First Friday Debut, Bike Rides, and Smoke Signals

So here's a little haphazard update on the happenings as they've happened haphazardly in the last few weeks.  First of all would I guess be Lynn's 29er is finished.  This was the summer-long project that took me into two suspension corrected rigid forks and a bit of a new building sequence to accommodate a sleeved seat tube at the bottom bracket that both looks cool and adds stiffness to the area.  The frame is out of thiner gauge OX Platinum with hand bent seat stays and the bike will easily take racks and panniers front and rear for a stable touring platform.  How about 4.5 lb. frame weight and 24.5 lbs. for a build as a rigid single speed.  Check out the hand made sliding disc mount on the chainstay with bottle opener dropouts.  That's not exactly easy.  The seat stay's are curved to accommodate the disc caliper being placed here.  We slapped this rig together the night before pines to the mines so the picture taking suffered...I have yet to get one of the rigid fork.  After stealing it for a few rides around Flagstaff and one at Gooseberry Mesa, I can say that this is without a doubt the best riding 29er I've had the pleasure to pedal to date.  Its predictable, it goes where you point it, but it still manages to keep you engaged, and its never boring like some 29ers I've pedaled.  The position keeps you over top of the bike so it retains the snap and quickness of a smaller wheeled frame as opposed to steering like a bus as some big wheels do.  I am very pleased, but what matters here is that Lynn loves it.  Shiela she's called.  Punk Rock Shiela.  And the pink and brown and the personality all were part of a vision from the start.    

So after Shiela was ridden back from Jerome, I rounded her and all the other bikes I've built this year and showed them at the First Friday Art Walk a few weeks ago at Flagstaff Bicycle Revolution.  Old hat now, I know, but I figured most people reading this aren't exactly local and wouldn't be in attendance anyway.  The show was haphazard  as is my life; I didn't even have anything saying Moustache anything anywhere in the shop, but Jessica came by with a finished moustache painting, and thanks to CJ and the FBR crowd for hosting.  

The show went well...one sold and some great general interest.  Thanks to Dr. Stewie who showed up in town just in time and with the right skills to help me out in the frenzy of getting ready.  I haven't talked to Stewie in at least four years and the last time he knew how to get a hold of me you had to track me down in person at whatever bike shop I was working because I didn't have a phone...He remembered I was moving to Flagstaff some years ago and when I dropped by Absolute Bikes I found a telegram waiting for me....Stewie....and a phone number.  He's in Tuba City doing medical practicums at the hospital on the res and drove down for the weekend of the art walk and helped me out getting ready so in exchange I took him on a seven hour bike ride out the far reaches of the AZ trail to the north connecting to some moto trails in the white horse hills.  Exploratory riding based on verbal directions from over a year ago, but a complete success.  The morning started out like this....

...and the riding was awesome....and for good measure here's a picture of me that Lynn took that I really like that about says it all in my life right now....enjoy.

Pines To The Mines....

.....is put on every fall by the Pay 'N' Take, the local beer supply for the cycling community, and runs one way from Flagstaff (pines) to Jerome (the mines).  After rolling out of Flagstaff on neighborhood streets, the ride is entirely dirt roads with the exception of about five miles of singletrack along the rim of Sycamore Canyon for a total of something like 85 miles of Arizona sun.  The first 50 or so miles are rolling terrain staying atop the Coconino Plateau before dropping off the Mogollon rim and descending to the Verde River some 3500 feet below and then climbing back up to 5500 or so feet in the last fourteen blistering hot miles.  

I've wanted to do this ride since I first heard about it four years ago but complications, namely work, hangovers, or simply not knowing, has kept me out of it.  This year as luck would have it our fire season would be over just in time.  I figured this out at some point the weekend before while putting the finishing touches on the bike I'd been working on all summer for Lynn and before I could even say anything she had found herself in at the Pay 'N' Take and had all the info and before she or I could think twice about the thing she had signed us both up.  For the next week our anxieties would build from realizing that working a summer in fire means that you do more sitting around than anything else, but whatever, we're tough, and there's nothing like sitting around bored with a fire pack on your back to make you realize it.  

Our season ended Thursday and after driving back from Kanab we shook down our gear and the crew headed our separate ways with the end of season party scheduled for that night at the Mormon Lake guard station thirty miles away.  Somehow between my car spewing gas onto the ground and not being able to make other arrangements, I decided to ride my bike out.  I figured on a two hour ride on the pavement and left Bashas grocery miraculously with a little less than two hours of daylight left with two steaks, a sleeping bag, and a change of clothes in my pack and a pad tied to the outside.  Haul Ass.  I took the super commuter.  Singlespeed with road slicks and pedaled as fast as I could.  Everyone from the crew must have passed me as I pedaled, grumbling at myself.  No one offered me a ride.  They knew by now that I'd just decline anyway.  I arrived to a beacon of a burn pile set ablaze and was greeted with a keg of Oak Creek Nut Brown and before I had even caught my breath I'd put back about seven of them.  The party waned into the wee hours with plenty of drunken mishaps and a only minimal of things burned.  

