Diary of Scott Morris

The next ride, more or less

Paula and I are flying to Oregon, shipping our bikes, then heading out on the trail for two weeks.

There’s no shortage of high caliber trails in the Cascades. The general idea is to hit some subset of: North Umpqua Trail, Middle Fork Willamette, Alpine, Eugene to Crest, Waldo Lake, Phil’s / Mrazek, Mackenzie River Trail.

Pretty much every trail I’ve ever heard of in Oregon.

I got a massive collection of GPS tracks, some maps, and some idea of how to piece all this together. But we have no set agenda, no pace to set.

We’re going pretty lightweight, but we do have a tent of sorts and a pop can stove. No racks — this is a singletrack tour after all.

There are a few possible show stoppers: poison oak, mosquitoes and snow being the big three. I’m sure we’ll run into all three in some quantity. I had a systemic reaction to poison oak on a previous visit, so I’ll be extra careful, use technu and try to wash off whenever possible.

After Climb or Die I’m now really feeling the heat, so I’m very much looking forward to trees, shade and cool temps.

AP NEWS WIRE
Brown, Morris complete “Climb or Die”
7/04/08

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Summerhaven, AZ — Mountain bikers worldwide are celebrating a significant milestone in the evolution of the sport. Mount Lemmon has fallen to a pair of Tucson cyclists.

Riders Chad Brown and Scott Morris left Tucson at 4 o’clock AM to begin climbing Milagrosa, a wicked singletrack once thought only suitable for downhill travel. Their goal was 9100′ Mt. Lemmon, some 6500 feet higher.

“It was terrible. Within 2 minutes of hitting the trail, we were sweating buckets,” said Chad Brown of their demoralizing start under cover of darkness. Tucson International recorded a relative humidity of 84% overnight. At the news of the brutal conditions, Vegas bookies dropped the odds of a successful summit bid to 10,000:1.

The “Climb or Die” challenge is an epic of untold proportions. Although the paved Catalina Highway carts cyclists quickly to the cool pines of Mt. Lemmon, the Climb or Die route follows singletrack, gaining some 12,000 feet of elevation over 30 miles. Trails on the route include: Milagrosa, Molino, Prison Camp, Bug Springs, Green Mountain, Butterfly, Bigelow, Secret Trail and Aspen Draw.

The route crosses the paved highway six times, giving riders attempting the challenge six opportunities to either “climb” or “die” (coast freely back down the mountain). To date all known challengers have chosen “die”, usually within the first half of the mountain.

Usually focused and articulate, legendary endurance cyclist Mike Curiak was dumbfounded when he heard the news. He could only utter, “Erm, wow.” After thinking a moment he commented, “Today is a great day for mountain biking.”

Although efforts were made to keep the news from spreading, Summerhaven residents noticed the cyclists and quickly organized a 1000+ strong parade, complete with brass band and bag pipes. [editor’s note: OK, it might have been for the 4th of July, but there was a parade and thousands of people].

The feat was not without controversy. Several anonymous cyclists phoned AP reporters and MTB Hall of Fame officials to demand proof. One cyclist, who only called himself “Max Morris”, told reporters flat out, “It’s impossible. There’s no way they did it.” Unfortunately neither of the riders carried a camera, preferring speed and efficiency. The GPS units of both riders have been sent to forensic labs for testing and verification.

Pending verification, according to the mountain bike bible, completion of the Climb or Die challenge “renders the rider immediate and irrevocable status as a mountain bike god.”

——-

Alright, I’m done being silly. Chad and I had a great ride. We walked some (not as much as expected) and somehow neither of us self-destructed in the heat and humidity. I thought Green Mtn was going to be our undoing with the baking sun and unending unrideable sections.

“Who’s idea was this?” Uttered twice, and dozens upon dozens of times in the mind. Today was a good day to die.

But we both agreed that after surviving Green, failure was no longer an option.

Why? Neither of us could imagine doing all that, again.

And so it rolled from there. Chad showed me his secret trail, which brought the singletrack percentage to about 90%.

We were too hot and super sticky from the get-go, and never really dried out after that. It wasn’t comfortable, but we nailed it otherwise. No mechanicals, no flats, very minimal stopping. A focused effort. A mission in every sense of the word. I even left the camera home to save time and effort as we made our way up.

I honestly didn’t think we had a chance of doing it on July 4th of all days. When I felt the humidity at 4am, my hopes dropped even lower. But I never tired. My legs had power even to the last switchback on Aspen Draw, at 9000 feet. It was a great day.

