Well, the past couple days were the most fun i've had in awhile, attending and volunteering at the first ever Multnomah County Bike Fair, a spoof on the traditional county fair. Everything from apple-bobbing to tall-bike jousting (and a few unregulated fireworks), it was a hoot, entirely organized and put on by bike-lovers.
I've been in a lot of cities and i think Portland is the best and most active bike place anywhere in America. Not so much to do with the official bike infrastructure of lanes and stuff (in that respect Portland is only slightly above average, and the average is lousy) but in the sheer numbers of people who bike and all the grassroots events and groups and energy. After months out there in ordinary America, feeling oftentimes like, um, a freak on 2 wheels, its awfully refreshing to be back here where bikes rule (at least in the community of people i hang out with most.) Portland is so great in fact i'm tempted to say its too good for its own good. Yeah, the mainstream political/economic powers here blow big chunks just like anywhere, and the Police are almost shockingly clueless (don't even get me started), but the human level is exploding with neat stuff, so much so that i dread the thought of the "scene" itself becoming a commodity, a source of fashion tips for the commercializers, an unwitting library of superficial gleanings and ideas for the brand makers and capitalizers. The difference here, and the thing that might save Portland or at least a significant portion of its community from dollarization, is the fact that what's going is part of a many-faceted movement (first noticed by mainstream observers with surprise and disdain at the 1999 Seattle WTO protests) of opting out of hyper-commercial culture. You can't buy them off, because they (we) have aspirations that run directly against the American consumer frenzy. This is not simply another twitching of fashion sensibility that will be soon enough co-opted and presented for sale at Wal-Mart. In fact, particular fashions or looks or sounds have very little to do with the new counter-world. It is something deeper, part of an oceanic movement. Or like this: a great river has been dammed and channeled into orderly canals and pipes, every drop serving the needs of a vast project of growth and! power-generation. There's some evaporation and spillage but nothing t
hreatens the overall enterprise. But eventually right there at the dam and the huge intake pipes, wind and rockfall and settling of bedrock enable a stream to trickle its way into a new channel, just a bit at first then more and more. Somehow this stream went unnoticed by the lazy and self-satisfied project engineers, and even still they idly imagine that with a bit of back-hoeing or creative landscape alterations they can either stifle the errant stream or pipe it back into the humming powerhouse. Too late. This is more than a babbling peice of site-mitigation. Water is seeping under, over, down in places the inspectors havn't even thought to look. The tour busses are still disgorging their loads of admiring Peorians at the glass-walled visitor center but the reservoir is already visibly dropping and the best the engineers can hope for is to escape the control room with their lives. The real attraction is the raging torrent carving a muddy new canyon away from the wilting rows of Monsanto tomatoes and clapboard trophy homes. Have i taken this metaphor too far? Okay, sure, but you get what i'm saying. Now don't think i don't believe in commerce as such, people will always want to get things, trade with other tribes, etc. But the world of mega-capital and logo-ism has met its match in a counter-reality that models itself as the antithesis of modern commercialism. As such the counterculture is both radical and profoundly conservative. Self-reliance, mutual aid, frugality, opposition to empire and government intrusion: these are the hallmarks of true conservatism. (I mean, for what its worth.) Like the Amish, you know? Or pre-war rural America. Think of how popular square-dancing (to live string-bands) is in the Portland counterculture. Drawing on (and reviving) a vital American cultural form, to self-entertain. No corporate agenda, no Hollywood tie-ins, no commercial radio airplay, in fact all completely under the radar of the would-be co-optors: Norse and Elks Halls full of young and old freaks and normals alike having a blast, dancing away. Or Craft Night at the Nocturnal, Midnight Bike Rides, house-party screenings of DIY movies, Portland zine symposium, SCRAP, Free Geek, bake sales, backyard bonfires, Last Thursday, middle Wednesday, and on and on.
