The Yawp! Company Bewitched by Penitente Canyon

Our first warning came from the park ranger. "We don't really have maps of this place. I used to have some copies of the course from the Twelve Hours of Penitence bike race, but those are all gone." 

Our second warning came from the campground host. "I'm here for another few weeks, but then I relocate to Crested Butte for the summer because there are too many rattlesnakes here." 

That was all we knew about the place on Friday night. Don't get lost, don't get bitten.

Nobody warned us about the witches.

From our campsite we looked across the San Luis Valley at the snowcapped Sangre de Cristos on the valley's far side. The Great Sand Dunes were a strange bronze smudge along the otherwise green mountainside. But we paid little attention to the view and instead stared into the fire pit, where Darin kept making delicious things appear:

On Saturday morning we found what appeared to be a trail, so we rode it. We climbed up fun little rock features, and the trail alternated between rigorously steep and mercifully steep. Occasionally we encountered forks in the trail, but instead of the signage one might expect (the useful kind), divergent trails were marked with Trail Confidence Markers, some of which (but not all) were numbered. What could we do but forge ahead and get lost? We were treated to fun little rock rollers and drops until we found a meadow atop this hill. One of the more prognosticating members of our party dropped bread crumbs behind us, but the same fate befell those crumbs that befell the crumbs of Hansel.

Continuing on, the trail narrowed until it became primitive, and then narrowed some more and all but disappeared into a creek bed. It was great. We felt like explorers of yore. After much loose and sketchy descending we ran out of rock cairns and debated whether we should turn around and push our bikes back up the gnarly hill we'd just descended or continue on into the wilderness and risk near-certain death. We pressed onward. Near-certain death versus hike-a-bike--is it even a choice? We yearned to see a useless Trail Confidence Marker. 

The faint and primitive trail eventually t-boned a well-worn trail and we picked a direction. We began to think we recognized certain hillsides. We began to suspect we knew where we were. But the the trail turned and we were treated to a rippin' little descent, and then we found this:

Had it been lost? Had it been bitten?

Further into the breech we rode. The sun was directly overhead, and you had to pick up a thing to see its shadow.

Somewhere out there we found a sign with actual, real words. Those words were Witch's Canyon. It wasn't until later that we reasoned it no great place for bikes, nor for credulous mortals.

In places, it was barely a trail at all. Beware the thicket.

There's a rock at the top, though, and upon it we sat.

Unexplainably, the trails were reshuffled so that we found ourselves in familiar territory. We descended the trail we'd first climbed, down rollers and drops and smooth stone berms. There was hucking, shredding, and thrashing. Clothing was rent out of sheer glee. Miraculously, camp rose up out of the plain below as if summoned. It was precisely one beer past sandwich-thirty.

Some of our fellow travelers had also found the Witch's Canyon trail. We asked them how they liked it, and they replied, "Only idiots would try to make it up that trail." Point taken.

By early afternoon it became apparent that spells had been cast, and I succumbed and was bound by an unholy gravity to this rock for nearly an hour.

I woke in full thrall of the spell, and was drawn inexplicably back up the mountain. The others, it seemed, had been similarly affected. Who knows to what purpose the witch's spells allured us back into the woods. We found ourselves climbing a trail that runs along Witch's Canyon but is far more pleasant to climb. It was called Kitten Nugget or Sunbeam Chicken, and it began near Trail Confidence Marker #11. But to what end does a trail have a name if that name is recorded in no log and posted on no sign and remembered by no party in this bewitched company? 

I would say with confidence that the spell dragged us up this mountain's every side, though it also compelled us down routes equal in number that we had not climbed. Can one solve a Rubix Cube with travel? That as much as anything else may be what was attempted.

Our lives were undoubtedly saved when the spell's antidote was discovered. Turns out it was pizza. And beer. We had our fill and returned to camp and once again were free to determine our own actions. I advanced to bed directly.

Having never before been the subject of a spell in my sheltered life, I knew not what a suitable treatment might be for subsequent day-after afflictions. It turns out that riding Cottonwood and Chicken Dinner on S Mountain in Salida is just the cure. 

Bikepacking Canyonland's White Rim

This blog isn't going to be about bikepacking gear. Having the 'right' gear is essential to bikepacking, but it also isn't. Humans have been sleeping outside for awhile now. I forgot to pack a few 'necessities' and things turned out alright. Let's save the gear talk for another blog.

