I never much cared for biking. It wasn’t that I disliked it, specifically; more that I didn’t care about it.
When my folks got married, they each had separate interests and hobbies, so they picked one to do together. I guess it worked, because thirty-four years later, they still ride their road bikes all summer. They have never ridden a tandem, another factor I believe has contributed to the success of their marriage. Continue reading “I want to ride my bicycle”
You guys. We should not be having this conversation again.
Do not ride your bike on muddy trails.
It’s bad. We all know it’s bad. Bike tires create ruts in the soft trail, which stick around all season long. Water runs through the ruts later in the summer, causing further erosion. Other users step around the ruts and the mud they generate, so the trail widens and social trails pop up. It takes resources—time, tools, labor, which land managers often don’t have—to repair these trails. The International Mountain Bike Association says not to do it. Local land managers post signs at trailheads asking us not to do it. Other mountain bikers are mad (super mad) when we do it. Continue reading “Things to do instead of riding your bike on a muddy trail”
We rented bikes and took the lifts to the top, from whence we careened back down the mountain on trails hidden all winter by feet of snow. The runs I’d skied so many times looked different, shed of their cold-weather clothing, but not at all unpleasant. It had never occurred to me that there was more to this place than the way I saw it between December and March, that there were nearly 2,500 acres of unexplored terrain beneath the mountain’s annual 300” of snowfall. It had never occurred to me that Copper Mountain had layers.
I grew up skiing at Copper Mountain, a resort at the edge of I-70 just shy of Vail Pass. I skied there dozens of times every winter in college, and I could’ve recited the runs accessed by each lift from memory or told you exactly how to get from Super Bee to Spaulding Bowl and back again. I knew when, on any given lift, to look for the tree adorned with Mardi Gras beads and discarded bras—that ski area staple—and that I had precisely four-and-a-half minutes to choke down the disfigured peanut butter sandwich in my pocket before the American Flyer quad deposited me at the top of my favorite run.
I thought I knew Copper Mountain pretty well. Continue reading “Kicking the Seasonal Avoidance Disorder habit: How I learned to love my favorite places all year long”
This morning I had a very positive check-in with my thesis advisor and, feeling uncharacteristically favorable about the state of my manuscript, decided to reward myself with a run on my favorite trail before the temperature soared from “hot” to the forecasted “blistering.” (By reward, of course, I really mean stave off self-loathing, but I suppose that’s for another post.)
Continue reading “No rest for the wicked: How my morning run turned into a discourse on feminism”
my alaskan odyssey 