editor, writer, wrangler
I wrote a thing about this and it rode Jacob and Isaac‘s coattails onto bikepacking.com—but the movie’s better than the book:
Close observers will notice I’m missing from much of the drone footage. This is because on bikes, as in our creative endeavors, I’m miles off the back at all times. 💁🏽
We’re all vaccinated at last and raring for a Return to Normal. The mountains east of Santa Barbara mirror the mood with a jolly parade of spring flowers in shapes I’ve never seen before, from clownish scarlet bugler to wooly bluecurls, on the nose. Salt heliotrope looks like a lost octopus. There’s a species of lupine here that smells like candy.
But there’s something else in the bloom to which I’m wildly allergic. Eyes swollen half-shut, I bail on the route and return to camp, pop Benadryl, and retreat into my tent and a string of drugged-up nightmares. The boys return in the dark, daring to hope I might have started dinner. Fat chance. They’ll find me asleep on a stack of all their sleeping pads, the perpetually useless princess and the pea.
I spend the weekend inventing progressively less useful mnemonic devices for distinguishing between conifers. You can tell a ponderosa by its needles because they are long, i.e., ponderous. A sugar pine keeps its cones on the end of its branches, as if it’s offering you candy. Picture a witch named Sequoia with tufty red hair. Imagine a heroin addict reusing a single needle and getting sick, ergo pale, ergo white fir.
Witch, goddess, god, or simply very large object—the sequoias command respect. They swell around their own burned-out hearts, tower upward beyond my comprehension and craned neck. They command respect, but do not receive it: I watch a child fling a desiccated pouch of Capri Sun into the grove without a word from any of the adults in his party, but am too shocked or or wary or slow off the mark to say anything. Still mad, though, as you can see, years later.
I eat shit riding away from the top of the lift—of course I do. It’s an abrupt, high-side crash that knocks the wind out of me. I can feel blood running down one arm, my friends are already out of sight, I’m pissed off and embarrassed and want very much to just sit for a minute and cry. Alas:
“Mommy, that girl fell!” Seven or eight years old, blonde pigtails, aghast.
“That’s right, she did,” coos mom. They’re civilians who’ve taken the gondola up for the view. “But watch, she’s going to get right back up and keep riding.”
Well, fuck—I suppose I am now.
After a demoralizing day on The Mountain I’m keener than ever to be in The Mountains instead—but the only permit I can get is for a trailhead up a collapsed road closed to cars. I convince the guys we ought to pedal. The ensuing five-hour hike-a-bike is a strain on our friendship but gas on the embers of my longtime thing for the Inyo. Stay tuned.
Abbey’s desert is everywhere under assault from vacation-home sprawl. We are both complicit and ensconced in its reckless fragmentation, surrounded by horrifyingly lush lawns separated from orange dunes by neat new curbs. It’s hideous and wrong and where is the water coming from?—and we browse Zillow anyway; we sit in the hot tub in the insufficient rain.
I spend hours pushing my bike along stretches of Seussian Southwest trail too burly for me: nothing new. But this trip is is also my first time canyoneering, down a series of a slots outside of Zion, suspended on borrowed gear and rappel skills rusty from the many years flown since I flunked out of multi-pitch trad. To descend rather than climb into a progressively less escapable situation is a novel angle on my general fear of entrapment. I am glad for my friends’ confidence and relieved when the bushwhack back to the car spits out suddenly onto open road.
On the way home, we stop at a London-themed boba shop on a strip mall in Vegas that sells chocolate mousse in the shape of a sleeping (one hopes) Sharpei puppy. It is genuinely too realistic to eat.
You’ve seen the Sutter Buttes from I5, perhaps, rising out of the smog like a hallucination. It seems ridiculous that anyone should own a mountain, but of course they do, and so public access requires winning the lottery for a spot on a tour. I dislike hiking in big groups and I hate a 4 a.m. alarm, but it’s been so many years of wistful glances through car windows that in the end I can’t not go. I make an alpine start for the Central Valley—also ridiculous—and cross the levees in predawn darkness with a sense of peril, Mario Kart’s Rainbow Road.
