The hedonist joys of riding solo.

This was my work station Friday morning - two new disc brakes to install, the associated brake cables and the shift cable to run - none of these tasks being things I'd ever done before... and it all needed to be completed by 2:30pm when D came home from work and would want to leave for Bike Camp Lynda!!!

So - yeah - didn't all get done. I let D change my tires, rant about my front brake routing (even though it was fine anyway), run some cable housing and otherwise save us from being really, really late getting up to Utah!!!


This last picture is of a string of burns near the North Rim - they had copious piles of logs and brush they were torching, both on our way up and on our way home - the already burned out piles of charred ashes made particularly interesting blotches in the otherwise solid blanket of snow. Much more snow than this time last year, too.

As for the three days between when these photos were taken??? Well - I really enjoyed being up there. Plans went quite smoothly each day (a giant credit to both Lynda and Dave for how they put things together - we won't mention how appreciated the roof was :) I started... and I use that term loosely... the first two days "with" the bigger group and then took off on whatever looked good from there. Part of the fun was being back in St. George. Even if I hadn't had a map - it's so easy to orient yourself with the cliffs of Zion to the East, snowy peaks to the north, and distinctive red rock just about everywhere you look. The first day as I was riding along a paved rode wondering whether or not I'd be able to easy catch everyone else's bike tracks when they turned back out onto dirt trail (which was pretty obvious once I got there) I just kept thinking - maybe I don't want to find their tracks, maybe I'll just ride this road, whatever it was, till I get tired, turn around, orient the West Temple to my left and start riding south again. Sounded pretty nice to me, though I didn't take myself up on it.

In the end my favorite day was still probably the last. Cause of the quick work I never did manage to get the shifting right on PomPom - all three gears of it - and at the end of the first two days my left knee was just starting to get bothered by the unaccustomed strain of pushing through instead of shifting down, so pulling M'Lady out for the last day (with all her eight gears) and riding the main rode into the heart of Zion Canyon was exactly what I needed. I really do adore Zion like nothing else. After the trails the road just felt so fast - and let's admit... there's not really anything you could call a Climb along that stretch. There were cold temps on the way in, I had to stop several times to dance around and get the blood moving in my toesies, and there might have been a slight bit of a headwind... but there weren't any goatheads - so really, I got the best of the bad. (My first goathead experience happened on day one - with a four goathead simultaneous assult on my front wheel which took me a good ten minutes per head to straighten out... I may be getting a new pump soon too - I have a little squatty hand-me-down from D that just isn't my friend)

Anyway - my ride on day three was really perfect, especially once the sun reached all the way down into the canyon and I hid under a bridge, in the sun, but out of the wind, to eat lunch. I know it may be weird to some people - but I really like riding by myself. It may have to do with starting to ride with D and a certain level of unarticulated pressure - he usually has a strict goal, he doesn't want to change his plans part way through a ride, and when we hike - he always complains when he's behind me that I randomly speed up or slow down without any ryhme or reason - or better yet, several minutes advanced warning. When I ride by myself I can choose to really push up a hill, or slow down and slog one tired stoke after another. I can careen wildly along the edge of the road while I attempt to reach my hankerchief and blow my nose and not worry about running someone else into oncoming traffic. Especially in Zion - where it's addictive but necessary to my very survival - I can stop just whenever I want to stare up at a particularly well lit stripe of canyon cliff and not have a single other thought fill my head for those 30 seconds, until I decide I want to keep going again.

It's quite a selfish inclination - it makes me appreciate more, how irritating it probably is sometimes for D to have me along, messing everything up, when he's so used to riding and hiking and doing other things at his own pace. And really - when you set a goal like TransIowa, you have to realize there's not always going to be another rider anywhere near you - you need to get used to the solitary sensation.

I'm thinking that part will come easily.