Up before 6. Hot shower to wake up the legs. Pull all the gear together. Coffee. Breakfast. I'm going to ride up to the wilderness boundary and hike to the lakes deep in the Rattlesnake. I'm carrying my backpack, my fivefingers stuffed inside with a water filter and 2.5 liters of water. More water on the bike. Two Cliff bars and two packs of some new fruit flavored energy gel. Mentally prepared for about 8 hours outside.
Out the door into the cool morning. Motivation wanes as the reality of spinning my little gear on the road for miles sets in. I fire up the iPod and let Phutureprimitive carry me through the early sunlight. Once on the trail, dirt beneath the tires augments the music, and suddenly my mind is nearly split in two. I've noticed this effect before. One doesn't fully appreciate how much the sense of hearing is used while riding until it is occupied with something else. In fact, this caused me to experience a completely different trail, even though I had traveled this route many times. The sense of unfamiliarity and disconnectedness startled me fully awake, and the first of the day's meditations came:
In Buddhism, the Skandhas (aggregates) are essentially the world as perceived by the senses, filtered and unified by the consciousness. The premise is that reality, for all intents and purposes, IS simply the result of the aggregates. You make your reality through this process from moment to moment. By fundamentally altering one of these aggregates, one doesn't simply "experience it differently" but literally creates a completely different reality. I have ridden this trail so often I feel that I could navigate it in my sleep. But without hearing my tires on the gravel, judging speed by the wind in my ears, it is an alien landscape.
The iPod came off. Meditation point number one: don't make anything. "Quiet" in meditation means more than just silence. It means not actively trying to manipulate or change the experience. Let it happen.
Up the long and winding road to Franklin Bridge. Golden sunlight just begins to filter down through the tops of trees. Twilight is still hiding among the rocks and the rushing waters of Rattlesnake Creek.
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| A dramatic contrast to the sun dappled fields of the south zone. |
From the bridge, across the rockfall, and into the narrow canyon. Sunlight just beginning to reach the trail shortly before 10am. The melt and the rains have nourished the rocks, which now congregate in these populations of mile-long obstacle courses. The two-track all but vanishes in places. Just before the wilderness boundary, another bridge, another view of Rattlesnake creek.
Now I was ready for this phase of the journey to be over and get started with the next one. 20 miles by bike, and now it was time to walk. Change of footwear, change of pace, change of scenery.
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| Wilderness. No mountain bikes allowed. Unfortunately, horsies are fine. "Take only pictures, leave only footprints... and miles of horse poop and potholes" |
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| Bike shorts aren't ideal for this kind of hiking, but it isn't far to the lakes. |
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| The trail looked like this much of the time. Huge winter snows and spring rains mean lush, almost rainforest environments. |
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| Not another plug for VFFs, I swear... I just though it was cool how this went SQUISH underfoot. So soft and springy. |
And this bring us to meditation number two for the day. I had heard about this particular hike as being "a true wilderness experience..." and I suppose that is a large part of why I was there.
Cross into the Rattlesnake Wilderness. Two-track disappears into the trees, becomes a stream, opens into a narrow ravine next to the rushing creek. Bear. On the trail. "Hi bear!" He moves off into the brush with a snort and I hear him stop. "Okay. I'm just gonna keep going this way. Okay?" Walking slowly past, nice and easy, bears don't really mind the presence of people, but they don't usually know how to react to people. We're the exotic wildlife in this context. Eagles screaming overhead, echoing off the rocks. Hunting. Midday approaches. I'm less than a mile in to this hike, and have bushwacked, stream walked, encountered bears, seen hunting eagles, and... I didn't get pictures of any of it.
At first this thought annoyed me. I should have had the camera at the ready, I should have been quicker. I did try once or twice, and then completely gave up. The wilderness was going to surprise me today, it was going to defy my efforts at capturing these moments... and I was going to let it.
Recently, I was explaining to a friend about the idea of "having only this moment." That no matter what you remember, or what you think will happen next, the only thing that is real, the only thing you can participate it, the only thing you can experience is right now. I used a photographic analogy. "See this picture? Maybe you can tell me 'what is happening' in this picture, but actually there is nothing 'happening.' It is a single moment, nothing is moving, nothing changing, only this. Your mind can make the 'before' and imagine the 'after' and make the 'happening', but none of that is really in the photograph."
So now, as I stand here in the middle of the forest, in my own moment, I think about the irony of photography. How strange it is, in the attempt to preserve this moment on a sliver of film or a collection of pixels, I often fail to appreciate it fully as it is actually happening.
