by Jill Homer
Singletrack closed in on my muddled mind, until my thoughts were nothing more than a tunnel filled with rocks and sand. I squinted away from the hard sun and focused solely on the washed-out trail. All of my capacity for hope was directed at maintaining my connectionto to that thin thread of dirt. There was no future beyond the next obstacle, no pain beyond the muscle burn and searing heat. I forgot that there was a Geoff, or a Juneau Empire, or even an Alaska. The desert filled the newly emptied space with hard apathy and sweat-drenched suffering.
It took me nearly three hours to cover the first fourteen miles. If I really wanted to complete my ride in three days, I was going to have to ride at least seventy miles the first day, and it was already 3 p.m. I sucked on the hose of my water bladder as warm liquid sloshed around in my empty stomach. I tried to stuff down sunflower seeds but they tasted like sawdust, so I went for the chocolate, which was gooey and hot. The trail veered down a slope so steep that I had to balance my bike on my shoulder as I picked my way down a rocky outcropping. At the bottom, I crossed a trickling creek that, according to the small sheet of cues I had printed out, would be the last on-route water I’d see before I crossed the Colorado River at mile seventy. As the rust-colored stream gurgled by, I weighed the prospect of filtering water. The cues also mentioned that the creek was tainted with mining runoff, and could be contaminated with toxic metals. In Fruita, I had filled my large MSR bladder with six liters of water, enough to last two solid days in Alaska. The heavy weight pulling on my shoulders made it difficult to anticipate a water emergency in the first seventy miles.
The trail out of the creek gorge was just as steep, a strenuous climb under the full weight of my bike and gear that left my head spinning and my lungs gasping for hot, dry air. I glanced up the gorge and saw a distance sliver of Interstate 70. Trucks streamed effortlessly east and west, mere minutes from the place I left three hours earlier. I put the bike down and leaned into the sparse shade of the rocks. It wouldn’t be too hard to just follow the stream up the gorge, climb onto the freeway bridge and hitch a ride. I’d probably be back to Fruita in an hour. I couldn’t think of any good reason why I should keep riding my bike in the desert. I certainly wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t comfortable, or fun, or even purposeful. It was lonely, hot and hard. And yet, my tired mind wouldn’t let me accept the ease of quitting. My mind understood that deeper needs trumped temporary pain. That quitting the Kokopelli Trail probably meant quitting everything.
The trail turned in the opposite direction of the freeway and continued toward the Colorado River, now a distant line through the large, rolling plateau. The open desert seemed to swallow all sound. The shadows of towering buttes slowly devoured the sunlight. An ochre sunset stretched over the horizon, deepening to orange and then red. The summer evening descended the way it would in Alaska, yawning lazily across the sky as though darkness was reluctant to return. I pedaled south toward the growing darkness on an unbroken line of gravel. Velocity came effortlessly as the road dropped toward the river and the heat of the day finally released its suffocating grip. The sudden ease of movement reminded me that I should never quit short of a goal because things are always bound to get better — that is, of course, before they inevitably get worse.
I arrived at the Dewey footbridge across the Colorado River just before midnight, having pedaled for nearly twelve unstopping hours to cover seventy miles. On the first day alone, the Kokopelli Trail had crossed every level of difficulty, from technical rock to smooth gravel to sand so deep that my legs wobbled as I fought to push my bike forward. Streaks of dried salt clung to my face and arms. I had sucked the last drops of my water from my six-liter bladder more than an hour before, and I was already feeling desperately thirsty, though not painfully so. I dropped to my knees in a basin of gelatinous quicksand lining the riverbank and stretched the water filter hose into the cocoa-colored water. I grunted as I pumped the filter, straining to extract precious ounces of water from a prison of silt. I stuck the release hose directly into my mouth and let the slightly bitter water gush down my throat. I had known the enveloping comfort of warmth after deep cold before, but never before had I experienced the intense relief of water after deep thirst. If life had a taste, the muddy water of the Colorado River reflected it perfectly — cool and refreshing, infused with little bits of the world.
