On The Topic Of Care And Feeding

Back in the day, before PETA ruled the world, you used to "own" your pet.  Now, they are adopted, I guess, or some even more enlightened concept that I haven't kept up with and am therefore not in tune with.  But despite PETA, anyone who is normal and even moderately compassionate towards animals, which I like to think is the majority of us, sort of understands that they kind of own you more than you own them.  They have needs and you're basically the mommy or the daddy, and it's up to you to do the right thing, and you acknowledge and accept the responsibility.

Two springs ago, I thought I could "own" a pump track.  Easy peasy, right?.  Come to find out, "adopting" one is quite akin to pet ownership.  They don't exactly take care of themselves.  They have needs.  They have to be taken care of, or they become a pain in the ass, by letting you know that they are being ignored.  In no uncertain terms.

Getting out from under the responsibility that you have accepted is easier with a pump track than it is with a pet, but only slightly.  I'm apparently not ready, as I have once again thrown myself fully into the care and feeding of my pump track over the last several days, sinking valuable hours that can never be recovered into the painful activities of moving dirt and yes, tamping. Oy.

The new and improved track became rideable tonight for the first time and although it needs to be fine-tuned, it's pretty rad.  I don't understand, at all, why I have not yet decided to return it to the humane society and move on with my life, post pump track style.  I guess it's just a deep-seeded need to nurture this beast that I have created.  I think this process is in its twilight.  But I have thought that before.  Who really knows?  Not me, that is for sure.

It looks sort of like a war zone, I know. I could have gotten the big ladder out for these pics, which would have provided a much better overview of what it now is, but I got the small ladder out instead. Which I think, means that I have established boundaries on yours and mine blog love. I do love you, but there are limits, in simple speak. All this aside, and point being, the track is now actually a perimeter loop, along with a pretty badass figure eight in the middle, with lots of new bumps.  It flows pretty well, preliminarily. It will get way better as it gets dialed in.

I'm A-OK with being owned by it, for the time being. Apparently.

In The Meantime . . .

While you're patiently waiting for my sad, lame recountance of Day Three, Part Two, please enjoy this truly wonderful and amazing video that Ward put together and that crushes anything I could possibly say. Holy living hell.

Colockum Quilomene Traverse - Day Three, Part One

The planned route for Day Three would take us from Brushy Creek to Whiskey Dick Bay.  (I'll give you juveniles a couple of seconds to crack yourselves up.  I'm right there with you, of course.)

Here's the aerial of where we'd eventually be parking our tired, jubilant asses at day's end.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.  There would be a lot of work to put in before we could rest.

Spikey, spikey, up, down, orange and purple, like the color of my puke, 23.7% upslope, 27.2% downslope, 13.7 total miles, 5-1/2 hours, 2.5 avg mph, drowning in my own blood, sweat and tears.  Blah, blah, blah.  Exact same shit, different day, then.

Before we get on with the ride details, though, I'd like to talk a bit about some ancillary, gear-type, slightly nerdy stuff.  Gear is a major part of what your day is about, actually, when you're out on the C/Q.  Or any bikepacking trip, for that matter.

If you're into Shackleton-type stuff, or that infamous plane crash in the Andes, or even The Shining, for that matter, you're acutely aware of how harsh environments and situations can bring out the worst in people.  I'm not proud of what I'm about to tell you, but in my dehydrated, delusional state of mind, I had begun contemplating a scheme by where I would murder Joe in the middle of the night so that I could inherit these goofy/rad backcountry slippers he had brought along.  I never got around to even considering if we had the same sized feet, that's how insane and desperate my state of mind was.  Holy living hell, if I could slip my dogs into those mothers for just even a second, though . . .    I'm thinking heaven on earth!

Tempering my slipper-lust, however, was the realization that if I capped Joe, I would have to either: a) do without an item that Joe had been packing and that I, along with everyone else, I think, had come to regard as an essential item on the trip, come those morning urges, or b) pack it myself.  Neither option seemed all that appealing or even remotely worth the effort and possible consequences of a wilderness homicide, after further consideration.  Joe's a smart dude, I have figured out.  I think he was way ahead of me here, and I'll bet you dollars to doughnuts that he didn't lose one minute of sleep over the course of the entire trip worrying over his personal safety or the security of those slippers.

