MTB'ing Moab, OCT '08

October brought a long awaited return to Moab.  It’s not that I haven’t been there within the past couple years, cuz I have, but not to mountain bike, which was the purpose of this latest venture.  One might say that riding fat tires in Moab is the principle reason to go there.  Probably, but I’d say the climbing is mighty fine too.  Didn’t do that this time, but didn’t find the trip lacking either.  Seeing as it’s so damn expensive to fly with my bike (NWA will let me bring 100lbs of crap between two checked bags plus a carry on and personal item as an employee, but a 50 lb bike case by itself is apparently unacceptable), I rented from Poison Spider Bicycles, a local bike shop in Moab, and I think one of the best (although Moab is small there are somewhere around 7 quality shops due to the enormity of riding culture there.)  I rented a Trek Fuel EX7, which I’d have to rate as adequate for the job, but not as cool as my Stumpjumper which was hanging up at home wondering why.  The West is what it’s made for.  Sad.  That aside, the riding was as I remember it- stellar.    We (myself, Kelly, and friends from MN- Nate and Emily)  rode Amasa Back the first day, and took it further than I have in past years.  We didn’t just top out on the initial climb as normal, but continued along the top of the Mesa that leads out above the Colorado river and eventually overlooks the mines of Potash, which in my visit two years ago Alison, Ty, and I rode out to via road bikes.  It was a different view from what I think was a couple thousand feet above.  You never can quite tell unless some topo map or local can tell you for sure.  But you can surely tell it’s damn high and straight down.  I enjoyed the climb up, having been without long, technical climbs that I got used to living in Northern UT.  We sessioned a few hard rock piles, mostly failing but loving each try.  The biggest challenge for me this trip was breathing.  I’m am again a Midwesterner that can’t breath at altitude.  It really hits you.  The descent was a blast, but I’m going to have to say that Poison Spider didn’t watch the pads on my disc brakes very well, as they were less than ideal at high speeds.  Not what you want on technical rocky terrain.  I was pinching my fingers between brake lever and bar before getting enough stopping power.  Not comfortable.  I compensated the next day by moving the levers in so as to pull on the very ends, and it did the trick.  Still, give an expensive rental pad that aren’t super worn.  Come on.   They’ve always been wonderful shop so I’ll let that one go.  I still bought a t-shirt.  J  The next day brought the biggest push.  For the first time (since we all have jobs now), we took the shuttle van far up into the La Sal mountains to ride down from Hazard to meet up with Porcupine Rim, which I’ve blogged about before as my favorite trail ever ridden.  Still is, but I have even more respect for it’s harshness after this trip.  The La Sal trails (which I don’t even remember the names of) were a reminder of Wasatch riding- fast high altitude (translation, lung busting) gravely singletrack with lots of baby-heads (small round rocks protruding from the ground, which I know is horrible term, but it is what it is) and sharp rocks as well.  Basically, a great place for suspension and the right tires.    I miss that feeling of getting tired from descending.  Not possible in MN.  Maybe in the ND Badlands, but probably not.  The day saw over 6,000 vertical feet of downward travel on two wheels over many many rocks.  To use a slightly overused term in most mtb circles- epic.  After the alpine singletrack of the La Sals, we transitioned to the Upper Porcupine Singletrack, or UPS trail, which is technically not supposed to be ridden (BLM disputes I think), but if you know where it’s at, which one of us did, and you follow that person, no one’s around to see you ride it.  And you have fun.  It’s basically an extension off the top of Porcupine Rim, and way worth the ride.  But be careful, there’s a lot of places you could disappear and not be found for a while, the trail follows the Rim, which is quite tall, so don’t try to be a hero.  No when to walk your bike, as is good advice in Moab in general.  Also, if you crack yourself along the trail in general, it’s a helicopter ride or a long long super miserable hike out, which will end in the dark for sure.  Porcupine Rim in and of itself was still there, the same trail I’ve raved about.  But I’ve never ridden it after already descending so far and thus with already blistered hands.  I looked down at one point to see blood coming through my glove.  One blister decided to open up.  Didn’t hurt until the next day, but looked pretty ugly.  My blister was not the injury of the day.  The trail bit hard at only 1.75 miles to go till the finish at the Colorado River.  Emily had the biggest endo I’ve seen to date in person.  Her front tire washed out to the left on some sand, and she fell to the right, and over a 12 foot cliff onto rock upside down with bike on top.  Bad news.  15 feet in all after starting atop her bike.  She was super tough through the whole thing; not a tear shed.  And Kelly, being an EMT from his ski patrol experienced was able to figure out her condition.  It was lucky.  She could have easily broken her pelvis, which out in the backcountry can lead to death by way of internal bleeding, but did not.  She came out with a badly bruised sacrum (the end of your pelvis).   We did get a walk-out search and rescue ordered, and the trip from crash to ER was around 4 hours.  Not bad for coming off the Rim.  But it was a bummer for her to have to close out such as great ride with a huge crash.  We’re all glad she’s ok though, to state the obvious.   Moab does at least have to tasty eats, and we were able to shake off the excitement with some good food and brew.  We hoteled it for the night so Emily didn’t have to put up with tents and 35 degrees injured, and drove back to SLC in the morning.  Getting back to MN was an adventure too with reduced flights and non-revenue status; it took two days and we missed a day of work.  Well, in the words of Office Space, “I wouldn’t say we were missing it.”  J  Long story short, wonderful trip with a sting in the middle.  Go to Moab.  Ride huge, but respect the wildness of UT.  Do your best to stay upright, and don’t take the battle with gravity too far.   