In the morning I was surprised to not be more hung over, water is good like that.  I pedaled back to Flagstaff before breakfast, much more slowly and painfully than I'd come down.  The ol' Flight seat was nagging at me the whole way as were my hamstrings.  The morning beauty of the lakes and being on the bike seat, in addition to the whole ride down with camping gear was giving me the itch for a bike tour.  Freedom.  Finally.  After selling my soul to the U.S. government for fifteen dollars an hour for the last five and a half months.  Time to make up for lost time.  This is only the beginning.  When I got back into town I stuffed my starving face with FRATELLIquiles from Martanne's and then bought a new bike seat.

A little after noon on Friday the call I was waiting for came.  It was John the powdercoater.  Lynn's had been colored pink and was ready.  I had just fixed the gas leak in the RV and went to pick it up instantly, along with Lynn so we could promptly get to work putting Shiela together.  Shiela was a vision from the start, a personality through and through, and by far the most functionally and esthetically beautiful thing I've ever created, but I'll get to that another time.  We picked up a 6 of Moose Drool and went to work.  I prepped the frame and Lynn went to work on the parts.  It was probably nine o'clock before she was finished but somewhere in the build process Lynn realized that there was no way she wasn't riding Shiela to the Mines the next day, and any adjustments would either have to wait or be made en route.  

Our five o'clock wake up came early.  Two nights of drinking, bad sleep, and bad eating habits.  No matter.  Coffee will fix that.  We rolled up to the Pay 'N' Take earlier than most with a little of that pre race jitter in the stomach that was quickly amplified by the free coffee.  I took a moment to spin Shiela around the block and was impressed.  She was light and quick, but not overly so; she felt confident, but the pavement is no proving ground.   Scott the owner/organizer gave a little pre race ramble with some blah blah blah....verbal directions that you'll soon forget....blah blah blah....suffer.....blah blah blah...suffer more....take some salt pills at the river or something....and we were off.  My stomach rumbling.

We rolled out of town at the back of the pack but immediately a bike was down with a mechanical.  A few people waited but the pack rolled on.  Pines to the mines is not designated as a race, but it is certainly treated as such.  There is a cup for the first to cross the line, male and female, as well as the last, but I just hoped to finish.  We hit the dirt and all the spandex ninnies were off in a cloud of cold morning dust, and I fell quickly to the back and rode with Scott who was riding sweep as Lynn rode off in a tear of excitement on her new steed.  The group with the mechanicals caught up as my stomach grumbled and with them were friends Andrew from Fort Tuthill, and John whom I'd met on the trail last summer, and I suddenly found myself rolling along in a posse and not noticing the morning's ailments.  

A turn marked in flour took us off the wide Woody Mountain Road and onto a doubletrack and I found Lynn there waiting for me.  We rode on together for a while and somewhere along the way of winding through the woods we came to the conclusion that the friends we'd asked to come and get us in Jerome were probably not coming.  And in neither of our minds was there even a question of what to do.....we had embarked on a bike tour twenty miles into a group ride or race or whatever this silliness was, we had our own mission.  The formality of it from Lynn's mouth was "we should just ride back to Flagstaff."  We had sleeping bags and money and so it was.  The no plan.  

The course wound us through some rough and rolling doubletrack sections before landing us on a powerline straightaway that crossed over a wash and put us out on a stretch of singletrack.  By now we'd passed about six people, not as though either of us were counting.  The singletrack wrapped the ride around the headwaters of Sycamore Canyon and was absolutely stunning, despite at times being barely rideable.  Rocks jutted out every which way and ate your tires and killed your momentum before you ever had a chance to build it.  It was really more of a hiking trail.  At the end we hiked up a short hill to the distant sound of music and at the top were greeted by Rick and Melanie at the first rest station.  It seemed to me that we must have been the first people through to not be taking this ride so seriously.  When they told us their resupply included beer and whiskey I excitedly said yes to both.  I guess I was the first taker of the day and Lynn must have been the second.  It was just after ten o'clock.  

