Mostly Pictures

Ode

You sicken me with sweetness
honey, thick and sharp,
running slowly enough
to savor the process
of biting numbness
as I shrink from your
cloying ways.

Oh honey, how I've missed
the slight bumps
granulations in the smoothness,
irregular pockets of purity
when crystalline clarity
spills out and melts away.

Poem:
Honey is delicious. Also, it's a bit of a metaphor about how something too sweet can be overwhelming, but the good moments make up for it. I don't know if that comes across very well, but it was in the back of my mind while I was writing.

Observation:
Turns out this post is having a bit of trouble posting. I got an error message, and things are freezing up, so I'm just going to get what I have up (hopefully), and try again tomorrow. I think it's the pictures that are making things a bit complicated. Anyway, thanks for reading, and I'll be back at it soon.

Me:
I still have vacation stories up my sleeve, but they seem less exciting the more removed I get from them, so I'll sort of skip around to the interesting stuff. Sunday we woke up quite unmolested, packed quickly, and entered the Needles section of Canyonlands. There wasn't anyone taking money, so even though we had a pass, it didn't seem like it was doing much. We hiked from Elephant Hill trailhead until we had seen some pretty views, and turned around to continue on our quest to see more parks. Needles is interesting in that it offers a different sort of rock formation to look at, but it definitely seems like it would be better to attack this park from a backpacking approach than day hikes. So I made sure we had seen what I thought was a good representation of what the park had to offer, and we were off to our next park.

Is it just me, or does this look like Snoopy the dog on his red house? Okay, I guess usually he is lying o his back in the comic and this looks like a dog on its tummy, but considering I hardly ever play the "what does that look like?" game, I thought this was pretty decent.

Next up was Capitol Reef. In a similar fashion to Canyonlands, this park doesn't have anything I would call astonishingly beautiful. It's just a nice place to be. Then again, being as partial as I am to the western United States, almost anywhere would qualify as a nice place to be as far as I'm concerned. Having witnessed Rebecca's love of water firsthand at Mill Creek, I decided the best hike for us at Capitol Reef was Sulphur Creek. The trail is simply the creek bed (though you can take an overland route to cut distance if desired. I've hiked this before, but as with every water-based trail, this offers a different view around every bend. In the later parts of the day the orange glow of the sun really brought out the color, and all in all, it was a nice, rather relaxing walk in the water. The waterfalls were pretty, too, even if I did almost fall down one. Don't worry; in addition to not dying, I even managed to catch my sunglasses as they fell off my head and threatened to plunge over the edge.

And now, by popular request (the only request), the story of how I hiked Bright Angel Point (with pictures). To understand why my sister wanted to hear about this story you should probably know some things about me. Or rather, I should clarify some things you probably already know about me. As a person terrified of dying (as I would assume many are), I take decent precautions to not put myself in situations where that might occur. As such, I tend to avoid heights. Okay, I'm just scared of heights. The other thing you have to realize is that this trail is high up in the air. There. I've pretty much set the scene. We drove into Zion after a decent night's sleep intending to hike the Narrows. However, we knew the water had been pretty high recently, and as such, had a backup plan of skirting death at high altitude prepared just in case we weren't able to go with our first option. Lucky me, the water was too high to hike in the safe canyon floor, so we got to go up on top instead. (They only let people hike the Narrows if the water is under 140 cfs for 24 hours, and that was the first day it had dipped below the mark. We came back to it later in the week (obviously, since I've written about it), but it was still quite high even then.



Also, it was hot enough that this happened:

We grabbed the shuttle to the Grotto where the trail began and started our hike. It looked like this:

And then it looked like this:




(In case it doesn't show up that well, this photo is of about eight switchbacks up what is basically a vertical wall.












Here is a better photo (not mine).













I thought that was quite a bit of elevation gain for our hike, but I knew there was another section to go. The so-called Angel's Landing. Having crested the top of our last switchback, we were greeted by a view of what lay ahead. At first glance, I thought I could probably do it. Then I noticed that what I could see was not the extent of what was in store. After going up a narrow strip of rock, we had to go down, and then back up even higher to reach our destination. We could see people (really small-looking people, really far away) climbing up and down on their hike either out or back, and I started to think this was going to be quite a task. I'm incredibly sure I wouldn't have done it on my own, but if Rebecca was going, I was too. In my head I was thinking I wanted to be there in case anything went wrong, but looking back, that's just like thinking "Well, if one of us is going to die, the other might as well be there to watch. Or potentially die with them." So not the best logic ever, but it resulted in me having something to talk about, so no complaints here. Now there weren't many places on the trail I felt like stopping to dig a camera out of my bag (since I needed all of my hands for clinging to whatever solid objects I could find), but here are some pictures I do have:

A view of what we climbed up.



















And a view of how pointless it was for me to be there in case Rebecca fell. Sheer cliff walls, and about four feet to walk on the entire way. Never again (probably).














A view down the canyon. It sure was pretty. Too bad I was constantly too afraid of where my feet were to be looking around much.

















A view back the way we had come from.














We eventually made it back to safety, hiked a bit further on the rim trail (bad idea and not worth the time or effort), and descended back to the canyon floor. The descent was quite hard on my knees, but overall I was mostly just happy to be alive.

It's a gradual process.

On tap for today: three quarters of a normal post. Didn't feel poetic, but wanted to get this up.

