Thunder Mountain breakdown

RED CANYON, Utah—Someplace about halfway into our ride on the Thunder Mountain trail, perhaps our most favorite place to ride a bike, we had joked about how the skin thins and the body gets a little more fragile as the years wear on. A few miles down the trail I proved my point.

If you've never ridden Thunder Mountain, you should.

We take it for granted that mountain biking is inherently dangerous. We really do. Riding around town is far different than riding on unfamiliar trails far away from home. If something goes wrong out here, a person is left to rely upon his own wits and resources. Contrasted with riding on your home turf—where every bail-out point is well known, every water fountain nearby, and nearly every technical feature of the trail is well rehearsed—riding out in the wilds does present a modicum of danger and risk. But we weren't thinking about that when we hit Thunder Mountain at midday for a nice ride.

We are on the backside of our vacation journey. We were out here ostensibly to celebrate my passing into the second act of life. Such a thing sounds sad and staid when I commit it to the page, but that is not the idea at all. Every stage of life is wonderful! There is still much mystery to be had, adventure to endure...life to be lived. Being out on the road, riding bikes in exotic locations, trying new things. Aging doesn't relegate us to reliving safe prior experiences and ceasing to live. For us, we feel as curious and rebellious as we did when we were two-year-olds testing the surface of a hot burner with our fingers or teenagers exploring the boundaries of free expression and good taste with our words and deeds. We are full of life and relish each new day as if it were a cold glass of water drawn from a good aquifer or a fine cut of Country Fried Steak like the one we ate last night at the Bryce Canyon Pines Inn.

Blood on the ground is never good.

Backing up a bit, I didn't feel like that so much when I was writhing on the ground at the bottom of the Thunder Mountain Trail while crimson droplets of my life essence were pouring out of my arm onto the crazy orange rocks that had shattered and torn me open. I had taken a turn too fast. The sound and feel of my rear wheel washing out barely registered in my head before I found myself on the ground in a dusty heap. The last thing I heard before I felt the sickening rush of pain overwhelming the right side of my body was a loud report—like two big rocks smacking together or a pair of bamboo rods colliding. 

When I looked down at my arm, I could see a deep hole with some white sticking out. A wave of queasiness rippled through me. I asked Caroline if my bone was poking out of my smashed forearm. She answering in the negative. I moved my arm around, searching for the characteristic hot pain that accompanies the fracture of a calcified frame. Thankfully it was not there. 

But there was plenty of blood, and a giant fissure about the size of a quarter that was cradling the giant flap of torn skin and meat that had been ripped by the jagged rocks when my speeding body was rudely hurtled to the ground.

We have learned from experience that it's always good to have a first-aid kit in our Camelbaks when we are riding away from home. But we had gotten rusty. Tragedy was a fuzzy dot in memory past. The last few years of riding conservatively and a boost in our skills have made such things irrelevant in our world. But as the rocks below were stained by the big dark red drops pouring from my damaged arm, we suddenly realized why they were there. Although Caroline's backpack had been emptied of its first-aid kit, mine still had one. And all of its contents were in good shape.

Kissing rocks remind us that love is the greatest good.

Caroline rinsed the wound with a generous amount of water and we covered it with gauze and tape. We still had two miles to go. My knee and shin had also taken the brunt of my fall, and truth be told, my leg hurt a hell of a lot worse than my arm. Needles of fire tormented my lower extremity, as if someone were going to work on it with a red-hot Brillo pad.

Shock and adrenaline are our body's way of helping us get out of danger. But their effects are temporary. I was able to remount my undamaged bike and ride back to the car under the close watch of Caroline. But once we got back to our starting point, I was racked with confusion and pain, and I circled about uselessly back and forth, unable to concentrate on necessary tasks like changing out of my bike clothes and getting the bikes up on the rack.

The Nice Ranger at the Red Canyon Visitor Center pointed us toward the hospital in nearby Panguich and we drove there mostly in silence. The buzz of pain was all I could really hear inside my head anyway.

