Sleepwalking The Vapor Trail 125

“The past,” Faulkner wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.”

Four months ago I participated in an event called the Vapor Trail 125, a mountain bike event that is 125 miles long and originally passed through the ghost town of Vapor. I first heard about this race twelve years ago, and it was the name that captivated me as much as anything else. “Vapor Trail” sounds exquisite, diaphanous, indescribable—something that is inhaled to affect the chemistry of the body. For years the idea of doing this difficult ride loomed like a star, not always noticed, but always there. I signed up for it both in 2018 and 2022, but circumstances prevented me from participating (this is called DNS for Did Not Start (or Did Not Suffer)). In 2023 that looming star aligned with the right celestial bodies as well as my own body, and I arrived at the starting line with a broken GPS and a tweaked knee. As getting what you want often goes, finally doing the ride answered no questions, scratched no itches, and solved no problems. The star is still up there in my sky, burning bright as ever, reminding me of this dream I had called the Vapor Trail that I neither fully remember nor understand.

The Vapor Trail begins at 10pm, and racers ride overnight—crossing the continental divide two times in the dark and once more in daylight—finishing anywhere between 11am and 8pm on the following day. I have been training for this with years of committed, regimented insomnia. No two days are quite the same, but most nights are, tossing and turning, bedsheets rising and falling like waves on a sea of endless anxieties and fears, made all the worse by darkness and a mind as opaque as the waxed paper served under greasy airport food. It leaves one feeling like a resident ghost in the town of Vapor (this is called DNS for Did Not Sleep). Because all long, sleepless nights bleed into one another, all of my dark waking hours are tinged by an experience I had several years ago when I was unknowingly drugged. I have no idea what I was given, but I do know that my mind fell apart for about twelve hours—from 10pm to 6am—and during those hours I had no idea what was happening to me. I did not know where I was (this was intensified by my being in a hotel), and even worse, I did not know when I was. Or rather, all of the events of my life seemed to be happening at the same time, accompanied by dreams, thoughts, fantasies, and horrors. There are quantum physicists who claim that while humans experience time in linear fashion, time itself is static, or happening all at once. This resonates with me after my experience, in which eternity felt like a place and not an amount of time, feeling all of my experiences orbit around me, occur without me. In some ways, the Vapor Trail was just one more of these sleepless nights; it was one type of struggle exchanged for another.

I cannot say why I am moved to ride long distances, but I’ve stopped trying to answer that question. I enjoy them and I keep doing them, and that, I suppose, is answer enough. When asked to name the fist city that comes to mind, one can’t really explain why one thinks of Cincinnati or Bruges instead of Bangladesh or Sydney; we are at the mercy of our own minds, and to some extent (or perhaps totally) aren’t in charge of the thoughts or desires that have us in their thrall.

Trying to explain the Vapor Trail to friends and family who don’t ride bikes inevitably convinces them that I am bonkers, which I can understand, but really what difference does it make if one is thrashing around in bed or if one is making circles with their feet in a dark forest, passing through a tunnel carved out of that darkness by a helmet light? Perhaps both things are happening at the same time.

For twelve years I wonder what it would be like to do this race, and then I am riding down F street with fifty other riders as pedestrians cheer without having any idea what we are up to, and then I am pedaling alone up a dirt road on a pleasantly cool evening like I have always been here, the night telescoping out before my headlight, the road ever changing but, within the confines of my light, remaining the same. It makes me think that my daytime life is written out linearly in a book, and my nighttime life is a hole bored through that book, cover to cover—a kind of tunnel carving through chronology like my headlight through the dark.

The forest through which the Vapor Trail winds is the same forest in which I grew up dinking around, with the same brisk mountain air, the same cicada chirps and coyote yaps, the same sprucey, mossy musk. The breeze sounds familiar moving through these aspen leaves and pine needles. The ride is by turns quite pleasant and brutally difficult. But who cares. We all face hard things, and in the end this is just a bike ride.

The first forty miles of the course pass relatively quickly. There’s a fair amount of climbing on mellow dirt roads and some great Colorado Trail singletrack. Aside from my GPS crashing at the start line and dumping all of my data—including the course—those first forty miles are purely enjoyable. (Thank you, by the way, to the Vapor Trail event staff and volunteers for marking the course well enough that I could navigate solely by your little pink flags). As we climb up toward the ghost town of Hancock, my knee feels like it is made of sugarless chewing gum. We are headed into the only unfamiliar section of the course, and though I pored over the course maps and watched jeep videos on YouTube of Hancock and Tomichi Passes and had been told to expect some walking, I am not prepared for the insane hike-a-bike of these sections. I have done the Canyon Creek hike-a-bike several times (which will come after cresting Tomichi Pass) and was expecting that to be the crux of the ride. I was wrong.