It took a LOT of water to get through this trip.  Between what we needed just as raw drinking water, and what we needed for cooking and other stuff, it added up to gallons.  This was our Brushy Creek watering hole. The water looks pretty clear in the pic, but it was actually pretty murky, due to the fact that we were in the midst of early season runoff.

The primary benefit of all this water of allowing us to merely survive was closely rivalled  by its secondary function: The supply was as equally ample at all three campsites and the luxury that this allowed, in combination with the warm weather, was a sponge bath, of sorts, at the end of every day.  No, I did not pack a sponge.  But a bandana was a worthy substitute and it was warm enough that I could wade into the water at the end of the day in nothing but shorts and knock down the stiff-as-starch salt and road dust that had accumulated on my skin and in my hair, and sleep that much better at night.  Yes, the water was colder than balls, and yes, the discomfort was well worth it.

No one besides me had experienced the joy of a gravity filter prior to this trip.  I let everyone know beforehand that I was bringing mine and that they therefore didn't need to worry about bringing any tablets or other filters or anything - that I had them covered.  "Fine, whatever", I'm sure they said, just like I did before I saw one in action.  There were a couple of time when Ward got his pump filter out to supplement because maybe we had not quite planned our filtering to coincide with our breaking camp and heading out on the trail, but for the most part, this filter supplied all six of us with water during a pretty damned hot and demanding trip.  It's such a rad filter, to the point that is sells itself, and from the comments I heard, I'd bet pretty good money that everyone on this trip will figure out a way to add one of these to their gear caches within the next coupla years.  Joe is proving here, once again, that a watched filter filters faster.  This is not something they tell in the instruction manual, it is just something that is inherently understood by humans.

Okay.  So it's time to talk about the wonder that is Chris' trailer.  And the wonder that is Chris.

He was a last-minute entry in this suffer-fest sweepstakes.  Which meant that except for Randy, we knew almost nothing about him.  There had been nothing in the way of email exchange, and the only real thing we knew about him was that he was a friend of Randy's and that like Joe, he would be pulling a BOB trailer.

Our first actual encounter with Chris, then, was at the start of the ride, in the Dept of Fish and Wildlife parking lot.  He was the last to arrive.  The rest of us were already in the mode of not-acting-like-we-cared-about-each-others'-gear-but-secretly-totally-checking-out-each-others'-setups. Without letting on.

So somewhere during the course of pulling his gear out of the back of his Subaru hatchback, Chris mentioned that his bike might be missing some spokes.  Ha, right.  Joe was the first to actually check, though, and yep, spokes were actually missing.  Holy living hell.

Chris also mentioned that his BOB trailer didn't fit his [spoke-challenged] bike and that as a result, he had ordered a $100 Chinese knockoff of a Burley trailer, into which he could load his massive BOB duffel.  He hadn't had a chance to actually try it out yet, since it had just arrived the day before and he had been up until 2 am putting it together and working out the last of his other gear details.  Holy-holy living-living hell-hell.  At that exact point in time I would have been willing to bet you, and would have thrown tremendous odds your way, that Chris would have been forced to turn around within that first day, and head back home with his broken bike and his broken trailer, in the back of his Subaru, while we all continuned on.

I'm glad we didn't make that bet, because you would have cleaned me out.

The thing is, we just didn't know Chris yet.  We had first-impression summed him up as this crazy dude who had no idea what he was doing and in fact he turned out to be this crazy dude who knew exactly what he was doing.  Or didn't, and didn't care, because this trip wasn't that overwhelming to him in the big picture, and he had the confidence in his judgement and his abilities to know that he would get through it.

Flash forward three days and it was clear that Chris totally defied our first impressions and that he was in fact a very experienced and capable rider and mechanic, and that he simply chose not to burden himself with the same kind of over-the-top fretting and worry and downright obsession that the rest of us had adopted in order to ease our insecurities.  We all came to really dig this rad dude.

All that said, I'm not sure he would choose to pull a two-wheeled trailer over this route again, given what he knows now.  He had rolled it a number of times (somewhere between 10 and 20), due to fact that it was bouncing all the hell over the place, in situations where there was enough speed involved to make it bounce all the hell over the place, due to the fact that we were bombing some steep, rocky descent, due to the fact that gravity exists and cannot be denied.  And when the trailer rolled, it could snag a rock and bring the entire bike-trailer-train to an instantaneous stop, while Chris continued his forward motion over the bars and into the brush and rocks.  Which happened a number of times (somewhere between 3 and 6).