In daylight, by contrast, the colorless sun of deep winter makes it feel as if I’ve wandered into an old photograph, as if something is wrong with my eyes. From the top of the steep, volcanic pinnacles is a 360-degree vantage of farm fields, endless to the horizon and blurry around the edges in the haze of waste piles burning in the rice paddies below. The perspective feels imaginary, an illustration from Jack and the Beanstalk.
We descend to hidden valleys full of oaks and ghosts of Californias past. I can see Maidu, vaqueros, mastodons; I can smell the earth.
I am crying in a Tahoe motel room, a meltdown precipitated by the sound of someone coughing in the hallway and the buzz of a group chat update: with days to go before our scheduled departure from Durango, only half of us have COVID test results.
The delay presents a problem somewhere between moral calculus and an LSAT question. Are the negatives willing to travel with unknowns, if a positive result delivered en route would disqualify the whole car? What if someone’s still waiting on results by the time we’re supposed to head into the backcountry? Would a result even mean anything if it was—at that point—a week old?
This is my first attempt at going anywhere since These Challenging Times began. I’d pictured long weekends training at altitude all spring; instead I’ve hardly been more than riding distance from my one-room apartment in four months. I’m overwhelmed by the sidewalks crowded with tourists, bristle at the man who stands too close to me at check-in.
“If we go and someone gets sick it’ll be my fault because it was my idea,” I protest.
“You’re giving yourself way too much credit,” Ryan says. “Everyone’s an adult. Everyone’s here because they chose to be here.”
“I know,” I croak, “but still.”
COVID conditions were still excruciatingly uncertain at the point we’d had to decide whether to keep our reservation—muddled questions about transmission, ongoing shortages of PPE. In the Bay Area it was all grim headlines and hand sanitizer recipes, NextDoor pile-ons and neighbors berating each other for mask lapses on the street. But when I called the tour company in Colorado they had answered breezily that they were operating more or less as as normal. The dissonance rattled my skull.
The group met to discuss it it—over Zoom. We are all Good Citizens, or at least very much want to be, and so it was and remains difficult to separate actual fear of getting or spreading the virus from fear of appearing not to care. Two of the party are married to nurses. The rest know enough.
Was the situation so unclear that clearly we shouldn’t go, or clearly so unclear that we should? On the one hand the news cycle seemed to birth some fresh hell daily. On the other hand, next year things might be even worse. “Personally I am oscillating between fuck-no and YOLO roughly every three hours,” I write to the boys. “This is friggin’ crazy,” one replies.
Now we pass through one-street towns in Nevada, shambling storefronts with angry Sharpie bans on entry to anyone with a mask on. I still don’t have a COVID result. Online, commentators wonder why we don’t batch test like the Rwandans. From the back seat I try to work out how you’d determine the optimal number of samples per batch, given a certain infection rate. The engineer in the car is initially amused by this, less amused when my remedial math questions make us miss the turn to Provo.
When we finally arrive there we stop for lunch at a city park. The other tables are occupied by big families of unmasked Mormons. I’m not sure if they believe in COVID, but I know they believe in heaven and so I stay as far away as I can. Hours later it’s orderly, distanced queues for groceries in Grand Junction, then onward to signed threats on the “fashist” governor’s life just a few miles down the road.
One nation, individuals.
In Silverton at last we’re sorting gear in the motel room when there’s a loud crash and a panicked wail from the parking lot below. I turn to the window and see a big touring motorcycle down, the rider convulsing on the pavement. At first it seems he’s been hit, but his passenger, frantic, screams to onlookers that he’s having a seizure. A flurry of activity. Her hands to her face.