This isn't going to be about the physical demands of long, fully-loaded rides. Long bike rides can be overwhelming, and that's interesting to talk about. Let's save that discussion for another blog on another day. We'll call it The Snacks They Carried.

This isn't going to be about mileage or navigation or logistics. We weren't the first group to bike the White Rim, and there are many sources for that kind of information. All you might need to know is that we rode seventy-five fantastic miles on day one and thirty splendid miles on day two, and that I'm grateful these kind folks let me crash their trip.

This isn't going to be about the weather.

Nor is it going to be about omens. At the trailhead I surprised a hawk that was devouring a dead bird it held in its talons, and it tried and failed to fly away, the payload just a little too heavy. She continued to eat while keeping her eye on me and I continued to eat my own cold donut with my eye on her. What kind of omen was that? I have no idea. Having to defrost your chamois over the heater in your car--is that an omen? Who cares. Best to just leave omens out of it.

This isn't going to be about the terrain. It's all desert doubletrack, and it's rough and gouged and compressed into a pumice, except for where it's sandy to a degree that can only be described as malicious. 

This is going to be about a song that was stuck in my head for a majority of our two-day ride.

The song appears on an album that I have loved deeply for decades, and during the ride it seemed odd that this particular song should be on my mind. Neither its tone nor its content are at first glance appropriate to bikepacking in Moab. When I returned home it continued to play like a soundtrack over memories of the trip, and the more I thought about it the more satisfied I became that it was exactly the right song. 

The song always struck me as slow and sad and not at all appropriate for sunny days or bicycle rides. The album on which it appears is antithetical to being in the wilderness (and perhaps to being happy). I am almost always indoors in the dark when I listen to it, as I at this moment am.

I didn't even remember the title the song of until I got home and looked it up. Of course it sums up the nature of the trip perfectly. This blog is about being a tourist. The song is Radiohead's The Tourist.

David Foster Wallace describes being a tourist as well as anyone in his essay Consider the Lobster:

"To be a mass tourist, for me, is to become a pure late-date American: alien, ignorant, greedy for something you cannot ever have, disappointed in a way you can never admit. It is to spoil, by way of sheer ontology, the very unspoiledness you are there to experience. It is to impose yourself on places that in all non-economic ways would be better, realer, without you. It is, in lines and gridlock and transaction after transaction, to confront a dimension of yourself that is as inescapable as it is painful: As a tourist, you become economically significant but existentially loathsome, an insect on a dead thing."

Wallace's sentiment is similar to mine, but not the same. I've always experienced tremendous rejuvenation in the wild, and it turns out there's some science that substantiates that experience (see The Nature Fix: Why Nature Makes us Happier by Florence Williams and Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World by Michael Harris). Canyonlands is very much alive, and getting out of town for a couple of days to ride as deep into the canyons as possible is very much what the sport--and this blog--is about. Wandering along lazy double track in the sun, allowing one's mind to wander, spending time with some delightful people but also a great deal of time alone--that's my kind of tourism.

Shafer Trail is the faint, plummeting zig-zag in the middle distance.

I first went to Moab when I was nine, and what is now a definition of 'tourist town' then felt remote; the land itself was totally empty. It doesn't feel like that anymore. There are tourists everywhere. As the area gets busier, Ed Abbey's Desert Solitaire gets more and more depressing, as if the open landscapes Abbey wrote about in the sixties will soon read more like science fiction than history. The White Rim gets busy, too, but early on a cold April morning it felt like the Moab that stirred me as a kid. It felt vast and desolate, the way I want it to feel. 

Honestly, Utah is so pretty that when I observe that desert I know who I am.

We camped at Potato Bottom, a lush and leafy contrast to most of the ground we covered that first day. Setting up camp as the sun set and the leaves rustled was cinematic. I ate almond butter using a chocolate bar as a spoon, enjoyed the banter of my compatriots, and was content to an extreme.

I woke in the middle of the night to a sky so awesome that I forced myself awake fully to watch it for an hour. Lying in a warm sleeping bag on a chilly night under a starry sky can calibrate a person.

Note the local dude ahead of Sarah pulling a kid in a trailer up this hill, which is steeper than it looks.

The story is that Jonny Greenwood wrote The Tourist after watching Americans in gaudy garb rush frantically through Paris in such a hurry to see the city they were amidst that they were missing the beautiful city they were amidst. This sentiment is similar to Wallace's but not quite the same. Neither sentiment is quite my own. Mine has proven difficult to convey. Perhaps it can only be spelled out by the arabesques of the canyons. 