So Chris and his trailer had both taken quite a beating, but I think that as bad as Chris's was, the trailer's was far worse.  The whole piece of fabric on the bottom was starting to rip out at the seams and by the time we hit the road on day four, it was so far gone that he had to break up some sticks to bridge across the frame to support his cargo bag.  The whole trailer was so beat to hell and battle scarred that it looked like it had been in industrial service every day for the last 20 years and the running joke was about how Chris oughta send it back on a warranty claim when he got home and tell whoever he bought it from that he had only used it four times, and that it was totally coming apart, and that they should replace it.

And finally, although it's not exactly gear related, the story cannot be properly told without at least a bit of recountance about the insane amount of ungulate waste that littered every inch of both campsites those first two nights.  City boy that I am, I would try to avoid parking my tent in it, or cooking in it or sitting in it, but this was hopeless, because it was everywhere.  And so in the end, I became one with the dung.

Enough with the attendent details, then.  We had finally broken down our fine tent city and once again stuffed it all into/onto-bikes-and-bags-and-bags-on-bikes and we were ready to roll.  I laugh every time I look at this photo because I look like such a rag doll (far left) and I'm pretty sure that my posture exactly captures my mood at that exact moment, as I mentally prepare to endure what will surely be another climb from hell.  Chris, meanwhile (second from right), seems unphased.

It began inoccently enough, as they all do, out in the C/Q . . .

Amidst the brutality of the climb, there were more stunning rock formations, as there always are out in the C/Q . . .

Here's Ward, powering through a section of brush and grass that's fed by a spring (you can see some water in the pothole in the left track), that had all grown tall enough to provide just a bit of shade.  We stopped to take a breather and get just a little relief from the sun while there was an opportunity.

From that point on, there would be no more shade of any kind . . .

It's at moments like this that a man questions what is important to him in life, and whether he really likes bikes or really hates them, and who besides himself he might be able to blame for his poor decisions.  And what his loved ones will write in his obituary about how he died, or whether they will even mention that part of it.  There's a lot of time to think, when you're travelling at 1-1/2 mph.

It had been another murderous morning, but after another 4-ish miles in 2-ish hours, we were finally approaching the top.

This woulnd't be our last big climb of the day, but it was good to be at the top of something, if even for a short time.

The view from the top is sweet out on the C/Q.

But the day was far from over.

2013 Sesh #1 of ??

I know I've said it before, but the pump track's days are numbered.

It's really weird, though . . . I'm not quite ready for it to die, and when it does, I want it to be with dignity. It's been a really rad backyard/neighborhood track. Somehow I've been motivated over the past few days to get out in my sparse spare time on the evenings/weekends and burn a few thousand calories moving and tamping dirt in an effort to reconfigure it into what will certainly be it's last reconfiguration. This latest, though, is kind of fun. John used his amazing bike-people-connector skills to pull together and organize tonight's sesh, and for that I am grateful. It was a great turnout, a class reunion of sorts. And don't even try to tell me that pump tracking is not a spectator sport.

No kids were T-boned during this sesh, in case you were anticipating something horrific based on the pic. And yes, the fatbike got out and played, along with the other bikes, as you can see.

This track is so incredibly not what it was two years ago or even last year, when I envisioned and tried to maintain it as a finely groomed and aeshtetically pleasing yet bike-rad functional component of our landscape package.

Now it's just plain ratty, with this season's dandelion invasion contributing majorly to the decay. And there are berms that no longer make any sense and piles of dirt in the middle of nowhere.  Which is kind of liberating, for me certainly, and for it, I suspect.  In it's final weeks/days/months or whatever it turns out to be, all I care about is that it gets the piss ridden out of it, by anyone who wants to, while they can.

If this is not an invitation, I don't know what is.

Day Three Report Stall

This post is an apology, an olive branch. To be clear.  I've gotten the message, and I  totally appreciate, that people want me to continue with the story in a timely fashion and I want to continue the story in a timely fashion.