He is alright now, it seems, but my heart is pounding. I don’t want to make a habit of crying in front of my friends in motel rooms, but for a moment I think I might again. Empathy for the stranger condenses quickly into judgement as I gather myself. I think of the winding, shoulder-less mountain road up from Ouray, the sheer rock and long fall to the river below. It’s one thing to choose yourself to ride yourself, with such a dangerous condition, but to take someone else with you? How irresponsi—and the word comes screeching to a halt on my tongue.
The countdown to departure is all tradeoffs and squabbles. Garmin has been hacked, hilariously, and I can’t determine if my SOS device will still work. The weather is deteriorating and we’ve bought up all the gardening gloves from the hardware store. I’m shedding pack weight in ridiculous, desperate ways (do I need both spare socks?) at the same time that Ryan’s trying to convince me to bring canned oxygen and Jacob is distributing hand-carved spoons. Meanwhile Sean’s in the parking lot offloading mangos and yogurt to a party of four-wheelers in an attempt to clean out his car. “Hey, thanks, man,” they say.
I bark and nag and fret until we have all six of us assembled on time (!) at the shuttle pickup spot. The driver steps out of the van with temperature gun drawn. Six moments of truth.
When we unload the bikes at the trailhead the actual clouds are gathering into grim gray fists—but the metaphorical ones have parted into sunshine. I know the week ahead is likely to be one of the hardest things I’ve ever tried to do. We have 200 miles to cover—today’s opener all above 11,000 feet, with weather incoming, on a bike I’ve never even ridden fully loaded. But I feel, for a moment, weightless. “Here we go!” someone says, but “We made it!” is all I can think.
Point of clarification: I don’t like bike camping, exactly. I just like it better than riding very far or very fast or anywhere I’ve already been a hundred times.
Biggest mystery: Is Blazing Saddles just hiding the bodies? I’d think it impossible that there shouldn’t be fatalities, daily. These are visitors from flat cities full of Fiats and baguettes; it seems almost unconscionable to send them wobbling out into our world.
Disaster averted: Samuel P. Taylor is the Bay Area bike-in standard and consequently overrun with people hipper than me. In Fairfax I encountered an artisanally disheveled couple going my way. The sight of their frayed denim crystallized my unease at the prospect of sharing a site with people who might judge me for my lack of tattoos, vintage ride, or any method of preparing my own coffee. Imagine my relief, then, when the ranger instead placed me with two French retirees: we shared only a brief and amicable exchange about the weather and the best rock for setting tent stakes. Quel soulagement!
Shit roadies say … in front of me, while I’m eating a scone the size of my head in Point Reyes Station: “I mean, if you’re just puttering along in Zone 1 or 2, you really might as well not be riding your bike.”
Animals I didn’t see (even though I probably should have before they’re all dead): Tule elk. I planned on setting up at Sky Camp Sunday morning and then riding to Pierce Point on safari. I did not plan on it being 95 degrees and humid. Once up Limantour Road was enough—I went on a walk to Kelham Beach instead.
Things I had to disregard in order to do this: The time, my metatarsals, my shirt.
Animals I did see: A raptor dark against the sun, grasping a wriggling fish. A live snake I thought was dead; a dead seal I thought I was alive. Quails: they preened in the trees, burst out of the bushes, throbbed in the air. A whale! (Well, the splash and spouting water, but still.) A beetle, the flat and total black of a pitch-dark room. Pelicans in pairs. A crow alone. A buck bounding away, stiff-legged, hilarious.
Black Diamond Mines is a fringe territory of the EBRPD that I’ve been meaning to try for years. Part of the drag is that it’s out in Antioch: there’s a greenway route, but it’s barren and hot and, when I rode there, had more abandoned shopping carts than people. This meant anyone I did see I imagined murdering me; furthermore I suspected the owners of the morose little houses abutting the path would, in that event, turn up their television sets to drown out my screams.
