A Week for the Strong

A man walks into a restaurant, orders the albatross, takes one bite and drops over dead. What happened?

This is what Anacleto Rapping, the photographer who talked me into this seven-day mountain bike ride, calls a conundrum. He sprang this one on me and the two strangers with whom we had just hooked up as we lay in the dark 10,980 feet up the side of a mountain. It would resonate throughout this 206-mile-trip. But as I sit on a rock the next morning, enjoying a landscape framed by the snow-encrusted peaks of Colorado’s San Juan Mountains, another question cycles through my thoughts: Why?

Below me is the winding dirt road we had pedaled up the previous afternoon, the last stretch in a short, steep ride that lifted us 2,785 vertical feet from the town of Telluride (To Hell You Ride). I can see the spot where my lungs and heart and leg muscles mutinied against a brain that had become alarmingly airy; where the midsummer heat knocked me sweat-soaked off my rented bike and forced me to push in 10-foot bursts, each of which left me gasping and dizzy. Far to the west are the La Sal Mountains. As weathered and white as T-rex teeth, they’re the final barrier we’ll have to cross before descending to our destination of Moab, Utah. They look as if they’re a continent away.

So, as two cute but disconcertingly aggressive chipmunks edge closer, I sit on a lichen-painted boulder, sip coffee and brood: Why am I doing this? Why would anyone?

Day One

Telluride (Elevation: 8,745 feet) to Last Dollar Hut (10,980 feet);

14.8 miles; 2,785-foot ascent; 550-foot descent

The superficial why of this sort of trip is easy: Logistics. For $395 per person, the San Juan Hut System provides maps and directions to steer mountain bikers through the Umcompahgre and Manti-La Sal national forests, over remote fire and logging roads linking a series of strategically spaced shelters. In keeping with the traditions of cross-country skiing, the huts are stocked with water, food, pots, pans and sleeping bags. Cyclists carry only personal gear and emergency supplies. From June through September, groups of two to eight (a party of one is too dangerous) move through the six huts in a continuous flow - a total of 56 riders may be spread out along the route on a given day.

On a rapidly warming morning in mid-July, Anacleto and I show up for our required briefing at Easy Rider Mountain Sports on Telluride’s main drag. This is a small town. Although we gave ourselves only one day to acclimate to the altitude, we already know that the bike shop’s co-owners, Jon and Missy Haas, had married the week before and that the Hut company’s co-owners, Mike Turrin and Joe Ryan, are in the midst of an acrimonious business tiff. This interests us not just as gossip, but because these people now have considerable influence on whether we enjoy the next week or die writhing somewhere in the vast unknown that lies ahead. As it happens, Joe eventually buys out the business, in part, this former miner who lives “off the grid” will explain, because he worried that Mike seemed intent on making the experience too “frilly.” Fortunately, at the time of our trip, the loosely linked operations are functioning as smoothly as the Shimano deraileurs on the new Jamis mountain bikes that Anacleto and I have rented.

As Jon tinkers, putting on the seats and clip-in pedals we brought from our own bikes back home, Mike spreads maps out on a counter and goes over the intricate route, telling us about the eccentricities of each hut and filling us in on safety - reminding us, for instance, that a couple of weeks earlier, out in the middle of nowhere, a hut-to-hut rider lost control on a gravel descent and broke her arm.

The day before, only two riders had gone out - strapping young women with calves so chiseled they could break teeth. Police officers from Denver, we’re told. The two riders joining us at initiation = the rest of our small group, it turns out - are also in law enforcement. As fate would have it, they’re lawmen.

Because they brought their own bikes, they’re off and riding while Jon makes final adjustments to our mounts. Dusk is descending when we catch up with our new pardners. Like Anacleto and me, they’re middle-aged. Like Anacleto, they’re semi-fanatical bicyclists. Yet, in what I take as an encouraging sign, only Anacleto is able to stay in the saddle as we struggle over the final stretch of road leading to the first hut, which is hidden in a stand of pines on a ridge abutting the Mt. Sneffels Wilderness.

