Pilots, Passes and Terrorism in the 21st
Century
Leave it to Meriweather to preach the
ultimate mission – 470 miles of trail that crosses
Colorado. Singletrack that tickles the divide and gracefully
flows between 8,000 and 13,000 feet high over nearly its entire
length. The Colorado Trail is out there, waiting silently for
someone in our peer group to heed the call. The trail goes from
Chatfield Reservoir outside of Golden to Durango. Period. It is
not a bike path, it is a singletrack – of a technical
nature with remote sections that skirt towns and roads for as
much as 70 miles at a time. It looks epic, and as we learned
through the planning and execution of such a journey, there
were many lessons to be learned on the way.
Our pals at Bike Magazine were nice
enough to put the CT on the cover of Bike on the month prior to
our departure. Great photos and advice that we were intent upon
ignoring (don’t do the trail self supported –
it’s murder). We are pilots, we are proud. We want to
adventure and orienteer and suffer. Suffering is noble. We are
going to support ourselves, carry minimal gear and live off the
land. Bike’s Rob Story complained about a 2,700 foot
"punishing" climb. We frequently do that much
climbing on the way to work (seriously) We heckled him, named
feminine hygiene products after him. Little did we know that
this Karma would be back – in force. At our pre-planning
meetings Dan was quoting John Muir, swearing by pine needles
and a strength hewn from the ages of adventurers. Of course, he
shows up with a neon sleeping bag rated to ten below zero and a
Gore-Tex bivvy sack. Idealism meets a wish not to lose valuable
body parts.
We trained with weight, and were brought
to our knees by the absolutely miniscule miles we were
covering. We were hoping to do the ride in 7 – 8 days,
which would mean 60 – 80 miles a day. We did some
training rides that were 50 miles, 10,000 feet of climbing, and
we were getting severely beaten down, punished into slobbering
messes. Rides that we thought of as epics were like 8 miles. We
headed out on one seek and destroy ride, and managed 12 miles
in 4.5 hours. These facts did not register. We would be more
fit, we would be focused. We would ride into shape. HAH.
Day 1. Thursday. Spirits are high and the
weather looks awesome (other than the snow predicted for the
weekend – more on that later). The night before, I
re-packed my bike three times – with three beers –
in the shadowy light of our shed, each beer bringing less
clarity to what the hell I was going to need. I went with light
panniers on a rear rack, remembering how during a cross-country
bike trip I ended up moving almost all the weight off my back
and onto the bike. That was a road trip – this was trail
– my choice was wrong.
Our tribe for the trip was reduced,
ironically by two hand injuries. Timmy P broke his pinkie
finger way back in the beginning of summer and had been nursing
it back to health ever since, and Joey took a face-plant on
‘Very Male’ and broke his thumb the very week
before we were to leave. Both boys required surgery, both boys
will be back fighting very soon. Joey was gracious and selfless
enough to take us to the trailhead Thursday night. We thought
we would get an early start, take a few miles out of the 70
mile leg the evening before we really got going. We ate a pizza
in the car on the way out, and downed a pint at the trailhead
as some sort of faux-nautical sendoff.
It was a beautiful night. Rain in the
surrounding area – but a very nice cruise up a
doubletrack for 6.5 miles until the real climbing began. First
technical – mile 2.6 – Dan’s rack fell
off the back of his bike with a gravelly THUD.It was dark at
this point – and it took Whit’s intergalactic night
vision to locate the errant 5 mil hex bolt. We re-installed
– checked other bolts and rolled on. By the time we got
the singletrack it was full on dark. We donned headlamps and
started the climb. Never before have I felt so uncoordinated on
a bike, and I have had some quality saddle time following some
serious imbibing. I was the only one with a granny gear (I gave
myself that ‘advantage’ based on being the senior
on the trip by ten years and the simply ridiculous weight of my
whole set up. We climbed for a while before we realized we had
climbed about 800 feet of vertical. We started down a small
descent and piloted our overweight beasts and sore backs to the
side of the trail somewhere around mile 8.5. Whoa. Huge day
– it was about 8pm.
As we broke out gear it was apparent that
I brought way too much stuff, Dan was just about right, and
Whit, well, Whit quite simply was going to die. Dan and I
busted out of 10-degree bags, wrapped them in our Gore-Tex
bivvies, and laid the whole loving sandwich down on nice thick
sleeping pads. Whit pulled out his silk liner and a bivvy and
laid it in the dirt. It was a sad sight. I walked by to hang my
food in a tree (we were camped at Bear Creek for gawsh sake)
and giggled at his tissue-like protection. We ate a few snacks,
and I laid down in my bag. It was way too hot to even get in,
so I put the bivvy under the bag, unzipped the bag – and
I was still too hot. I ended up sleeping one leg out until
about 5:30am. After the required farting and bear jokes, we
dozed off to Whit mumbling something like "This silk thing
doesn’t do SHIT!".
