At the edge of civilization

Our days in the White Mountains so far have been a blur of bike trails and restaurant meals; the trails are far better than the food!

There are miles of singletrack trails crisscrossing the thick forests up here. And while Phoenix swelters away at about 110-degress for the past few days, temperatures up here have hovered in the low 80s at their hottest. We've even had a little bit of rain to keep the trails nice and sticky.

So far we've logged nearly 70 miles of rides, the best one so far this afternoon. It was touch and go for a minute. We got a late start and needed to secure some supplies to fix a mechanical issue with one of the bikes, so by the time we got to the trailhead, big cumulonimbus thunder boomers were roiling up over the hills a short distance away. The roll of distant thunder pounded steady in the distance, like a drum beat keeping time for weary oarsman on a slave ship tossing in uncertain seas.

We hammered as best we could in an attempt to outflank the approaching storm, but the trail—an 18-inch wide ribbbon of dirt winding pleasantly through meadow and aspen stand—suddenly began to climb. Its smooth and friendly character transformed itself into a jarring journey up a ladder of sharp chickenheads (an annoying scatter of rocks that are smaller than "babyheads" for those unfamiliar with the peculiar parlance of the mountain biker). The trek might not have been as daunting had we had fresh legs, but the 30-mile epic ride the day before had taken its toll, and our legs felt like al dente pasta with each stroke of the pedal.

We watched the skies warily, wondering whether we would hit the bail-out point halfway through the trail before the lightning bolts began.

Luckily, we stayed one step ahead of the storm, skirting by it and then heading away from it as the trail mellowed and later provided us with some of the most rippin' downhill sections of the week. All this after meandering through fields of fern and oak that had been woven into the rich forest tapestry of Ponderosa Pine, aspen and fir.

This is fine country up here. It seems that some sections of the forest were ravaged by fire years ago and have been reborn into the kind of roomy forest that allows a generous amount of sunlight to pass through the tree canopies and energize the forest floor into a lush living carpet of brilliant color and texture.

All of this is cast upon a landscape of ancient volcanic rock. In some areas, trails and forest roads are covered with pea sized rust-colored cinder that crunches under the tires and makes a rider wonder whether the wheels will wash out around the next switchback.

In other areas, sections of cruel pock-marked babyheads force you to uncouple from your bicycle and dance above the seat with hands and feet light on the bars and pedals as the machine below bucks and heaves its way toward the next brief smooth section. With the slightly red cast of the soil and the abundance of rock, I imagined how it must be to mountain bike on Mars if such a thing were possible.

Up here the skies are a brilliant blue, rivalling the vistas of New Mexico, and it seems like these mountains are blessed with life-giving moisture. The mosquitos certainly have flourished, and our rides only commence after we have slathered ourselves in an unsavory chemical bath of SPF 30 sunscreen and 100 percent DEET.

We have tested this mixture for the past several days under the harshest conditions of sweat and dirt, and we can attest that neither chemical affects the performance of the other when used simultaneously. Were it not for sunscreen, we would fry like bacon during the long daily rides we have endured, and if we had not packed the DEET, our flesh would be as raw and bumpy as some of the sections of trail we have mastered. Any breather out here brings clouds of mosquitos that hover just out of range of the DEET molecules we exude.

This is life as we have discovered it out here on the Mogollon Rim—where the Colorado Plateau abdicates its majesty to the Basin and Range below. It is a marvelous place at the edge of civilization, but it seems as though people are trying as hard as they can to "civilize" the area with asphalt and tract developments. Wherever possible, realtors and developers are cramming houses together in every nook and cranny, whether that be on the site of a former wetland or within the migratory routes of great herds of elk.

As odd and ridiculous as it seems, developers are making big bucks carving gated communities into the middle of the wilderness here. Perhaps the city folk from Phoenix find comfort in the knowledge that their vacation home is walled off from surrounding acres of open space by a six-foot-high iron fence. This to us is pointless and weird. But apparently it sells; these gated communities have very few vacancies even with their abundance of smallish half-million-dollar pricetag homes that are used but a few weeks each year.

Fences may keep prowlers out, but they don't segregate humanity from things like the species of tiny toad we came across today on our ride, or from the thimble-sized vole that peeped up at us from just beyond the edge of the trail as we rode by. But people who hide behind fences in the middle of the woods don't keep their eye out for things like that anyway. At night in those sections of forest, pockets of trees are illuminated by the light of plasma-screen televisions blaring out through barred window panes.

Meanwhile, far away and too tired to care, we sleep like exhausted kittens after a wild day of nonstop play.