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| Bike+ gear pose for a picture in Idaho
Wobbly Wheels Through Utah:
I guess this is how the adventure
began.
I was peddling my bike down
Highway 40 toward Vernal, UT, concentrating on staying upright with the 100
pounds of weight atop the rack behind me. It would have been a costly fall
considering the various cars, trucks and oil drilling machinery flying by my
left side.
I was planning to ride for a
couple thousand miles from the boathouse where I had been a raft guide for the
past summer into the Pacific Northwest. Within the first mile, I was
discovering that my loaded bike was prone to wobble and veer unpredictably. Nor
did the narrow breakdown lane leave much margin for error. If my tires drifted
even a fraction of an inch, I would hit the rumble strip, and the whole bike
would shake.
The moment I let my guard down and
crossed the white line, I got a horn blat from a passing haul truck. My heart
leapt into my throat. Then there was the inevitable wash of air as the
high-speed diesel monstrosity hurtled by, jolting my bike even further into the
highway.
It feels like that’s the problem
right there. More people would want to hit the road on bikes, if there weren’t
so many crazy bastards already on the road in gas-fueled death machines.
When large, speeding vehicle and
puny two-wheeled bicycle run afoul of one another, the laws of physics
generally give victory to the former of the two. Thus, the idea of driving 10
miles into town becomes more appealing then peddling the same distance in the
exhaust of speeding vehicles, always wondering if the engine noise coming from
behind is the harbinger of an E.R. visit.
One more car goes on the road.
Things get a little more crowded for the remaining bikes.
More cars flying down the asphalt
to the coffee shops and shopping centers downtown can only be a boon to the
drilling business, which there is plenty of around Vernal. Consumers share the
road with the producers in ugly symbiosis. Neither the oil machinery or the
vehicles they support are particularly friendly to bicycles or pedestrians. The
drivers sit sedentary in their cabs, spewing pollution into the air sipping
their Big Gulps, accumulating health problems that might have been prevented
through better diet and exercise — exercise like riding a bike. Thus, the
American love affair with the automobile wages war on the environment on one
front and on American health on the other.
I shouldn’t let self-righteousness
get the best of me. Those oil trucks passing my trembling bicycle had plenty to
do with me and the choices I’ve made over the years. I own and drive a car for
instance. I eat food that grows in petrochemical fertilizer and moves across
the country courtesy of diesel semi-trucks. Worse, I have a fiendish compulsion
for travel. It’s meant driving across country to start a job in Wyoming two years
ago. Family members burned even more fuel on airplane trips when they went out
to visit. When the job ended some months ago, I went on a fun, fossil fuel
drenched jaunt through Utah, Nevada and California, driving up and down
mountain passes, and into National Parks, with thousands of miles and thousands
of pounds of CO2 in my wake.
I could go on confessing my sins,
but it’s just the standard liberal guilt drill. You’d hear the same from any
angsty environmentalist who makes compromises to live in the “real” world. This
type of confession often feels like a rote exercise, not meant to inspire
action or personal change but to foster helplessness. I could come to terms
with the fact that I undermine my values through my actions and reassure myself
that this made me no more of a hypocrite than most other First World citizens.
Then I would have to think about something else before I got really depressed.
So let’s say that I was sick of
rationalizing all of my concerns away, if I wanted to take a break from the
sinning? Where would that leave me if I were in Northeast Utah already, my
summer job as a raft guide had just ended and I had no other prospects lined
up? Well, I wanted an adventure, damn it, even if I cringed at the thought of
putting gas in my tank to go on some selfish quest.
That’s why I was glad to have my
bike with me. It meant that I could get places under my own power, that I
wouldn’t have to drive to an adventure; the adventure would begin as soon as I
pushed off from the boathouse doorstep.
Of course, I’d never done a multi-day bike trip before, much
less try to go thousands of miles. The plan was to go northwest toward
Washington and Oregon where I had friends. I’d never been to the Pacific Northwest
before, so I figured I had a great opportunity to see new places under my own
power.
