Stickers

Due to scheduling conflicts and injuries, this blog has suffered some the past couple of weeks. Here to tide you over until next week is a picture of some stickers and a little foreshadowing: next week may bring some very big news.

Stupid Whiny Times

Things are going very well. Yawp has been offered the lease for the space it wants to occupy. There may be some rad events in the works. Life, as they say, is as good as puppies on a rainbow trampoline. 

Despite the general top-notchness of things, there come days when everything inexplicably seems horrid, and a person comes to hate one's own marvelous life. This is the worst kind of badness. This is even worse than first-world problems such as "I've run out of storage room in my larping shed" and "I hate how long it's taken me to count all of this money." This kind of problem is saying "I'm alive in one of the best times and places that has ever existed on this planet, and it sucks." 

I knew I was in the midst of stupid whiny times, and there I did not want to stay, so I took a trip to Three Sisters. I rode up to the fork near the top of Evergreen mountain and told the trail "I'm having stupid whiny times," but at that point I realized that I was no longer having stupid whiny times because I was really enjoying myself. Stupid whiny times had ended, unnoticed by me, within two minutes of the trailhead.

Riding a bike is preventative maintenance for stupid whiny times, eliminating at least 80% of them. So lets do ourselves and all of our friends a favor and get out there as often as we can. Sometimes I wonder what my dog would be like if I didn't walk him for three days and then gave him a bunch of and caffeine. He would be like the Flash in that he'd be able to vibrate through solid walls. People probably aren't much different.

Tangentially related, here are all of the pictures I've taken at that particular fork. In fact, let's have a quiz. Question: which of these bikes is not like the others? 

Answer: the invisible one. You're right!

In closing, I hope your week is free of stupid whiny times.

Five Other Things to Do

There are things that keep us from riding our bikes. Injury. Broken equipment. Ennui. Weather (although there's no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothing). Sometimes, these things keep us from riding our bikes for a long time. Unable to concentrate, we pace about like a dog that's missed his walk. Here are ten things you can do to occupy yourself, provided your injury doesn't involve a full body cast.

1. Read The Better Angels of our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined  by Steven Pinker. If, say, the reason you're not riding your bike is injury, you may be spending more time in the car than you were, which would mean that you're seeing a lot of humanity at its worst and barely avoiding accidents far more often than when riding a bike. Should this be the case, Mr. Pinker's book will remind you just how lucky you are to live where and when you live. If you did not get shot, stabbed, or tortured today, you are ahead.

2. Watch all three seasons of Louie on Netflix. It's a wonder that this show can be so funny and serious at the same time. If you don't like laugh tracks, this show is for you.

3. Call three friends you haven't spoken to in a month. They will likely be out doing something fun and active with their uninjured bodies, but hey, at least you tried. 

4. Cook a really good meal. Spend a few hours in the kitchen making something from scratch. Since you're not riding your bike, you'll be putting on weight anyway. Why not do it right?

5.  Clean your bikes. Sometimes parts fall off. Cleaning your bikes will help you to notice these things and prevent future injury. If you like your front teeth, you won't want to ride without all of your chainring bolts.

So take it easy. You deserve it, you crusher you. 

Flipbook: Absolutely Killing it

You know how it goes. There's a section of your favorite trail that is so difficult that you can barely even hike it in cycling shoes. You refer to this section as "the last pitch of El Capitan." Then, one day, as you're dismounting your bike for this section, you hear a bell ding behind you and, to your complete astonishment and horror, a stranger rides past without breaking his pace or his face. Then you might discover that all of your friends ride this particular section. When you show a picture of this section to your grandma, she says she cleans it on a unicycle. So then you get up your courage and you attempt to ride El Capitan, and then for the next few months you refer to the section as "the place where I broke my helmet" or "the place where front wheels become Pringles." A few months pass. Something very weird happens when you arrive at this section. You clean it.

One year later, as you ride this section, it occurs to you that it once seemed difficult and made you anxious, and now it's just a bump in the trail. When other people talk about "the terrifying shin-tenderizer" it takes you a minute to remember what they're talking about.

Getting better at something is usually a difficult thing to detect. Am I a better person this year than last? I wish I knew (or maybe I don't). While I'd hesitate to say I'm a better person because I can now clean "section faceplant," it is important to experience improvement.