Maybe if you play this video while scrolling through the photos below you'll get a sense of the hauntingly elegant, serene, and unspoiled landscapes we traversed. The trip could've been a dream--traveling in a fugue state with friends I might've known forever across alien terrain that felt like home.

A Few Words About the Surly Big Fat Dummy

The Big Fat Dummy is for bigger, fatter times.

Surly released it's first cargo bike, the Big Dummy, in 2007. I have no memory for dates, so I have no idea when I bought one for myself. Let's call it somewhere between six and eight years ago. Since the day I rode it home, whatever day that was, the Dummy has been one of my favorite possessions.

Cargo bikes can sometimes inspire a kind of smugness that I want to avoid here, but to describe how invaluable the Dummy has been I want to catalog some of the things I've hauled with that bike: passengers, lumber, bikes, dogs, firewood, charcoal grills, mannequins, and gardening soil. I've raced cyclocross on the Dummy (with and without a passenger), bikecamped, and moved. I've made a game out of running errands without planning beforehand how I'm going to get everything onboard, and it's a game I've yet to lose.

Here are a few fond memories from unspecified years:

Big Dummy, little dummy.

The Wheelie Upgrade

The Big Dummy is a bike that encourages a good time. Going somewhere fun? Take a Dummy and never regret it. Going somewhere that's not fun? Take a Dummy with a cooler on the back and suddenly Gumby is with you and you're having a good time.

That's Chad on a Big Dummy (the cooler and jukebox are aftermarket). 

I was pretty sure the Dummy was the one bike I'd have forever, but deciding to sell it was easy.

The release of Big Fat Dummy seemed cause to raise an eyebrow. Did Surly bring a product to market simply to satisfy an inspired name? I threw a leg over it and knew within minutes that I'd be trading my Big Dummy for the BFD.

It's stiffer, and thus it handles better. I've ridden the Dummy down many a staircase, and it's always been fun, but the BFD does it with, dare I say, grace. The smaller double crankset means you can drop the front end off a low-to-moderate retaining wall without bottoming out on the large chainring. That might not seem important, but one of the worst wrecks of my life was caused by just such a bottoming-out. It occurred during a birthday party (after a couple of beers) and I have no idea what year it was.

The BFD is relatively easy to bunny hop. I love this so so much.

The cargo deck is bigger. It's easier to balance wide loads and it's more comfortable for passengers. The deck is also higher, so you can inflate your rear tire or adjust your derailleur without fighting a cargo bag that's full of 87lbs of pancake mix (or whatever).

I never had a problem with the mechanical brakes on the Dummy, but the hydraulics make a notable difference.

Now, about those fat tires. Fatbikes have drawn ridicule from some riders, a few with experience and a few with mere aesthetic objections. Like any bicycle, however, fatbikes are really good at some things (climbing straight up a wall) and not so good at others (shedding grams). For hauling cargo, there seems to be no downside. I've hit curbs and potholes on a fully-loaded Big Dummy, and the forces involved made my cartilage hurt. A fully-loaded BFD (we're talking close to 400lbs) absorbs obstacles. Does it make the BFD slower than the Dummy? Who cares. Why are you in such a hurry to get your food-grade rain barrel or your crate of watermelons or your deflated bouncy castle across town anyway? Also, big tires mean you can stick some sweet wall rides on the South Platte Trail underpasses.

I've been meaning to do this to my Big Dummy for years, so I installed an axle mount to the rear of the BFD's cargo deck. This makes it easy to haul bikes. This may seem ridiculous (it certainly looks ridiculous), but I've already used this twice and am planning to use it again tomorrow, and I've only had this bike for four days. The axle mount accommodates a 15x100mm, but with a wooden dowel and a homemade spacer, a quick-release, boost, or fatbike hub will also fit.

Is that photo above absurd? Yup. Sometimes a person has to haul various things in various directions in a single day.

Some people might look at the Dummy and the BFD and think about how full their garage already is, and wonder whether they really need another bike. I can understand. Clutter stresses me out. Having too many possessions stresses me out. But here's the thing: a cargo bike allows you to leave your car in the driveway more often. For a number of years, the Big Dummy allowed me to live without a car. Those are very valuable things. If you're cargo-curious, get a cargo bike and use it to haul a couple of boxes from your garage to the thrift store. Park it in the space you've made, and I'll bet you find yourself using it more often than you imagined.