Of course i still go to silly Hollywood blockbusters. I'm only human. Its hard to fight more than one or two revolutions on any given day. Besides, think of all the misery and unemployment down there in La La Land if we all stopped forking over at Regal-Loews-Cinneplex.
Cars kill people, bikes do not. Doesn't get much more basic than that.
I'm in Portland for a few days, good time to be here as Mini-BikeSummer
is going on, all sorts of fun events. Sadly, two bicyclists were killed
yesterday by a probably-drunk van driver on Belmont, not far east of my
old apartment. Nothing underscores more the fundamental difference
between muscle-powered and engine-powered transportation. No one, so far as
i know, has ever killed another person while riding a bike. But the
speed and size of motor vehicles makes the roadsides into a mass memorial.
You know those little white roadside memorial crosses? I discovered on
my tour that there's a lot more of them than you ever notice from
inside a speeding car. One day i decided to count them, there were 38 just
on my side of the road in a 75 mile stretch. That may have been
exceptional, but my point is, a lot of good people die in the mad rush to get
from A to B in a car. And when a car kills a bicyclist? Well,
its a bitter pill. It upsets me and i'm not even family or
acquaintance of the two who were killed.
I'm not currently in a "person-powered" mode of travel but i thought i'd just offer some observations based on my recent wanderings.
The most striking thing right now is that, even though i am in a long-planned hiatus in my bike touring, and even though i had frankly reached a point of almost terminal fatigue of deserts and headwinds, i miss being out there on my bike really bad. So bad that i almost decided to complete the loop back to Portland right now, but the time frame would have been cutting it too close for comfort. I don't like to feel rushed when its only my legs turning the wheels. Besides, the second half of my original plan is the biking back to Portland via Burning Man, which in any case i already have a ticket for. Black Rock City or Bust!
But i realize now that it will be hard to stay in touring shape for the 2 months until then, no matter how much hiking and jumping-jacks i do. So who knows what'll happen. Burning Man is always a wild-card anyway.
But that brings me to something which for me is very important: integrity to my original intentions and statements. I said i was setting out to do roughly such-and-such a trip. When i went to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail in 2001 i took it seriously and completed the whole thing, and i'm glad i did. The sense of completion of a major goal and the keeping of one's word, even if i never actually swore on a Bible and no one's life and livlihood really depended on it. It was a personal thing, trail as multi-faceted crucible of spiritual development. Am i making sense? But the crucial difference between the AT and my current travels is this: the AT, despite its extreme physical difficulty (way more so than most trails out west) was constantly and intensely social and communal. I started as a solo traveler but from day one was immersed in a northward-walking community of (literal) fellow travelers. At times i did seek and find solitude (for example by intentionally camping alone in the woods rather than at a designated campsite) but most days were bookended by the close social atmosphere of the shelter, campsite, or hostel. I got to know people really well in a short period of time, and in the course of the trek was part of several informal, ever-shifting, but very close (almost familial) groupings of thru-hikers. The differences with a solo-bike tour (especially on an unusual route and season) are obvious. Although i met hundreds of people, was showered many times with generosity, saw incedible sites, performed physically beyond anything i've done before, it really was a solo journey. Every day, day in and day out, it was just me, a little speck out there in the hugeness. Everyone else was just a shifting panoply of strangers. My one real lifeline to a sense of community in fact has been writing these dispatches and knowing that there have been friends following along. On a trip like this you have to have an outlet for processing the experience. The sheer density of the experience is almost incomprehensible, so snapshots and journal entries and rambling remembrances help make some sense of it.
So, what am i driving at? I guess i'm just trying to reconcile what i see as the gap between intentions and realities in this phase of my travels. The AT was total completion, this current agenda something less so. And yet for all that, even the AT is just an arbitrary scratching of dirt. Some obsessive completists start in Florida and end at Cape Gaspe, Quebec. There's never an absolute endpoint in this lifetime. Heck, even when i climbed Katahdin at the AT's end, i wasn't content to come back down via the same route so continued over the mountain and down the other side before hitchhiking back to civilization.