It's just that the quality of the telling of the story is important to me.  Because it's a really good story.  And even though I am not an artist, and even though I have no integrity, I am evoking the artistic integrity excuse.  Just deal with it.

The thing is, these posts take my inefficent, slow, ass a long time to put together, and the photos from Day 3 are really great, and the story is really great and I don't want to not show and tell it the right way.  And when my day is so slammed that I can't even get started until after ten, it just doesn't compute.  (End of sad song. Feel free to play me a tune on the world's smallest violin.)

In straight talk, though, I'll get to it when I get to it.  But here are a couple my favorite pics from the day, maybe from the whole trip, to hold your rabid asses at bay.  If even for just a day.

Colockum Quilomene Traverse - Day Two

The planned route for Day Two was from Tekison Creek to Brushy Creek.  (Via ten gazillion feet of climbing at ridiculous grade angles.  But I digress.)

If we were lucky, our arrival might even coincide with one of these caught-on-satellite wild boat-people party events, in which case we could bathe in the river of tequila and rum that would surely be flowing and immerse ouselves in the no-holds-barred revelry.  And then in the morning, we could pile our hung over selves and gear into boats with our new BFF's and hitch rides back to Vantage via fossil-fuel-powered river travel.  Sweet!  (Hey, a guy can dream.)

The Google Earth data shows that we started at about 600 feet, and topped out at around 1950 feet. We were out for 6 hours and 16 minutes and we travelled a mind-boggling 9.88 miles.  Our average speed was 1.6 mph and our max slope up was 30.8% and our max slope down was 36.3%.  What Google Earth does not show, is how many times per hour, on average, I swore to myself that, assuming I got out alive, I would never, ever, ever, do this again.

As the morning light emerged and Day Two began, snakes were still very much on our minds.  The inevitable business of "doing our morning business" would mean a lonely and terrifying excursion into the grass and brush for each of us, and an even more terrifying experience of the vulnerability of squatting with no way to protect or even know what was advancing against our white, fleshy backsides.  We all survived the experience, but I don't think that any of us will ever be quite the same.

We eventually broke camp and as we walked our bikes out onto the road, the first snake of the day appeared. Naturally.  But amazingly, this was the last snake we would see on the entire trip.  As quickly as they had imposed themselves upon us, they vanished.

What we didn't know just yet, was that the challenge presented by the snakes would be replaced and surpassed with an environmental challenge that would become the theme of this second day ~~~ HEAT.

For the moment, though, it was good just to be back on the road.  We motored across the creek and headed uphill.

By "uphill", I'm talking about the ridiculous grades of up to 30% that I mentioned a minute ago.  That's Randy in the white, and Ward in the blue and then up the trail a bit is Joe, who NEVER walks his bike, walking his bike.  I can't speak for the other fellas, but much of this ascent, for me, was spent microanalzying every bit of gear I brought and why it was necessary to be hucking it up this insane slope, on this idiotic surface, on this increasingly stupid hot day.

There is very little in the way of shade-generating vegetation (a.k.a. "trees") out in these here parts, and so when we did find a bit of this rare goodness, we drank it in.  Bike touring through the desert is super fun, as you can tell by the expressions on our faces.

Some 2+ hours after leaving camp, we had climbed the 4 miles to the summit.  The trail was so steep that you were constantly blowing yourself up to make it through a technical section without getting off your bike, or maybe it was just so steep that you were blowing yourself up pushing your 85 lb beast up some loose, rocky shit.  The net effect was the same: Over the course of the climb, I had blown up and recovered so many times under a sun that I couldn't hide from on a day that was rapidly climbing into the mid-to-upper-80's, all while trapped in a body that just emerged from winter and hadn't had any chance to acclimate to any kind of warm weather, that I was feeling damned spent.

I looked at the road ahead and while it was scenically gorgeous, it was at the same time frightful from the perspective of constant exposure to the sun and the physical challenge that it promised to deliver.  Oy.

The crazy-ass wildflowers were just an integral part of the trip.  So rad.

If you haven't yet concluded that we were genuinely travelling through the desert under the harshest of conditions, just have a look at Stu's garb.  You don't do this kind of thing unless you have to.  And it should also be said that not just anyone can pull this look off.  Stu's the man and I totally dig it.

