Alternative “Floor” Rides: Prospector/Church Rocks, Bearclaw Poppy/Stucki Springs
This is a fast, fun ride, with just enough ledges and rocks to make the intermediate rider at least think about dabbing, but nothing white-knuckle. The ride is a nice-flowing loop, with great views of the eroded badlands winding down into Cove Wash below, and the Beaver Dam mountains behind to the Southwest (pic below right.) I’ve stolen the map from utahmountainbiking.com, and refer you to them for excellent trail descriptions, mileage and GPS coordinates (though if you really need a GPS to do this ride, you probably shouldn’t be mountain biking in the desert…)
When you ride one of the excellent singletracks around St. George, if you don’t notice any other plant, you should at least notice this- Creosote. This amazing shrub, which over its 18,000 year history in North America has come to dominate the Southwest like no other plant, is immediately obvious. Its foliage is an olive green distinct from that of any other shrub in the area, and its form is distinctively “spindly.” It’s also usually the biggest shrub around on any of the “Floor” rides. I did a big post about Creosote back in May during Monocot Week(Man, was that a great week or what??), which I encourage you to check out before riding Barrel Roll- it is an incredibly interesting plant.
Probably the most common associate of Creosote on the Floor- and across much of the Mojave- is Blackbrush, which we looked at back in April. And Blackbrush is interesting because it’s the one shrub that we’ll see plenty of on all 3 rides; it ranges seamlessly across 4 of the 5 terraces, always the same, monotypic species, the one constant companion to the Southwest Utah mountain biker. Interestingly, the Blackbrush, which I described back in April as being “partially deciduous”, appears to be pretty much “all deciduous” this winter down around St. George; wherever I rode over the long weekend, the Blackbrush was bare (pic right), or close to it.
Botanical Spotlight:Mormon Tea.We looked at Mormon Tea (genus = Ephedra) back in May near the Dirty Devil, and I talked about how it’s so interesting in that it’s just so way, unbelievably different from everything else around it, with a unique and strange evolutionary history. There are something like 20 different species and subspecies of Ephedra in North America, and they can be tricky to tell apart. But here on Barrel Roll trail (and on neighboring Blackbrush trail) you can see the see the two most common species in these parts side-by-side.
Green Mormon Tea, Ephedra viridis, is the most common in the Southwest. It’s the bright green ephedra, with the stalks sticking straight up, looking almost like little upside-down brooms.
Torrey Mormon Tea , Ephedra torreyana, looks different in 2 ways. First is the color; the Torrey Mormon Tea is a light blue-green, almost pale in comparison to E. viridis. Second is the stem architecture, or “geometry”. Unlike the stems of Green Mormon Tea, those of Torrey Mormon Tea branch out at sharp- almost right- angles, in a form that is vaguely similar to that of Blackbrush.
The two species overlap extensively on the “Floor” but don’t seem to hybridize much if at all. Of the two, Torrey is the more thermo-philic; it thrives down as low as 1,500 feet, but rarely occurs at over 6,000 feet. Green, on the other hand, hardly gets lower than the “Floor” (2,500-3,000 feet), but has been found as high up as 10,000 feet. Though the 2 species exist here in roughly equal numbers, when we get up on the Mesa level the Green will dominate.
The Floor is also interesting botanically for 2 things that are not here. The first is trees. The plants down on the Floor are all shrubs. Though some “trees” (Juniper, Turbinella Oak) do grow along some of the wash bottoms, and real trees (Cottonwoods) grow along the Virgin and Santa Clara Rivers, they’re otherwise absent from the Floor. The shade-less singletracks around St. George, great as they are, are no place to be riding mid-day in summer. Utah Juniper, the toughest, most drought-tolerant Utah tree, and the first to appear as you move upslope, can’t hack the brutal heat and dryness of the Floor in summer, and the spectacular Joshua Tree don’t quite make it up to this high, northernmost fringe of the Mojave. (The ones in the I-15 median don’t count; they’re planted.)
But after the ride, if we pop back in the car and drive another 10 minutes down I-15 in Arizona, all of that changes as we plunge into the Virgin River Gorge (pic right) and transition into the Basement. Suddenly we’re in the real Mojave, and Joshua trees are everywhere. Though there’s no singletrack in the Gorge, the convenience and accessibility of this part of the Basement make it well worth the short drive. Pull off at the rest/area campground about 10 minutes into the gorge and spend a little while poking around.
Tangent: If you want to ride amongst Joshua trees, the best places to do so are another 90 minutes South, outside of Vegas. But if you’re OK with doubletrack, there are numerous old 4WD roads (and plenty of open camping) just over on the South side of the Beaver Dam Mountains, still in Utah.
