Friday, August 27, 2010
Waning days
Last night Dan and I snuck up high to escape the heat and ride some of the best trails around. The climbs are steep, descents hair-raising, and the singletrack is phenomenal. I think I was grinning the entire time except when the dust Dan's tires kicked up got too thick.
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
Skilly Magee
What happens when a skinny enduro geek rides up a big hill and sees this:
Well, initially the geek is at first excited and bombs down the opening of the descent. All is good until the going actually gets steep.
Then said geek has a few reservations but continues to ride at his limit, despite having very inappropriate tires for the presently loose and deeply rutted conditions. Then the trail gets a little worse...
But he gains confidence after actually riding it all. After some trecherous switchbacks, he encounters a rock drop. "Ok," he thinks, "I can ride this. I'll set up my camera on that there rock and look cool for all those people out there in blog land."
So he sets up the camera, runs back up the hill, and then...
Huh. That didn't go so well. The overeager rider failed to consider the slippery grus.
At least there was a nice reward waiting beyond the bushwhacking that followed the descent: a new canyon to explore.
Well, initially the geek is at first excited and bombs down the opening of the descent. All is good until the going actually gets steep.
Then said geek has a few reservations but continues to ride at his limit, despite having very inappropriate tires for the presently loose and deeply rutted conditions. Then the trail gets a little worse...
But he gains confidence after actually riding it all. After some trecherous switchbacks, he encounters a rock drop. "Ok," he thinks, "I can ride this. I'll set up my camera on that there rock and look cool for all those people out there in blog land."
So he sets up the camera, runs back up the hill, and then...
Huh. That didn't go so well. The overeager rider failed to consider the slippery grus.
At least there was a nice reward waiting beyond the bushwhacking that followed the descent: a new canyon to explore.
Sunday, August 22, 2010
Sobering
This weekend I headed up into the mountains, tagging along with some friends who were running or pacing in the Leadville 100. I've run twice since June, so I instead brought my bike and headed off on my own adventure, exploring a 110-mile loop full of entirely unexplored (by me) dirt. Definitely rideable in a day, I opted to spend a night out there, ride at a leisurely pace, and finish up on Sunday morning.
I headed south on the Colorado Trail, following the wilderness detour into BV. Now I know where the famous railroad tunnels have been hiding.
From BV, I climbed. And climbed. And climbed. The first half of the ride had 1000' of climbing. The second half had 10000'. Ouch. That hurt my sea level lungs. The first part was entirely on jeep and ATV trails, though I had them all to myself.
Sometimes my planned route was a bit faint
Beautiful country I'd been wanting to explore for a while
Early evening light with brilliant shades of green abound
Looking east across South Park toward next weekend's destination
The biggest source of uncertainty in my route was a long stretch of "pack trail" indicated on the USGS topo maps. I took a chance and was rewarded by 20 miles of amazing singletrack, hovering around 10,000'. It clearly doesn't see much use and is rather overgrown in places, but it sure put a smile on my face. If this trail was closer to anything, it'd see quite a bit of attention.
The last gasp of the sun, captured only by these rounded peaks
As night settled in, I stopped, built a fire, ate my dinner, and drifted off for a long slumber.
I was again rewarded for an early start with spectacular morning lighting on continued blissful singletrack
One last big pass to climb over and my ride was over.
While the scenery and trails were enough to capture my attention for hours on end on any normal day, I continually found my mind drifting off and my riding completely on autopilot. I was hoping the ride would help clear my head a bit, but instead, it just gave me all that much more time to spend with my thoughts, which were in a realm that I rarely visit, of life, death, purpose, value...
Last summer on Baffin Island, we discovered bikes and gear left behind by Mike and Dan Moe's fateful traverse, which hit incredibly close to home after I learned that they were the first to ride something akin to the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route a couple decades before I raced the Divide. I came home with some photos and a couple ice axes to return to Mike's family.
Fast forward twelve months. A few days after returning home from Baffin last week, I received word that the helicopter pilot we had been working and living with for our last 10 days in the field was killed in a crash the day that we departed. I'm still struggling with this news. Our group shared with the pilot his final days. I awoke that morning after he spent his final night sleeping on a hard floor next to me. We all joked around in the little airport in Qiki as he waited for fog to clear farther north and we awaited our flight's arrival. And that was it. He soon flew north, and we flew south, never realizing that while we sat on the airplane, he lived out his final moments while flying over Sam Ford Fiord. Some debris was found washed up on shore, but it's still not clear what happened.