We rolled on refreshed through the flat dusty roads of the Kaibab National Forest.  Long shots of mostly straight roads through Ponderosa Pine forests with late autumn flowers blooming yellow in fields spanning many acres out of brown stems in the sparse canopy.  I felt the tired of the past nights setting in and wanted a nap but settled for a snack.  We passed some crazy bastard on a single speed back there a little ways.  A brown and white fisher 29.  He'd been having fits of flats.  He passed us as we set under a tree and snacked on leftover fire camp food.  When we got to the downhill we figured we were something like 50 miles in....better than half way and we passed the single speeder again, his bike upside down and his pump out.  He wasn't flat but was paranoid for the downhill.  And with good reason.  Rocks of all shapes and sizes reached out from the soil to steal your flow and eat your rubber and stop you in anyway possible.  I gave a tube over to this paranoid single speeder and he introduced himself as Jeff.  I made some adjustments and he took off, but I quickly caught him.  We more or less paced each other out for the rest of the downhill.  Me pulling away with gears and out riding him while I could, and him catching up when my innards were jarred painfully loose from riding a rigid bike.  And so it went: the dueling doubletrack downhill of rigid bike and singlespeed.  When this brutal road flattened out we turned left onto the Perkinsville Road and I left my counterpart behind for a fast pedal to the Verde River and a much needed rest stop.  

This stop had people cheering me on as I pulled in and I asked them in a frenzy how far up was the leader?  The girl looked at me with a discouraged look and said, "ummm...they came through about three hours ago.''  Well, I guess I'd better hurry then.  I made my way to the tent and found all the food had been pillaged, but that the beer had not so I cracked one open to see Jeff roll in on his single speed and crack one open and clank my can in good camaraderie.  Lynn followed shortly there after and we sat under a shade tree by the river bank and kept the good folks that kept us going in good spirits by making a joke of the whole thing and the men in spandex that took it all so seriousliy.  "I'm gonna need another beer," I said, "....and a nap."  And so I proceeded to the amusement of those watching.  Lynn took off, wanting to get the hill to come over with, and good for her.  See you at the top I said.  I woke from my nap and felt the need for a hot dog...fresh off the grill.  MMMM.  No better way to start up a 14 mile climb in the dry heat of a desert afternoon than dehydrated with two beers and a hotdog in your gut.  I dunked my head in the river, took off my shirt, strapped my helmet on my pack and pedaled on up the grueling climb to Jerome.  

And what a climb.  Stomach cramps coming from all directions.  Hot Dogs and Beer.  Burps that start to taste vomit.  I dropped to the granny gear for the first time in I don't know how long.  My sweat began to feel like someone poured a beer out on me.  I passed the old doctor that rolled through the rest stop as I was waking from my nap.  He looked like he was really hurting.  It made me feel better for just a minute until he was out of sight.  Then back into my own world of suffering.  Mile posts ticked by slowly.  I figured mile 8 was about halfway and I thought I'd take a break but I wasn't even sure for what.  More food so I could burp it up later?  At mile post 8 I came up on Lynn with her bike upside down having just fixed a flat.  She was looking pretty rough herself...pale, salty, eyes sunken back in her head.  I told her I was going to take a break.  She said to ride just a little further and that she had heard screaming, the enthusiastic kind, just up the road from there.  We rounded a bend and a few hundred yards up the roads we came across what had to be a mirage.  An RV full with beer, tequila, music blaring from the sound system inside, scantily clad and beautiful women frolicking about with frisbees and hula-hoops appeared out of nowhere like water in the Sahara.  And all the while they are trying to coax me into stopping mid stroke, bribing me with tequila and beer with what had to be at least another eight miles to go in this climb.  What sort of tease was this?  It was the popsicle that finally got me.  Nothing ever sounded so good in such a time of agony.  I sat in the shade of the canopy amongst good company still not believing this to be happening and Lynn passed me her beer.  I still wanted nothing to do with this vile fluid after the climb but eventually I came around.  We stayed for a few rounds, all hard earned.  The hula girls were telling us it was just five easy miles to the party at the end and I thought....yeah, easy if you're in a car.  But it was all true.  Every bit.  Even the bit about the ride to come.  I began to realize how cool this ride is.   Every aide station was awesome, put together by people who made it so, and progressively more so.  And everyone whose company I sat in began to feel like some sort of masochistic family.  We'd all suffered in and earned this fine reward that was coming in just five miles.

The last stretch was easy pedaling and breathing and talking.  We were stoked.  Stoked to have made it, but more stoked I'd say to be on this adventure, and in such good company.  We rolled in on the party with the sun already behind the mountain and found ourselves in some friendly ghost town amidst a strange array of junk cars, trailers, a boat, some old mining machinery and some couches.  Not to mention the Pay 'N' Take trailer and its outside mounted beer taps, and a whole lot of food.  The party was mellow but the beer flowed endless.  The spandex ninnies had mostly passed out or gone home.  Many with good tales of their own. The real party, as I realized a very short distance into the ride, was coming at the back of the pack, and wouldn't completely roll in until after dark.  And when they did they brought with them stories of blown side walls, satellite phone calls from the bottom of the Grand Canyon for coordination of medical evacuations, wrecked motorcycles, scuffed limbs, and God knows what else.  We entertained ourselves well into the night with our respective stories of the day's adventure before passing out on some musty old carpet on a dilapidated stage.  And our friends, they never made it to pick us up, but we already knew what we were doing in the morning.