My five compadres, hammering into the midday sun . . .

By the time we got to the bigass descent down into the Brushy Creek, I was pretty wasted.  I hadn't pee'd once all day and wouldn't, until around 8:00 that night.  I'd sweated every last molecule of salt out of my body and as a result, I was feeling a bit "unbalanced".  It's not like I had a choice of whether or not ot continue, though.  And so I did.

That strip of green vegetation was where we would be travelling, assuming we survived the death fall off the ridge . . .

I was too involved in my own survival to take a bunch of dumbass pictures and so this next one is really the only one I have of the descent, which is a shame.  But this is where the 36.3% downslope happened, and as icing on the cake, it was this loose rock bullshit all the way down.  There were stairsteps and all kinds of craziness and for me, there was no riding, only walking, and I can state with utter conviction that after having wrestled an 85 lb bike through this garbage, that I have never worked harder on a bike while going downhill.  And there's not even a close second, let alone 22nd.

Joe's blown knee wouldn't let him walk without a lot of pain and jeopardy and so he rode most of it, although I have no idea how in the hell.

Just a badass rock formation that appeared on the way down, that is all . . .

Based on what Ward and Randy had told us in preparation, we were quite apprehensive about the work it might take to navigate along the Brushy Creek.  Fortunately, because it was still relatively early in the season and because the wild turkey hunters had already been beating a path up and down the creek, it wasn't all that bad.  Yep, there was some hike-a-biking and creek crossing, and Stu had his second flat in here, but it was relatively okay.

Ward and Randy, in their awesomeness, had reconned in a few weeks earlier, along with 11 cans of beer.  As trip hosts, their plan was to put them in a duffle bag along with some rocks, tie the bag off to a tree and drop them into the creek, so that when we all got there, we'd have a few cold beers to share.  That's just how rad these guys are.  It's exactly the roofing scene in Shawshank Redemption.

But in one of the weirdest coincidences in the history of the universe, two bike riders showed up at about the same time that Ward and Randy were planting the stash.  These, to hear Ward tell it, were older guys on older rigid MTB's, and they were true, 'bikepackers' in the sense that they were carrying pretty much nothing on their bikes and everything in bigtime real backpacks.  The 'weirdest coincidences' statement has to do with the fact that NO ONE rides bikes out here.  Until we met up with Megan and Steve at the end of Day Three, we hadn't seen a soul on the road.  (Well, we did see one guy in a truck, but he didn't count, 'cause he was in a truck. ;-)

So when we got to the bottom of the Brushy, Ward went to retrieive the duffel and the first thing he noticed was that the cord had been cut and re-tied.  Not good.  Then, when he go into the bag, he found that 7 of the beers had been stolen, and only four 16 oz PBR's had been spared.  Dirty, lowdown, mofu, beer-snob, THIEVES!  Whatya gonna do, though?  Such is life in the desert.

We finally arrived at our campsite in the Brushy canyon.  It was obvious that it had been a homestead at one point in time, as there were orchards and it was just too logical a place for a homesteader.  I will always think about how harsh our experience was out there on this relatively mild day and contrast that with the extreme days that anyone who lived out here would have had to deal with and just conclude that, holy living hell, whoever was homesteading out here was just pure badass.

I had left my guts on the trail and my electrolytes on my hat and I was pretty messed up.

So what should have been a pretty amazing campsite vibe was pretty damned subdued.  It wasn't just me . . . everyone, I think, was feeling the toll of the day.  I crawled into my tent at 7:30.  I don't think anyone else was that far behind me.  I didn't think the low point of the day before could be topped, but apparently it had been.

At least we had made it halfway, so there was that.

Colockum Quilomene Traverse - Day One

The planned route for Day One was from our starting spot at the Washinton Department of Fish and Wildlife office on the north edge of the Colockum Wildlife Area, to our campground at Tekison Creek, a.k.a. "Rattlesnake Bay" (stay tuned).

Direction of travel is from right to left.