The second thing that’s missing from the Floor is a shrub. One shrub we won’t see anywhere on this, or any other “Floor” ride, is Sagebrush, which we checked out back in April. It’s completely absent. As a rule, where Creosote occurs, Sagebrush is absent, and vice-versa. It’s like the 2 shrubs are Superman and Clark Kent; you never see them in the same place, even though they’re similar in profile and seem to fulfill the same role in their environment. Each is the “alpha-shrub” where it grows, towering over neighboring smaller shrubs. And each produces the strongest, most wonderful- but very different- scent following a rain. If you crack your car window in the desert on a rainy night, more often than not, the scent of one or the other will tell you where you are.
Another thing about the Twin Corral backpack worth mentioning is the weird physiogeography of deep canyon hikes. Early in the season, I talked about how each Great Basin peak hike follows a similar 3-stage methodology. A like 3-stage methodology holds true for most canyon hikes, only in reverse. First is a traverse across high ground. Second is the descent through the middle layers, or “tiers” of the canyon system, and third is the travels and exploration along the canyon bottoms. But somehow the 3 stages of canyon hiking are clearer in reverse, as you exit the canyon, typically after a stay of a few days.
The first stage in this direction (up & out) is the hike and climb through the main canyon bottom- what I call the Underworld- and up and out a navigable side canyon. This is basically more of what you’ve been dayhiking the last few days- beautiful, with high walls and a small patch of sky overhead, easy navigation.
The second stage is the Middleworld. The Middleworld is a weird land of interconnected sandstone hills, ramps, cliffs and ledges interspersed with ravines and patches of brush and woodland. The Middleworld is far and away the most problematic stage navigationally- suddenly a ramp starts rolling steeper and turns to a wall, or a little valley winds its way into a dead end, or open out into a towering pour-off. For many of us, the Middleworld is the closest we come to navigating a maze in the natural world.
The third stage is the Overworld, the high plateau surrounding the canyon, over which you trudge back to your vehicle, (which hopefully will still be present, intact and operational.) And the shocking thing about the Overworld is the sky. So much sky, all around you. Too much sky, no protective canyon walls, and so much light. You tuck down your cap visor a bit, and focus on the ground ahead, but all that sky and light is both wonderful and un-nerving at the same time.
The Overworld on the East side of the Dirty Devil canyon system is dominated by 2 shrubs. First and most dominant is our old friend Blackbrush.
Tangent: I’ve learned something new about Blackbrush since blogging about it last month. In that post I mentioned that the right (ish) angles of the branching twigs is one of the easiest ways to identify Blackbrush. But it also appears that that right-angle branching may have a direct benefit: It creates pockets of internal, shifting, intermittent shade for leaves on the interior branches, shielding them at least part of the time from the full strength of the sun.
The second plant is fascinating because its so different from everything else around it: Mormon Tea, Ephedra viridis (Green Mormon Tea) or Ephedra nevadensis (Nevada Mormon Tea.) (The two species overlap and are tricky to tell apart.). Ephedra is a genus of several dozen species, around 10(?) of which are native to North America. What makes Ephedra so interesting is that it’s a Gnetophyte. The vast majority of Gymnosperms (non-flowering plants) with which we’re familiar are Conifers, like pines, firs, junipers, etc. But there are 3 other major orders of Gymnosperm which are completely separate and distinct from and only distantly related to Conifers.
The first is the Cycads, which we mentioned when we looked at Palm trees. The second is the enigmatic Gingko, a prehistorically common and varied order, which today exists only as a single species, the Gingko tree, believed to be extinct in the wild.
Gnetophytes are way ancient (200+ million years) have never been very numerous, but hang on in specialized niches. Ephedra is one of 3 families in the order (the other 2 are totally weirdsville). Ephedra bears no leaves, only stems, which are green, upright and fairly flexible, and it is within the stems that photosynthesis takes places. Ephedra is dioecious, and the male cones “bloom” in April and May like little flowers (which they are not.) Ephedra is what I call a “Wind-Agent” plant, meaning it is wind-pollinated, but its seeds dispersed by an external agent- usually small rodents who cache them underground. Ephedra also reproduces asexually, via root cloning, and often re-sprouts from the crown following fire.
Tangent: The type of Ephedra we find in the West- Mormon Tea- bears no measurable amounts of the much-publicized drug, “Ephedra”. The drug “Ephedra” comes from an Asian species.
There are a couple of other interesting things about Ephedra. The first is that the form of the male cones is such that they direct wind currents to disperse its pollen away from itself- a more sophisticated dispersal schema than the undirected "pollen blast" of conifers. The other is that Ephedra is the only known non-Angiosperm to practice double fertilization, a sophisticated reproductive mechanism we'll look at when we talk about Oak.
Ephedra is cool in the desert because it’s so generically and evolutionarily distant from everything else around it. For hundreds of millions of years it’s followed its own lonely path, and here it is, thriving alongside Blackbrush and Bitterbrush and Sagebrush and Shadscale and all the rest of the pack of modern-day angiosperm shrubs.
The Overworld effect usually damps out on the long drive home, in the “safety” of your vehicle passenger compartment. But over the years, it’s strange how the Overworld effect has become one of my favorite and most savored parts of a multi-day canyon backpack.