Durability. Versatility. Utility. Surly requires these things from all of their bikes, and the BFD is no exception. It's a strange, magnificent, all-terrain, mind-altering, work-horsing, fun machine. Don't believe me? Get a six-pack and hop on the back.

Land Run 100 and Beckett's 'How It Is'

The Land Run 100 is a gravel race that starts and ends in front of District Bicycles in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

How It Is is a novel by the French writer Samuel Beckett, in which a man crawls through endless mud and can hear only his own panting.

Stillwater, Oklahoma is home to Oklahoma State University, where the works of Samuel Beckett are studied (I assume).

The red soil of Oklahoma is so rich in character that it inspired a musical genre and is never ever going to wash out of my tights.

District Bicycles is owned by Crystal and Bobby, two of the most delightful people you're likely to meet.

Here's an example of the distinct and unusual voice of Samuel Beckett's How It Is:

"other certainties the mud the dark I recapitulate the sack the tins the mud the dark the silence the solitude nothing else for the moment"

I mention these things because I recently participated in the Land Run 100. It was a day unlike any other in my life but not unlike reading How It Is. It was muck and ooze to an order that's difficult to describe. It was so muddy that my memories seem hyperbolic. Photographs show they are not. There were at least four different kinds of mud. None of these were "fast mud."

It was intense, it was preposterous, and it may have changed the way I think.

My relationship with endurance events is love/hate, as is my relationship with travel. The drive to Oklahoma is long and boring, and the forecast for Saturday was a 100% chance of rain. However, I was past the point of cancelling my hotel reservation, so I loaded up with snacks and podcasts and ventured east.

After I arrived I discovered that the hotel had gone out of business and had taken my reservation with it. Well, whatever. I didn't have enough podcasts to get me back home. Once I found another hotel and a place to eat, I wrote a single sentence in my notebook. "This was a bad idea." Whether that refers to traveling to Oklahoma, signing up for another endurance event, or ordering waffle fry nachos from the late-night bar menu is anyone's guess.

The day before the race there was a no-drop, twenty-mile group ride. Living near the mountains and several trail networks, it has often been tough for me to understand what draws people to dirt roads, but they are empty and wild and sunny and take you past fields of perplexed cows and silos painted red, white, and blue, and you feel that you yourself are made simpler by this simple place. I'm no plainiac, but it was quite pleasant.

I awoke to the sound of rain on Saturday morning. It's tough to pin down why, exactly, I did not want to ride, but I found a supply of excuses. I thought I was getting sick (there were symptoms, but they disappeared), and I hadn't ridden a singlespeed in a long time, and I wasn't sure I had the right clothing, and ad nauseam. I thought about getting in the car and driving home.

As I pulled on my jersey I formulated escape plans: if it rains for an hour I'll turn around. I'll quit at the halfway point. If I'm cold after the first ten miles I'll call SAG.

Clearly I can't decipher my own mind. I signed up for an event and made tedious preparations and drove to Oklahoma and then labored to talk myself out of it.

The rain let up for the start. Nobody was fooled.

You can see my Straggler in this photo, left. Someday I will write Surly a love letter about it. 

Before firing the cannon, Bobby had some words for us. Because I am a cynic, I heard him out and thought about how nice it would be if what he said were actually true. Because I am a cynic, I make a lazy connection between inspiration--a word that means 'to blow into'--and hot air. Bobby is really good at inspiration. What he said was stirring. But I'm really good at being a cynic, and talk is cheap and saying you can do a thing is no guarantee.

Whatever. He said his thing and we put our hands in the air:

We rode a little pavement to get out of town, but soon hit dirt. It was not bad. It hadn't rained all that much. The temperature was forty degrees--as it would remain--but the riding was pleasant. 

It began to rain. 

The roads were wet but in no way an indication of what was to come. I stopped to adjust some clothing and learned an important lesson about wet gloves with integrated liners. The integrated liner pulls halfway out when a wet hand is withdrawn, and wadding a wet hand into a wet liner and getting that mess sorted out inside a wet shell is nearly impossible. You might as well try to pull on socks that are tied together. Separate liners would've been much better.

"centuries I can see me quite tiny the same as now more or less only tinier quite tiny no more objects no more food and I live the air sustains me the mud I live on"

I'm guessing it was around mile twenty where we got our first real, literal taste of the terrain to come. At the crest of a hill the road turned the color of Mars, and we descended through wet cement. It was squirrelly. Climbing the subsequent roller was mixing cake batter with a bicycle. This was where I first saw a rider carrying a bike with the derailleur dangling from the chain like a pendant. I saw perhaps fifty iterations of this throughout the day. 

