Colorado

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strand-hill

So I’ve manged not to get eaten by a bear (yet), to only fall off my bike a few times and to go on some pretty amazing rides with some fantastic people. Traveling like this is a weird mix of enjoying the time away and simultaneously missing what you have at home. That and wondering how the hell people actually tamed the west in wagons with no GPS. Earlier this week, we camped over a mine shaft that was about 4′ tall – imagine hacking your living out of the earth in dark, continually flooding hole in the ground that could crush you instantly. Makes designing websites seem fairly simple by comparison.

All told, the rides have been a sucess, in the sense that nothing was broken, and no one got to badly hurt. The trails were tough but not impossible.  Today though, got interesting. The high point of the day was putting my bike’s rear suspension back together with a radiator hose clamp, a peice of a pump gasket and a hammer gel wrapper while sitting in the middle of the woods (yes, we had all these items with us) MacGuyver would be proud. It is apparently mayor brad’s training program  that we will be drinking lots’o Pabst this evening in to counteract the effects of today’s  five hour hammer fest. We’ll see how it goes.

Sidenote – Germ has some pictures up from their trip which nicely overlapped with mine.

Driving

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sunset

To borrow a turn-of-phrase from Badowski, you have to to wake up and make a commitment to excellence to get out of Texas under 10 hours. Maintaing  an average trip speed of 65 mph requires dedication, a strong bladder, an extremely long playlist, and the willingness to risk renal failure from the mix of coffee and Redbull. If I could find a way to refuel the wagon with out stopping in craphole towns like Vega, i would in fact pay double for my gas for some kind of mid-flight refueling solution.

All told, my  drive out to Red River is about twelve and a half hours, with very little interstate. Back roads mostly – two-lane state highways, some (especially in New Mexico) with only one lane-width of actual pavement (interesting at 80mph), and not a soul in sight to the horizon. Giant thunderheads spit out squall lines onto the hot plains kicking up true toad stranglers in the eastern New Mexico, with triple rainbows in my rearview mirror as they pass.

You also get the welcome and physiologically confusing experience of having the temperature drop 60 degrees from 104 in Austin to 45 at the top of the pass coming into Red River. And finally, sunset over the mountains, with the sky lit up like the fourth of july.

The Gear Closet

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I spent last night doing few thing. There was HALO. There was some bike riding. There was some eating of wings (spicy ranch, you are a saucy mistress). Then there was the cleaning of my apartments equivalent of the garage, a 6’x5′ closet sandwiched between the kitchen and the bathroom. The goal of this domestic adventure, was to excavate enough old gear (to be relocated to a storage unit) to allow the accommodation of one of the three bikes currently inhabiting the apartment (the other two live in the dining room. really).

For me this was quite a trip down memory lane, as I’ve been collecting camping and climbing gear for almost two decades now, we uncovered a few treasures of questionable value.

  • The coleman backpacking stove that leaked fuel at the supply-line juncture. Nothing will keep you on your toes while cooking a camping breakfast like a small fusion reactor’s worth of flames over a puddle of kerosene. Safety first kids.
  • My very first camelback, or rather the remnants of the pieces of my version of my very first camleback: some PVC Tubing a sonic straw and a pump vendor water bottle that my dad grabbed me from a pump meeting (he attends his share of pump meetings). Why waste money when you can build your own.
  • Climbing gear. Lots and lots of climbing gear. Seriously, you’d think I was about to tackle Cerro Torre. Sadly though, as my fingers get sore from typing now days, that’s been relegating to the storage unit, with the caveat that it goes at the front, just in case we need it for the zombie war.
  • A truly alarming array of bike parts. My best guess is I could build at least two-and-a-half bikes simply from what’s still in my apartment. Again not the most useful use of storage facilities in a tiny living space, but handy for the zombie attack (given time, we could fashion wicked crossbows from derailleurs)  .
  • A sizable stash of dehydrated backpacking food: We’ll file this one under not useful for anyone, anywhere, ever. You could use it in a pinch if you were trying to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and needed a back up heat-shield, but that’s about it.