Would my crotch have the mettle for it? My bike repair skills
were next to nothing. Neither had I tried rigging a bike up with gear, and I
wasn’t about to shell out for a pull-behind unit (they run for about $400) or
the somewhat less expensive panniers.
I’m sure I amused the staff at the
local bike shop with my ignorance of about just about everything related to
cycling. The fact that I spent a good wad of cash there getting my bike tuned
and buying up miscellaneous gear probably made me a welcome sight when I came
in through the door
The last thing I needed to pick up
for the journey was a bike pump. I managed to wobble the 13 miles down the road
to Vernal without getting smashed by traffic, and then swerved into the bike
shop parking lot. I didn’t so much dismount my bike as I thrashed away from it
as the weight crashed hopelessly to the pavement.
After I bought the pump, I invited
the worker who rang me up to check out my rig. Whatever he was thinking, he hid
it well.
I had taken the rack I had bought
earlier in the week and fastened a huge piece of plywood to it using rafting
cam straps. I’d used more straps to lash my hiking backpack to the wood. It was
full of clothes, food, water, my camp stove, a cook pot, journal and Rand
McNally atlas of the United States. Behind my pack, there was my gigantic green
dry bag, that bulged from the volume of my tent and enormous -40 degree
sleeping bag.
“Yeah, that could work,” the bike
store guy said, none too convincingly.
I had actually pared down my
supplies by about a third that morning. There had been an ice axe and crampons
in the earlier gear pile, part of a misguided notion about climbing Mount
Ranier or some other northwestern peak when I wanted a break from all the 100+
mile days I would be throwing down.
All the packing and unpacking had
set me back to where I was leaving in the late afternoon and soon I would have
to find a discrete place to camp nearby.
Since I couldn’t make it to the
national forest, I’d probably end up camping on somebody’s private land, or in
one of the state parks, though I knew that they charged fees. “Hey, do you know
about any camp sites near here?” I asked.
The bike shop guy knew about some
mountain bike trails about 10 miles north up Highway 191 near the Red Fleet
Reservoir. It wasn’t an official camp area, but he told me it would be easy
enough for someone to spend the night there unofficially. The place would be
the last spot for a while because public land of the massive Simplot phosphorous
mine, which owned all the public land along the road for the next few miles. To
reach the public land in the Ashley National Forest, I would have to take on
the 8,000-foot pass through the Uintas Mountains — 4,000 feet of climbing in my overloaded bike. I was happy to
put that off until the next day.
I had my work cut out for me
working my way up the foothills coming up toward the camp area. The bike didn’t
want to follow a straight line. Fortunately there were fewer roads to deal
with.
I climbed through the sagebrush
landscape, underneath ancient desert walls of Morrison formation and Mancos
shale. Gnarled juniper trees blended in with the other high desert flora as I
climbed higher.
There was a final punishing hill
before I reached the place I wanted to camp. Somehow, I puffed my way up
without the bike falling over. A flooded dirt path went off the side of the
road and into the scrub. I dismounted and went to see if there was anywhere I
could pitch my tent.
I wheeled the topsy-turvy bicycle
through deep mud ruts and puddles. Four-wheelers and dirt bikes had torn up
every scrap of land that they could power over, leaving a ragged landscape
where trees and scrub huddled together in tiny islands amidst a sea of broken
soil. The light was getting lower and I felt the evening chill.
Finally, I chose one of these
islands and put up my tiny shelter.
I thought about the day’s progress
from within my sleeping bag, looking up at the low nylon ceiling overhead —
only 23 miles. I’d barely made it out of town, fighting my bike the whole time.
The Wyoming border was about 60 miles to the north of me and I found myself
wondering if I would last for even that tiny step of the journey.
Finally, I shut my eyes and tried
to satisfy myself that this night on the dirt-bike island was the beginning,
that exciting adventure waited for me on the miles of road yet to come.
And then the rain began to fall.
Friday, September 13, 2013
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