So, after climbing 12,000 feet on singletrack, we turned around and descended 27 miles of pavement… at a coast. It seems lame, no doubt, and I was grumbling about it… for about three seconds. The cooling breeze and freedom from gravity was too intoxicating. 25 miles later I was finally some approximation of “dry.” Just in time to face the blast furnace of Tucson — 100+ degrees in the face.

I believe every last one of those little wiggles on that profile. Part of what makes this ride so hard is that it requires double climbing. Meaning, to actually gain (for good) one foot of elevation, you have to climb two. It doesn’t really look like it on the plot, but the numbers don’t lie (and neither do my legs).

That’s the reason we coasted the road down. If we took the trails we would have to climb 6000 feet just to drop 6000 feet.

And so it goes on Climb or Die. One for the books.

Real fanfare and mountain bike divinity are in order for this year’s Great Divide Race. John Nobile is, at the moment, wrapping up the last 125 miles to Mexico, and it looks like he will crack the course record. I’ve been following his progress each time as I updated the leaderboard, and rooting him all the way. Amazing.

Yeah, it’s hot in AZ these days. But the storms have started rolling in, so if you are both patient and lucky, you may just find the perfect evening.

The darkest rainclouds are potential backdrops for the brightest rainbows.
It all depends on coincidence and conditions.

I missed the big storm while I was in Alaska, I guess. It erased tracks, creating a clean surface on all the local washes that I ride.

Erasing the past. And what is the past, but something we relate to? Should it affect us so?

Today’s storm was not so big. Just enough to drop the mercury ten degrees, and compact a tacky layer on the trail surface.

I love the smell of the desert after a hot summer rain. I think it’s the creosote.

An under-used but very local piece of singletrack. The preceding climb is generally unrideable, but it went clean for the first time in half a year.

By the time I started riding home the wind had shifted, yielding speed when I expected suffering.

Oregon scheming and planning is well underway. We’re set for ~2 weeks of singletrack exploration in the Cascades.

It came time to present my paper on Finding Trails. The place: Anchorage, Alaska.

A perfect destination for a toasty Arizonan. They are having a “crappy” June - 50’s, clouds, rain.

Perfect.

Upon landing I met up with Adam B, who invited me to stay at his place. We rode all over Hillside - Rovers, Llama, Spencer. Roots were the name of the game.

When we got back it was 9pm. It got kind of dusky around midnight, but never dark. It was impossible to go to sleep with all the light blasting through Adam’s front window.

I could get used to this.

A draining day at the conference led to more riding. Above is approaching Powerline Pass, which I rode to from Adam’s place. I found the denizens of this valley more interesting than the denizens of the conference halls.

Adam set me up with his B29, a blast from the past for me. I’ve suffered plenty on that frame, and I was happy to queue up a little more pain on it. It’s a 1×9, which to me is practically singlespeed. Good times.

Despite the fact that we are past the summer solstice, there was too much snow to attain the pass. I turned around and skipped the Glen Alps parking lot for a descent of Powerline, South Fork Trail and Llama.

I wonder how long that drop will stick around. With a thudbuster on board I had no excuse for not hitting it.

A magnifico view of downtown presented itself. At least I had some good riding to do between here and there.

Llama trail. Green is my new favorite color.

Or yellow.

Thanks to Adam, I not only had a bike to commute with, but a fantastic commute route. I’m utterly jealous of his commute — ~10 miles and almost all sans automobiles. Singletrack and dirt road options are there, too.

I’d pedal the bike paths on the way there and take the scenic / fun route on the way back, laptop computer and spare clothes/shoes bouncing around in the bag.

Thursday I stood around for ~3 hours and was talking nearly nonstop. It was cool to see so much interest in the paper and techniques. Not a single mountain biker in the 1000+ member bunch, though, just a couple hikers. Everyone was very kind and generous, with one notable exception. This guy wasn’t satisfied until he had proved himself smarter than me. I don’t think either of us questioned that fact going in, but apparently it needed to be proven.

Funny stuff. It was an interesting experience and overall quite worthwhile, but I don’t foresee a long future of computer vision conference attendance in my future. Even with the superb location, good friends, awesome bike commute and quality auxiliary rides…

Speaking of quality rides. I sent a plea out to MTBR for a ride out of town. Adam had high hopes of getting out for some rides with me, but the guy is deeply and happily involved in his “job”, and things were busy for him.

Mark responded and invited me to join his friend, Adam, on a ride in the Resurrection Pass area. Initially we were going to do Res, but my 5pm flight meant we only had about 4 hours to ride.

Things were looking a little shaky when Mark’s bike flew off the bike rack on the freeway on-ramp, folding his derailer hanger in the process. I was wondering a little what I had got myself into. But if I miss my flight, I miss my flight. I’d rather risk it on a good ride.