The travel plan, in general, was the same as it would be for each of the four days of this trip:  Start out near river level, climb our asses off until we were way the hell up on some gawd-forsaken, wind-swept ridge, and then descend back down to near river level.  The plan was what it was because it was the only way it could be, really; we were traversing a totally badass section of ridges and valleys and you can't just effing ride straight up or straight down cliffs. In short. So you take the roads (and I use the term loosely) that exist because of some amazing collective human effort that has spanned who knows how many years and involved who knows how many people, or groups of people, to put them there to do exactly what we were trying to do, I think, which is to travel overland along the river in the most efficient manner possible.  Which is not very effiecient.  Because the terrain doesn't particularly lend itself to efficiency.

The other part of the low-to-high-to-low pattern of movement is that it's the desert (and honestly, it is), and you need water, badly, and it's damn hard to find it at the higher elevations.  So it's best to start and end the day's travel at the bottom of a drainage, where you have an ample supply of this magical fluid.

Google Earth delivers some amazing data, and even if you click for big I'm not sure it will be totally readable, but the red line with the orange underneath it is the elevation profile and the dark blue line with the purple underneath it is the speed at which we were travelling.  It shows that we were frequently travelling under 5 mph, and mostly travelling between 5 and 10 on the way up and between 10 and 15 on the way down.  We had a max slope up of 18% and a max slope down of 19%.  We went 17.5 miles and it took us 5 hours and 17 minutes.  Holy hell.

I've gotten kind of ahead of myself, though.  Let's start at the beginning of this first day . . .

Joe and I left Spokane at around 7:30 and arrived in Vantage on schedule at about 10:00.  Ward was waiting for us.

Ward (L), Joe (R).  Getting in some last bits of conversation before heading into the wild.

Stu showed up shortly afterwards, and Randy showed up shortly afterwards of Stu's [afterward] showing up.  Randy was the designated shuttle commander, meaning he had the rig and the plan to get all our bikes and gear from Vantage up to our starting point near Wenatchee.  The dude's rad.

We arrived at the Dept of Fish and Wildlife office/shop complex and embarked upon the task of putting together our "equipment packages".  This scene would have made the most stoic bike nerd blush.  It was a relatively brief period of time in the hyper nerdism realm.  But it was a good thing.  To be clear.

The two fats that would be making the trip - mine and Ward's - ready to roll.

Randy making final adjustments to his handlebar sling pack, while Joe and his bionic knee look on.

Stu, a meticulous planner, had stashed three daily rations of two beers each, on or in his setup.
I believe the two shown here were deliberately placed such that he could keep on eye on them, lest
the thirsty desperados with whom he was travelling got any ideas.  Maybe they were actual decoys.
The other, I believe, was deliberately hidden such that should the desperados take the first
two rations by force, he would still retain one secret stash.  Given the riff-raff he was travelling
with, it seems like a totally rational plan.

Finally, we were ready.  And of course nothing less than a timer shot would do, to mark the moment in history.
I set the camera to take three shots and when I got home and reviewed them, the first two showed a bunch of
deadpan expressions, but this last one showed some spontaneous smiles.  I can't remeber what joke was told,
but I can tell you that it was just the tip of the iceberg in terms of us cracking each other up during the trip.

Everyone headed out on the trail, while I hung back to take a pic. What was immediately evident was how small we were against the backdrop of this big, bold place . . .

The climb was steady and continuous and it wouldn't be long before we would start to experience some spectacular views of the valley floor . . .

It would also not be long before our so-so road surface began to turn much krappier . . .

A coupla gates needed to be crossed and let me tell you that after the first, no one particularly wanted to be my friend when we hit the second.  It could have had something to do with my 85 lb loaded fatbike, but I am not sure.



So at this point, I guess, we were still a little giddy.  But we were also working our asses of and the reality of the harshness of the terrain and what we were heading into was starting to set in, a little.  Things were about to quickly get more serious though, and in fact, the overriding theme of this entire first day was about to emerge:  Snakes.  Rattlesnakes, to be specific.

Look, I don't care for snakes much, and I had some pretty sleepless nights in front of last year's tour across the state on the John Wayne Pioneer Trail, but in my more rational and sane moments, I recognize that the probability of encountering one is actually pretty low and that my head is my worst enemy.

At the same time, a person has to acknowledge and come to terms with the fact, on some subconscious level at least, that when travelling through the desert, he's among snakes, whether he sees them or not.  And when we saw our first bull snake, just after the gate, said person was forced to come to grips with the fact on  a conscious level.