"I turn on my side which side the left it's preferable throw the right hand forward bend the right knee these joints are working the fingers sink the toes sink in the slime these are my holds too strong slime is too strong holds is too strong I say it as I hear it"

I was unable to take a lot of photographs. Initially it was too wet for me to fish my phone out of its baggie and then worm my hand back into a wet glove. Eventually I couldn't really operate my hands at all. However, this picture I took accidentally shows the benefits offered by narrow and fairly slick tires. This is about as muddy as they got.

Compare that to other tires:

"the tongue gets clogged with mud that can happen too only one remedy then pull it in and suck it swallow the mud or spit it out it's one or the other and question is it nourishing and vistas last a moment with that"

The road became packed gravel once more. It felt like we should be nearing the halfway point when I asked another rider how far we'd gone. He wiped the mud from his glasses and from his Garmin and verified that we'd come twenty-seven miles. About halfway to halfway.

Despair.

I couldn't navigate back to Stillwater without cell service. I couldn't face turning around. My hands were too cold to loosen the clasp on my snack bag, so I stopped on a bridge to eat. This is where everything changed.

I had been wearing the glasses with clear lenses that I always wear when riding, and though I tried to clean them the mud was greasy and I hadn't a scrap of clothing to wipe them on that wasn't also muddy. I stuffed the glasses in a bag. I cannot explain the abruptness with which clarity settled.

There was a tent on the riverbank (barely visible to the right of the bridge, above). A torn and soiled tent, a dog, a shovel, and a cooler. Likely these were the sum of someone's assets. The dog--seated to calmly survey the passage of hundreds of humans aboard strange devices--did not mind the rain.

"we are if I may believe the colours that deck the emerald grass if I may believe them we are old dream of flowers and seasons we are in April or in May and certain accessories if I may believe them white rails a grandstand colour of old rose we are on a racecourse in April or in May"

The above photograph, taken through a wet baggie, doesn't do the landscape justice. The water was translucent, and I could see ripples in the sand of the river bottom, which were purple and aqua in the strange light. With my glasses on, everything had been reddish-brown or brownish-red.

My Honey Stinger chews had become a single, firm clump, and as I sat there trying to dislodge a chew so that I might eat it I began to regard my general preference for being warm and dry as a meaningless preference. Skin is waterproof. Hypothermia wasn't going to be an issue, so what was, exactly, the issue?

There were a hundred very good reasons to stop riding, from broken derailleurs to illness to insufficient clothing to ninety-seven other things. Nobody who DNF'd should feel bad--that's not what I suggest. I, however, recognized I had no good reason to stop. At the end of the day, my story would come down to the narrative that I was telling myself. Indeed, this is cliché--mind over matter, etc. That doesn't make it less true. It took these clichés--a bridge, a clarity of vision--to prove that what Bobby had said to us was correct. My doubt was my greatest obstacle.

The mind is weak; the flesh is pretty strong, actually.

So I continued, attentive to my surroundings. Purple bushes were in flower. Green fields were resplendently sodden. Thrice I saw smoke rising in the distance and smelled burning wet willow, which is a smell that took me back to a place and time I'm not sure I'd visited in the first place. Gloomy is a word employed for days like these, but it's just a word. The world is sometimes dry and sometimes wet. Exchange the world gloomy for serene or lustrous and the entire narrative changes.

These were new.

The sand had eaten away my brakes by mile thirty, which made for some really exciting descents.

A party was going down at the halfway point, but I stopped only long enough to do two things: adjust my brakes and eat a burrito, only one of which had an effect.

There were several miles of pavement leading into and out of Guthrie, and by the time I hit dirt again, the character of the mud had changed. It had grown mean. Ruts were deep. Clots of mud were flung by my rear wheel up over my head to rain down in front of me to be run over and flung up again.

In the days before the event, my friend Tobie from blackriver and my friend Joe from J.Paks had recommended a singlespeed with slick tires should there be mud, and their advice played a huge part in my being able to finish. There was a fifteen mile stretch where every half-mile I passed some poor rider--all of them brown, all of them bent over their derailleurs in the exact same way. It was like playing Excitebike and looping through the same graphic every few seconds. I don't have the willpower to ride a geared bike and not shift it, so here again it was a few words that changed my day (thanks, Tobie and Joe).

And yet here language is going to fail me. These last miles I cannot describe. The varieties of mud. The relentless rolling road. A motion outside of time.