I pedaled another two miles up the road and laid out my bivy sack and sleeping bag beneath a juniper tree. The clarity of the nearly full moon revealed a startling pattern of craters and mountains. It was a cartoon moon, a moon out of a children’s book, full of features and laughing. The sky was half white with stars, blazing from the deepest corners of the universe. I pulled a jar of peanut butter from my frame bag and dug two fingers in, relishing its smooth sweetness garnished with the salty flavor of my skin. I excavated nearly half the jar, and confirmed with satisfaction my consumption of a thousand calories. I ate dried cherries and a handful of pumpkin seeds for dessert and lay down with my face to the glittering sky, supremely satisfied with my solitude, my slowness, and the stark simplicity of life on a bike.
The sun woke me up at 7 a.m. The morning sky was still tinted with streaks of pink and purple, but dawn was rapidly disintegrating at a rate inversely proportional to the meandering twilight the night before. The air was sharp and cool. I felt slightly hung over, probably from spending many of the final hours of my ride dehydrated. I had no coffee to combat the feeling, only a few pieces of chocolate, which were dry and chalky from melting all day and nearly freezing all night. My peanut butter also bore no resemblance to the delicacy I had consumed the night before, but instead stuck tastelessly in my throat like a lump of caulk. I packed up my bike and flung my lead-weighted legs over the saddle, knowing the Colorado River crossing had been the low point on the trail, and there was no way out of my current situation except to climb.
But I could not have anticipated the climb that lay in front of me. It was straight up, several thousand vertical feet of grinding gravel and slipping in the sand. I cranked with all the energy peanut butter and a full night of sleep could give me, and still I struggled for four miles per hour, and then three. I slumped off the bike and walked, with the 8 a.m. sunlight already hot and bright enough to pierce exposed skin. I reached the summit in a new climate zone, a place where pinion trees grew. A deer streaked across the road, looked back with what I swore was a bemused smile, and bounded down the road in the direction I was heading. It disappeared beneath a horizon line that looked like the edge of a waterfall. I squinted in disbelief because as far as I could see, that was still the road. As I approached it, the other side of the canyon came into view, so close it seemed almost possible to jump the gap. But the road instead plummeted into a narrow chasm down a series of dramatic switchbacks. I couldn’t even tell where exactly the road went after the first bend, fifty feet in front of me. But the fifty feet I could see were the most disheartening of all — broken steps carved out of chunky slickrock, smeared with sand and studded with large boulders.
I throttled the brakes as I dropped over the first step, inching my way down a minefield of rocks and sand. I bashed my knee against a larger rock and swore loudly, cursing the four-wheel-drive maniacs who built this nightmare of a road. I also cursed myself for never, in all of my gusto to become an endurance cyclist, actually learning to ride a mountain bike. The bike screeched and halted and lunged over the hard drops, then screeched and halted again. I couldn’t finesse my way over the boulders like an experienced technical rider, so I would simply ferry awkwardly around them, locking the brakes and piloting the bike through a semi-controlled crash. Downward progress was slower and more physically taxing than climbing. I was quickly running out of steam.
At the bottom of the canyon, the trail started rolling again, climbing and dropping steeply over smaller drainages. My progress was excruciatingly slow. By noon, nearly five hours after I had pulled myself out of my sleeping bag, I had covered twenty-three miles. I pushed my bike to the top of wha
t felt like a near-vertical sandstone wall and rode the brakes to a shady spot at the bottom. I slathered more sunscreen on my skin and checked my water bladder. It was less than half full. I had chugged more than three liters of water in five hours, and there were no known reliable water sources before Moab, forty miles away. Less than five miles down the rugged jeep track, I was supposed to cross a paved road at a place called Onion Creek. I didn’t know whether Onion Creek was actually a creek, if it was an alkaline creek, or if it was simply a name for another barren strip of desert. I did know I would need to get water there before continuing on to Moab. If I couldn’t, riding all the way to Moab was out of the question. I would have to follow that road until I either found water or found my way out.
