So why bike?

Musings on unconventional travel: Day four, Sept. 17, 2002.

The morning arrived with the soft glow of sunlight shimmering off dispersing storm clouds. The night before we had met our first storm, wind and rain pummeling the ground as we rushed to cover our bikes in a tarp. But the morning is blue and warm, and we only have 22 miles ahead of us to our next destination - Telluride, Colo.

Just over two miles outside the mountain resort town, the highway turns away from the canyon and the pleasant incline of the San Miguel River. All we can see ahead of us is elevation, 1,000 feet to Telluride, and a steady stream of cars winding on the narrow highway corridor climbing toward it.

A so we climb, two miles over a tenuous shoulder in the shadow of heavy traffic. The ever-steepening San Juan mountains cradle the highway in virtual suspension, and the only thing between us and a thousand-foot tumble down a rocky slope is a few inches and a mangled guardrail.

Over a mile and a half goes by before we even reach the first pull-out to stop. My lungs are burning from a combination of exhaust and the thin air of high elevation. I stand by the side of the road, wheezing - I’m still out of shape. A couple of mountain bikers, bicycles still strapped to the top of their jeep, greet us. We tell them we’re on our way to Telluride, and they tell us they just came from there. They point out a network of trails weaving their way to the river, now several hundred feet below us. Beautiful single tracks that rip through trees, bounce over rocks and generally make for one exhilarating bike ride - one that my IBEX roadie will never experience.

And as I glance up at the half mile we have yet to climb, the envy sets in. Oh, the convenience of being a day rider - the effortless exhilaration of a one-way downhill trail, the weightlessness of full-suspension, the cool comfort of the jeep waiting below. I lean over my 90-pound bus of a bike and try to focus on something positive.

So why bike? Why load every heavy thing you need to survive on a two-wheeled vehicle powered solely by you? Why the effort? And why, in this fast-paced age of information, would anyone waste so much time moving at 12 mph?

In a word, sustainability - the very essence of survival. Short of throwing on a backpack and walking into the wilderness, there is not a more self-contained mode of travel than a bicycle. Everything that you put into it, you get out. All those backward aspects of living that have been lost over generations of progress become essential again.

Calories, rather than an enemy, become a necessity, and you cherish them. You learn about the excess of modern novelties such as iceberg lettuce, which, at 45 calories per pound and nearly no nutrients, won’t get you very far. You rediscover simple mechanics and learn to fix your bike. By spending vast amounts of time outdoors, you become dependent on nature. You observe the movement of clouds and rotation of the sky, and use them to gauge weather and time. You no longer have computers and TVs and magazines to tell you what to do all the time, and you learn to trust your instincts. You hold your body in the highest regard - it’s your only means of movement - and all of your other possessions become secondary. You discover the contours of landscape and develop an acute sense of place. And through it all, you learn to love the land and yourself in ways that modern living has adamantly denied.

So why bike? Because biking is the only means to escape civilization in a civilized society. Biking is the only way to crawl along the car-choked Interstate and still feel like part of a natural flow. And, short of hiking into the wilderness with a fishing pole and a Swiss army knife, biking is the shortest route to independence in an increasingly dependent world.

And damn if these mountain bikers didn’t catch a glimpse of that feeling as they barreled down the trail - I know they did. But the reason we suffer the uphill battle is to sustain that feeling, to slow progress down a little bit before it passes us by

The rules of bike touring

Day three: Sept. 16, 2002

It's amazing how quickly the daily occurrences on a bike tour become routine.

The nuances of "normal" life - day after day staring at a computer for eight hours a day, driving home, making dinner, reading the paper, and going to bed - suddenly seem distant and strange. Peddling along a crumbling highway in the hot September sun - this seems normal.

As soon as routine begins to kick in, general truths come into view. On my recreational rides, hills were always an ominous presence, something to be avoided if possible. Here, in southwestern Colorado, they're just part of life. The foothills of the San Juan mountains roll away in the distance as far as I can see, gently caressing the San Miguel River Basin in a symbiotic wave, and in making my way over them, I learned that the general effort on a hill is always in your favor.

See, since most longer rides, regardless of distance, start and end at about the same elevation, the general truth of "what goes up must comes down" applies. Say you go up a five-mile long hill at maximum effort, moving at 5 mph. You reach the top, and start barreling down at 40 mph, tears streaming down your cheeks, smile stretched across your face - needless to say, you are exerting no effort. Though your average speed is only 9 mph, generally less than the flatland average, total energy exerted is only 50 percent per mile, also less than the flatland average, which hovers around 75. A steady stream of hills and drops allows you much needed rests wihtout stopping, plus it breaks up themonotany. So yes, I believe in the long run, hills are an advantage.