Ride On.  

We rolled into the town of Jerome in the morning and found ourselves at the Mile High Grille for breakfast as it had come highly recommended.  The words "Best Bloody Mary in Northern Arizona" were scribed all over the menu and could not be ignored.  When it came it was hard to argue with those words.  Booze before 9:00 in the morning never tasted so good.  Breakfast didn't even matter at that point.  We coasted down the seven miles of twisting pavement with the speed of traffic into Cottonwood and wondered around for a while.  We found our way to Dead Horse State Park where we were hoping to find the Lime-Kiln trail and take it to Sedona.  A knowledgeable ranger caught sight of our bikes and woke us up from a nap under a tree to chat us up.  He steered us in the right direction and we were off...in the heat of the desert day once again.   We managed a fun stretch of singletrack before hanging a left on the Lime-Kiln.  This trail was really more of a wagon road.  It was well marked with cairns, but the sandy doubletrack wound about aimlessly in the hills outside of Cottonwood and seemed to make no direct effort at getting us to Sedona.  We climbed for a while.  The goat heads were making me nervous. Without slime in your tubes they can give you the fit of flats that will end your ride and leave you walking to the highway.  At some point the hill leveled off and I thought it prudent to rethink our route.  Lynn rolled up a minute behind, obviously well into that thought, and definitely cursing me.  We sat under a shade tree and had a snack and a nap and awoke two hours later to the sun still beating down on us. 

We turned around.  Out to the highway.  Twenty miles of pavement to Sedona.  The movement was still slow but it seemed fast relative to the climb on the trail.  We felt refreshed.  But not for long.  Again the sun and warm water in our bottles would have their way with us.  Dehydration.  As we got closer to town I started scheming a plan for the night and the morning, so we could camp and get food, enough for dinner, breakfast, and fuel back to Flagstaff.  Something in this scheme wasn't adding up.  Stores, and good camping are located nowhere close to one another if you're on a bike, and we'd end up backtracking through Sedona on the streets to accomplish our daily chores...never fun.  We stopped at the top of the hill and sat down on a sidewalk on a busy highway, both delirious.  We swapped schemes for our night and mine was out the window.  Turns out Lynn has REALLY good ideas.  We did something I thought I'd never do and got a fancy hotel in Sedona.  Posh living, but rather than compare prices we figured our time would be better spent in the pool and hot tub.  When the sun went down we walked to a fancy dinner in our sweaty bike clothes and flip flops.  We were hobos in the lap of luxury, dirty and underdressed.  Now where's my pedicure?  

In the morning we lounged around as long as possible and exhausted the free continental breakfast at the hotel.  Usually I'd be disgusted at this idea, eating shrink wrapped, sugar-coated pastries, but this hotel had bean and rice burritos with salsa and sour cream and granola and fresh fruit.  Perfect for a long bike ride that climbs 3500 feet or so over a route yet to be known or decided.  We rolled out and stopped in at Mountain Bike Heaven and met Rama John, the owner since 1989.  Not your traditional bike shop in any way.  I don't think there was even one remotely new bike on the floor, and on the wall were relics to the glory days of mountain biking....old Foes, Mantis, a Doug Bradbury Manitou with the fork linked into the seat stays.  What really threw the whole thing off though and really made it "Sedona" was the oxygen bar.  All it needed was a disco ball and you'd be set for all post ride transcendence.  I grabbed some chain lube and Lynn set to work copying a Cosmic Ray map onto a paper towel.  Off we go, climbing up Schnebly Hill road in the company of Pink Jeeps and passenger tourists cheering us on.  This is feeling so familiar now.

We got to the top of the climb and were quite hungry, but the pedaling turned easy and we decided to wait for a good spot to eat.  We came to I-17 and some buildings occupied by the power company and thought to look around for a soda machine.  There was none, but I seemed to remember a Forest Service outpost amongst these buildings.  Little Antelope Guard Station.  And it was.  The Forest Service has a seemingly bottomless supply of Gatorade, now if only someone was home.  The driveway was empty,  but a green fire engine was rolling up the way we came in and we soon found ourselves in the company of Jason and Geordie, Engine 454.  We all had lunch and shared stories and as we pedaled off they were called to a fire.  We definitely don't miss doing this.