Although the focus of the long weekend was visiting Anasazi ruins, no trip to the desert is complete without a little mtn biking and botany, both of which I enjoyed on our Memorial Day Family Road-Trip. But first, let’s talk about something a little closer to home.
The Problem With Lambert Park
If you live and mtn bike in Northern Utah, you’re probably familiar with Lambert Park. It’s a modest-sized network of not-very-difficult trails in Alpine, which is tucked into the Northwest Corner of Utah Valley. I think most area mtn bikers would classify the Lambert Park trails as fun, nice-to-have-close-by, but not amazing.
Tangent: I have a Love-Hate relationship with Lambert Park. For several years I would head down there ~once a year, usually in March or April. Much of Lambert is low, open and South-facing, so it’s quick to melt out in the Spring. To drive there from my house (up by the zoo) is the better part of an hour.
Every year I’d go down and jump on the trails and be like, “Wow! This is awesome! How come I never come down here? I’m going to start riding these trails all the time!” Then, about 20-30 minutes later, I’d be like, “OK, that was fun, but I think I’ve looped past this point at least 2 or 3 times already, I wonder what else is around here… “ And then finally, after riding around in various circles for about 45-60 minutes, I’d think, “That’s it? I drove all the way down here for this? This is so lame… I’m not driving all the way down here again!”
And then another year passes, the memory fades, Spring rolls around, and I think, “Hmm. I wonder if Lambert Park’s melted out- I should go check it out!” and I do the same frustrating day all over again… Because when you get right down to it, I am a total Utard.
What If…?
Lambert’s fun for people who live close by, but it’s not quite worth driving ~an hour for. But imagine if Lambert were different. Imagine if instead of covering maybe a dozen acres, it covered a couple hundred acres. And imagine if it included over 20 miles of trail- all great singletrack- trails that didn’t just criss-cross each other in circles and figure-8’s, but trails that really went places, and went to places that were kind of different- some through woodland, some through open flowery meadows, some over slickrock slabs along canyon rims.
Then imagine that instead of being set in the scrub oak at the base of the Wasatch, it was set in the high desert through Piñon-Juniper Woodland. And then lastly, imagine that the trails Freaking Rocked. Like wild, buff, fast roller-coasters, where you hit maybe 2 G’s at the bottom of a trough and then 0 G at the next crest- over and over and over again, while turning and banking and twisting this way and that.
Seriously, how could it get any cooler than that? Here’s how- if it existed. And coolest of all- it does. It’s called Phil’s World.
Phil’s World lies just 3 ½ miles East of Cortez, close enough to sneak out, ride at dawn, and get back just as the family is stirring.
Tangent: There is a delicate art to waking and exiting from a motel room before dawn without waking anyone else in the room. I am a master of this art. The key is to have everything that can be left in the car the night before- helmet, gloves, glasses, extra layers, etc.- already in the car, and to have a small pile of stuff at the door with things that cannot be left in the car the night before- shorts, jersey, socks, wallet, phone, keys and of course, bike.
I never leave my bike in or on the car in a motel lot. Yeah I know, most motels have those big “No Bikes in Room” signs nowadays. Screw that. Just get it inside fast, get it out at dawn, like a tree falling in the forest…
Nested Tangent: We also camped one night, which I mention only to highlight, once again, what an Excellent Camper I am. We had plenty of rain in the evening, but for the Well-Equipped Excellent Camper, rain is no obstacle. Here’s Awesome Wife happily toasting a marshmallow under the protective cover of the Single Best Piece of Camping Gear I Have Purchased This Decade- the Kelty “Noah’s Tarp” 9’x9’ fly. I cannot recommend this item highly enough- best $60 I ever spent.
The trails are in excellent condition and the soils respond well to moisture/heavy rains, becoming firm, not muddy. The trails are that weird, wonderful combination of interesting-but-not-actually technical, so that you feel like you’re riding really, really well, but when you stop and think about it, you realize you’re not riding anything all that difficult. The climbs are minimal, fast and moderate- just enough to provide a little elevation gain for the fast, thrilling descents. I rode it 3 times over the long weekend, twice at dawn and once before dinner, a different combination of trails each time.
Extra Details: I strongly recommend Rib Cage and Stinky’s Loop. The Ledges Loop (pic left) is a bit less exciting, but possibly the most beautiful, with a nice combination of woods and meadows. There are little signs at most junctions, making it near-impossible to get lost.
Bonus Tip: One of my rules when I get to a new trail network for the first time is this: If there’s a trail with the word “stinky” in its name, take it. “Stinky” trails are always great. I don’t know why this is.
Seriously, you gotta go check it out.
Riding The Southwest Uplands
As longtime readers know, I welcome any excuse to spend time in P-J woodland, and this is another reason to ride Phil’s; it’s classic Southwest Uplands riding. In many ways it’s similar to the flora atop Gooseberry or Little Creek, but it lies a couple hundred miles to the East, and as I’ve become more attuned to desert plants, I’ve started to notice little differences. The Utah Juniper is the same, but the Piñon here is 2-needled Colorado Piñon (pic left), rather than the 1-needled Singleleaf Piñon common to the St. George/Hurricane area. There’s Mormon Tea all around, but only of the “Green” variety (Ephedra viridis.) The “bluer”, more angular Torrey Mormon Tea (E. torreyana) that’s all over hills surrounding St. George is absent.
The Sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata) seems lusher, leafier and more strongly aromatic, probably in part due to heavy recent rains and time of year, but also I suspect due to elevation; Phil’s World lies ~6,200 – 6,500 feet, while Gooseberry and Little Creek range from ~5,400 – 5,800 feet.
These minor floral differences extend beyond Phil’s World. Here’s a shot of a Gambel Oak leaf against my hand that I took up in Mesa Verde; it’s bigger than any such leaf I’ve ever seen in the Wasatch. The higher mesas/cuestas support Ponderosa Pines in the sheltered draws. On Saturday as we hiked down the long, narrow canyon to the Ute Reservation-ruins site, Ponderosas started appearing in the lower, shadier, wetter reaches of the canyon.
Tangent: Several of the canyons up in Mesa Verde National Park have spectacular flora. A good example is the canyon in which Spruce Tree House is located, which includes everything from Juniper to Piñon to Gambel Oak to Skunkbush, Sagebrush, Mormon Tea, Poison Ivy, Hackberry and even Douglas Firs in the canyon bottom. Here’s a shot of some Eaton’s Penstemon (Penstemon eatonii) also called Firecracker Penstemon, blooming alongside the trail down to the site.
Even the lichens were different. Bright orange Elegant Sunburst Lichen, Xanthoria elegans, which is all over the place around St. George, is almost absent around Cortez (though it seems common a bit further West, out at Hovenweep.) And foliose lichens (pic right), so rare around SG, are common throughout the area, both in P-J woodland and in open shrublands.
Phil’s World had a number of nice wildflowers in bloom, some familiar, some not. Groundsel was all over the place, but it wasn’t the Singlestem Groundsel/Lambstongue Ragwort, Senecio integerrimus, that’s all over the Wasatch right now. Instead it’s Lobeleaf Groundsel, S. multilobata (pic left.) You can tell by checking out the leaves, which are smooth and well, “multi-lobed”, rather than simple and hairy like our Groundsel up here.
But let’s zero in on my favorite, which was blooming all over the place: the fabulous Sego Lily, Calochortus nuttallii, which happens to be the state flower of Utah.
We’ve already talked about Desert Mariposa Lilies (genus = Calochortus) back down in St. George, when I woke up next to a Winding Desert Lily on my overnighter with KanyonKris. The Sego Lily is a close cousin of that flower, with an identical petal/sepal architecture. You can take your pick as to which is the more beautiful (I slightly prefer the C. flexuosus), but they’re both absolute stunners.
The Sego Lily earned its state-flower crown largely due to its supposed* role in early pioneer times. In the early years of Utah settlement, cricket infestations caused significant crop damage. According to tradition, famished pioneer families augmented their diets with the edible bulbs of Sego Lilies.
*The story may be apocryphal. I don’t know, but many of these early pioneer stories often are. A prime example is the Seagulls eating the crickets story, in which it’s usually told that Seagulls never existed in Salt Lake Valley before the crickets showed up. It’s not true; guano deposits on islands in the Great Salt Lake have been dated back over 5,000 years.
How I Really Am Like Euell Gibbons After All
Now, longtime (and I mean really longtime) readers may recall that I have a continuing fixation/jihad on identifying, collecting and consuming edible foods in the wild. The reasons for this are convoluted and, well, probably stupid, and I’ve already detailed them in another wandering, stream-of-consciousness tangent in another post, so I won’t repeat them here. But suffice it to say that most of my efforts to date- such as digging up Glacier Lily corms and roasting Gambel Oak acorns- have turned out pretty dismally. So I was determined to give Sego Lily bulbs a try.
On Monday morning’s Phil’s World ride I collected a couple of bulbs (pic left) and returned to the motel, where the Trifecta and I sampled the goods. And the verdict was… OK. Definitely edible. Though the Trifecta had no urge to indulge in seconds, I found the flavor not half-bad, and I daresay that a suitable quantity, sautéed lightly in butter or olive oil, might just make an appealing side dish. Have to tear up a lot of pretty flowers though.
So there we are. I like fry sauce and Sego Lily bulbs*, and I’ve got a whole posse of Mormon friends ready to baptize me just as soon as I kick the bucket. I think I’m a real Utahn now. Gotta get me a handcart!
*Oooo….. Maybe I should try dipping Sego Lily bulbs in fry sauce…
Let me start by saying that, in general, I think it’s kind of pretentious to do a retrospective-year-in-review-type post, because doing so implies that a) the blog is more important/has a bigger audience than it actually does, b) the year was somehow exceptional or notable, which it really wasn’t (with the obvious though admittedly not-world-shattering exception that it was the first year I had a helmet-cam), c) even if it was an exceptional year, that I would somehow be in any way more qualified than any other Average Joe to, er, retrospect it, d) that the visual content of this blog somehow merits review/re-posting, and e) I think they always come off as a wee pit pretentious.