Pictures, in pretty much reverse chronological order...

At the top of Amasa Back...

"The blister"...now that's descending till it hurts...

Bummer...hey, that's a sweet Intense 5.5 you crashed...

SAR walk out...

There's a Christmas card shot...Nate and Emily

There's the Castle Valley mesas and Casselton Tower down there (usually you're saying up there)

One UT hardman and three MN heavy breathers at 9,500 feet.  :)  No, I'm not as fat and my jacket blowing the wind eludes.  :)

Shuttles and a whole lot of money in full suspension bikes...

The "stairs" at the beginning of Amasa back.  I've sucessfully ridden down them a few times, and believe or not, Kelly has nearly successfully ridden UP.  Nice.

Chillin' above Potash...

Resting on top red rock and below the La Sals.  I love Moab.

Sessioning on Amasa Back...

More of the same...makes for an excellent afternoon.  Screw cubicles.  

Yeah, so you may be thinking- "Ben, your blog sure has sucked lately."  Your right.  But it's not due to my lack of having anything to write about.  I've had quite a bit of fun the past month, including a Moab trip and a bike purchase.  You'd think I'd have updated on that.  I haven't though, because of my addiction to fun.  You see, I've been working a lot of hours at my job too, and during the time I actually have off I tend to bike or climb, or travel to bike or climb.  This ends up meaning that I don't write.  Bummer.  I do intend to update you all with the latest adventures soon, but as of tonight I still have to keep you waiting.  That is if you haven't abandoned the habit of checking treadnorth already.   Stay tuned...

Fall MTB ride in MN...

Had a great fall mountain bike ride in the fall colored forests of MN yesterday with Nate and Emily Goltz.  It was an odd day for October, being that the leaves were a brilliant fall showing, but we were riding with temps in the upper seventies, and got to ride out a small isolated thunderstorm.  Made for muddy last few miles, but hey, what mountain biker doesn't like getting completely dirty once and a while?  Sometimes I forget what a sweet mountain bike I have living here in MN.  I think it may be my favorite ride if I were still living in Bountiful, but the riding here is sparse.  What exists is fun, I'll give it that, but there is no where near the experience to be found here as in UT.  Which brings to mind that I'm headed to Moab this week!  Yes, it's been a couple years now and it's time to return.  I'll be heading out this Tuesday night and returning Sunday, getting a much needed break from work.  I've worked so many extra hours this summer on a special project that I basically have an extra week of vacation built for this year.  Not bad.  So it's off to ride in the old Spring Break stomping grounds of southern UT.  We'll probably get a bit of bouldering in in SLC, and crack climbing while in Moab as well.  That's the good life.  I'll give you a report when I get back.  And oh yeah, the Alaska blogs aren't finished yet either.  I've only bothered to write about half that trip yet.  Man am I distracted.  As you were...