Now i'm on a bus from Reno to San Francisco. Thanks to Ms. C. Reynolds for a couch to crash on and a garage to store my bike and trailer in. I'll be in SF a couple days then continue northward to Eugene, Portland, Seattle. I'm in the process of planning out my next 2 months, i foresee more hiking and biking (on borrowed bikes), some paying work would be good, either that or sell some paintings or superfluous vital organs. doing some volunteering would be good too, something of service, you know? Although i like to think my travels are a form of service too, to be one of those crazy people who shows by example that we don't have to live in an endless constant automotive loop. If I can do it, believe me anyone can. Join the revolution! (And it really is one.) It's way funner than sitting inside in the flickering light with your brain in a cathode daze. Although i sure like the Weather Channel and Comedy Central.
Long ago, but not so long ago that humans were not yet wandering around here, what we call the Great Basin was a vast inland archipelago of mountain islands rising above the cold blue waters of enormous freshwater lakes, lakes larger than today's Great Lakes: Lahonton and Bonneville, now shrunken to salty remnants ringed by bony desert fortress-hills. The mountain ranges are still here of course, and in fact are more island-like than even in the glory days of the late ice age. For then there were huge continuous forests of evergreens and aspens and thick grasses along the sinuous shorelines, such that one could trace an unbroken line of trees from what is now the Mohave desert north and eastward to the Rockies. Now the ranges of this huge high desert province rise from brown sagelands to forested subalpine and alpine heights, but the desert valleys ("basins" of the basin and range) separate these high oases as effectively as any sea between islands. Even the babbling mountain streams (like Lehman Creek here where i am) just disappear into the rocks at the foot of the range as if into a mysterious invisible ocean.
I am high in the Snake Range of eastern Nevada, surrounded on all sides by baking treelessness, but camped in a forest of Engelmann Spruce, Limber Pine, and Quaking Aspen. A mile up a trail is a grove of Bristlecone Pines, some of which are 3200 years old. The harsher the site conditions the hardier and longer lied they are. During the ice age they lived 5,000 vertical feet below along the lapping waters of Lake Bonneville and here at 10,000 feet everything was under a glacier. The ice has retreated but amazingly still persists in the shadowed headwall of Wheeler Peak as Wheeler Glacier, the only one left in the entire Great Basin. I hiked up into the cirque yesterday, an impressive place, the route still snowy this early in the summer. Oh how great it is to be up in the coolness after all that hot canyonland!
Today i hiked to the summit of Wheeler, 13,063 feet elevation, most of it a steep slog up the shoulder behind the impossibly vertical northeast headwall. Highest summit in Nevada, though the highest *point* in Nevada is several feet higher in elevation on the side of Boundary Peak next to California. Hiking at these elevations is slow going but there was a guy who jogged up just behind me. He did the 4 mile, 3,000 foot climb in 1 hour 20 minutes. Crazy. I mean i know i should be impressed, and who am i to judge, but he was a loon. I think the altitude was affecting him, or he had an extreme runner's high, the way he kept giggling and dancing little jigs.
Anyway, Great Basin National Park and Wheeler Peak. Check it out sometime. There's a nice limestone cavern you can tour too, Lehman Cave.
And not nearly least, i want to say a big humongous thank you to Mr. Andrew Morton, my tech-master, who made it possible for me to do both a mailinglist and a weblog from the road and even lent me his Pocketmail device. Andrew you ROCK, and your bike tours last summer are definitely part of what inspired me to do this trip.