Anyway, it’s was a bit of nostalgia for me to see all this strewn across the floor. Gone are the days when I was sure i’d spend most of my year sleeping in my car, bouncing around the various wild an beautiful places the continent has to offer. I’m sure 18-year-old me is a little pissed at the thirty-year-old-version who likes a glass/bottle of wine, works in an office, and if given a preference will generally sleep in a bed (although my mutant powers of being able to sleep anywhere are still strong). I’d don’t climb anymore, my Kayak hasn’t touched water in two years, and I haven’t been on a backpacking trip in quite a long while. Things change though, priorities shift. But at the end of the day, I’m certain that 18-year-old me would be pretty impressed with the coolness of my life, vagabond or no.

Also makes you wonder what 40-year old me is thinking right now.  Probably something along the lines of  ‘man, that kid was really smart to be so prepared for these zombies.’

Playing for Change

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Germ gets all the credit for this one – The Playing for Change Project. These guys have traveled the world recording different street musicians and then mixing it together as one track.

Road Trips

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Good maps histories most epic journeys – from Lewis an Clarke to the Elecric Kool-Aid Acid Test Trip. With pictures, and all other manner of flashy goodness. Who’s ready for a summer road trip?

Mas o Menos

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masomenos

Cars used to be relatively simple – the VW bug is a great example, you can take the entire engine out with three bolts. As we stared into the guts of Germ’s Subaru in Junction, Texas looking at the smoking viscous mass that had spewed onto one of the catalytic converters (yes there’s two – twice pipes, dude), I realize that things are a bit more complicated these days.

Driving in West Texas is always an adventure. I-10 starts to look like a deserted (albeit big) county road, and the distances between towns get bigger the farther out you go. You have to do fun things like the cracker game to keep from passing out.  So events like running out of gas, or breakdowns get a little nerve-racking, especially after you make that left turn down into the Big Bend. Hence our little Ft. Stockton layover. Ft. Stockton pretty much defines the pimple on ass end of no where. The mechanics at the shop we rolled up to were cool – turns out our viscous mass was just grease from a blown out CV boot – nothing to worry about. They’d have us out of here in no time, cause holy shit you wouldn’t want to get stuck in this town. “Come on, there’s got to be something fun to do,” I said. You’re looking at it they told me, as they rolled the car into the bay.

Man, that is bleak.

The purpose for our little jaunt west, was of course the Mas o Menos Marathon mountain bike race in Terlingua – 30 miles (or 60 depending on your stupidity level) of serious suffering through the Chihuahuan desert. Sand pits, Gravel pits, and a small hill at the end. It’s kind of like a bike tour of Tatooine. By about mile 20, it’s common to puncture your own tires, just so you can catch a breath. Really it’s quite fun.

Actually, what makes it fun is the crowd and festival atmosphere of the thing, what makes it worth 8 hours each way in the car. You can tell folks are hurting because attendance was down, and the vibe was much more subdued. Hopefully it picked up on Saturday night – it’d be a shame if an event that cool went the way of the the McRib.

At the end of the day, we actually had good races, Germ shaved 30 minutes of his time, I shaved 20, placing just above the halfway marker. Respectable and well worth the drive. And nothing can really compare to  topping out that last hill, and staring out across the desert for fifty miles into mexcio.

Photos

Elsewhere

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The fact that it briefly dipped below 95 degrees today and that gas now only costs $3.50 a gallon in our neck of the woods has me hankering for another road trip. Who’s coming with me?

Pasqual’s

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A block off the square in Santa Fe you find Pasqual’s which feels like its been around since way back before they put the ‘New’ in New Mexico. A breakfast quesadilla with eggs so organic that the chickens who produced them have better healthcare and retirement benefits than I do, washed down with and a good, smooth cup of coffee who’s beans were hand-picked by smiling children in Guatemala (and who’s healthcare package is only slightly less awesome than the chickens). Take your moral satisfaction, your full stomach, and your much lighter wallet, and go wander the square in the cool New Mexican sun washed daylight until margarita time.

Who’s sick of +100 degree days? This guy.