I sat dejected beneath the tree, stewing about the massive failure that my first big mountain bike trip was becoming, when I head a woman’s voice say, “Jill? Is that you down there?”
I stood up and saw two figures walking around a cluster of trees. They were the first humans I had seen since just a few miles after I left Fruita, twenty-four hours before. I squinted until I recognized them — my friend Jen and her boyfriend, Mike.
“Jen!” I said in a voice that was startlingly hoarse. “What are you doing out here?”
“Mike and I came down here to go camping. Geoff said we might see you around here. He said you were on the Kokopelli Trail.”
“Geoff’s with you?” I asked.
“He’s out for a run right now,” Jen said. “Mike and I drove down here to look for Cottonwood Canyon, but this road is kind of sketchy for my truck. We thought we’d hike and check it out. What’s the road look like beyond here?”
“It gets worse,” I said. “A lot worse.”
“Oh,” Jen said. “That sucks. And how are you doing? You looked kind of tired under that tree.”
“I’m running out of water,” I said as I juggled my backpack. “Do you have any I could borrow?”
“Oh yeah, we have a lot,” Jen said. She directed me to a jug in the back of her truck. I topped off my bladder, took a few large gulps and topped it off again.
“Better?” Jen asked.
“Man, I’m having a hard time with all of this,” I said. “I’m not used to how hot and dry it is, and this trail has been really tough so far. I’m starting to wonder if I should just call it good here.”
“Well, if you want, Geoff’s got your car just a few miles down the road. You could meet him there and get it back if you want. He can ride home with us.”
“Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for the water. I’ll probably see you guys again in Moab.”
I shouldered my guiltily acquired water. This ride was becoming less self-supported and more difficult than I wanted it to be, and quitting at this point would be easy. At the same time, I had no real reason to quit. As in physics, motion sought to prevail. I pedaled because pedaling was the most natural course of action.
I emerged into an open valley and joined the wide gravel road. My car was parked at a junction of another four-wheel-drive track. I intersected Geoff running just a few miles beyond that. He smiled as he approached. His sweat-drenched T-shirt hugged his thin body, and his quads bulged below his shorts. I felt a rush of attraction followed by loathing, and through this wide range of emotions washed a confusing sense of relief. I didn’t know how to feel about Geoff. Our break in San Francisco had been anything but clean, and now he was here muddying it up even more. But the truth was, I needed to see him here. I needed to believe I wasn’t completely alone.
“I thought we might see you here,” he panted as he stopped next to me. “But then I assumed we missed you. I thought you’d be beyond here by now.”
“This is going pretty slow for me,” I said. “I can’t believe you rode the Kokopelli Trail in a day last year. This thing is hard!”
“Eighteen hours,” he corrected me. “But yeah, that Yellowjacket section is the most technical part you’ll have to ride through.”
“And it’s all climbing from here,” I lamented. “I know. I checked the elevation profiles.”
“It’s not so bad,” Geoff said. He looked at his watch. “I bet you’ll be to Moab before sunset.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But tomorrow I was going to ride the White Rim. That’s thirty miles past Moab. I really wanted to do that paved part tonight so I could focus on the century tomorrow.”
“Tell you what,” Geoff said. “I’ll meet you at the end of the trail. We’ll camp there, and then tomorrow I’ll take you to the White Rim trailhead.”
“What about Jen and Mike?”
“They already have a site reserved, so they’ll probably stay here,” Geoff said. “But it’s not a big deal. I have your car. I can meet back up with them tomorrow.”
I bit my bottom lip. If I agreed to meet Geoff in Moab, at least that would mean not quitting at that spot. I had already blown my self-support rule, so catching a thirty-mile shuttle ride on the pavement wasn’t a huge deal, and was probably the only thing that would make this whole ride even possible. Finally, agreeing to his plan would mean spending one more night with Geoff. As we both stood apart in the hot desert sun, drenched in sweat, the thought of making some kind of peace with each other seemed more important than any athletic goal.