Andrew keeps a regular weblog plus links to all kinds of stuff, check it out at http://www.drewish.com
Zion was so great, i think maybe it surpasses even Yosemite in sheer amazement factor. Tough call, and no point pitting one against the other, but the color at Zion is so rich, and the sheer number of cliffs, monoliths, side canyons, narrows. The Navajo Sandstone which makes up the bulk of Zion Canyon is the thickest/tallest sandstone layer in the world, 1 to 3 thousand feet of sheer vertical relief. I hiked up to Observation Point on a trail that they'd never be allowed to build these days, given the aesthetic impact of blasting switchbacks up the side of a nearly sheer cliff. Just as well maybe, but i'm glad for such trails anyway. Like most of the useful trail infrastructure in the West it was built by the CCC. Why can't we have the CCC again? I guess because trails and campgrounds don't have anything to do with securing geopolitical advantage and fuel supplies.
Also hiked to Emerald Pools, where you can walk behind two waterfalls, then up the Virgin River narrows and up into Orderville Canyon narrows. Sheer walls rising on either side, you walk in the river itself. Tiring but fascinating experience.
In the campground the ground was so hard i bent 3 tent stakes sideways but nice cottonwood shade and very nice neighbors Lance and Laura who plied me with excellent food and drink. Her potatoes au gratin were the best i've ever had, had to do with the garlic.
Today biked the 60 final miles to Cedar City. Crossed the divide from the Colorado River basin into the Great Basin, where the streams go nowhere but into the shimmering desert. Sometimes they disappear into the rocks at the base of a range, other times flow into a salty sink or an impossibly blue terminal lake like Pyramid Lake.
Had a good tailwind, thank God, there have been some headwind days that just about wiped me out. Like the day i rode from Page to Kanab, i've never been more exhausted than that, i rode into town like a windburned zombie, legs on automatic, face encrusted with salt. That's why i love to eat these 50 cent frozen burritos (not frozen by the time i eat them) as snacks and lunch, each one has 25% RDA of sodium. Plus i have a salt shaker and i drink gatorade. Never much drank it before and 90% of people who buy it probably don't need it but in extreme sweating situations it works.
So anyway, this marks the end of the spring 2003 portion of my self-propelled travels. My itinerary and plans have obviously evolved considerably but i always knew they might and stated so months ago. I've learned a hell of a lot in the course of 2300 miles, not least is that 2300 miles is enough for consecutive self-propelled miles of solo travel, not that i won't miss it almost immediately. The amazing thing is that for all i've seen and done (including hiking down the Grand Canyon, up Zion, scads of beaches and headlands on the coast, redwood groves, biked up and down a million hills, met dozens of great people, etc etc), in spite of all that i *still* feel like i rushed thru and i have a huge list of places i'd like to return to someday and explore in even more depth. The more you see the more you realize how much is there.
For those of you who get this as an email, this will probably be the last until further notice. I thank you so much for subscribing, knowing you are there following my travels
has been gratifying and a source of strength for me. I'll keep posting to the weblog as i see fit, so check in on it. I have a hard time not rambling on and on when i start writing, but i figured i'll do the actual mailinglist only for travels that are specific muscle-powered journeys.
I admit the irony of me of all people loading my bike into a motor vehicle and driving it some hundreds of miles. Not ideal i admit, especially for someone who frankly sort of relishes being counter to the death culture of fossil burning and useless consumption. But what am i gonna do? It's beautiful out here but its also on the wrong side of about 12 ranges of high desert mountains from where i want to get to. I'll do a hydrocarbon calculation and make up for it in spades later.
Well, i'm in Zion National Park, which i'll call the destination of the Spring '03 portion of my bike trip. I'll bike on to Cedar City but poetically speaking Zion is the perfect endpoint. If nothing else, the Mormon pioneers who named the place knew a sacred spot (Zion means place of refuge or sanctuary in ancient Hebrew) when they saw one. Zion Canyon is one of those places. Sort of a red sandstone Yosemite is the best way i can think to describe it. I plan to do at least a couple of hikes, i've been here before but it is a place to return to.