It turned into a great ride, with great company.

Looking back on it now, the ride seems so strange, almost dreamlike. Above treeline it’s always kind of like that. Knowing I’d be riding in dry hundred degree air within the next 24 hours was another part of it. Fog and the trappings of the clouds had their effect.

Devils Pass Lake.

That was an interesting obstacle. Mark went first, then he turned around and as I approached said, “dude, you’re standing on nothing right now.”

Nothing collapsed. We saw grizzly prints in the snow, checked out the forest service cabin and descended a bit towards Coopers Landing. Then it was time to turn around and head back. I could have used a couple more hours up there, though my numb feet may have disagreed with that.

The descent back down was ripping, and easily the best riding of the trip. There is some special riding up there, but the window on it is VERY short, and this year almost nonexistent.

I made my flight thanks to a very cool cabbie from Pakistan. Somehow we started talking about the Divide, and by the time we got to the airport I actually believed there was a chance he’d ride it. I’ve never seen someone so interested in the concept of bike touring. He really made an effort to understand it, and to some extent, I think he did.

A good ride like that is a great way to setup for a 8 hours of flying and associated traveling drudgery. Not tedious at all. The mp3 played solid tunes, and I had queued up my favorite blogs to catch up on during the flight. My brain had much to process from the trip.

…in the White Mountains.

Paula’s got a new bike, and we’re planning a singletrack tour this summer. But she’s a runner, not a cyclist. So it would be a good idea to maybe do a long ride or two before embarking on a couple weeks of singletrack riding, right?

Well, before riding the 2,500 mile Divide in ‘04, she did a single long ride. She’s like that (tough as nails), so it’s looking like the same story this time.

But where to put in a solid day’s effort in AZ, in June? Plans to attend the Kaibab Monstercross got derailed, then even a consolatory White Mountains trip looked in doubt and was delayed.

But we loaded up the car, hit the dentist on the way out of town (!), and were soon at 8000′, enjoying a quiet evening in the trees.

A short evening’s ride brought good trails, fun challenges and strange frustration at the gaping holes in my memory. Yet more evidence that my schematic trail memory has a life expectancy of about five years. After that it gets pretty vague.

It’s been six years since we camped at this site, just before they closed all the forests in 2002. And it’s been six years too long, as far as I’m concerned. Almost off the map, very quiet, free, trails going in and out, meadows with elk wandering, and most important for this time of year: cool temps and shade!

My plan was to be the first to pre-ride the 2008 Tour of White Mountains ~60 mile loop. It’s a brand new course that I have been mapping and working with Todd on for the past month or so. It seemed the perfect ride to do with Paula (for tour prep). Plenty of singletrack, but nothing too gnarly, and a relatively quick way to get 60 all-dirt miles in.

So many rides start out in high hopes…

We made good time around the sweet Los Burros trail, and continued blasting downhill on the Country Club connector. It’s a confusing jumble of 2-tracks, ATV trails and occasional singletrack. GPS kept us on course, though we did make a few wrong turns.

Following Thompson Creek things get technical, and I began to worry about the fun factor for Paula. I was loving it, but it was getting slower for Paula. I was just letting her do her thing while I rode ahead and waiting every once in a while.

Turns out she was slow because she was really trying to ride everything. And often succeeding! I did watch her descend some pretty technical stuff, and was really impressed.

Speed was not high, though, and it only got slower as we began climbing up Blue Mountain. There are some challenges (I dabbed a few times and walked a bit), but we were moving along. It had been a long stretch of rocky / slow riding.

But we were finally at the descent. New territory for me: the Ice Cave Trail.

It started out OK, but things quickly deteriorated. Bad trail layout has led to nasty erosion. So there’s a deep rut that’s full of rocks. Kind of fun for a while, but it quickly grew tedious, and even I wasn’t having that much fun.

Paula got frustrated on a few sections because it was too hard to even get started again, but I was really impressed at how well she held together. I know some very experienced riders who would have been much more unhappy / frustrated.

Now it was time to find the Ice Cave Connector Trail. Coincidentally, we lost the trail in the same area we were supposed to branch off onto the connector trail. I searched around where my GPS line told me to be, but found no such trail.

So we backtracked into a boggy area and found the classic WMS blue diamonds, leading away from the GPS track. I was confused, but didn’t really care. We both had already agreed that the race shouldn’t use the Ice Cave trail period, so whether we were on the connector or not seemed irrelevant.

Finally we made it to a gorgeous lake, and I suggested a break. We’d been riding for four hours, with the last hour being pretty brutal. We ate apples, mango slices and chips while watching fishermen float around the lake.