At the Garfield Memorial Hosipital, Dr. Colin Marshall and Nurse Susan cheerfully treated me while I spewed wisecracks pretending to be brave and robust. Everyone should be thankful for excellent medical personnel in small, unfamiliar towns. Conversation lagged a little bit as the doctor took his needle and injected the giant hole—which was about the size of a bottle cap and probably just as deep—with numerous doses of topical anesthetic. Yes, it hurt as badly as it sounds. And no, even lidocaine doesn't make debriding a deep, jagged wound any more pleasant. 

Although I felt stupid at needing to go to the emergency room for a mountain biking boo-boo, Dr. Marshall made it clear that we had done the right thing. The wound required five stitches in the meat below the skin and five more at the surface. When all was said and done, my little corner of the otherwise empty emergency room was home to a good-sized pile of blood-soaked gauze and wisps of the blue monofilament that had been used to draw the edges of my wound together.

Even the hardest climb is surmountable.

It sounds bad now, but about 45 minutes before the crash, Caroline and I had proclaimed ourselves the luckiest people in the world as we stood at the top of the trail overlooking the insane orange hoodoos that dot Red Canyon and the outstanding ribbon of swooping singletrack trail ahead. And I still believe that.

What is life without adventure and crashes and pain? What is life without triumph and passion and love? What is life without fun? 

Long after the pain has subsided and my scar has mellowed into a barely recognizable aberration of my skin, I hope to be living with as much gusto as I have enjoyed during this first half-decade, and I can only hope that Caroline and I have many more adventures to share.

See you on down the road.

Pleasant surprises

Alligator junipers are the coolest trees ever!

PINETOP-LAKESIDE, Ariz.—After spending the morning cooped up inside our temporary home because of dreary gray skies, cold wind and minefields of puddles all over the ground, we could no longer stand it. We got dressed and went for a bike ride. Damn the consequences!

We knew full well that the previous night's rains might have made the trails unrideable, but there's only so much television a person can stomach, and we'd already reached our weekly toxic allowance 24 hours earlier. So we set out for the Land of the Pioneers trailhead hoping for the best. The skies were still loaded with puffy gray rain clouds, and temperatures hovered at a chilly 45 degrees. It was a day for wool jerseys and knickers.

As we drove toward our destination, the skies dried out considerably and the sun beat down on us, leading us to believe that we were grossly overdressed for our ride. When we finally reached the trailhead about an hour later, however, the skies had once again grown dark and the air had grown even cooler. We quickly hopped on our bikes and made our way down the unfamiliar trail.

Show Low bike shop owner Todd Fernau had tipped us off to the rideability of the Land of the Pioneers trail the previous day when we happened to pop into Cycle Mania, Fernau's most excellent shop. With impending rain in the forecast, we wondered which of the White Mountain trails would dry out first in wet conditions.

The forest service map describes this as an "interesting box canyon." That's a total
understatement. It's an absolutely stunning box canyon!

A few years earlier during the annual Tour of the White Mountains ride/race, we had seen some of the trails turn into nightmarish mud bogs after a downpour. When exposed to rain, some of the soil in these parts transforms into a fearsome sticky-yet-slick clay that can totally gum up a bike, so we were anxious to avoid the trauma of becoming paralyzed in oobleck someplace way out on an unfamiliar trail in a community where nobody even knew who we were or that we were even out there riding.

When we inquired about the Land of the Pioneers—mostly because we had never ridden it—Fernau told us that the trail had been greatly improved during the past couple of years and that it was totally worth a ride. We needed to hear nothing more than that, so we made immediate plans to ride the trail a day later.

We enjoyed every minute of the trail! Despite its designation as "difficult," we navigated the rocky, winding path with ease. Maybe we rode well to ward off the chill, or maybe it was the simple fact that riding for five out of the past seven days had put us into great shape. Whatever it was, we enjoyed the ride more than we ever thought we would. Even better, the night of rains made the trails perfect and dustless.

If you wonder why they call this trail Land of the Pioneers, the ruins of an old home-
stead provide a quick answer.