Utah of course is the center of the Mormon empire. I don't really want to get started on Mormonism, precisely because it is a subject that fascinates me and i really would have too much to say on the subject. I'll say this much, small town Mormons are interesting, they're like rednecks but without the booze (except for the drunken jack-mormons) which isn't entirely bad. Lord knows the only thing worse than dumb rednecks is drunken dumb rednecks. Hey, don't think i'm branding all small-town people as dumb rednecks. Most of them are great. But you know the ones i'm talking about, they tend to stand out and represent the whole socio-cultural class, for example when they yell "faggot" at me as they tire-squeal past me, or from the sheer number of 'merican flags pasted, plastered and strung from their pickups. Oh i feel a rant coming on. I'm so sick of American flags. Aren't we all, like a year ago? Growing up i was taught to respect the flag, i was proud to have flag raising duty every morning in front of the school, and heck, i was a Boy Scout, and in a military community to boot. To me the flag meant what i thought of as the American way: justice, equality, the unhindered fulfillment of dreams. Naturally i grew up and learned (and continue to learn) the many and various terrible things done under cover of that flag. Still, ideally it is a symbol for all Americans. Native Americans certainly make liberal use of it, especially the Navajo at their many jewelry stands. But man, i just want to trample and burn every American flag i see these days. I guess i shouldn't blame the flag itself, rather the dimwitted "patriots" and commercial exploiters who have turned it into little more than a decorative shit-wipe. And they think they are patriotic!Okay, enough ranting. Gotta get to the Ranger talk.
There are four major deserts in the American West (aside from various smaller desert and steppe areas): the Mohave, the Sonoran, the Colorado Plateau, and the Great Basin. By the time i get to Cedar City, Utah i will have traversed the first 3 of those on my bike, plus of course 1200 miles of coast. That's plenty. I'm using my motel budget and renting a van to transport me and my bike the 500 miles from Cedar City to Reno. I came to this decision today as i rode 80 long miles into a desert headwind. I've amazed myself many many times on this trip at the things i've accomplished but i'm kind of tired of having every single day feel like a super-human feat. Yesterday a woman asked me in total seriousness if i was an Olympic athlete in training. That's flattering but like i said, 3 out of 4 deserts is enough (for now.) The headwind thing is the real clincher. I do still plan to bike from Reno to Burning Man though.
Having said all that, i will really really really miss being on the road on my bike. I understand the guy who's been out there touring for 10 years straight (Richard Gregg.) But i also love hiking, and visiting with my friends and family, and various other things, so it'll be good to do that stuff. Although my more radical acquaintances in the Portland bike world may shun me for using a motor vehicle to transport my bike. Not very pure, i must admit, but sainthood is too much of a burden for any person, that's why they don't confer it until after you die.
I'm in Page, AZ right now, hot but apparently Portland was even hotter today. Crazy. The aforementioned ride was 80 miles because of the usual lack of water in between. Beautiful though, especially the Echo and Grand Wash cliffs, a high fault scarp that runs for tens of miles parallel to the highway, until you climb it in a 3 mile/1,000 foot burst. The crappy thing (beside the wind) was the rumble-stripped shoulder, makes riding a chore, evading the rumble and the passing trucks at the same time. Another factor in my decision to not ride across Nevada, my bike route map of highway 50 says it has a rumble strip most of the way.
Route all day was on the Navaho Reservation. Interesting place, on the one hand everyone seems to live in tiny block houses or little round hogan-style houses, on the other hand almost everyone seems to drive a big shiny pickup truck. Not many bikers must come through because twice i startled horses grazing along the road, usually horses pay me no particular attention but one of them (a mule actually) was hilarious: when it saw me it ran full tilt along side me then stopped abrubtly in a cloud of dust and just stared at me (head turning) as i rode on.
Not that the Grand Canyon isn't desert but up on the rim it is not actually desert, it is nice fairly shady pine woods, and cool enough in the morning to actually need my sleeping bag. I'll miss that. That is, now that i'm heading down across the blazing openness to Page and into Southern Utah.