Observation:
My observation for today is pretty depressing. But maybe it's only depressing if you happen to be me. Here it is: It turns out I would probably not be qualified to work at McDonald's. You know, that oft-joked-about job reserved for the dregs of society? Yup. Last night made me pretty sure I wouldn't pass muster. (I used to think that expression was passing mustard. Maybe McDonald's is in my future after all?) Anyway, my dad had grilled up some really delicious vegetable burgers (spicy black bean) and told us to put whatever toppings/condiments we wanted on them. And here's what I did: I put some pickles on top of the burger, and then sprayed some ketchup and mustard onto the other side of the bun. Then, upon assembling the burger, I realized I had put the slippery stuff on the bottom bun. At that point, I just shook my head at myself. See, not only does the additional weight of the burger cause the ketchup and mustard to ooze out all over the place, but the slickness of the liquids causes the burger to lose integrity, sliding apart at the slightest opportunity. It's not like I've never had a burger before. How many times have I bitten into a sandwich and known the ketchup and mustard are on top? Thousands? I guess on the bright side, cutting McDonald's from my career options isn't such a bad thing.

Exercise:
Begin a story with the last line, and write backward (end with the first line). Read it backward, then read it forward.

(This takes forever. And it's really frustrating, because I kept wanting to write two sentences at a time as a way to segue between thoughts. Enjoyable challenge though.)

He hadn't buzzed, and was in the middle of asking the lady in white what the heck she was doing there when a brief, intense look restored him to silence. The nurse, he had quickly learned, was a sort of no-nonsense, practical, and altogether humorless individual, so it was a bit surprising to him that she had taken the time to pay him an extra visit. She seemed concerned, squinting at him over her clipboard while telling him someone was coming in to see him. He tried to tell the nurse he was in no mood to receive visitor's, but she either didn't hear him or didn't believe him. He heard the door open. By now there was no way his hair was still presentable, the pillow having flattened one side and added an interesting topiary-like feature near the top. The sheets felt a bit too warm, too clingy, restraining him from whatever slight movement he may have been considering. He felt her hand brush against his, and he turned his head, grimacing slightly. It was reassuring to have her there by his side, though pain in his torso prevented him from moving much. At least I don't have to fix the roof, he thought as he closed his eyes.

Me:
I have a lot of biking stories built up by now, so I'll take a break from recounting my vacation to bring my life up to date. Thursday morning was a disaster. Rebecca had made me oatmeal recently, and I felt like duplicating it for breakfast. I was unable. It was the blandest bowl of mush I'd ever tasted. Luckily, honey transformed it from a bland bowl of mush to a delicious bowl of sugary goodness. Of course, the quantity of honey I added probably rendered it into more of a candy than a breakfast food, but I ate it happily. The disaster continued. I was supposed to hang out laundry to dry, and despite the cloudy weather, it seemed rather dry. I even checked the weather radar and forecast. Exactly ten minutes after I finished hanging it up, I was in the kitchen packing a lunch when the pitter patter of little raindrops (big raindrops) alerted me all was not well. I went out and pulled the now-wetter-than-before laundry off the line.
But you're probably wondering what this has to do with cycling. Well, I've always noticed that the worse things go before a race, the better the race itself goes. And this was one of those times. I had a 12k time trial that evening, and my previous best time was around 17:40. My time for this particular race? 16:49. It was pretty great, and that is an understatement.
Then Friday was another time trial. This one was 20k, but I was doing it on a tandem with my dad. The thing about tandems is, when you're on the back, there is no wind to cool you off. Sure, you're more aerodynamic, but you're also blind. I couldn't see without stinging eyes for a few minutes after we finished. This one also went well, though I didn't feel nearly as good as I did Thursday. And that is an understatement. I felt awful. My calf started cramping before we'd even gotten halfway, and at one point I was sure the tandem was going to snap in half we were so out of sync with our shifting weight. Nevertheless, we were only three seconds away from having the fastest overall time of the night. We finished in 27:33, so I wasn't too unhappy.
Which brings my cycling tales up to today. Today was a road race. I was signed up for two laps of a 27 mile course, but the Iowa Games decided it was too hot. Apparently we are under some sort of heat advisory for the next four days or so, and they shortened my race to one lap. This was my sort of course. Meaning, of course, that there are hills on it. There are two major climbs, and the last comes with three kilometers to the finish. The guys who signed up for two laps are the ones who are pretty good at cycling, so I didn't have much opportunity to do interesting things. At one point there were some people attacking and I decided to participate, but I was not nearly strong enough to get away. So I sat in for the most part (took a few pulls when things slowed down), and climbed hard. The first climb has a steep descent to it, and I am still unwilling to risk anything at high speed after crashing quite a few years ago, so I was off the back by the time the group started going up. I climbed up to the back, noticed the back was moving backward in comparison to the front, and climbed pretty hard to get up to the group that was moving the right direction. I felt pretty terrible during the climb, and I'm pretty sure I was just at my limit, but by the time we got to the top of the hill I started feeling better immediately. I noticed things were still slow, so I pulled through to get the pace back up and test my legs out a bit. Sure enough, not a lot of people were feeling as good as I was. This boded well for the finale.
I sat in for quite a while doing as little work as possible and we eventually made it to the last hill. I descended in my usual slow fashion and got a bit boxed in on the ascent. I made it up to the third wheel of the group, with two people off the front. I was thinking the two guys in front of me would give a hard chase and I would be able to attack after they made the catch. However, it quickly became evident we were not getting any closer to the two guys up the road, and with only just over 1.5 kilometers to go, my options were limited. I attacked. I looked back, and there was no response from the group. The climb took quite a bit out of the group, and I got away clean. I made it up to the two up the road with almost exactly one kilometer left, but I thought the group behind might be getting organized enough to bring us back, so I didn't grab their draft like I should have. I pulled through, and one guy attacked immediately. I had no energy left, so I watched first place disappear up the road. Still scared of the group behind, I was pretty sure the kid I was with was in a different age category. I sprinted, but he came around me and got second overall. I guess I just need to realize how much of a gap is safe, but it definitely wasn't worth getting caught by the group. An assured top-three finish was better than risking it all in a bid for first.