Here are a few other "rules" of bike touring that I have found along the way:

- The amount of room a vehicle leaves you while passing on the highway is inversely related to its size: small sedans will give you an entire lane while 18-wheelers are content to edge you into the shoulder as they blow by at 60 mph. Oncoming traffic is almost never a factor in this case.

- Do not collect the loose bolts on the road. What starts as a quaint souvenir quickly becomes a 20 pound zip lock bag filling up your rear pannier.

- Foods that do not require refrigeration: mustard, cheese, produce, fruit, and mayonnaise.

- Foods that do require refrigeration: BUTTER! (I learned this at the expense of a perfectly good cotton T-shirt)

- I don't care what anyone tells you, but chocolate is THE perfect bicycling/ backpacking food. It's tasty, it's compact, and at 150 calories per ounce, with a few pounds and a jar of multivitamins, you could head out into the wilderness for a month. In theory.

- Padded biking shorts are a necessity. I was once a scoffer myself, but a few 70 mile rides in nylon cargo pants have shown me the error of my ways.

- Bicycling jerseys, on the other hand, are a waste of money. Unless you are trying to shave two tenths of a second off each mile of a 3,000 mile trip, don't bother with head-to-toe skin tight clothing. Unless, of course, you bought the bicycle jersey because it is made of non-cotton material. Anything non-cotton is good. Cotton = wet and cold for an entire day.

- It doesn't matter how thick your tires are, your bike will always jackknife if you hit the breaks on a patch of ice. This rule applies to cars as well.

- The best campsites are nearly always the ones you just happen upon after walking your bike through the mud for half a mile.

- Do not burn dry cowpies. While a good rule of thumb for surviving a cold night in an area that's short on timber, this does not make for a pleasant campfire experience.

- The morning hours just before sunrise are really the best time for bicycling. Traffic is sparse, the lighting is good, and it really works up an appetite for a big breakfast. However, crawling out of a warm sleeping bag before the sun comes up is damn near impossible.

- When staying at a motel, avoid getting a room on the upper deck; 80 pound bikes do not go up stairs.

- Before leaving on the trip, print out some "business cards," detailing your point of departure, destination, average speed, average mileage per day, and the phrase, "Yes, I do get tired." This is a quick and easy way to answer all questions you are likely to hear a million times.

- And, finally, the unknown is the reason for putting one pedal in front of the other. Never fear it.

The Bedrock Store

Day 2 of a 600-mile bicycle tour in the Four Corners area of Colorado and Utah, Sept. 15, 2002.

By Jill Homer

An exhilarating descent down sharp switchbacks drops us in Colorado, land of extremes. As Geoff and I spin through the Dolores River Valley, our bikes drift into the middle of the road. No car has passed by in half an hour.

We're about nine miles from Bedrock, Colo., only the second town we'd pass through in over 50 miles. Geoff tells me to keep my eye out for a store, as ice cream has become our main motivation on this trip. Sandstone walls box in an sprawling agricultural oasis, still green and glowing from heavy rainstorms the week before.

Bedrock, on the other hand, looks dirty and worn. Those rainstorms that drenched the fertile fields west of here drained into the Dolores in a rush of saturated water. Bedrock, sitting just of the river banks, took the brunt of the drainage. Streets, tree trunks, and foundations are caked in red silt. Everything else in town appears beaten - 1970s-era trailers, vehicles on blocks, boarded windows, crumbling cabins all occupying a four-block radius that just happened to make it on the Rand McNally map.

"There's not a store here," I say, feeling that disappointed pang in my stomach. There's not another town for 21 miles, and we won't pass it today.

And we're just about to blow on by when I catch, out of the corner of my eye, a sign on one of those deteriorating buildings: "Bedrock Store, est. 1891." And in the clouded window is another one: "Open."

As we pull up to the door a scraggly mutt limps up to me, but doesn't seem to care one way or the other if I'm there. The person I assume is owner, a large graying man draped in dirt-caked denim, stands on the porch chatting with a mousy middle-aged woman and a teenage boy. A sign on the door reads "Help stop cattle theft," and I wonder how - and more importantly, in this day and age, why - someone would steal an entire cow.

The cashier doesn't even look up as we walk inside. A man sitting in a chair in the middle of the small single-room market continues making comments about his newspaper to the cashier. The plywood floor creaks under his work boots - again, dirt caked - as he stands up to get more coffee. We don't even exist to them.

Neatly stacked on dusty wooden shelves is, Geoff tells me, any and every kind of food we could ever want to buy. Cans of spaghetti sauce. Black beans. Macaroni and cheese. Kipper snacks. White bread. The brand already chosen for us. Selection means nothing here. If you want ketchup, you get Heinz. Period.