I awoke at 5:30 to lightning in the
distance, and a low rumble that seemed to portend our first
spanking of the trip. It wasn’t light, but I was
wide-awake, having anticipated starting this trip for the last
six months. The rumbles grew louder as I crawled out and paced
the campsite for a good pee spot. The boys slowly rose, Dan
complaining about being too hot, and whit grumbling that the
ground was hard (ROCKY mountains?!). We determined to ride a
while before cranking out breakfast, a very wise decision based
on the hail that started about 8 minutes later.
The temperature dropped from a very
pleasant 52 degrees to less than 35 in about two minutes. The
hail intensified and then turned to a very hard frozen rain.
The campsite was immediately awash in little hail balls flowing
down through a river of mud. We threw on rain gear and warmer
socks and prepped for some tough going. As we were getting
ready, Dan sat down next to a tree and just kind of went pale
– like a sheet. His head lolled sideways on his shoulders
like a little broken GI Joe. He said he felt like his body was
shutting down, dizzy and confused, and said that he thought he
might be in the beginning stages of hypothermia. The cold had
come on so fast – and was so wet that we all had gotten
wet underneath before we got our outer layers on – Dan
got the wettest. We hoisted him out of the puddle, and walked
him for a few feet, and then he took over and walked some short
laps up and down a small incline in the campsite area. He said
he was feeling a little better. We mounted the bikes, and
started riding through the two inches of accumulated water,
mixed with mud and a plethora of different-sized hail balls. It
was pretty slow going.
The trail got amazingly technical, and we
started climbing out of the Bear Creek drainage up to the ridge
between us and the South Platte. It was a wild feeling, being
so wailed upon – and we were EIGHT miles into the trip!
The climb out helped us all out. My bike still felt incredibly
heavy, and I was really claustrophobic in the confines of rain
gear and base layers. We topped out the climb and started
descending a very sweet slice of trail that switchbacked
endlessly and dropped us out at the South Platte. 15 miles.
Whoa – hold me back! It felt like we had been riding for
three days, soaked to the core and very cold from the descent
we sought refuge behind a dumpster and extricated cooking and
eating supplies from the packs. It was then that the sun broke.
Huddling in the entrance of a cement
outhouse – replete with nasty poo smell, we brewed
coffee, made hot chocolate, ate nuts and generally dug for
resolve. With the sun came warmth, with the coffee, motivation,
and with some dry clothes and bright sun now, we headed out on
the climb out of South Platte.
The trail was re-routed here – into
very sweet singletrack -something we are not spoiled into
expecting from the CT. The climb was slow going. I had modified
my 9 speed (no front derailleur) into what I call the
‘kick-back’ two. By simply mounting my granny ring,
but not having any front derailleur – I had 9 speeds. All
I had to do was manually kick the guy over (OVER WH AT). I
spent a great deal of time in that Granny Gear for the
2,600-foot climb to what they call ‘top of the
world’. Whit was off the front as usual, further proving
his cross-breeding with mutant alien climbing beings (See
– X-Files; Conspiracy). He was gone. I suffered in my
granny alone, staying pretty motivated and occasionally seeing
Whit around a corner, but otherwise just suffering along. The
climb was amazing – clean, gorgeous trail through a
burned out area. Nicely graded, and slow. Did I say we were
going slow? We all calculated the impact of carrying the extra
25 pounds of gear, and thought it might increase difficulty by
about 2.6 – barring any presence of alien blood.
The rest of the day went about like that
– slow – gorgeous – and really inspiring. We
covered 49 miles in about 10 hours, clawing our way put of the
wilderness at Bailey (the first thing that greets you is a
storefront that says: Alchohol – Tobacco – Firearms
– this is Bailey). We it the local DQ moments before
closing and downed corn dogs, burgers, milkshakes and anything
else that wasn’t moving. It was another 12 miles of road
to the top of Kenosha Pass – we opted for the safe, close
options and booked a cabin at the luxurious "Glen
Isle" cabins just west of Bailey.
Enter Sue. Whit’s girlfriend had
offered caloric and moral support for Friday night – we
made phone contact, gave her the location of Glen Isle, and
headed the 1.5 miles out of town to our dwelling for the
evening. Our cabin was called "Knicknack’ in the
custom of assigning super-gay names to quaint places in the
mountains (Larry’s Lookout; Garrison’s Getaway;
Northern Exposure – gag me with a transplanted
Californian). We showered, gathered gear, and sat on the porch
guessing how slow we would be going the next day. I jettisoned
about 30% of my gear in hopes of not going quite as slow the
next day; Sue showed up, we shared one beer, and all dropped
like soggy sacks of flour.