We rolled off into the unknown parts of the Coconino National Forest with a hand-drawn copy of a hand -drawn Cosmic Ray map to guide us to who knows where fully knowing thats where we might end up. When the signed roads ran out we chose the next most major road to the north only to be wound around in a swirling uncertainty as to where we would end up.  And after a snack we found ourselves at a known major road.  Instinct, or possibly even Cosmic Ray I suppose, had pulled us through.  We ground our way back to Flagstaff, woefully passing by the Mountainaire Tavern in favor of dwindling daylight.  We rolled into town on empty, but figured it only proper to end our adventure precisely where it began at the Pay 'N' Take.  And on our arrival we were greeted by some of the same friendly faces that greeted us in Jerome two days ago.  They asked how our ride back was, not realizing it had just ended.  Then they put together the same dirty clothes, the sweat, and the helmets and jaws dropped.  We ordered beers and margaritas and sat outside and said nothing.  What was there possibly to say?

Some Would Call It Summer

Its been a while so I thought I might be due for an update.  Fire season has been in sort of a lull since the Schultz fire nearly burned down parts of east Flag.   We took a ten day trip to the North Rim of the Canyon and a long 18 day trip to Northern California, only four days on fire.  Honestly fire work can be alot more boring than staging work.  The staging parts of the trip brought us to Mount Shasta and South Tahoe, much finer places than the sage and juniper country outside of Susanville where the fire burned on our first days of the trip.  So for my summer vacation I "got to" hike 2500 feet up Mount Shasta not even breeching tree line at a pace so blistering I couldn't even fathom looking around at the beauty and completely missed the waterfalls flowing off the glacier nestled on the mountain...all with my fire pack on my back and an infection in my lungs....somehow I dodged out on carrying the chainsaw that day.  We did manage to run to a sweet swimming hole flowing directly off the glacier some distance downstream to find a rope swing dropping willing flyers directly into water colder than I can ever remember swimming anywhere in northwest Montana.

Daily threats of going home turned into a trip to South Tahoe being put up in hotels and working 13 hour days doing harder work than we somehow do on most fires.  All told, our hotel was across the street from the finest sushi joint I have ever been to...in admiration the chef made me the custom Moustache roll after recruiting me to the bar, a hilarious spectacle.   And it turns out that Sake is a damn fine beverage when served cold.  Right down the street was the Stateline Brewery...nothing to write home about, but here I am writing home about it.  Apart from battling the illness our stay was capped with an hour swim in the blue lake on our last day...then Las Vegas on the way home.   Vegas puts me in a bad mood.  Its a huge whitehead zit on the planet.  Everything wrong with the world erupted in the desert just to prove itself.  Gluttony and vanity breathe from its every pore.  I just don't get it.  It makes me uncomfortable.  And somehow I've ended up there something like nine times since I've worked on the hotshot crew on the way home from California or where ever.  Bleh!

In actuality, my summer has allowed me some fantastic bike rides and a little shop time to boot.  Riding in Flagstaff in the summer is as good as it gets.  Days are long, the sun gets up before 5:00, but outside of work I rarely take advantage of it.  I tend to fancy starting later and getting caught in the summer monsoon.  When monsoons are good here there's nothing like it.  Clouds start building over San Francisco mountain by 10:00 or so and a few hours later they can no longer contain themselves and pour themselves out with incredible violence...rain, hail, lightning, thunder, more rain.  This summer's monsoon was predicted to be weak and late, but not the case.  Days of seven inches of rain back to back to back instead making a wreckage out of the drainage where the Schultz fire burned.  Flooding in the desert.  All said this has been a summer of biblical scale.  No locusts, but plenty of Secedes.  But the point of the tale here is the riding....yes the riding.  I headed out to the west side of the mountain...a two hour ride to access alone.  Getting lost on the way, but knowing the direction I needed to go I ended up bicycle bushwhacking through the Pondos until I found myself on more familiar trails....eventually flying fish to Snowbowl road up to the AZ Trail.  I was trying to ride out to Andrew Frost's house under construction.  A place only accessed by skis or snow machine in the winter.  He's building a one room straw bale cabin with a detached shop out in Hart Prairie with the help of the Zach Attach.  All by hand, hoisting locally cut timbers with home made cranes, pretty bad ass by the sounds of it.  There's access of the new section on the AZ Trail but the clouds and lightning were building just over the route and the ground strikes made me reconsider my trek to the north.  I decided I'd take the section to the south that I'd never ridden before hoping to escape the storm.  Whatever.  It was on top of me within fifteen minutes.  Lightning, rain, hail, the works.  I rode for my life....or so it felt.  All of a sudden the trail diminished.  What had been a freshly cut bench of singletrack into the side of the mountain became a sawline of trail yet to be dug and shortly thereafter a flagline of trail yet to be started.  Flags led to flags, I thought I was following some sort of trail, and then I ended up by some science experiment involving white containers and flags of a different color than I had been following while soaking myself in the downpour.  I followed the new flags down to another trail...I'd been here before, except now the trail was a flowing river.  A problem commonly faced here.  The trails are not properly outsloped, thus turning into gutters, big ones, creeks even.  I followed this trail back to flying fish, a gusher in itself.  I've never ridden such a continuous streambed before. This stream led me to a trail I built a few summers ago with the YCC known now as Scrotus, which fared a little better against the first rain of the year.  Trails known led to trails unknown let to bicycle bushwhacking led back to familiar trails led to home six and a half hours after I left that morning, sans shirt, and almost as dry as when I'd  first left.  Awesome.