But here, that makes sense. I settle on grapefruit juice, an ice cream sandwich (the generic kind that come in packages of six for a dollar) and a giant russet potato, chosen from a produce section that contained potatoes, onions, carrots and iceberg lettuce - the hardiest, longest-lasting vegetables known to man. Geoff buys chips and Gatorade, and we sit on the balcony to eat. The mutt shuffles around the gravel parking lot. The cars that pass by keep on going, onto Naturita, only a half hour drive away.

In the early 1970s, The Flinstones established Bedrock as the origin of all human civilization. In geology, bedrock is a description for foundation, the first layer of earth. Bedrock is solid, planted, unmoving. Entire formations grow and then deteriorate around it, but Bedrock stays where it is.

Bike touring is such that life starts to move backwards. Technology gives way to the tried and true. Convenience loses importance in the face of survival. The hectic rush to get things done returns to a lingering meander without a destination. On that path, you'll always end up back where you started. And from there on out there's only the retrospective and rose-colored landscape of history ahead.

Before we leave, I make a stop at the outhouse - the perfect stereotype: all wood, a little moon cut out of the swinging door, the toilet just side-by-side holes with no seats, and no toilet paper for miles. This, by far, is my favorite bathroom of the trip. I could stop at a thousand truck stops that I'll never remember, eat a thousand different kinds of ice cream sandwiches and not recall how any of them tasted, but Bedrock, Colo. is burned in my brain - a permanent foundation.

My definition of bicycle touring

Hi. Jill here. I keep that Up in Alaska blog that seems to have gained me a reputation as a crazy snow biker. Fair enough. But here on Veloquent I hope to contribute essays about the love of cycling. I started out in the sport as a tourist, still learning the dynamics of pedaling and shifting even as I dragged 40 pounds of gear and a flat-bar hybrid across the driest, most remote regions of Utah. I wrote a bunch of essays following the trip on a Web site that has long since been sucked into the black hole of cyber space, so I'd like to post a few of them here. The first one was written Sept. 14, 2002: An account of the first day of my first bike trip.

"My definition of bicycle touring"

That annoying little voice inside my head tells me to crank it. My wheels are spinning, barely. Sweat drips through my helmet and streaks of red dust stick to my arms.

You never realize it when you're driving, but the only way out of Moab, Utah is up, a nearly-continuous climb. As Geoff and I lumber up the shoulder of Highway 91, I fix my gaze on distant buildings scattered near towering vermillion cliffs. They take forever to reach me.

Before this trip, it's hard to remember what exactly I thought bike touring was. Lingering views, sprawling vistas, maybe a little work. I sure didn't imagine burnout on the first day. When daylight will allow us to go no further, we pull over and park a mere 50 yards from the road.

And thus ends the first day of my very first bike tour, Moab to Moab via the San Juan mountain range and 600 miles of the most remote highway the lower 48 has to offer. It was supposed to be a simple day ... 30 miles from the Colorado River valley to the base of the La Salle mountains. In front of me now is an expanse of sagebrush-dotted range cut off only by the horizon, deep orange and shimmering in the September sunset.

We kick cowpies from a small clearing and set up our tent just as the landscape descends into shades of purple. As a lay in the spiny grass watching erratic bats chase bugs visible only to them, I regret not getting in shape before the trip. Every muscle, every bone in my body is melting into the warm soil and I doubt my ability to get up, even to go to bed. The camp site, hidden behind a barb wire fence in a cluster of pinion pines, feels stark and uninviting on private property, a grazing range. We should have made it at least 10 miles further tonight, but night snuck up on us. The next 500 miles feel like an eternity away.

Geoff, most likely just as worn out and tired, musters up the energy to lean toward me.

"Isn't it amazing?" he says. "We just biked here."

While working as a journalist during the 2002 Winter Olympics, I only heard mirror responses from everyone I talked to ? "the experience of a lifetime," "a once-in-a-lifetime experience," "a lifetime of experiences in one." The Olympics were a splash of snow in a colorful racing whirl. The world blinked, and they were gone.

Bicycle touring is anything and everything but a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It is tamarisk dancing incessantly on the layered shores of the San Juan river. It is a flapping tent standing against a lightning storm on the open plateau. It is a tiny roadside grocery store in a town that by car would be nothing more than a blur. It is wildlife in the form of flattened fur on a roadside and literature in the form of faded
billboards. It is slow and lumbering, discarded bolts rusting on the highway. It is adrenaline-inducing at 35 mph and agony-inducing at 5. Itis hills that will stop your heart and views that will stump your soul. It is pinnacles and peaks and houses and streams and desert and forest and road, open road, endless roads, but it is not, I am convinced, not a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

It, simply, is life.

One that I should keep on living.