I found this photo taken as the only large piece of wreckage was returned to Clyde River. Just the evening before the crash, I sat in those seats. After joking about how old he was, the pilot had asked how old I was and then said something in his thick accent about how much life lies ahead. That brief exchange played through my head all weekend. And now I've again returned from Baffin with something to pass on to the family of someone who never made it home.
I headed south on the Colorado Trail, following the wilderness detour into BV. Now I know where the famous railroad tunnels have been hiding.
From BV, I climbed. And climbed. And climbed. The first half of the ride had 1000' of climbing. The second half had 10000'. Ouch. That hurt my sea level lungs. The first part was entirely on jeep and ATV trails, though I had them all to myself.
Sometimes my planned route was a bit faint
Beautiful country I'd been wanting to explore for a while
Early evening light with brilliant shades of green abound
Looking east across South Park toward next weekend's destination
The biggest source of uncertainty in my route was a long stretch of "pack trail" indicated on the USGS topo maps. I took a chance and was rewarded by 20 miles of amazing singletrack, hovering around 10,000'. It clearly doesn't see much use and is rather overgrown in places, but it sure put a smile on my face. If this trail was closer to anything, it'd see quite a bit of attention.
The last gasp of the sun, captured only by these rounded peaks
As night settled in, I stopped, built a fire, ate my dinner, and drifted off for a long slumber.
I was again rewarded for an early start with spectacular morning lighting on continued blissful singletrack
One last big pass to climb over and my ride was over. While the scenery and trails were enough to capture my attention for hours on end on any normal day, I continually found my mind drifting off and my riding completely on autopilot. I was hoping the ride would help clear my head a bit, but instead, it just gave me all that much more time to spend with my thoughts, which were in a realm that I rarely visit, of life, death, purpose, value...
Last summer on Baffin Island, we discovered bikes and gear left behind by Mike and Dan Moe's fateful traverse, which hit incredibly close to home after I learned that they were the first to ride something akin to the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route a couple decades before I raced the Divide. I came home with some photos and a couple ice axes to return to Mike's family.
Fast forward twelve months. A few days after returning home from Baffin last week, I received word that the helicopter pilot we had been working and living with for our last 10 days in the field was killed in a crash the day that we departed. I'm still struggling with this news. Our group shared with the pilot his final days. I awoke that morning after he spent his final night sleeping on a hard floor next to me. We all joked around in the little airport in Qiki as he waited for fog to clear farther north and we awaited our flight's arrival. And that was it. He soon flew north, and we flew south, never realizing that while we sat on the airplane, he lived out his final moments while flying over Sam Ford Fiord. Some debris was found washed up on shore, but it's still not clear what happened.
I found this photo taken as the only large piece of wreckage was returned to Clyde River. Just the evening before the crash, I sat in those seats. After joking about how old he was, the pilot had asked how old I was and then said something in his thick accent about how much life lies ahead. That brief exchange played through my head all weekend. And now I've again returned from Baffin with something to pass on to the family of someone who never made it home.
Monday, August 16, 2010
Arctic adventures completed
Another Baffin Island field campaign, more logistically complicated than any I've yet been a part of, is in the books. Everyone is en route back home, uninjured and pleased at accomplishing more than we had ever hoped. The crew was composed of between 5 and 7 people for the past month, including scientists working on 4 distinctly different questions investigating young ice caps that tell the story of climatic cooling related to volcanism over the past 800 years, climate records spanning the past 8,000 years preserved in lake sediment archives, the evolution of the landscape during the last 2.5 million years of glacial-interglacial cycles, and the much longer-term geologic history of the region on billion-year time scales.
We began with 10 days of work based near Pond Inlet and covering nearly 500 km of terrain stretching from near the northern tip of Baffin to the southern edge of the Barnes Ice Cap. Helicopter support made this all possible. After completing all objectives and more before our stay ended, we moved south to the Qikiqtarjuaq region. Bear problems in this region last year led to a new approach, with everyone staying in a nearby cabin. Bear monitors and a helicopter provided considerably safer working conditions and three new faces with our crew for 9 days. Thick coastal fog had us stuck in our tracks for the first few days, but beautiful weather followed, and we accomplished far more than expected.