The second ride stuck in the monsoon happened almost intentionally.  When we got back from California, Lynn, my riding partner for the last year and a half, and I were due for and adventure.  We left her house under gray and threatening skies and questioned our sanity only once, briefly.  We proceeded.  Ten minutes out we passed some riders heading back to town as lightning struck ground just off in the distance over their shoulders.  We proceed.  Rain starts overhead and clouds grow darker, lightning closer.  We ride on.  Into the canyons for shelter.  We thought we'd explore into Walnut canyon, considering we had no leash today.  The strikes grew closer and closer until finally one of them made me crash my bike into the side of the trail and jump off and crouch down under the trees on the canyon wall.  Short, young pondos make the best cover from lightning, especially in low ground such as this canyon, as lightning strikes the tall trees in the open most frequently, but canyons are hardly the place to ride out the summer monsoon as we would soon remember.  No matter.  We were here, riding it out, off our bikes.  Good thing we stopped to get Tequila on the way out.  As the hail bounced off our helmets and rain jackets we crouched in a squat and drank to warm our bellies, laughing all the while.   Complaints were made, briefly, as were threats of not riding on when the storm passed, but we knew we were getting into this.  Eventually the storm passed and we disrobed, wet cotton does no good, and rode on down canyon into the flooded mess of Arizona mud.  We figured our best bet of continuing a ride would be to climb out to the rim, so we did.  A mile up to Fisher Point via the AZ trail again.  This trail takes you just about everywhere around Flagstaff.  My house is a few hundred yards from it.  Lynn's house is a half a mile from it if that.  Utah to Mexico.  800 miles.  I'll ride it someday in its entirety.  For now though we're just following it along the north rim of Walnut canyon as steam rises of the rocks in the cloudy humid warming period after the storm.  Its very surreal.  100% humidity and steam rising through the dark coniferous side canyons of Northern Arizona, like we'd been teleported to British Columbia.  We eventually wound our way back, smiling and laughing all the way....as rides with Lynn tend to be, I can't remember a bad one, she might tell you the same.  Happy Summer.

Lost In The Mix

I managed to finish up the Heinchez 650B bike.  Scott picked the build kit and he know's what he's doing.  King bearings all about, XT/XTR drivetrain, Avid BB7s, Paul levers.  He's been riding the piss out of this thing and has almost worn out the back tire already.  The chainstays are shorter than most 26" bikes and the rear wheel backs out of the frame without having to remove the caliper.  Check out the bulges on the seat tube and the custom bent seat stays.  Word so far is that its super stable and if the Heinchez were forced to evacuate due to fire and was only allowed to take one bike (Heinchez has a fine collection including an old Fat Chance road bike with a Mavic kit, a Rock Lobster, a Geoffrey Butler with friction Super Record, and a few other unmentionables), it'd be his Moustache Ride.  Hell Yeah!

Flagstaff Burning

As you may have guessed I am in the full swing of summer work fighting fire with the Mormon Lake Hotshots here in Flagstaff.   We've now had a total of four days off since May 25th of something like that.  So the paychecks are good but, man, am I worked.  We typically go out for a maximum of two weeks but this last trip we were hurried off the Tecolote Fire in New Mexico when word broke that a fire popped and was threatening homes in Flagstaff.  We were sent home with the thinking that the crew might need to evacuate our homes, but we all knew we couldn't return home to take days off when our back yard is burning down, so we extended our tour for a week.  Many of our crew has been fixed here for years, while some come only for the fire season and have no real ties to the forest.  Either way, I knew that this fire would be different than the others.  We travelled to Albuquerque that night and I spoke to some friends in town and the mood there was just eerie.  The forest we live in is dominated by San Francisco Mountain (Kinlani to the Hopi).   The center of ancient trade routes and the ground that bonds a community of avid climbers, mountain bikers, hikers, runners, and equestrians is now engulfed in flames under a huge billowing plume of smoke spanning the gray scale from white to black.   People in town were freaked out, scared, somber, sad, a full range of emotions comparable only to that of the color spectrum in the smoke column.  We rolled into fire camp on the east side of town just after noon after watching the column close in from a distance in its second day of burning.  It was the heat of the day and fire activity was picking up.  I was speechless, and I have never seen of felt such concern for any piece of ground on which we've worked such as this one.  This feeling was echoed throughout the crew.  It would all have to be put aside for the job ahead.  