Click on the pictures below to watch Biggity absolutely kill a tricky switchback. Confidence + 10.

Remember: you can do it. If not now, someday (though you can probably do it now). As the weather is getting colder you'll be wearing more clothes anyway, so give that tricky switchback a try. 

Don't let Ogre and Krampus fool you. Not all mythical creatures are pink and green.

Rainbow's End

The day began strangely, flimsy and dull as a floor mat. I had no plans, no looming chores. It was shaping up to be the kind of day that gives people bad couch-posture and raises their cholesterol. I put my Surly Pugsley on the car--because it was the bike nearest the garage door--and drove into the mountains. I found myself parked along Mill Gulch road having only glanced briefly at Google maps before leaving the house.

The grade was steeper than is translated in the photographs. Of all the granny gears in the world, the Pugsley has one of the granniest, and I spent some time in that gear and out of the saddle. It took an hour and fifteen minutes to climb what it took seven minutes to descend. 

I've never heard a sound like the Pugsley made descending this road at forty miles per hour. The Larry is a 3.8" tire, and on pavement at ten miles per hour it sounds like a vibrating phone might sound underwater. At forty miles per hour, the throbbing of the tires' knobs puts your hands to sleep, everything goes white, and you pass through the wilderness like feedback through an amp at a rock concert.

Before the descent, however, there was dirt. It continued skyward at an impossible angle. Again, you can't tell by looking at the pictures, but this is the kind of hill where if you drop your last Wintogreen Lifesaver, it is gone forever. Should some hapless squirrel manage to get himself in front of that Lifesaver, he will be vaporized into a red cloud of tasty freshness. 

Despite what Google's maps had shown, the road dead ended here, and I was just too tired to scale this pitch. I really can't explain how steep this is. I hurt my neck taking this picture.

Feeling a little defeated, I turned around and made my way back to the car--nobody likes to spend more time in the car than on the trial. When I say "made my way," I mean "plummeted on a shrieking rocket while the wind rent my lips to shreds." Seriously. Despite a pleasant temperature I'd estimate at sixty-five degrees, that little spot in the middle of my forehead, just above my sunglasses, was so cold after this descent that I felt my head might crack apart. It was like the worst ice cream headache.

The car's clock told me it was just after noon. The thin, rubbery day threatened to flop upon me once more. You know, I think it has to do with the angle of the sun. In the autumn, the sun's light gets flimsy, which tends to make me restless and sad. For whatever reason, I was able to find the gumption to not drive straight home to sweep out the garage or lie prone on the floor, but instead I turned up Fall River Road and drove past a couple of promising dirt roads until I passed the sign for Rainbow Road. I remembered looking up Rainbow Road a year or so ago when I was planning a trip here:

As it turns out, Rainbow Road is very well suited to the Pugsley. Though it's at times impolitely steep and riddled with pillow-sized rocks, the more air I let out of the Larrys the better they sorted through the mess. Remember that Looney Tunes bicycle with the plungers for tires? 

Snow. The Pugsley sees its future.

The three-mile climb gets strenuous at times, but there are no hike-a-bike sections. Despite being on a "road," you really get the feeling that you're in the middle of the wilderness. There are cabins and houses scattered intermittently all the way up, but I only saw two people and one dog (separate parties, oddly). This is the kind of place where you feel like you've actually done it. You've stepped beyond the race of rats, beyond your Verizon zone, and into yourself. A mind can forego its preoccupations, and in fact its occupations, and perform that periodic necessity: focusing on nothing at all. 

Poor planning usually leads to things like flatting without a spare and having to walk your bike nine miles in the wrong direction while your cell phone is on your bedroom dresser, and spending your last few dollars on a tainted sandwich at Arby's, where you'll spend six hours making little condiment package structures while waiting for a ride. Today, however, there was a pot of gold at the end of Rainbow Road.

If you're wondering what it's like to descend a rocky fire road on a Pugsley, then imagine stuffing fifteen marshmallows into your mouth and then running as fast as you can into the Charmin bear. It's just like that.  This was my first real ride on the Pugs. I would put a 3.8" tire around my heart if I could.