DAWN – DAY II
I rolled over and looked out the window
at about 6am and just started laughing. There was about seven
inches of fresh snow, laying over what appeared to be a great
deal of slush. The trees were bowed down like exhausted
warriors – it was winter. My mind did the math – we
were at 8,800 feet and there were seven inches. The top of the
pass was at 10,000 feet – estimations for that altitude
would be about 11 – 12 inches. The top of Georgia Pass
sits as 12,600 feet – I’d put the snow there at
about 18 inches. It was still dumping. We were finished.
I got up, made some coffee and waited for
the troops to awaken to determine a course of action. Dan
slowly crawled out of his bag, and pretty soon we were all
gathered over steaming coffee, talking contingencies, exit
strategies, and ways to re-trench and get the deal done. Two
hours later we were headed back to Boulder, tails between our
legs, wondering how to explain to the world (or the three
people who cared) that our ‘Epic’ was over in 36
hours. Over beers, cramped into Sue’s truck at 8:20 in
the morning we vowed to return on Wednesday night, and bludgeon
our way through as much of the ride as possible.
Tuesday dawned a little chilly. Shenna
gave me a ride down with all my re-packed Colorado Trail
preparation. As we approached the office there was a very pale
broker from the offices beneath us, smoking a cigarette
furtively on the curb. "They took down the World Trade
Center, and New York is on fire" he said. Shock.
Disbelief. An impossibility to comprehend what we were watching
as the second plane crashed into WTC 2. I thought of my sister,
who owns a business in Manhattan, and who was at that moment
staring incredulously at the sky. I thought of my father, who
worked in NYC for twenty years. I thought of all of my
childhood friends who worked in the financial district. Mostly,
and while reading the Sunday New York Times five days after the
attacks, I cried for the regular fucking people who were
getting their coffee at a quarter till eight on a Tuesday
morning who got in the way of an incredibly convoluted global
conflict, and died because of where they worked, or lived, or
because they happened to go to the ATM on their way to work. I
see no way to even address this issue here, and I feel
inadequately prepared from a knowledge or emotional standpoint
to do so. Now, weeks later, we are bombing while we fear our
mail and wonder if someone is going to blow up the Golden Gate
Bridge. I have no answers, but feel very strongly that those
involved will pay the ultimate price, and that death will just
be the beginning of a long terrible road for them. I hope they
are worried for their souls, as I feel they have bartered those
away with no opportunity for redemption.
Friday. Same Week.
By Friday, we were ready for some time
away from the Taliban, and the mounting death toll in NYC. Not
to be crass about the occurences of the week, but a few days in
the woods – away from major landmarks seemed a pretty
good idea. We headed west and south to Buena Vista to drop a
car off, and finished the evening up at Buena Vista Hot Springs
– Hippy Haven. We had driven past this spot numerous
times before on our way to and from Crested Butte. We were
stoked to finally see what the place was like. We rented a dorm
room for something like thirty dollars, a great
‘eclectic’ little room that we shared with only one
other person.
The Hot Springs are out in front of the
main building, and they rock. The pools vary in temperature
from 106 to about 90, and get progressively hotter as you
approach the source of the boiling water in the rock. We
floated, and sweated, and gave thanks that we were a few beers
into the evening and that there was nothing between us and
upwards of 90 miles of high altitude single-track. After a
massive breakfast in the morning we rolled the mile up
Cottonwood Pass to the trailhead, and turned into the woods.
Finally, wheels were touching dirt on a portion of the Trail
that we had not seen before.
The trail quickly became awesome. It is
amazing to me that we had passed this spot for 10 years, and
never ridden this trail. It paralleled the road and headed back
down the pass along the southern side of the drainage. It was
so obvious – even well-marked – yet we had never
taken the time to pull off the road and check it out. It made
me recall something about journeys and not destinations. One of
the many lessons of the trail. We plowed on, taking our time,
enjoying the technical singletrack.
44 miles and eight hours later, we pulled
out onto Highway 50 and crawled into Whit’s car. To
characterize all the different moods of these sections of the
trail would be impossible. It was very technical, with some
pretty brutal, long climbs, and some fantastic descents through
blazing aspens and some gorgeous high country. We saw two
people all day. Unreal. We drove back to the hot springs where
we started, poached showers from the same room we stayed in and
headed out for stage 2 – Kenosha Pass to Breckenridge.
Pulling into the Breckenridge brewery at 8:30 that night we
were all stoked for some serious calories in the form of
carbonated hoppy, beverages, and for the meat eaters among us,
a serious flesh fest in anticipation of the pounding we would
take the next day. We drank too many beers, drove up some
random dirt road outside of Breckenridge, fell out of the car
into a meadow, and fell asleep in the dirt. It was really quite
refreshing, having not done that in quite a long time.