Cycling in Austin

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Texans are insane. It’s the heat and the good food. More specifically though, Austin cyclists are really insane. By some lucky quirk of geography and wind patterns, the weather in Austin is dry enough (a little more so than the eastern parts of the state) for us to pretend like we’re in a really hot, less mountainous version of Colorado. With no pine trees. And no snow.

People in this city are active, almost psychotically so. You want  to drive across downtown on saturday morning ? Forget about it, there’s a 5-10-15k going on. Probably most Sundays too. Something wrong with your car and you need to pull off to the side? Chances are peloton of road bikers are going to be asking you if you need a hand.

And all this while it’s 100 degrees out (and god knows how high with the heat index). I like to think it makes us tougher than our neighbors to the north who tend to stay inside or do non-stupid sports (frisbee golf? ) when the weather gets ridiculous. Or maybe we just work to hard – most of my motivation for getting on a bike after work has to do with dispersing some of the rage built up from sitting in an air-conditioned mausoleum all day and having photons unsympathetically shot at my face. An effort to dial the asshole meter back to a more tolerable four or five so my co-workers will be able to deal with me the next day.

I think we instinctively, biologically miss the old days, when working for a living meant physical effort, whether ti be tilling an existence out of the land, or earning a wage via the fabrication of something physical. Although I’m certain my Great-Great-Grandfather, a farmer from southern Oklahoma, would probably think I’m absolutely insane for waking up and riding a bike 25 miles for fun. Different times I guess. He probably wouldn’t get the time-investment involved with this website either (neither do I sometimes).

To cycling specifically, though,  Austin breeds some hard riders. Setting aside that one guy who won the Tour de France a few times, there are hard-core people out on the roads and trails – this dude for example who’s doing an eight day, 530 mile endurance race on the Colorado Trail (A race with camping sounds pretty fun – anybody?). There’s two weekly Crits that go on through out the summer, even when your tires are starting delaminate from the heat coming off the pavement. There’s also a Short Track Mountain bike race in the fall and a rumored Cross Season. There’s even just plain stupid people like us who do dumb shit like ride Lost Creek after work, when the average temperature is 98 degrees.

I was in a meeting recently, with some guys who know what they’re talking about and someone said that I was an average Austin cyclist – In this town, that’s one hell of a compliment.

There and Back Again

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The American Roadtrip. I’m not sure if other countries have this – it seems to me that Europe is too close together, and to interconnected with highly sensible trains, and the rest of the world can’t afford to be that extravagant. Maybe in China, but I’m not Chinese so I don’t know.

Regardless, the summer tradition – load the car and head west, an unconscious tribute to the days of taming a wild continent (genocide of the natives is kind of over looked for the sake of the kids here).  The drive to New Mexico is something else. It’s 12 hours, 34 minutes and 24 second from my parking spot to downtown Red River, nine hours of which is spent getting out of Texas. It’s a big damn state folks. We opted for the previously mentioned stopover in Amarillo, complete with Jehovah’s Witnesses, and angry English people. Amarillo has always been best described as “rode hard, put up wet,” a phrase that nicely captures its western cowboy roots and its utter craptasticness, although given the number of spanking new wind turbines up there (it looks like a strange forest), there could be something bright on the horizon for them.

Another fine thing about the road rip is the early morning roll out. Given Amarillo’s previously mentioned status, there’s no reason to hang out for the continental breakfast. 5 a.m. finds us on the road, watching a grey sunrise of the panhandle. Then it’s across the state line and up the flat plains of the Canadian river valley, screaming across pavement that has its origins in the Nixon administration.

This is the West as I like to see it – empty. You can drive for five hour and maybe pass three people on the road (who will of course give the requisite two-fingered steering wheel wave). Then, in Springer, you catch your first glimpse of the mountains – the distant purple lumps on the horizon, little teasers as if the guys who built these roads knew you’d been driving through the panhandle with nothing but flat cornfields and a game of highway alphabet that is indefinitely stuck on ‘x.’

Finally, your brain thoroughly unplugged after 11 hours from the driving motions of 20 mile stretches of flat, straight highway, you hit the first canyons in Cimarron, and from there you’re rewarded by 45 minutes of downshifting, hair-pin turns, mountain passes, gorgeous scenery as you wind your way up to 10,000 feet.

In short, we made it.

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