Hidden within the vastness of this intimidating and inhospitable landscape are geologic wonders that have seemingly defied the erosive powers of repeated intense glaciations. While some of the most impressive fiords in the world attest to the effect ice sheets can have on a landscape, there are countless examples of areas deeply buried by apparently protective ice during glaciations, frozen to its bed and accomplishing no erosion. Sandstone towers 30 meters tall near Eclipse Sound have been carved and scoured by wind and water more extensively than eerily similar towers in the Utah desert. Remnants of granitic outcrops dot hilltops between widely-spaced fiords southwest of Home Bay, covered in deep weathering pits and shaped into rounded knobs reminiscent of the formations in Joshua Tree. Hilltops near the Barnes Ice Cap lack the expected glacial polish and streamlining seen on similar landforms not deglaciated until 5,000-8,000 years ago elsewhere in the region. And streams on the Borden Peninsula flow through deeply-entrenched meanders in canyons showing evidence of only minimal reshaping by glacial ice.
With hundreds of pounds of new bedrock, till, and colluvium samples in hand, the tedious lab work and numerical modeling begins. Measuring the geochemical compositions and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide inventories of many of these samples will begin to dominate my time this autumn as the irresistible draw of summertime in the mountains begins to weaken.
Here are some illustrative photos of the work we were doing and the landscape in which we were immersed.
Ice caps and highly weathered summit bedrock
Setting up the GPS system to resurvey a transect up the South Dome of the Barnes Ice Cap to update the melt record that will now span nearly 40 years. The ice in the background is the last remnant of the once-great ice sheet that covered much of Canada and the northernmost part of the US 20,000 years ago.
Sampling weathered bedrock on a hilltop in the central part of the island
Small ice caps and big fiords cover the eastern coast of the island
The view from our first camp on a dreary evening
Alexis atop a tor above Dexterity Fiord
Our first camp
Long hours of golden lighting every clear evening
Arctic cottongrass
Mad clouds
High winds higher in the atmosphere, but eerily calm down in our realm
Semipalmated sandpiper
Hidden sandstone towers, one of the biggest unexpected discoveries on a day spent exploring a very atypical Baffin Island landscape
Deep canyons with entrenched meanders were also unanticipated
Heading out to work at 10 pm after a tremendously windy day
Kate ready to head out onto Midnight Lake to find an appropriate core site
The boss man, relaxing in a packraft
Kate midway through our trip down the Salmon River in the packrafts. We hiked out of camp, floated the river and it's rapids (some far bigger than expected!) to Eclipse Sound, and then paddled back through the -1.5 deg water among ice bergs to town.
Kate taking it all in
Back in Iqaluit with far too much gear. Fog stranded us here for a few days because both the helicopter and commercial planes were unable to fly
Once we arrived in Qikiqtarjuak, our Inuit guides took us by boat to the field area. We saw a few Bowhead whales en route
Allen's cabin near Qivitu, our home for 9 days
One of many amazing sunsets
And one of many foggy days that kept us from working for the first few days at Qivitu
Alexis taking a break from digging in the cliffs (containing 2-million-year-old glacial deposits) to watch a Bowhead and Orca fighting in the water
Ma bear and cubs that were unafraid of the helicopter. These bears kept heading upwind toward the lake where Chris and Kate were coring, so the helo pulled them out to avoid any problems.
Alexis and Chris coring Kivitoo Highlands Lake
We visited a few dozen ice caps like these, which have been frozen to the underlying bedrock since they formed sometime in the past 800 years. As they melt, moss and lichens are reexposed and can be dated using radiocarbon to determine the age of the ice cap.
Alexis logs in a sample location
Some mountain tops in this region felt amazingly similar to Joshua Tree
Evening light
Returning to the cabin after working farther north for the day
More breathtaking fiords
A sense of scale is lacking a bit here, but the walls on the left side of Okoa Fiord are at least 1,700 m tall
This was one of my favorite views of the entire trip
The helo pilot explores the area while we collect bedrock samples
Everyone working late into the night
Kate and Chris show off the first of two sediment cores they pulled out of 22 m of water on Kekerturnak Lake.
We began with 10 days of work based near Pond Inlet and covering nearly 500 km of terrain stretching from near the northern tip of Baffin to the southern edge of the Barnes Ice Cap. Helicopter support made this all possible. After completing all objectives and more before our stay ended, we moved south to the Qikiqtarjuaq region. Bear problems in this region last year led to a new approach, with everyone staying in a nearby cabin. Bear monitors and a helicopter provided considerably safer working conditions and three new faces with our crew for 9 days. Thick coastal fog had us stuck in our tracks for the first few days, but beautiful weather followed, and we accomplished far more than expected.