A blue diamond indicated a trail heading east, back towards the connector. So I assumed the GPS line was simply off — it was based on my hand drawn trace over a scanned map, and that map was a little suspect to begin with.

The lakeside trail rolled along nicely for a quarter mile, then it followed a pattern I have seen many times before: gradual disappearance. People lose their enthusiasm for following the faint trail at a linear rate, and pretty soon all we had were a few broken branches to indicate where to go.

Worse, the cliff walls were steepening, and the only way forward was through the brush.

Bushwhacking shoes on standby.

Once we came around the cliff face the vegetation also let up, so I suggested we head straight up and search for the Connector trail, which I now was convinced that we had missed back by the bog.

hike-a-bike up from the lake

We hadn’t missed anything. There was no trail. Two fences, a sketchy creek crossing and some creative route finding brought us to Porter Mountain road. I rode back and forth on it to confirm what I already knew: there was no Ice Cave Connector trail.

(side note: turns out that trail is going to be constructed this summer, in time for the race. little did we know this at the time)

It was now midday and hot. The lost connector trail had cost us over an hour, so we decided to skip the Timber Mesa trails and start heading back. Porter Mountain took us over the FR 9722, back on course.

Again, I had a hand drawn track from a questionable source, and it sure wasn’t accurate. Once we were on the right “OHV trail” (really just a 4wd-ish road) things rolled smoothly, and I soon recognized the railroad grade the old race used to start on.

Time to hop back on singletrack near Pat Mullen mountain. But I’ll be darned if it wasn’t getting hot, and the midday sun had robbed us of most of the shade. We took a break at the trailhead to eat some food and allow shadows to creep longer.

It was a good place to stop. On singletrack the shadows don’t need to be long to keep things cool. Awesome trail and a fun descent.

I had studied the trail map at Pat Mullen and didn’t like what I saw: no indication of the road we were supposed to take. Again all I had was a hand drawn track from the same questionable source. Worst case we’d have to loop back on fun singletrack (what a shame) to the way we headed out.

But sure enough there was an ATV trail in almost the right place. It strayed several times from track, but it was quite fun to ride. We were good to go, soon blasting down an improved road with a tail wind.

The last twenty miles took as long as the previous five. So it goes in exploratory riding.

Now Lake Mountain was looming ahead of us. I gave Paula all the options (and encouragement) in the world to bail around it. It had already been a long day that hadn’t gone as planned. Lake Mountain is a few hundred feet of elevation by hike-a-bike.

But she had been riding strong, so I wasn’t too surprised when she said “let’s get ‘er done!”

The hiking was pretty straightforward over the first hump, but as we got into the real steeps we learned that riding in the trees has its drawbacks.

Sometimes they fall down.

All over the place.

And we were the first people of the season to attempt it. We had already pushed our bikes up too far to turn around. And even hopping over the first couple log piles was enough of a “point of no return”, so we kept going.

We ran out of water. Brought enough for ~8 hours of riding, but not 9 and a half.

I’ve been through plenty of log jams, with bike, in my day. But these were among the worst I’ve seen. The sideslope is so great that walking around is not an option. There’s nothing to do but fight through it. Being the first through is always hard since none of the branches are broken or minor trees cleared.

I put a lot of effort into clearing things should anyone else be unfortunate enough to attempt the trail.

It was a good thing there were two of us, because we had to hand bikes over a number of the piles that were taller than us.

It took 1.5 hours to go one mile, and when we got to the junction with the summit trail we chose to head up since it seemed more clear of trees.

Lake Mountain does have a lake, of sorts, at the top. Strange indentation that gets water from… where?

I knew there was a lookout tower at the very top, which means a driveable (free of trees!) road to get us down. Blissful coasting took us almost all the way back to camp (we bailed on riding the final piece of singletrack). Cold gatorades and chocolate milk awaited.

We still managed 50 miles, but several of those miles were “bonus” miles. Though my intention was to put together a rideable, moderate loop, this turned into anything but. It was a good revelation, though — my girlfriend rocks — and has a good future as an adventure rider. As I said earlier, I know many an experienced mountain biker who would have folded or at least been very whiny / unhappy. But as we were pulling into camp, dehydrated and exhausted she says, “I think I could ride another couple hours, easy.”

The next day Paula went for a ride and I rode a loop of Los Burros, picking up some of the trail and generally rocking my socks off. When I came back into camp, Jeff from Dallas was talking to Paula. He had just ridden the last half of Los Burros and commented that it had so much downhill that it “felt like cheating…”.

So I saddled back up and rode that loop again. And he was right.