And my legs ache too after that Canyon hike. So much so in fact that i felt the need to take an extra "zero" day at Desert View campground at the eastern edge of the park. Nice view, otherwise not much to do but read and eat soft-serve ice cream from the snack bar. I met this guy who created and sells this multi-media Grand Canyon CD Rom (which he gave me a copy of as he repaired the display terminal) and it turns out he lived for 15 years in Ballard a stone's throw from my folks' house, teaching school at Whittier Heights. Now he lives in Enterprise, California and runs his CD rom business (inyopro.com) from home in the shadow of the towering eastern Sierra Nevada escarpment, the Owens Valley, which if you've ever read "Cadillac Desert" you know has a crazy history in the battle to water Los Angeles. Literal battles, check the book out some time.
I now understand clearly that being in good shape for biking and hiking are two different things. Not that i was out of hiking shape, but the heat really drains you and the hiking uphill thousands of feet on the way out. Word to the wise, if you ever plan a serious Grand Canyon hike, train for it rigorously. Hike up and down mountains regularly, etc.
The best selling book at all the Grand Canyon gift shops is called "Death in the Canyon", a narrative compendium of all the many fatal mishaps over the years.
...is one way of thinking of the Grand Canyon. The gentle vales are at the top, and the further down you go the more extreme and difficult it gets. The heat makes it so you can't (or don't want) to move a muscle between about 1 and 6 PM. I'd like to hike down in here in winter sometime, when you need crampons on the upper reaches but its pleasant down below.
Once you get well down below the rim it really feels like being in a huge and unique range of mountains, unique because of the amazing horizontal layering of strata. Any one of the cliff layers (Kaibab limestone, Coconino sandstone, Redwall limestone, etc.) would be a Park-worthy attraction in itself, but put them all atop each other and the effect is overwhelming. And the "canyon" far is more than one singular thing (although it is that), it is a vast complex of landscape, canyons within canyons, amphitheatres, buttes, ravines, cliffs upon cliffs, rolling plateaus and mesa tops, hidden creeks and waterfalls in side canyons.
A couple observations:
An afternoon rain shower that rather than cool things off, immediately evaporates off the baking rocks and makes the air swelter like Carolina in July. But the rain also brings out all the scents of various desert plants, fresh and pungent.
Above the campsite, the vertical headwalls of Monument Creek rising up 3500 feet. From the top on West Rim Drive they've named this spot "the Abyss", so here i am in the bottom of it.
The Hermit trail was a marvel of construction, even though they took the gentlest route down through natural breaks in the Kaibab and Redwall cliffs.
Monument Creek is only partially flowing but below the campsite is a nice section of little pools and chutes of cool water.
Never made it all the way down to the Colorado, it was one of those times when you test your own physical limits and understand just what they are. Even though it was only another 400 vertical feet down the side canyon from where i turned back, again the mountain-in-reverse analogy: it was like when a mountain climber is so close to the summit but can't quite make it on risk of death, not that i was in any remote danger of dying but it is situations like these where you understand internally what the human limits are, and how going too far past them would kill you (exposure, exhaustion, heatstroke, etc.) A lot more people have died here than on Mount Everest. So of course you draw back short of that horizon (which we'll all cross someday without even trying.) And anyway, i'll ride my bike across the River in a couple days. The Colorado River, not the River Styx.
A fat yellow and black striped lizard chasing after a peice of cottonwood pollen then snatching it in its mouth and munching it down like a peice of cotton candy. Then stopping in front of me and doing what looks like pushups before running off again.
The inside of a composting outhouse in the inner canyon on a summer day: I decided i could wait until evening rather than broil like a lobster.
My stupid camera (Olympus D-520. Olympus D-520) broke down again, i swear i'm gonna keep sending it back to warranty service until they realize they should just replace it altogether. In fact i'll request that specifically this time.