I put my camera away. One foot and then another. The wilds all around.
Not to worry though, there are still more pictures.
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| Log crossing over a stream. There were more waterfalls than I could keep track of here, mostly hidden behind dense walls of green foliage. |
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| Focal length faux-pas. Still pretty, pale, and purple. |
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| Pink fuzzballs. |
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| Beargrass has this way of just springing up out of nowhere. No fields of the stuff... just round the corner and there it is. Kinda like bears. Hmmmm. |
Spend some time looking at flowers. Going too hard, too fast is bad. Lessons learned. Poke around and appreciated the colors, the smells. "Suck the marrow out of life," or nectar, as the case may be... if you're a bee... plenty of those. Lots of insects. Swarms. Clouds. A midday promenade in the sun.
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| Good incentive to keep moving. Stillness attracts the winged hordes. |
Standing at the shore of Little Lake right about noon. Awestruck by its beauty, the peacefulness of the place. Feeling the heaviness of exertion, altitude, and sun begin to settle in. Keep moving.
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| Here's a beautiful alpine scene with my ugly mug provided for the sake of contrast. |
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| Little Lake may be small in the context of this landscape but it is still impressive enough to make you feel very small. |
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| Alpine paradise. Glacial lakes, waterfalls, exposed granite cliffs. |
Perspective. Its what you get when you stand in a place that makes you feel like you could be the only person on Earth. And then realize that Earth is swallowing you and 7 billion other people at the moment. Its being 25 miles outside of a city of 100,000 people, and witnessing the mind-altering dichotomy between this alpine wilderness and that urban wilderness.
Time to go. One needn't linger in places like this. A few moments, clearly perceived, forever burned into the consciousness are sufficient reward for the effort. Hike down. Run every other switchback. Flying, falling, stepping. Navigating the rivulets of snow melt, puddles, rocks piled high with mud and moss... dodging piles of horse excrement and narrowly avoiding twisted ankles in post holes with horseshoe prints at the bottom of them.
Rant: Wilderness areas are special. They are meant to preserve a pristine wilderness experience where people can go to experience what nature is like without the influence of man and his machines. For this reason, a ban on motorized transportation is in effect in wilderness areas. Unfortunately, with no clear support from the Wilderness Act, this has been made to include bicycles. Now when I ride my bike into the woods, the only thing I leave is... wait... nothing. Maybe a tire track analogous to the footprints that would be left by any hiker. What I don't understand is that horses ARE allowed in wilderness, they leave deep potholes on the trails, miles and miles of excrement, and transport non-native seeds into the local ecosystem as well. I'm pretty sure that takes away from my "pristine wilderness experience" in many obvious ways. Now I would be more than willing to just shut up and deal IF: 1) neither horses or bikes, or any other means than WALKING UNDER YOUR OWN POWER were permissable in wilderness or, 2) users of horses and bicycles were both welcomed with the understanding that responsible trail use does not include riding on soft trails and generally tearing things up. The double standard is particularly annoying.
Back to the wilderness boundary. Gear up, ride out. 4 miles down I realize: no sunglasses. No big deal, I thought, but then... where are they? In my helmet. Hanging from that tree. Shit. I seriously consider leaving them there. Then consider that isn't very responsible. Climb back up 4 miles of rocky two-track. Retrieve my helmet and sunglasses then start back down. Timetable for the ride is blown. Now its looking like close to 60 miles and over 10 hours. Ah well, it just wasn't going to be epic enough without this little extra 'adventure.' I remind myself to be more mindful. I remind myself that I WAS being mindful... mindful of being attacked by a swarm of a dozen different kinds of biting flies as I was changing shoes... what was hanging in the tree was pretty far from my mind.
Back down below Franklin Bridge. Fatigue really setting in hard. Steer around big pink rock, avoid dark colored snake slithering across the road, red butterfly passes right in front of my face. Minutes later... steer around big pink rock, avoid dark colored snake slithering across the road, red butterfly passes right in front of my face. WTF?
Onward. Out of Rattlesnake, hit the pavement and hang on the bike, grateful for the negative grade of the street. Hot in town. Busy. Cars swarm like the clouds of insects on the mountain. From one wilderness and into another one. What is different? Only me. In this moment I am not the same person that was standing on that lakeshore. That is the truth, and it makes me smile.
Ride finished.
10.5 hours.
58 miles.
4700 feet of climbing.
50 miles on the bike.
8 miles hiking.
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