"Bull snake.  Big whoop.", I bravadoed, internally.  But the edge had been set and I was on some level of alert, although I'm not sure what color.  I am sure that it wasn't just me, though.

A few hundred feet of climbing later, as I was crossing some standing water on the sun-warmed road, something moved, and then RATTLED!!! directly underneath my pedals!  My already ragged heartrate pegged hard and I let out some spontaneous and uncontrollable girl noises.  Joe was right behind me and before he could figure out what the hell I was spazzing about, he ran over it with all three of his wheels - the two on his bike and the one on his trailer.  The snake quickly moved off into the rocks on the side of the road, appeared injured, and sat there rattling.  I grabbed my camera and approched to take a picture, until Joe insisted that I was a total dumbass.  I had a hard time arguing the point, so I backed away.

We warned the others coming up behind us about the snake and then we all headed on up the trail.

The mood had abruptly changed; this gig was for real.  We found some shade and stopped to take in some fuel.  It was good to rest, but it wasn't a super joyous event.  Everyone would now be paying a lot more attention to the road and a lot less attention to the rad scenery.

That said, it was impossible to completely ignore the scenery.

That road is what we had just ascended.

It was somewhere-sort-of-but-not-really-near the top of the climb that Stu had his first flat of the trip.  After making the repair, I got out my pump and mentioned that in the course of filling a fatbike tire with air, I had to put in "400 strokes".  The juvenile minds that I was travelling with latched on and had a field day with this theme, and yucked it the hell up.  "I'm usually asleep by the time I hit 150", that sort of thing.  I have to admit, I was laughing just as hard.  Whistling through the graveyard, I suppose.

The wildflowers were out, all trip long.

We were finally getting close to the top, which was both good and bad.  If anyone wanted to turn around now, it was a do-able coast\ride back to the parking lot.  You could be there well before dark and call this whole deal a lapse in judgement and rejoin civilization and leave it at that.  If you forged ahead though, you would be plunging into the next valley, making a quick, convenient escape impossible.  If I had know then what I was about to know within the next coupla hours, I might have gone for it.  But I was still in denial, apparently.

Stu, pushing up a badass rise.

This was my only ungulate sighting of the trip.  Which suprised the hell outta me.  I sure spent a lotta time wading through their poop.  But they had mostly departed for higher elevations, I think.

Summit glam shot . . .

And another . . .

The descent had finally begun and it was certainly good to be rolling downhill.

The rock formations in the evening light can be spectacular.

And we had kind of written off the snakes, because we hadn't had to deal with them for the last few miles. Until:

We were bombing through a brushy section of trail and the rattlers started going off all the hell around us.  It was not just a snake here and one there, it was some freaky gathering and they were pissed and they were right there off the side of the trail, just loud as hell.  We all got through this section of whatever the hell had just happened and we were talking about standardizing hand signals to point out rattlers to the riders behind us, but we were ignoring the elephant in the room, which was that it was getting dark and we had just dropped several hundred feet off of a ridge into the valley of death.  It was kind of somber, let me tell you.

Stu's crossing the creek here and just on the other side, is where we would be camping for the night, and the rest of us are standing there, looking at a baby rattlesnake in the middle of the road.  Holy living hell.

The end of the red line is where we stopped for the night.  Trust me when I tell you we talked about our options.  But the light was fading fast and any alternate plan involved travelling in darkness.  This image was taken at a much drier time of year, because the creek was flowing and the area to the south of the line was green-grassy.  Which is a scary place for snakes to hide.  We beat it with sticks and cut it down with our bare hands and huddled our tents together like sissies.  Whatever it takes to survive.

The thought, however delusional, that we had driven off the snakes and claimed this small parcel as our own eventually began to take hold, and we began to relax, just a bit.  Some liquid courage that we'd packed may have aided our cause.  A full moon rose over the ridge and illuminated the walls of our canyon and the evening was as fantastical as it was frightful.  I don't think I'll ever forget it.

Ward, in one of the most momentous acts of the entire trip, cooked up some gourmet grilled cheese sandwiches and passed them around. Oh. Hell. Yeah.  The ultimate comfort food.

I had no idea how I was gonna have the mental strength to make it through three more days of snake terror.  Turns out that tomorrow would get even worse, but not because of snakes.