White Rim Trail

Our mountain bike ride began in a thunderstorm as we descended 1,100 feet on the Shafer Trail. The guidebook describes the switchbacks as "dangerous or impassible when wet." Though cold and mud splattered, we evaded the instant waterfalls pouring off stone ledges. We made all the sharp turns but brake pads thinned rapidly. At the bottom of this initial trail, faithful Dave had set up a soup kitchen in the support vehicle. I tried to shake the cold by draping myself across the still warm car engine. Then we headed out ten more miles to set up our first camp site. So began day one of our ride on the White Rim Trail in Moab, Utah.



We were on a 92 mile, three and a half day mountain bike trip, riding across one of the earth's most spectacular landscapes...the series of deep, arid canyons whose deep formation go back 280 million years. These canyons follow the course of the Colorado and Green Rivers which join just below the White Rim Trail. Once joined, they move as one to carve out the Grand Canyon further south.

The scale of the landscape creates miniatures of our selves and bikes and tents. As in "Can you find the biker in the picture below?" Or " Find Bob standing on the rock rim" or "See the group of bikers resting on day two of the ride."







There they are!



The white rim rocks reveal another scale. Here the occassional downpours form small pools. The wind and water push soil into shallow hollows. Here plants take root and form diverse desert colonies of goosefoot (once collected for their edible seeds), yucca, saltbush, and Indian ricegrass. So the trail exists on both a macro and a micro scale...the latter being harder to find but just as satisfying as the depths and distances of the canyons and mountains beyond.





And then the human scale. The trip was organized by the PEDAL club of Loveland, CO on a volunteer basis (the chief volunteers being Ed and Dave....Dave the cook, support vehicle driver, chief transport official, water and snack supplier, and general bon vivant and Ed the chief financial and administrative officer). Eight cyclists (some occasionally falling off their bikes and some more commonly pushing their bikes up hardscrabble hills) followed the jeep trail made by ranchers and uranium miners.







So the joy was to be in this landscape with friends who cared about each other's welfare and who experienced this wide space in his or her own way. So we rode the final miles to the edge of the Green River, camped for a final night at Potato Bottom (oh, the ice on the tent on the cold, damp last morning), and rode (or pushed) up 1,000 feet of switchbacks back to the top of the mesa.



We shared the long car ride back to Loveland and Fort Collins, bikes strapped to the back of our SUVs, our heads filled with memories of these vast lands and the beginnings of plans for our return.

Back porch stories

The back porch of Oak House at Valley View is a platform for hanging out...watching clouds across the valley, reading one of the books from home, playing music, drinking a cup of tea on a cold afternoon. You meet people hanging out. You hear their stories. The universe is made up of stories, not atoms.

A long-haired man in his early 60s saying that the first time he came to Valley View was in 1957 when he was 10 years old. He came up riding on a horse with his Dad from the valley below. The area around the hot springs was deserted. He most distinctly remembers that his new Levis chaffed his legs badly against the horse's back on their return to the valley floor. His parents had first come here on their honeymoon in 1935. He remembers his Dad playing the piano at the small ranch where they stayed. The ranch couple dancing to his music.



The back porch, the hot springs' pools are places of stories from folks coming here for decades and folks coming for the first time. The land itself holds stories. The canyons are filled with crude, stone artifacts made the small hunting and gathering bands that first sought game and plants in the valley wetlands. The Orient Land mine is over the next ridge, its gaping mouth the result of a huge explosion in 1893 in which a dozen miners died. The stones and the mine tell silent stories. The couples in the hot pools speak of more current stories: of their comings and goings, their wounds and their healings, the beginning and the end of relationships, their memories and their imaginations.

And from the back porch, the clouds tell their stories...across the valley, evening storms compete with the dying sun in a thunderous struggle of light and darkness. Ben builds a bonfire by the large pool up the creek. Folks gather to soak under the stars. And to tell old stories and create new ones while the earth and sky continue to create their own, long narratives.

Valley View

The Oak House at Valley View had only one dorm bed available last night, so I took it. The cabins and private rooms were all taken...somewhat surprising this late in the fall. Arriving in the late afternoon, I did some hiking, a bit of mountain biking, but mostly soaked in the hot tub and baked in the sauna. Had a simple meal, read, went to bed early. Got up around five...one of the dorm mates snored insistently.

This part of the earth curved toward the sun around 7:00. I was having coffee and doing some e-mail as the dark night lifted. I got on my bike, took my camera, and rode up the trail to the old Orient mine. The clouds formed and reformed in horizontal lines along the San Luis Valley floor. They rose high over the far San Juan mountains. Toward Poncha Pass in the north the clouds dipped low and filled the valley. In the south, the clouds stayed above the fields and wetlands...perhaps a stronger wind was blowing from the southwest. The sun rose higher striking the upper rims of the clouds and slowly, as the earth rotated, sunlight filtered lower to the valley floor.



The wind came up; my hands got very cold. I got on the bike and rode down for another cup of coffee. Early morning at Valley View and the Orient Land Trust.