We were put to work griding for spot fires out ahead of the main fire in the last stand of forest between the fire and the structures of a community east of town.  The line I walked back and forth for hours paralleled a trail I would ride to my friend Isaac's house in that community.  Fortunately that stand had burned back in the nineties and offered little for fire to get established.   Our day came to a close without any direct excitement, and for once I was relieved about that.  In a job where you live for excitement to relieve you of boredom, today I preferred  boredom.  We were allowed to go home that night and it wasn't until the stories start coming from the townspeople that you realize the urgency of the situation.  Town felt like a war had broken out in the middle of it with a faceless enemy, but its people stood united together.  It was the buzz everywhere you went, and still is.  

With the fire in check where the houses were threatened, our second and remaining days brought a new assignment.  Prepare and indirect (away from the fire's burning edge) control line up Shultz peak to keep the fire in check on the wilderness flank, and keep it from progressing further onto the San Francisco Peaks.   The line was cleared and prepped to burn in a day and a half with the work of three hotshot crews, but before we could burn we had to handle a  slop over that threatened the security of our mission.  Fire had started backing down the ridge between Shultz mountain and Doyle peak (the eastern most of the San Francisco peaks).   It would take the rest of the day to secure it.   The burnout operation down Shultz mountain would begin in the morning when conditions were dry enough to ensure a good burn (full consumption of ground fuels for no possibility of reburn).  It commenced around noon.   One of the other crews started burning and were about to hand it off to us when the winds shifted causing the main fire to the east of us to make an impressive crown run up the mountain pulling in with it the back burn from the other crew.  We waited it out at the safety zone at the top of the mountain, but felt the heat from 150 foot flames at a distance that tickled some nerves.

  As soon as the run was over we all knew the mission, control spot fires.  We moved swiftly down the line and into battle past the other crew looking completely dazed.  We started picking up spot fires instantly and continued the rest of the day.  To complicate things the burn would have to be continued downhill torching out trees and sending more spots until the burnout was completed or else we could have been outflanked by the fire that sent the first crown run.  Heavy helicopters were used to make water drops a thousand gallons at a time on the green side of our control line in hopes of mitigating any of the spot fires from getting established in the fuel beneath us on the opposite side of the ridge.  Between running the burn out, holding the line, directing the helicopters, griding for spots, and a respiratory ailment that was taking its toll on our crew, we were spread thin.  We called for reinforcements, realizing that we would not be able to complete the burn ourselves and hold it.  Three more hotshot crews came to our aid and eventually we passed our burn off to the next and them to the next.  As soon as we passed the torch the winds switched back to favorable and the burn continued until 1:30 in the morning.  We would spend the next two days controlling the edge which we had burned before finally being pulled from the fire for some much needed rest.  With the fire now more or less contained at 16000 acres, all the citizens of Flagstaff can do now is wait for their forest to be re-opened to go and explore and reminisce.  

Bike to Work Week

We celebrated bike to work week a couple weeks ago.  Its so nice to live in a town that puts on an event such as this and people actually support it by participating.  I was lucky enough to be able to ride everyday that week.  I try to ride whenever I can anyway but being on call for the forest service sometimes means hauling large amounts of laundry and showing up before dawn and my 45 minute ride just doesn't happen under those conditions.  The commutes this particular week were amazing though.  So many friendly smiling faces and hellos.  There were also events and fun rides to mark the occasion, most notably the tweed ride and bike to breakfast day.  The tweed ride was just as it sounds.  Show up to Mia's Lounge dressed in your finest wool attire, drink some whiskey, socialize, and then pedal around.  We pulled up in front of Zach's house where he sped ahead and readied a bottle of scotch.  Those informed on our whereabouts wheeled into the yard and took a pull.  The ice cream truck at Thorpe park forced another stop.  And this sort of behavior continued until the sun went down.  A fine evening.  Thursday morning was bike to breakfast day.  I managed some coffee and some coffee cake and fruit, but I guess I missed the real gems of the morning by leaving too late and opting for my usual breakfast burrito and its load of calories.  I did however find myself in some interesting conversations outside of the breakfast stops.  Something about bikes and free food puts people in really good moods.  This should happen more often, the biking to work that is...for the masses anyway...the free breakfasts and coffee too.

A rant about road bikes

What are road bikes anyways?  I can define this in several ways.  A purposeful bike that keeps speed and distance at the forefront of its personality perhaps.  But perhaps also the bike with the most constraints strapped to it.  Tunnel vision.   The truest road bikes can only travel where that web of connected asphalt hold their strongest bonds....or for the daring, only slightly farther into the tierra.  I used to ride road bikes a lot back in the Athens days and if I still lived there I'd probably ride them a lot still.  But in the days since leaving, the nice network of farm roads has become an ever extensive network of rock strewn forest roads and a road bike just wouldn't hack it.  