"you are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's one you are there no more alive no more then again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another"

Inconsequentially, it stopped raining. Every few minutes I wiggled my fingers, and if I could feel them I continued. When I wiggled my fingers and couldn't feel them, I bit them, and if I could feel the bite I continued. When I bit my fingers and couldn't feel them, I stopped and put my hands in my armpits until I could feel them, and then I continued. I otherwise felt fine.

"for number 814336 as we have seen by the time he reaches number 814337 has long since forgotten all he ever knew of number 814335 as completely as though he had never been and by the time number 814335 reaches him as we have also seen has long since forgotten all he ever knew of number 814337 vast stretch of time"

Some argue that How It Is is about a form struggling to emerge from formlessness--a character speaking himself into existence. To one degree or another, that was my race.

These stories I tell myself about who I am, which of them are fictions?

I am not a person who does things like this. But I am. How does one reconcile the narratives in their head with what's real? By testing those narratives, I suppose. It's shattering when a discrepancy is revealed--you do not know upon whom you look when you look in a mirror. It's shattering for a cynic to admit that an enthusiast was right. You were right, Bobby. Thank you.

James Gaan

"and if it may seem strange that without food to sustain us we can drag ourselves thus by the mere grace of our united net sufferings from west to east towards an inexistent peace we are invited kindly to consider that for the likes of us and no matter how we are recounted there is more nourishment in a cry nay a sigh torn from one whose only good is silence or in speech extorted from one at last delivered from its use than sardines can ever offer"

*See some better photos of this event by 214 Photography and James Gann. Search #landrun100 on Instagram.

A Trip to the Fatbike World Championships in Crested Butte

Jason from Clif Bar took this photo of your friendly neighborhood Yawp! Owl.

Ordinarily when someone tries to charge me for riding my bike, instead of opening my wallet I open my mouth to complain. Bikes are already expensive, and racing isn't terribly exciting for those of us at the back. I typically prefer to ride alone or with a few friends at a leisurely (and free) pace. However, because fatbikes are a little ridiculous in a way I fully support, and Crested Butte is one of my favorite places, I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did.

I was accompanied by my trail partner and life buddy Rebecca, and we arrived in Crested Butte on Friday night at exactly pizza-thirty. Reports of heavy snow in the area were not fake news. 

The forecast was calling for temperatures around 20 degrees during Saturday's race. It was -16 when we woke up and I never saw the thermometer climb into double digits. It didn't seem like the best weather for bike riding, but it was great weather for drinking coffee next to a window.

Perhaps this 14" pancake explains side-stitch I had later.

This may be the first time I've ever seen something "safe for work" trampled out in the snow.

The course was out in the open and unbelievably gorgeous. I tried to take some pictures, but my phone was in my pocket and I somehow got sweat all up inside my phone's case (though I'm sure I wasn't sweating), and thus I couldn't swipe over to the camera. After you finish looking at Chad's suit, look beyond him to get an idea of the kind of Rocky Mountain meadow we rode through:

Photo: Rebecca

Despite the temperature there were some bare legs:

Photo: Rebecca

The course had been groomed by snowcat. It was a little soft on the periphery, but in the center it was quite fast. The abacus zip-tied to my handlebars on which I calculate my average speed was frozen, but still I maintain that the trail was quite fast.

I've ridden bikes in the snow a fair amount and haven't had issues with frozen water before, but on Saturday my water was frozen before we left the starting line. It turns out that riding 18 miles in the cold without hydration isn't really a problem (the whiskey handups were key).

I don't think I've been involved in a race that felt more like a group ride. Participants were great to one another. It's a real joy to get out on the bike in the middle of winter, and that joy is what the event captures and promotes.

Steve somehow gets some sprinting done on a fatty.

Photo: Rebecca

On Sunday, we got to take our bikes up the mountain the easy way. It was a little bit warmer, and it's unclear whether it was the weather or the free beer that motivated Rebecca to suit up and hoist her Surly Wednesday onto the lift, but there she is.

Greg often has just one wheel on the ground.

At first, there was only one singletrack run open for us, and it was deep and sloppy and rutted, and one couldn't help but do this about every seven feet:

See?

It was silly in the best way, like playing in the snow as a kid. It was an exercise in being upside-down with snow in your pants and getting to laugh with other people who also have snow in their pants. After a couple of hours we were too destroyed to continue.

Now, if only somebody would hold Hot Tub Worlds on the same weekend.