But, I’m doing it anyway, because a) I’ve been looking at a bunch of old helmet-cam clips this past week, which have really highlighted the remarkable changes in the living world over the course of the year, b) it allows me to get a post up during this quasi-nether-week without doing any real* research, and c) I guess, if we’re completely honest, I am just a wee bit pretentious.
*Just to be clear- the issue here is that I am lazy- not that I am unimaginative, or in any way out of cool post ideas. In fact I have a great two-fer brewing for next week, about a cool predator and hearing.
I get this weird thing about seasons every year. In the Summer I’ll be walking around in shorts and a T-shirt, maybe hiking or biking past some spot in the woods up in the mountains, and I’ll think that in just a few months, the forest all around me will be leafless, freezing cold, and under several feet of snow. And while I know it consciously, I just can’t really believe it. It just doesn’t seem intuitively possible that the same place could be so different in such a short time. Then 6 months later, skiing or what-not in the backcountry, I’ll have the exact opposite experience, looking around at the frozen silent forest, trying to imagine it green and leafy and warm and full of flowers and hummingbirds and dragonflies, and I just can’t really believe that it’ll be that different so soon. That all this snow will somehow melt away and the dead forest will just come back to life.
Tangent: I’ve been fascinated by the place-change effect of seasons for a long time, since long before starting this project, or even knew anything about forests. In the summer of 2001 I decided to photograph the same spot on the same trail weekly throughout the Summer/Fall. I didn’t see it through, but still have some of the old photos, reposted below.
During past winters I’ve sometimes reality-checked myself by looking through photos from the preceding summer, which helps, but a still photo is just that- a still. But this year, looking at old video-clips, I’ve found a connection to the past cycle of seasons I never managed to experience before.
So anyway, I started to do a kind of a month-by-month helmet-cam retrospective, intending to document the change of seasons and be all kind of artsy and such, but by the time I got to May, I thought, “Man, this is a lot of singletrack through leafless scrub-oak footage…” So instead, I’m just going post a bunch of my favorite helmet-cam clips from 2010. Here we go:
The Clips, Already
Some of the best early season clips I got were down South. This is a portion of the descent of Upper JEM outside of Hurricane, UT, traversing the upper 3 members* of the Moenkopi formation. The trail is lined mainly with Blackbrush and the occasional Utah Juniper up top, with Rabbitbrush and Mormon Tea joining in lower on down. I love the flow of this clip, the way the land changes color as we tranisition between geologic members, the weird light and ominous clouds. Pine Valley Range in the distance.
*Upper Red, Shnabkaib, Middle Red
Tangent: Yes, that’s right. The helmet-cam was my Christmas present last year. What’s that? What did I get this year? Well, I received several nice gifts, but one of the most interesting was a pair of Eyeclops Nightvision Infrared Binoculars. They’re not real night vision binoculars, like the kind of light-amplifying devices used by the military and such, but rather an infrared flashlight attached to a camera-viewer.It’s a fun little toy and I hope to use it for things like night-time bug-hunting, maybe checking out scorpions and such down in the desert come spring.
But in playing around with it (pic below, left = living room chair viewed in darkness) , I discovered a curious and unexpected side effect, which is this: it appears that artificial hair coloring doesn’t show up in infrared light. [I actually have a great photo that displays the effect, but unfortunately I can’t post the photo here, for reasons I can’t really get into.*] Meaning that when you look at someone with colored hair through the infrared viewer, their hair looks gray or white. You can actually pick up the viewer, scan a room full of people, and instantly see who’s dying their hair- Isn’t that freaky??
*Because Awesome Wife would likely leave me if I posted it. If you’re a real-world friend and want to see it, email me- it is way, way freaky.
Back in March I was in the same area with the team, and filmed this clip of the road descent into La Verkin with Teammate-Perry. I like this one for the rush of speed, as well as the physio-geographic significance: We’re crossing the Hurricane Fault here, dropping off the very, very Western edge of the Colorado Plateau and into the Basin and Range country, which extends clear to the Sierra Nevada.
Further down in the Mojave, this clip is from outside Blue Diamond, just outside of Las Vegas. The riding is slow and light dim, but I love the otherworldly feel of this ridge, following the faint singletrack, as well as the sense of solitude and open space just ~20 miles from the spawl and noise of the city. The tall yuccas alongside the trail are Spanish Dagger. Spring Range in the distance.
OK, this one isn’t helmet-cam, but I’m including it anyway. It’s driving across a wash in the Mojave, specifically Beaver Dam Wash, the lowest point in Utah. I love the blast of sun and green and water all together way out in the middle of this dry, spiky expanse of desert.
