time...but we all get off, eventually.  Like the tree rings found in the alpine, we count the weathered years and remember with fondness the better years....but the years are all there nonetheless just like the river.....

As my friends stop to work on their bikes before the final push of the day, I ponder the color that lately holds my fancy.  As we mount our bikes for the final descent, a 30 minute whoop-dee-doo ride back home in hero dirt accompanied with hard rain and thunder all around us; we find ourselves yanking and banking through the turns, hooting and hollering underneath the canopy of Spruce and Aspen and later Ponderosa Pine and Oak.  On this descent....I find myself letting go of the handlebars once again.....

A beautiful distraction

When you focus on a goal for so long you can develop what experts call "target fixation". Blindly focusing in on a single object, all other things around that object fade out of existence until the goal is reached, or failure.....with failure being the most likely endstate. Tunnel vision takes over....all dangers and concerns are ignored save for the single object of fixation. The past few weeks saw me starting a new job which brought a new operational tempo to my ride. A necessity which pulled my attentions away from the old horizon and onto a new one. No longer feeling a need to wander the landscape in search of long mental miles, I've defocused and have found a beautiful distraction....the fun ride.

The beautiful distraction is the ride where I don't look at the clock. How many eons did it take for the patina to develop on this piece of weathered rock....lichens taking hold of it's exterior and bleaching the surface a cold grey....yet when fractured, she shows her heart....a rosy hue which tells the real story of how this became, why it is and who it will always be.....

....and like that....she slices open the sidewall of BGR....it's been a long time my friend...it seems like just last season when I listened to the Navajo radio station in your snow cave......

During this down time, I focus on the other rose colored hues around me....following the tangent that presents itself to me when I wander down that rabbit hole I enjoy so much.  This picture makes me long for a fisheye lens...but I wind up creating a ghetto fisheye shot for myself.....

As I wait for the sidewall slice to be remedied, I focus on the layers of history around me....and I see strain hardening.  Under certain conditions, rocks like materials become stronger than their original selves.  Where the rock breaks through a fracturing process, it sometimes become harder....so much so, that when it weathers and erodes out....it's the original rock that disapears, leaving only one thing behind....a fin of hardened material that incorporates the original rock along with the thing that hardened it......  

Growing within these fracture zones, I see plants backlit in the shallow sun of morning.  The roots exploit the fracture zone in search of easy resources....pulling it upwards into the light.  I eat, I ride and I love.  I use what is available to me to do this and to keep it all going.....so does this plant....veins exhibiting an order that is not unlike ourselves.....

Breaks are taken, conversations are had, laughter is shared.....gut shattering laughter...the forest takes us in.  Smiles are the norm...we are happy and we are in a beautiful place....should there ever be another way?

Descending into Kelly Pocket....I am once again transfixed by the woman in the green dress....she wears it well in the early summer.....and Gitty provides the action.....

Swoopy turns, up and down, banking left and right between trees and slabs of rock.....we travel through this lush microclimate....

More breaks are taken....snacks are shared....I pass out Twizzlers bought at the QT.....I hear they're taking over Arizona.....

tRoy shows us the skinny......but winds up just being hokey.....thanks for the video my friend and for organizing this ride.....

The next morning, I go ride with Dara and Agnes.  Riding in front of Dara....I hear a commotion behind me.  Narrowly avoiding running over a Horny Toad, she almost wrecked.  As I take pictures.....Agnes tells me that if you pet it's neck, according to the Navajo, it will rain....I pet it's neck a lot.....we need it.......

Having fun just past the overlook....a log roll is tried......

This one has always had my number since I missed the exit, augured in and went over the bar; hurting my shoulder so bad it took weeks to recover....you gotta trust the branch is there on the backside and aim for it without seeing it.....

As I try.....I fail to trust this time as I've so often found myself....I see it when I'm at the top, stalled and contemplating, but need to trust it on the approach and just go for it.  The fact that I'm trying it again is not lost on me....I've found a beautiful distraction once again....the long solo ride is a beautiful transformational thing....but so is a short ride with friends.