In addition to enjoying the flow of the trail, we enjoyed the scenery as well. Giant alligator juniper trees loomed alongside us in many areas. Ancient oak trees stood guard over their piñon and juniper colleagues. As we climbed Eckes peak, we were able to look across vast expanses of Arizona wilderness. Newly re-routed sections melded perfectly with the landscape. Land of the Pioneers was much different from the grueling Hell Ride we'd heard it called when we first visited the White Mountains five years ago.

After our ride we returned home to clean up and get dressed for dinner. Hot water never felt so good! We dressed and visited the Sakura Buffet restaurant located in a strip mall in Pinetop. During our first visit here, we had dined at Sakura's predecessor—a delightful, four-star restaurant that served some of the finest sushi we had ever tasted.

The White Mountain Trail system is truly a mountain biking paradise.
The system has nearly 200 miles of well-marked, non-motorized
trails.

The new Sakura Buffet provided all-you-can-eat sushi and Asian food that was absolutely soulless and uninspiring. We had found the Furr's cafeteria of Japanese cuisine, except that I actually enjoy eating at Furr's sometimes. It seemed to us as though the Sakura 
Buffet food was simply created to reap a profit. There didn't seem to be any love or care put into the food. It was industrial, pedestrian...dead.

As a last thought on Sakura Buffet, I refer you all to one of the last scenes in the 1997 Hollywood blockbuster, Titanic. In that scene, actress Gloria Stuart as the Old Rose Dawson recalls her experience, so I'm summing mine up something like this:

"But now you know there was a restaurant named Sakura Buffet and that it was wretched...in every way that a restaurant can be wretched. I don't even have a picture of it. It exists now...only in my memory."

The good thing about a bad restaurant is that it makes the good ones seem even better!

See you on down the road.

Rain delay

Rains have made our bicycles a prisoner of the porch and have caused nearly every
single pine needle in this place to fall to the ground.

PINETOP-LAKESIDE, Ariz.—A good friend of mine once told me that I need to learn how to relax. I guess he's right.

The rains have come to our little hideaway, banishing us from the trails for the past day. It's forced us inside, where the inescapable siren's song of television finally lured us away from the easy jabber amongst ourselves that we had been enjoying on this vacation.

If I've learned two things on this trip, it's this:

1.) Riding bikes is always much better than not riding bikes; and

2.) television sucks no matter where you are.

Here in Arizona, the political races are underway hot and heavy, and the airwaves are fetid with vicious political advertising made possible by faceless corporate-sponsored political action committees. Thanks to the stooges on the supreme court and the Citizens United ruling, anyone with money can now say pretty much anything they want about pretty much any political candidate. The result is a stinking haze of lies and innuendo plastered all over the airwaves in an attempt to support candidates who will gleefully serve their Corporate Overlords, and defeat any candidates who still have a shred of integrity.

Arizona political advertising in this neck of the woods has boiled down to a never-ending video character assassination of democrat Richard Carmona, who apparently could tip the balance of power in the U.S. Senate. Another ad for some candidate around here accuses the other candidate of beating his wife in front of the other candidate's child. Or something like that. People make fun of the "Have-you-stopped-beating-your-wife" routine, but this is the first time I've actually seen it used. It screams of desperation.

The tiresome 24-hour parade of crap-vertising has prompted me to subconsciously tune out all political advertisements and substitute them in my own head with hilarious parodies of political advertising that go something like this:

"Baby-eating space alien Barack Obama is a presidential impostor who has a smelly butt that hides a business-destroying socialist agenda—This ad paid for by the Secret Handshake Club for Grotesquely Wealthy Fat Cats who Live Off of Corporate Welfare and Pretty Much Hate Anyone Else Who Doesn't Earn an Annual Income of More Than $16 Million."

But there was one upside about watching television because of the rain: We caught the Joe Biden/Paul Ryan debate last night. I guess that's good. I guess...

But now that we've grown sick of the never-ending squeal of the Glowing Box of Idiocy, and we are forced to remain indoors on this gray rainy day. We sit here inside our little hideaway, which is alive with the smell of bacon, hunched over our computers, waiting for the sun to dry out the ground so we can get another ride in.

I'm learning to deal with these circumstances, but I don't exactly call it relaxation.

See you on down the road.