There are about 3 road rides in Flagstaff according to the city urban trails map.  Snowbowl road: the 2500 ft climb to the ski area, out and back.  I've never done this because trails also lead to the snowbowl parking lot in the summer and riding that road during ski season is just a bad idea.   Mormon Lake:  a 4-5 hour lollipop out to and around Mormon Lake, the largest natural mud hole in Arizona and a nice flat paved road with a huge shoulder/bike lane.  This is the most popular ride here by far.  I've only ridden this on the way out of town to Tucson, a very long and very awesome road ride.  And the Sunset Crater - Wupatki road: 30 or so miles gradual downhill from Sunset Crater to Wupatki National monument starting in craggy volcanic lava fields, traveling past 1200 year-old ruins and ending in the painted desert.  This could be done as a loop with highway 89, a route heavily trafficked with drunk drivers or as an out and back.  The preferred method of travel though is the full-moon downhill shuttle run.  The ride from town to sunset crater isn't all that great anyway so the shuttle run just seems to work out.  This is one of the top two road rides of all time for me.  The other being the Going to the Sun Road in Glacier, also in a full moon.  All the other road rides pretty much feature jumping between descent patches of pavement via interstate highways or dirt roads.  

I began realizing the limitations of road bikes in the days of my beloved Klein.  R.I.P.  I discovered the back ways of Oconee county by assuring myself that roads with powerlines on them, be they paved or otherwise, were through roads.  This logic never failed to get me home, but there were many nights of racing daylight to get to the familiar ground of Milledge avenue.  Oddly enough the Klein never flatted on a dirt road ride, no matter how rough or how many creeks it crossed.  But that beautiful beast obviously had its limitations.  I've never had a true road bike since.  That was 6 years ago I think.  I had a crosscheck for a while, but I quickly realized its limitations too.  The 45c tires rubbed the frame, clogged with mud, and stopped the back wheel from moving when I broke a spoke at the end of a tour.  Plus the geometry was too slack and it fit me poorly.  The bike I built for myself as my new "road" bike attempts to hit on all these shortcomings while hopefully keeping alive the essential elements of a road bike, the ability to go far and fast. 

My commute to work at The Man starts up my driveway and most commonly heads for Elks Lodge trail, a commuter trail that frequently features sad attempts at closure by seasonal residents.  Most folks in town use this as access to the trails of the Coconino National Forest, but for me it is my wake up commute from the sticks across town.  Really, riding this trail every morning to work is my favorite thing about work anymore.  Its a pretty high standard.  I cut right onto a short pavement descent on Quintana and then left on fort valley road or the path that rides beside it to Quinn's restaurant, featuring the best breakfast burrito known to man.  Then its a bit more downhill to town, then across the tracks to cut through the NAU campus.  I tend to hop curbs and cut through parking lots as I see fit.  A few more lefts and rights through the hilly section and up the steep driveway to the Mormon Lake ranger station.  There are infinite variations and other cut throughs, most of them involving trails.  The longest of which would take me 4 hours one way and be entirely singletrack.   My route takes about 40 minutes.  Going home hosts about 500 feet of climbing that can be done all at once or broken up into chunks.  My favorite is doing the elks lodge trail in the dark, nothing but starlight.  There are often large bull elk hanging out in the meadows.  One night I passed two cyclists with headlamps that looked lost.  They said they were just looking around and I rode on past.  They asked how I could see without lights down the trail...I told them it doesn't help when they shine those bright beams in my face, and rode off into the darkness.  Some people will never even begin to understand the ways of a ninja.  

So here's my new rig as it turned out.  Its the only full XTR road bike that I know of.  The wheels are M-950 hubs that came off of Puc's breezer laced to Sun Equilizer 29 rims.  Check out the bolt on conversion.  The cranks I picked up NOS at The Hub a couple of years ago with only the big ring and I ended up running it that way.  The cantis I picked up at the Tucson bike swap last fall for $15 and the levers I bought off a kid when I was in high school and when the shifters failed I sawed that part off.  The headset is a WTB grease guard also off the Breezer and the handlebars are GT brahma bars off the wall of 21 ridgecrest, my old house. They were hanging as art.  And the seat is from the Klein.  I probably have no more than $400 into the build plus the cost of the frame and fork which I may never bother to know.  As it sits here it weighs in at about 20 lbs and it is definitely the fastest bike I've ridden in a long time, and it is definitely a road bike.  It'll take 45c tires with gobs of clearance, gears if I ever want them as well as racks and fenders front and rear.  Keep your eyes peeled for a large hauling front basket.