One of the obstacles at Murphey Hanrehan Regional Park, MN...

Emily singlespeeding through the fall colors...

Nate showboating through the fall colors.  :)  Approved.

Mud anybody?

Making beer...

I decided to pick up yet another hobby this summer, as I'm someone who doesn't sit idle well.  This time it follows my love of food and drink, the latter being the current subject.  There is extremely well stocked and knowledgeable home brewing supply store here on Grand Ave in St Paul, and I decided after reading up on the hobby to try it out.  Glad I did.  I had a great deal of fun learning how the beer making process goes, and brewing my first batch.  I chose an EPA ingredient kit modeled after St Paul's flagship Summit EPA.  I like a great tasting brew just like a great tasting meal, and I think I'm hooked on brewing my own for a while.  It ended up costing me around 64 cents per home-brewed beer (after the equipment), which is a fantastic price for great beer.  Stop by sometime if you know me well and I'd be happy to treat you too a glass- it turned out great and has gotten rave reviews from everyone I've shared it with so far.  For now, enjoy the pix of the process:

Steeped grains:

Prepping the primary fermentor- Mullet did not trust all the hoses and containers for a second, but he sure was interested in the whole process:

Right after pitching the yeast into the cooled wort and sealing the fermentor:

Bottling with Ty after a few weeks of waiting:

Headwaters 100 Year 2008

I rode my strongest century this past Saturday.  It was at the yearly Headwaters 100 in Park Rapids, MN.  This one's become a yearly tradition for me and some of my road buddies.  Role call this year ran pretty thin; only myself and friend Nate Goltz showed from the old crew which numbered around 6 or 7 depending on years.  Nate is running the Twin Cities Marathon this coming weekend, so he elected to ride the 45 mile short option of the event, so I rode the full miles mostly solo.  Some guys Nate went to law school with showed for that one though, so I shared a few miles with them.  

I can tell all the commuting (18 miles roundtrip) from my St Paul apartment to my Eagan workplace is paying off.  I've also been adjusting the amount I eat on longish rides, and it's working.  I felt strong at the finish this year and sprinted the last couple miles at 22 mpg.  Those who know me realize that I usually don't end that strong, so it felt great.  I'm getting the sick urge to go bigger next year and move beyond the realm of century rides into a 150-200

 mile one-day ride.  We'll see.    

MN mini tour..

Well, this happened back in June, but I've been meaning to blog it since then.  I finally used my Surly for something other than riding to work.  Every time I loaded it up with office clothes, the same old lunch, and commuter garb, I could hear my touring bike growl a little.  A nine mile jaunt through suburbia only to sit in the corner of my windowless office for who knows how many hours is not a way to treat touring bike nor rider.  So I finally got it loaded up with camping gear and ventured out of town.  Actually, I drove the first couple miles cuz I was short on time and it was the only way to get as far away from the city as I'd intended.  I took the Gateway Trail from just outside St. Paul to the highways of Washington County, MN, then on to Interstate State Park on the St. Croix National Scenic Riverway.  It was hot and sticky, as are many MN summer days, but it was nice to get out and ride, have a fire, sleep in a tent, not work, etc.  I intend on more touring; I don't know with the falls schedule already filling if I'll get the Surly out of town overnight again in '08 but more trips will follow.  Touring a great distance (ocean to ocean, or UT to AK are possibilities) is still on my "bucket list".  Most people have some of those type of lifelong intentions, and few make it happen.  The sad statistics make me realize it may be the type of thing to force into happening if you can find the right way.  Still thinking.  Still time.  If I get to 50 and haven't done it it'll be time to drop everything and go.  But for now, a night out in MN was fun:

 

My two workhorses.  I prefer the two-wheeled option, but the other tends to get me to UT quicker under tighter timeframes.  :)

In Washington  County, MN...