We set up a meeting space and parted. I continued up the road, another backbreaking climb that seemed to flow easier than the first of the day. The gravel was still loose, the grade still steep, but my mind was more at ease with the pain — more resigned, maybe. I climbed to nearly 9,000 feet, where I could look toward the La Sal Mountain Range and see snow, although those cool distances couldn’t provide real relief from the midday sun. Sandstone mesas and layered canyons rippled toward infinity, studded with green brush and broken only by the curving stroke of the Colorado River, so far below it almost looked blue.
I plummeted down the next canyon and climbed to yet another pine-choked plateau. My GPS unit registered nearly 12,000 feet of climbing over the course of seventy miles that day, nearly as much vertical space as Mount Everest climbers cover between base camp and the highest summit in the world. The sun dipped behind the canyon-rippled horizon in yet another sweeping light display of crimson and gold. I had ten more miles to ride into Moab, nearly a vertical mile below me. It seemed like an excess of elevation to lose in that short of a distance, and I knew that worst of the day’s riding could still be in front of me. I expected a white-knuckle rock garden. Instead, I found a steep but smooth gravel road plunging through the forest. The red glow of sunset lit the pinion trees on fire, brighter than the brightest sandstone cliff beside them. I coasted effortlessly as my odometer rose to nearly thirty miles per hour. Tears streamed from my eyes and joy poured through my veins. It was the simplest kind of joy, born of raw freedom, blocked from interpersonal clashes and washed with well-earned fatigue. It was joy free of analysis, free of consequence and free of guilt. It was the joy of being, the joy that all animals know, and the joy that self-aware humans only seem to find propped up against the boundaries of fear and turmoil.
Cool purple twilight descended as the jagged canyon swallowed me whole. The ambient temperature climbed even as daylight disappeared. I coasted into the dull beam of my headlamp until I saw orange light dancing on the canyon wall. I approached a flickering campfire and found Geoff sitting on the picnic table beside it. He stood up and waved at me.
“I was just about thinking of going to look for you,” he said. “I thought you’d be here a couple of hours ago.”
“I thought I made good time,” I said. “I told you it was going to be slow.”
He opened a cooler on the table and pulled out a bottle of Diet Pepsi and a container of grocery store sushi. He handed them to me before I had even let go of my bike.
“I got these for you,” he said. “I’ll heat up some pasta for dinner, too, but I thought you might want a snack to eat before.”
I clutched the appetizer that was nutritionally questionable but otherwise my most favorite
comfort food in the world. I expressed enthusiastic gratitude, but inwardly I felt suspicious about possible ulterior motives for Geoff’s kindness. It felt like a shallow peace offering, the kind you might make to a neighbor after accidentally burning their house down. “Sorry I ruined your life … brownie?”
“How was the ride?” Geoff asked as he fired up the propane stove.
“Fantastically beautiful,” I said. “And hard. Did you realize there are 19,000 feet of climbing in those 140 miles? That’s what my GPS says.”
“That makes sense,” Geoff said. “It was pretty tough when I rode it. But at least you had two days to finish.”
“Yeah,” I said. “Even if I pieced it together without sleep, that would still be … what, like twenty-four or twenty-five hours of continuous riding. Glad I didn’t decide to race this thing. I’m actually pretty terrible at technical desert riding. How come you never warned me about that?”
Geoff shrugged. “I guess I didn’t really get a chance. But you’re going to encounter a lot more rough roads on the Divide, so you might as well get used to it.”
“I’m still really uncertain about the Divide,” I said. “Now more than ever.”
“You’ll be great at it,” Geoff said. “I know you will.”
He smiled disarmingly, and I took a long swig of the Diet Pepsi. The cold carbonation burned as it tumbled down my throat. My head still throbbed from dehydration. My heart still raced from two long days of effort. I knew I needed sleep soon if I stood any chance of riding a full desert century the next day, but I also knew I didn’t have a good chance of achieving sleep, wired and exhausted as I simultaneously was. I gobbled up my dinner, refilled my water bladder, drank the entire bottle of Pepsi and two quarts of Gatorade, and lay down in the tent next to Geoff.