Tangent: What’s that? You’re wondering what else I got for Christmas. Well I got whole bunch of great books on my latest obsession, er, I mean interest- history of the first peoples in the Americas, and in the Great Basin in particular. (My recent rockartencounters have piqued my curiosity.) And I got some CDs and some more of that quick-drying underwear, and oh, yeah, this:
OK, so I bought myself that one…
Back up in Utah, this is one of one of my favorite stretches of Gooseberry Mesa, the South rim. Following Hunky Neighbor here, we’re rolling across the Shinarump Conglomerate, which marks the transition from Moenkopi to Chinle formations. About a minute in we roll up onto the next Chinle member “up”- the Lower Sandstone Member. We’re passing by Blackbrush, Mormon Tea, Cliffrose, Turbinella Oak, Utah Juniper and Singleleaf Piñon. Little Creek Mesa in the distance.
Closer to home, a couple of May bird-sightings. Here’s a male Black-Headed Grosbeak singing alongside the Shoreline Trail up above the Capitol…
And here’s a soaring Red-Tailed Hawk from Jack’s Peak. Oquirrh Range, Great Salt Lake, Antelope Island and Salt Lake Salient* in the distance.
*No, I haven’t explained this yet- it’s the geologic formation that comprises what I generally refer to as the “foothills” at the North end of Salt lake Valley. We’ll get to it when I do my Geology of the Wasatch post. (And yes, I will do a Geology of the Wasatch post one day and it will be awesome- my veritable Wasatch Opus. You will not want to miss it.)
Around the 1st week of June the forests around 7,000 – 8,000 feet practically explode in greenery. Here’s a clip from up in Pinebrook. The leaves (mainly Maple & Aspen) are only partway out, still that light, lime green color, and the underbrush (mainly Ninebark & Snowberry) though green, is still low, only recently freed from the weight of the snowpack.
Just 2 weeks later, on the eve of the solstice, I took this clip from the Northern (and best) stretch of the Mid-Mountain trail, passing through several Aspen groves. You can’t see it in the clip, but the trail is lined with blooming Sticky Geranium and Wild Rose.
I did some cool summer road trips this year. This clip is from along the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, riding the Rainbow Rim Trail. The tall conifers are Ponderosa pines. In stretches we pass through stands of Gambel Oak and New Mexican Locust. Out at the point we roll by a couple of Colorado Piñons, and finish off with a corridor of blooming Cliffrose. This section smelled fantastic. (At 2:27 I glance into the inner gorge.)
This clip turned out cool. It’s the full moon rising over the Paunsaugunt as I pedaled the bike path back to camp. There are all kinds of cool conifers on the Paunsaugunt. It’s hard to tell in the dark, but I’m pretty sure we’re passing through Douglas Fir and Ponderosa.
OK, another non helmet-cam clip, but a good view of Redfish Lake up in the Stanley Basin of Idaho.
Earlier that same day, here’s a clip from up on the ridge on the West side of the lake (so on the right side of the previous clip) with some nice views of the lake. The trees on this stretch are Douglas Fir, and geologically I suspect I’m rolling over a glacial moraine, not from the last glacial advance, but from the one before, likely ~100,000 years ago.
Later on that vacation, here’s a clip from our campsite on the Lochsa River up in Northern Idaho.
Tangent: I just realized that reading the 2 previous tangents, you probably think that the only thing I care about around Christmas is getting presents. I assure you, nothing could be further from the truth. For while I certainly enjoy receiving gifts, I certainly know what really makes Christmas a truly unique, special and magical time, which of course is Making Fun of People’s Holiday Cards. Oh come on, you know you do it too. Every family has a Crazy Aunt or some such who sends out a whacky form letter every year that you and your significant other just can’t wait to get.* Actually, in all seriousness, I like Christmas card-form-letters**. Yes, sometimes they have a lot of detail, but they’re a great way to get caught up on the lives of friends and family you don’t get to see very often.
*Sadly, my own Crazy Aunt stopped sending us her card/letter a few years ago. I can’t figure out if she stopped doing it altogether, or somehow got wind of me making fun of it and took me off the list. It’s a shame, I loved it. It was always written in this super-happy upbeat tone, but kept mentioning things that seemed borderline inappropriate for a Christmas card. Actual line from a past edition: “After breaking off his engagement, Tad*** bought a VW Rabbit and moved to California…”
**Except for the downer ones. You know, the ones that go, “It’s been a year of challenges for the Hetzweigs; Hal lost his job in May, Betty’s back in rehab, and we had to put down Rasputin this year, but we’re hopeful little Petey will learn to cope with his deep anger issues…” Gee, I’m sorry it’s been rough, but did you have to dump all this on us the week before Christmas? Couldn’t you have emailed me or something back in October?