Hidden within the vastness of this intimidating and inhospitable landscape are geologic wonders that have seemingly defied the erosive powers of repeated intense glaciations. While some of the most impressive fiords in the world attest to the effect ice sheets can have on a landscape, there are countless examples of areas deeply buried by apparently protective ice during glaciations, frozen to its bed and accomplishing no erosion. Sandstone towers 30 meters tall near Eclipse Sound have been carved and scoured by wind and water more extensively than eerily similar towers in the Utah desert. Remnants of granitic outcrops dot hilltops between widely-spaced fiords southwest of Home Bay, covered in deep weathering pits and shaped into rounded knobs reminiscent of the formations in Joshua Tree. Hilltops near the Barnes Ice Cap lack the expected glacial polish and streamlining seen on similar landforms not deglaciated until 5,000-8,000 years ago elsewhere in the region. And streams on the Borden Peninsula flow through deeply-entrenched meanders in canyons showing evidence of only minimal reshaping by glacial ice.
With hundreds of pounds of new bedrock, till, and colluvium samples in hand, the tedious lab work and numerical modeling begins. Measuring the geochemical compositions and terrestrial cosmogenic nuclide inventories of many of these samples will begin to dominate my time this autumn as the irresistible draw of summertime in the mountains begins to weaken.
Here are some illustrative photos of the work we were doing and the landscape in which we were immersed.
Ice caps and highly weathered summit bedrock
Setting up the GPS system to resurvey a transect up the South Dome of the Barnes Ice Cap to update the melt record that will now span nearly 40 years. The ice in the background is the last remnant of the once-great ice sheet that covered much of Canada and the northernmost part of the US 20,000 years ago.
Sampling weathered bedrock on a hilltop in the central part of the island
Small ice caps and big fiords cover the eastern coast of the island
The view from our first camp on a dreary evening
Alexis atop a tor above Dexterity Fiord
Our first camp
Long hours of golden lighting every clear evening
Arctic cottongrass
Mad clouds
High winds higher in the atmosphere, but eerily calm down in our realm
Semipalmated sandpiper
Hidden sandstone towers, one of the biggest unexpected discoveries on a day spent exploring a very atypical Baffin Island landscape
Deep canyons with entrenched meanders were also unanticipated
Heading out to work at 10 pm after a tremendously windy day
Kate ready to head out onto Midnight Lake to find an appropriate core site
The boss man, relaxing in a packraft
Kate midway through our trip down the Salmon River in the packrafts. We hiked out of camp, floated the river and it's rapids (some far bigger than expected!) to Eclipse Sound, and then paddled back through the -1.5 deg water among ice bergs to town. 
Kate taking it all in
Back in Iqaluit with far too much gear. Fog stranded us here for a few days because both the helicopter and commercial planes were unable to fly
Once we arrived in Qikiqtarjuak, our Inuit guides took us by boat to the field area. We saw a few Bowhead whales en route
Allen's cabin near Qivitu, our home for 9 days
One of many amazing sunsets
And one of many foggy days that kept us from working for the first few days at Qivitu
Alexis taking a break from digging in the cliffs (containing 2-million-year-old glacial deposits) to watch a Bowhead and Orca fighting in the water
Ma bear and cubs that were unafraid of the helicopter. These bears kept heading upwind toward the lake where Chris and Kate were coring, so the helo pulled them out to avoid any problems.
Alexis and Chris coring Kivitoo Highlands Lake
We visited a few dozen ice caps like these, which have been frozen to the underlying bedrock since they formed sometime in the past 800 years. As they melt, moss and lichens are reexposed and can be dated using radiocarbon to determine the age of the ice cap.
Alexis logs in a sample location
Some mountain tops in this region felt amazingly similar to Joshua Tree 
Evening light
Returning to the cabin after working farther north for the day
More breathtaking fiords
A sense of scale is lacking a bit here, but the walls on the left side of Okoa Fiord are at least 1,700 m tall
This was one of my favorite views of the entire trip
The helo pilot explores the area while we collect bedrock samples
Everyone working late into the night
Kate and Chris show off the first of two sediment cores they pulled out of 22 m of water on Kekerturnak Lake.
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