We woke up very early, cotton mouthed and
completely frozen – I’d estimate the temperature at
about 8 degrees. Since we were lying in a riparian area, the
moisture content was high, we all looked like "Little
Debbie" powder-covered donuts. We shook out the bags,
scraped the car off and headed back to Breckenridge for
caffeinated beverages, copious amounts of seared flesh and
carbohydrates. It was a fine meal. The plan was to ride
segments X _X from Kenosha Pass back to Breckenridge – a
casual 38 mile day with a high point of 13, 300 feet atop
Georgia Pass. The day was perfect, and we drove XXXXX Pass over
to Kenosha reflecting on the irony that we were driving around
these huge mountains only to pass right back through them to
finish the day.
As we approached Kenosha, and saw the
trail-head parking full of Denver FreeRiders, I got a little
twisted feeling in my stomach. After the previous day’s
completely uncrowded bliss, I really didn’t want to make
pals with a million Denver knobs. The pain was short lived, as
we changed, lubed, and saddled up. To say we nailed the aspens
would be a great understatement. Not three minutes after
leaving the parking lot we were gawking at the whole South Park
drainage off the south side of the pass. We could see mountains
to the west, and wondered where we would be passing through. It
looked like Breckenridge was a long way, and certainly quite a
few ridges away. The trail rocked, and sped through winding
groves, open spaces, and just basically cranked up the grin
factor.
We hit the base of the climb and had to
cross the XXXXX river. There was a great bridge that crossed,
but the approach was completely sketchy, and the bridge looked
a little wet. Shenna and I walked across, and Whit decided to
ride it. He got his front tire up onto the bridge, stalled,
tried to do the outrigger save with his right foot, slipped off
the side of the bridge and fell the four and a half feet into
the river. To qualify the depth of hilarity that this event
represented, I have to characterize Whit and Whit’s
riding in general. We have collectively decided that Whit
struck a deal with the Devil some time ago that allows him to
not touch the ground when he rides. When I ride behind Whit I
feel like a pregnant hippo that just had nine Big Macs with
Tylenol PM chasers. He glides, I splat. He effortlessly cranks
up 1,100-foot loose climbs like Tinkerbell while I grunt, sweat
and propel my two-inch-long legs like some Lilliputian GI Joe
bike rider toy. Suffice to say: he doesn’t fall much.
As he hit the water, on his side, it was
pretty clear that the water was not warm. After he screamed, it
was really clear. Not to devote a paragraph to Whit shriveling
his privates, but for those of us in the mortal realm, it is
kind of gratifying to see the big people fall in water
sometimes. He crawled out unharmed, and started wailing up the
climb to Georgia Pass to get warm.
The climb was about an hour and a half,
and as is always the case at high altitude, I was amazed at how
slow I climbed. It started pelting a light rain and snow
mixture towards the top. The last half mile of single-track was
truly gorgeous – you could see where it hit the top of
the pass. We crawled up that way, crested, and started the big
descent down into Breckenridge – or so we thought. The
first of many descents to come was outstanding. Starting well
above treeline we barreled downward, through alpine forest as
the trail slowly got more technical, and approached a major
drainage. We rolled along the side of the ridge and continued
planning along at about 10,000 feet.
Now we return briefly to the immense
atrocities in accuracy of the CT Guide book. Looking at the map
of the two segments that we were riding, one could assume an
un-encumbered descent from the top of Georgia Pass all the way
to the brewery. Perhaps not. Perhaps the creators of the
guidebook still believe the earth is flat. Perhaps they are
serious stoners. They clearly have not ever ridden this
particular group of segments. Shenna and I disagreed over the
length of some of the remaining climbs, as we had ridden this
portion of the trail a few times in years past. There were
three significant climbs between the top of Georgia and the
terminus, the longest of which was almost 50 minutes – a
reasonable climb by any Coloradan’s standards, and a
veritable fricking Everest if you are a contributor to a major
single wide mountain trail cycling magazine.
As we descended, and climbed, the weather
was turning worse quickly. On the LAST climb it actually
started sprinkling, the first real weather of the trip. The
tail end of the last descent it was really threatening, and as
we put the bikes on the car it opened up. Sore, and happy to
have timed the ride perfectly, we retired once again to the
brewery for calories and carbonated beverages. The drive over
Boreas was beautiful, we bade Whit goodbye and headed back to
the very pleasant reality of our lives of riding, drinking, and
making the most of each and every day.
As of this writing, we have committed to
completing the trail, with full support, in the summer of 2002.
Updates will be available as we progress. Here’s to
seeing what’s over the next ridge.