***Not his real name.
The truth is, there’s only one type of holiday card that drives me batty, and that is the Card With New, Unidentified, Unannounced and Unexplained Family Members. I’m not talking babies or pets here- I’m talking adults. Several years ago one of my cousins sent us all a card with a picture of him, his wife, their 2 teenage sons, and… another teenaged boy. We don’t see this cousin but every few years, but so far as we knew, he’d always had 2 kids. Could we have somehow missed one over the years? We doubted it. The card had no explanation, and we chat so infrequently with him, his parents or his siblings that there wasn’t a smooth way to just call him up on some other pretext and say, “Oh, BTW, who’s the other teenager on your Christmas card?” And because we felt awkward asking, by the time the next year’s card came around (again, with mystery teen) it was too late to ask, and so… anyway it was like 2 or 3 years before we were clued in*.
*He was a teen from a troubled home who played basketball with their sons and whom they took in and became his legal guardians. A totally awesome, inspiring story. I just wish they’d noted it in the card so we weren’t scratching our heads (and then semi-faking like we already knew) for so long…
This year, we got a card from AW’s cousin, a single(?) man with a young son. The card said, “Happy Holidays from the Jones* Family” and had a photo of the cousin, his son, a middle-aged woman and 3 teenaged girls. Who are these people? No note, no names, no nothing**. None of these women were in his card last year. We hadn’t heard of a wedding or even a serious girlfriend and suddenly we get the Brady Bunch Christmas card… We are totally clueless…
*Not his real name.
**Which is ironic, because this is the kind of Christmas card that totally merits a lengthy detailed form-letter…
Closer to home, the Wasatch Crest always makes for good video. This clip is from SkiBikeJunkie,Coryalis and my 83-mile Fourth of July Super-Crest tour. You can tell by the low brush/grasses and the light Aspen leaves that it’s still early in the summer. In addition to the usual Wasatch characters, we pass a number of Limber Pines between around 1:00 and 1:20.
For comparison, here’s a piece of that same stretch, exactly 2 months later. Check out how much higher (and drier) the grasses are, and how the Aspen leaves are now a dark, mature green.
This next clip I like- even with the problematic lighting- because it’s one of my favorite stretches of Great Western Trail, and also because it’s my only helmet-cam clip of, er, me. SBJ was kind enough to film it later during the Super-Crest ride. The conifers in the shady sections here are mostly Engelmann Spruce, which do real well on these North-facing slopes*
*And have been doing even better following a century+ of fire suppression in the Wasatch.
Here’s part of that same stretch 3 months later, the trail now lined with fallen Aspen leaves. Passing through the darker Spruce stands, the golden underbrush seems almost to glow, lighting up the forest from below.
The colors peaked in mid-October. Here’s another stretch of Mid-Mountain, about 2 miles North, and 4 months after, the Solstice-Eve clip up above.
Later in the Fall we returned to Gooseberry, where I took this clip following Fast Jimmy through Piñon-Juniper along the rim, with glimpses of the banded Moenkopi formations below.
In mid-November I followed Cory on this high-speed descent down into City Creek. The oaks and maples are bare, the grasses wilted and brown, the sky gray. The landscape is practically begging for snow. We’re rolling over conglomerate soils here, eroded down from the tertiary conglomerate cliffs above. I’ve been trying to keep up with Cory on the downhills for 15 years now, and he just seems to be getting faster. We hit 29.9mph on this stretch.
I saved my favorite clip for last. It may seem like an odd pick, and my feelings aren’t hurt if you don’t like or get it. It’s slow and meandering, I’m alone, the scenery is unspectacular, and the trail rather undefined. It’s the descent of a side trail* off Mid-Mountain trail during the peak bloom of Serviceberry on the day before the summer solstice. The video’s slow and poky, but when I watch it I feel the sun on my neck and smell the brush all around. I feel the Serviceberry brushing my arms, the Sagebrush scratching my shins, my flexed stomach flat on the seat and the braking-burn in my forearms**. For me, this clip is Summer.
*Lower Finesse.
**Because yes, I am a Luddite and ride with v-brakes. Or rather rode. Did I mention my new bike?
Tangent: But first, 2 things about the last post. First, if you ever want to find out how many coworkers really read your blog, do a post like that one. All week long, coworkers have been coming up to me, saying (mostly) nice things* about how they’ll miss working with me, mentioning that they read the post, and sometimes asking a follow-on question or two to try to get a handle on the details of the past-blown-up deal or B or C or some other aspect of the LQC*.
*A couple even hugged me, which I thought was kind of nice. In general, I’m not a Gratuitous Hugger, but I have some great co-workers. Now that I think about it, I don’t think I ever did a tangent on Gratuitous Hugging, which is a rich, rich topic. Oh well, possible material for Part 2.
**Never gonna tell. But contrary to what Co-worker Matt is spreading, there is no anagramming involved. Seriously, the guy sat down in my office yesterday trying to Da Vinci-Decode “ABC…” One of the odd things in my life, BTW, that I think has been if anything exacerbated by this blog, is that people generally assume I’m smarter than I am. Really, I’m not all that bright- I’m just interested in a lot of things and like to run off at the mouth. Lots of times I’ll be talking with someone and they’re looking at me and I can tell they’re thinking, “Boy, I wonder what he’s thinking about right now- probably some deep, important stuff…” But mostly I’m just thinking about when I can next go for my next bike ride. Or lunch.