Lately I’ve been questioning whether it would be worth this sort of sprawling suburban wasteland to achieve home ownership and my official Badge of Adulthood. I’ll credit this little trip for reminding me of the answer, which is: no, God, a thousand times no.
Once into the park, I trundled up the usual fire-road climb to the ridgeline. The view is very good: a long valley gold and billowing like water, a rarely seen face of Diablo, and, in the bright haze on the horizon, the towers of either Sacramento or Oz. I ditched my bike in a stand of what I later learned is the northernmost occurrence of Coulter pine (neat!) and hiked back down through tunnels of manzanita with dusky pink sandstone underfoot. There’s an old mining-town cemetery here; the effect of the incongruous skinny cypress on the steep and stripped-bare hillsides—and the tiny turbines advancing on the river in the distance—is that of having walked into a model railway. I read crumbling headstones and reflected on my good fortune to have avoided dying of typhoid at age 12.
My company at Stewartville camp that night was a driving wind and a chorus of coyotes, an atmosphere so end-of-the-world I was taken completely off-guard by the first joggers in the morning. (Read: was not wearing pants.) On my way out the other side of the park I stopped to investigate Star Mine. It’s just a short tunnel, but still the farthest I’ve ever been underground—and more than far enough to eliminate my previous interest in going caving.
In sum, while I can’t exactly recommend it to the able-bodied for riding in July—especially since so much trail is closed to bikes—this is a real interesting place for history, geology, and colors. (Also a commendable piece of park planning, given the lack of other open space in this part of the bay.) I’ll be back for the official, well-lit mine tour and wildflowers in the spring.
My theory of evolution for the mediocre cyclist is that once you get too busy, lazy, or broken to race, there are only two paths forward. One leads to downhilling, the other to touring.
Implausible as it may seem to anyone who’s ever watched me mountain bike (or more accurately, walk my mountain bike around any actual mountain biking), I really did have my sights set on option one. This is about aspiration, after all, and I want to be fast and brave far more than I want to … carry stuff. But with still-coagulating metatarsals, it finally came to this:
Day 1: Mountain View to Portola Redwoods. When I called the ranger from Skyline I learned there was only one campsite left. (“They’re going fast,” he added, “so I hope you are, too!”) Descending 7 miles and 2,000 feet with the prospect of having to turn around and go back up was grim; snagging the last walk-in, joyous. I met some actual bikepackers, who told me about getting chased by a pack of wild dogs on an abandoned Indian reservation. This made my Georgia freakout seem extra bush league.
Day 2: Portola Redwoods to Butano. Mostly just coasting down Old Haul Road, listening to birdsong and watching the light come through the trees like freakin’ fairy dust. There wasn’t a wicker basket full of wildflowers and baguettes on the front of my bike but there might as well have been.
At Butano I hiked a loop around the park to see the abandoned air-strip. It was a real bad idea on the injury front, but worth it to get up onto the ridge, to the heat and the sun and the light. There is Spanish moss on everything. Plus I saw banana slugs, an alligator lizard, a six-point buck, and all the way the ocean, gee whiz!
Day 3: Butano to Palo Alto. I had planned to climb Tunitas Creek but wimped out in favor of a tailwind-assisted spin up 84. Not sorry. On the way home, I assembled my preliminary assessment of bike camping, below:
+ You experience 50% less self-loathing for incidental pastry consumption en route.
+ You experience 75% less self-loathing for riding really, really slowly.
– Combination of the above is dangerous.
– About 50% as fun as either normal riding or normal camping: bike handles badly because it’s heavy, plus/even though you left all the glamping items at home trying to cut weight.
– In my case this included toothpaste.
– If you’re even a bit grubby, people in Palo Alto think you’re a hobo.
– Wait … am I a hobo?
+ You experience 60% more smugness when passing triathletes.
– I’m going to have to buy more gear.
– Seriously, how is possible than I have to buy more gear?
+ I love stopping to look at everything!
e.alia.salim 