We all face hard things. Most of them we don’t get to choose. For me, many of those things come to face me in the middle of the night when I am awake and alone with nothing to stop my overactive sense of responsibility and black-magical thinking. The midnight challenges of the Vapor Trail wear me out in a different way. In the middle of an increasingly chilly night, this bike ride becomes a hard thing. I’m pushing my bike up a road so steep that it’s at times difficult to keep my footing, and the road is full of loose rocks that range in size from softball to coffee table. When I feel I must surely be nearing the top of this climb, I see some exceptionally bright stars above that I realize with a twist of the stomach are racers ahead of me still pushing their bikes up this sysophysian cliff face. And it’s absolutely, unquestionably insane, this effort, that we are out here, and yet there is nothing to do but continue on, as we do in the midst of all the hard things we endure. As Becket says, “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on.” Because my malfunctioning GPS has reset itself twice since the start, I haven’t the vaguest idea how far I’ve come, or how much longer this is going to continue. Have I pushed for an hour? Two? You might as well ask Wilson the Castaway volleyball how many waves he traversed at sea.

(In the video above, I’m doing my best to hold the phone level. It doesn’t quite do justice to how steep this road is. We should’ve been on belay.)

As surprised as I am to find myself on this impassible road—the granite milling my shoes to powder and snowmelt soaking up into my shoes around the cleats—I am not as surprised as are the hunters in blaze orange who set up before first light at the top of Tomichi Pass and who clearly spent a lot of time and effort to get up here and who rose very early to make coffee and sandwiches and find the perfect, silent, remote vantage point only to have fifty grunting, wheezing, bike pushers scrape their derailleurs against boulders as they ram their way up the valley and mere feet from the hunters’ cover. Right place, wrong game.

The remnants of the shoe covers that Rebecca loaned to me flutter around my ankles, tattered as flags at a besieged castle, as I push on, skyward, toward a distant headlight that is in view at what must be the top of Granite Peak, the race’s high point. If the light weren’t fixed in space, I would think it was an airplane. I crane my neck to look up at that light,  lose my constitution, and decide that once I make it to the top of Tomichi Pass I will descend down the road to Snowblind campground and give up, rather than pushing all the way up into the jet stream. But as the faint outlines of the mountains start to appear in the morning’s earliest green light, I am in a place that I love, and I’ve pushed my bike for so long that my knee feels great. So I make a right onto the singletrack and begin pushing onward toward the top of Granite Peak. Once past a certain milestone of exhaustion, there is a peace of mind that is as near to living in the moment as I ever get.

As I drink hummingbird water for calories at the top of Granite Peak, I envy my dog, who found a meatball in a bush beside the Arkansas River before the race started (the very incident, in fact, responsible for my tweaked knee). Drinking my calories has served me well in the past, but it never occurred to me that there is likely a limit to the number of hours that I can function on even high dollar hummingbird water. (This is called DNS for Did Not Sandwich).

The daylight portion of the ride is all quite pleasant. I descend 9 miles down Canyon Creek, up Old Monarch Pass, along the spine of the country on the Monarch Crest trail, and absolutely shred the Starvation Creek descent—seriously, I’ve never ridden Starvation so cleanly. All of that riding passes about as quickly as this sentence. As soon as the sun rises, I can once again touch bottom, and with proper footing comes linear time, and like all linear time, it passes.

It’s the climb up Poncha Creek Road that gets me (this portion of the course is somewhat cruel, as Starvation and Poncha Creek Road make a ten mile loop, leading racers through Marshall Pass twice). I can no longer stomach the hummingbird water, and I’ve shortsightedly mixed drink mix into all of my bottles and I have a tough time hydrating during the heat of the day.

From 10pm through 3:30pm I rode (or pushed) 95 miles in 17-1/2 hours (whatever those are), and climbed over 16,000 vertical feet and dropped out at the final aid station, which is just before the fun part. The arduous Rainbow trail was still ahead of me, but I was about to descend 6,000 feet. What’s more galling is that I think I could’ve finished the race in less time than it took me to abandon it. Just one portion of that time—the ride back to town—took over an hour, and I regretted my decision each time my ears popped.

(I can tell you why I didn’t stop earlier. I just so happened to run into Mike Franco, the race director, at aid stations 1-4, and he was a supreme motivator. I was back on my bike with more hummingbird water in my bottles before I had a chance to feel tired. Thanks, Mike.)

I’ve long thought that doing difficult things on a bicycle has value—beyond simply enjoying the difficult thing—because it reminds me that my body can handle much more than my mind assumes it can. In turn, that helps me hold my resolve when real life challenges come unexpectedly in the middle of the proverbial night. “I can’t go on. I must go on. I’ll go on.” (And so on). It turns out that I don’t even have to finish these difficult things for the lesson to ring true. In fact, I never quit (Did Not Stop). I am out here pedaling through the dark, thinking about tacos and looking up at what might be stars.