Gentle descent down to Marine on St. Croix...

Campsite along the St. Croix River...

The combination of campfires and bikes will always make me smile.  It was a good day...

AK day 3

We continued on further into the park on the third day in Denali.  This is done by purchasing a ticket to ride the park bus system (the only way to get past mile 15 of the 90 mile park road).  It takes several hours to travel into the park as the road is gravel, rugged, and slow.  Sweet.  Anyhow, we chose to head in all the way to the Eilson Visitor Center, which is near the bottom of Denali itself (Mt McKinley to those who disregard it's proper native name- we European types are good at barging in and claiming/renaming things which are already established).  Our route took us past a lot of fantastic alpine tundra scenery full of small to very large wildlife.  Caribou, Dall Sheep, Grizzlies, Marmots, Moose, Ptarmigan, Fox, and lots of flying things I couldn't define.  It was so great to see a part of the earth that is mainly undeveloped (save for the one gravel road we traveled to the visitor center- which has little services of any kind other than educational displays and restrooms.)  The rest of the park is pretty much as it always has been for this era.  We didn't get to see Denali, which was shrouded in cloud.  We were told that it had only been visible 4 days in the past two months.  It's typical to have to make several trips to the Park to see the mountain, since it's cloudy/raining much of the summer.  It's hard to imagine we were standing under a 20,000 ft mountain and couldn't tell, but that's about it.  I really want to go back and see it hulking over me; sunset is the dream.  

A hike down a gulch by the Eilson Visitor Center revealed that we were in moose territory:

Other hikers passing up through the brush back to the visitor center:

Never seems to be a "quick" way to hike in AK; good thing Alison has a purple backpack:

Don't let the expression fool you, I like some kinds of hardship, liking bushwhacking AK!

Overlooking braided rivers flowing off the Polychrome Glaciers:

Alison taking in Polychrome Pass.  The world is bigger than us my friends....

Polychrome Pass area:

Difficult to spot, but here you have it- a mother Grizzly and two cubs...look for the blond dots...

View where you could normally look up and see 20,000 ft of mountain.  Not this time...

More AK...

So I do still mean to continue with this blog.  It seems that I'm always making the excuse of working too much and not finding the time to keep up with writing.  Well, it's true.  There's a lot of things I could get done if I didn't have to earn money, but I haven't figured out how that could work yet.  Anyhow, I do intend to finish blogging about our summer trip to AK.  I can take care of day 2 of the trip now.  We took one of the park shuttle buses into the Savage River area, which is only 15 tiny miles into the enormous expanse that make up Denali National Park.  I decided to mainly day hike on this trip to AK because we didn't really know how backpacking worked up there.  There is a permit system that is first come first serve by zones of the park, so you can't really do any sort of detailed planning until you're there.  I'm pretty sure we'll take that option next time we go, but for this trip we stayed within a couple hours of the park road.  It's amazing how wild the place can feel even in that area.  We hiked out along one of the many streams branching from the Savage River, and it was reported that a female grizzly had been sited in the same area within the last day.  So considering we were hiking through classic AK scrub or "bush", we had to make a lot of noise so as to not blunder into the big animal.  Made me nervous at first, but after a while you come to realize that that's just the way AK hiking is.  You're there, and so are the bears.  Neither party really wants to mess with the other, and the best bet is to do what you can to alert each other your there and stay out of each other's way.  Works out.  It was a great experience.  I've read a lot on Alaskan bush hiking, and it was wonderful to see it first hand.  I'm going back.  