Second, I’m sorry- especially to male readers- about the “We Have To Talk” teaser. Because men are terrified of that phrase. When our wives/SOs say it to us, we simply have no idea what’s coming next. We honestly don’t know if they’re going to ask us for a divorce, or our opinion on the color for the new drapes. Really, we think it could be either. Because in relationships- and this is the truth- men never really have any idea of what is going on. Oh, we like to think we do, but we’re pretty clueless. We’re like long-distance drivers who have absolutely no idea how an engine works. We know we’re supposed to fill the tank with gas when the light comes on and maybe check the oil every once in a while. We generally think that when we get back in the car and start up everything will run just fine, but for all we know the next time we turn the key the engine might just blow up, like at the end of The Mechanic. That’s kind of like… oh, you get it already.
Monday night OCRick and I drove down South to Gooseberry Mesa. After a quick night-ride on the Bench level we drove on up onto the Mesa and camped. I looked up at the stars for a while and saw Perseus, Auriga, Gemini, the Big Dipper, Draco*, Orion, Taurus, the Pleiades, Jupiter, Cassiopeia, and much more.
*Thanks, Doug M.!
Tangent: We have a new favorite Phenomenally Awesome Campsite on Gooseberry. For years we had an Awesome Campsite, but about a year ago it got taken out by a cell tower. Then back in October, we stumbled across the new, Phenomenally Awesome Campsite, which turns out- incredibly- to be even better than the Old Awesome Campsite. It’s 2WD accessible, private, right on singletrack, and the view, well…
No, I’m not showing it on a map here. If you’re headed down there, email me and I’ll give you the beta.
The next day we rode all over the mesa. We pedaled past Piñonand Juniper and Cliffrose and Sagebrush and Mormon Tea and Prickly Pear and Turbinella Oak, and rolled over the Shinarump Conglomerate and the Lower Sandstone Member of the Chinle formation. The rock surfaces were dotted with bits of crustose lichens, and shady spots bore bright green swathes of moss. Away from the trail, in the open spaces between the trees, I spied rich black patches of mature cryptogamic soils. We heard the calls of Pinyon Jays, caught glimpses of the banded red & white Moenkopi members below the rim, the Wingate cliffs and Navajo domes of Zion in to the North, and the massive laccolith of the Pine Valley range to the West.
Tangent: So you’re probably wondering how I like my new bike. After careful testing, I’ve assembled this highly technical Evaluation Assessment Matrix (may be too advanced for non-technical readers):
Seriously, I love it. The low bottom bracket requires a bit of “awareness”, but gives the bike a wonderfully stable feel on fast descents. And the brakes deliver a masterful sense of effortless controlled power, even if the sounds emanating from them remind me of the zombies in The Walking Dead. I could prattle on about this or that feature, but the most remarkable (and surprising) thing about a full-suspension carbon 29er with a through-axle fork is that you don’t get tired. After a full day on Gooseberry in the off-season I just can’t believe how good I feel. My wrists, butt, neck, legs, arms- everything feels great. And the next morning I feel, well, normal.
All of these things- and the stars the night before- I not only recognized, but now knew something about their stories: what they were, where they came from, why they were here- pretty much none of which I knew 3 years ago. Though there will always be new bugs, birds, rocks, shrubs and stars to learn about, by any reasonable measure, I’ve completed the project. I’ve watched the world wake up.
My plan was always that this project would have a start and an end. And this is probably a good point to wrap it up. Except…
Now that I finally have all kinds of time and freedom, I’m going to get to go to all sorts of cool places and see all sorts of cool things- stuff really worth blogging about. So I’ll probably blog again, which means starting a new blog. I’d probably leave a pointer here to the new blog for any readers who were interested, which is kind of silly, because then, well, it’s really the same blog… So here’s what I intend to do:
Next week I’ll complete the project, which I’ll call Part 1. After I wrap up Part 1, I’ll take a brief break from blogging- probably around a month*. Then, I intend to start Part 2.
*Couple reasons for the break. First, I’ll have said my piece and feel I can let it sit for a bit. Second, I want a break. Third, I’ll be traveling light in a third-world-y kind of place where I don’t really want to be dragging a laptop around.
All About Part 2
Part 2 will be more focused on travels, places and experiences over the coming year- it won’t simply be a continuation of blogging about the Wasatch and Northern Utah. And it’ll be different than Part 1 in other ways. Posting will be less frequent, and there may be other changes in tone, perspective and focus.
Note that I said “intend”. I’ll start Part 2 when- and if- it feels right. I’ve always felt this project worked best when I wanted- was itching- to blog, which fortunately, was most of the time. When I felt I had to blog, well, it felt kind of like a job. I’m taking a break from jobs- of all kinds- for a bit. I think (and hope) that I’ll be itching to blog again soon, but if not, Part 1 will stand on its own.
So that’s the “plan”, such as it is. Next week I’ll finally get around to explaining the thing I probably should have explained when I started the project- the Wasatch. And some other stuff.