Alison in the Alaskan bush:

A couple from Washington D.C. had been on their Surly LHT's for quite a while; nice:

If you want to feel small, go to Denali National Park and hike the backcountry...

No trails in Denali...Checking in on our location, yup, I was right... :)

Alaskan Fireweed growing alongside a braided river...

Large Caribou crossing a dry river bed:

AK Details Begun...

Day 1 and 2 of the Alaska Trip: 

First off, we got up very early in MN to catch the first 5.5 hour flight up to Anchorage.  So we started off tired and didn’t catch up for a while because of the time change, but we just had more travel on the schedule anyhow.  Didn’t have to be rested up for much running around yet.  When we arrived in AK, we pretty much just had to do some “trip chores”, such as get to the rental car place and pick up our hunk of crap Fort Escort that would be taking across the state, find the local natural food store, find a campground for the night and set up, etc.  We then decided that we were super exhausted and just felt like eating some local seafood and sleeping instead of doing the camp cooking/cleaning thing, so we ended up at the Glacier Brewhouse, and famous local AK brew and seafood place in downtown Anchorage.  I would definitely recommend it, whether a good India Pale Ale or a 5 pound king crab is your fancy. Then we turned in back at the tent for our first rainy and bright AK night.  (It rains a lot, and pretty much is never really truly dark in the summer.) 

The next day, we woke up early for AK, late for St Paul; perfect.  Somewhat rested but still a little groggy, we jumped in the rental car and made the drive up to Denali National Park; about a four hour haul.  We did it in about six though after stopping for some groceries we forgot the first day, and of course for some scenery gawking.   When we got to Denali, we set up at the Riley Creek Campground at the mouth of the Park, and took in the Visitor Center, Wilderness Access Center, and Backcountry Information Center.  Denali’s website pretty much tells you that as far as backcountry hiking goes, there is not a whole lot of specifics you can plan at home, since the park is divided into sectors, and backcountry permits are giving out first come first serve the day before your hike.  So, bring the normal navaids and buy a bus ticket to your hike the day before.  They have a shuttle bus service on the parks only road, a ninety mile gravel track that cuts into the interior.  The park is three time the size of Yellowstone, yet has basically no trails.  It’s all wild backcountry, and you access it by way of the super restricted bus road, or by air, or by our own feet.  Awesome.  Keep it wild.  Keep Caribou Coffee out, and the real Caribou in.  Damn right.  After making plans for our days up there, we took the park road as far as private vehicles are allowed (15 miles in) to the Savage Creek area, where we planned to do a day backcountry hike.  I know, you can’t really claim it to be “backcountry” in it’s purest form if it’s a day hike but it was pretty wild.  We got our first wildlife viewing in heading out to this area, seeing moose, caribou, and ptarmigan.  We were very impressed with the scenery of the Savage River, which is a gravel bar “braided” river, typical of low lands around glaciers.  There will be more on this area in the next post.  

Outside the Delicious Glacier Brewhouse.  Mmmm.

Driving up to Denali:

Stopping along the road at Hurricane Gulch:

There were a ton of people traveling the right way: losing the job for a while and living on two wheels...sweet:

Mother Ptarmigan and chick.  Fun to watch, but sometimes hard to see when they don't move; they turn bright white in the winter as well:

Impressed by the Savage River gravel bars (which aren't in fact very savage when the bears aren't around):

One of the many many wildflowers of the interior Alaskan Tundra.  Pretty place...

I like Alaska, she says!

Going to sleep at 11:30pm, but it's bright as day outside.  Wierd.  Never turned my headlamp on the whole trip...

back from the far north

Alison and I are back from AK.  That is a very good state.  Yes.  I can't possibly include everything about our adventures in one blog entry, so I think I'll break it up as I have to time to write, which unfortunately, tonight, I have none of.  But here's a teaser picture to keep everyone interested:

Stay tuned...