Bruce Radomski, a crime-scene investigator, and Jack Archer, a detective sergeant, work together at the Costa Mesa Police Department. As we putter about in oxygen-deprived exhilaration, unlocking the hut’s doors and windows, turning on the propane, pulling our overstuffed panniers off the bikes, I’m reminded that cops tend to view journalists in general, and ones who look like Anacleto in particular - beard, waist-length hair tied back in a braided ponytail, chile-pepper jersey - as hippie puke scum. Fortunately, the mind-whupping beauty surrounding us mitigates any social discomfort. We team-cook a pasta dinner, and by the time we’ve washed the dishes, it appears we’re all gonna get along.

Day Two

Last Dollar Hut to Spring Creek Hut

(Elevation: 9,200 feet)

26.3 miles; 1,600-foot ascent; 3,380-foot descent

On the glistening green fringes of mining-town-turned-upper-crust-tourist-trap-Telluride, we encountered well-waxed sport utes, bedecked with racks to carry every form of upscale outdoor paraphernalia: kayaks, skis, snowboards, mountain bikes. Now the rare vehicle that grumbles past kicking up dust is a beater 4x4 pickup with a gun rack. We’d envisioned wilderness. Instead, we’re pedaling through timber and high country range land, where the fauna includes not just the deer and wild turkeys we see, or the bear and lynx whose tracks we follow, but cattle and sheep and the people who ride herd on them, a breed as exotic to most city folk as the coyote that runs out ahead of us on the trail. By and large, these working folks’ expressions suggest bemusement, as if to say in passing: “Dang flatland fools, even lizards know better than to move around in this heat.”

In fact, the temperature is one of the more amorphous numbers being crunched by our internal calculators. More quantifiable: Miles to cover, miles per hour, altitude and elevation gained and lost. The ride is something of a scavenger hunt, and while we’re all on the same team now, we often separate into pairs or ride alone for a stretch. Each of us has maps and detailed instructions. Anacleto and I have mounted ours on handlebar bags next to our odometers. We ride and watch for landmarks and cross-reference the mileage, knowing that a missed turn could mean a cold night in a culvert.

It’s tricky matching the landscape with the directions (“At the third water bar ditch and a very large Douglas fir stump, follow a small foot path to the hut”). I’m buoyed when we finally find the structure, illuminated by shafts of late-afternoon light slicing through the forest. Most of the huts are made of plywood and two-by-fours, with sheet-metal roofs and floors raised on cinder blocks. Inside, all look like your screwball uncle’s unfinished attic - provided your uncle is a survivalist with a serious Costco habit. Crammed into every inch of the bare-wall framing and under the bunks are shrink-wrapped cases of Dinty Moore beef stew, Hormel chili, Campbell’s chicken noodle soup, Dole tropical fruit salad, Green Giant mushrooms and Spam. Sleeping bags and dry goods are stored in galvanized steel trash cans. Metal office cabinets labeled “Keep Closed at All Times - Mice!” harbor a bounty of candy, gorp, Power Bars, Top Ramen, cocoa, pancake mix, dried pasta, onions, potatoes, apples, oranges and Velveeta.

After gulping lukewarm powdered lemonade mixed in a blue enamel coffeepot, we lube the bikes, patch old tubes, wash up with the tightly rationed water (two gallons per person per night), cook dinner, then sit around and chat in the ritualized manner this sort of travel prescribes. For his part, Bruce projects a Kevlar persona, an attitude sufficiently sardonic as to deflect any torment (and, by extension, it seems, a measure of the pleasure) life hurls his way. Jack is another story. He seems to inhale joy from every nuance of every moment. Yet his face, with a drooping mustache and watery blue eyes, emanates sorrow. Indeed, he softly informs us that his only son died a few years earlier, at age 15.

Oddly, Bruce and Jack are well-matched. “I heard about this trip 10 years ago,” Bruce says. “Ive been trying to get someone to go on it with me ever since.”

Day three

Spring Creek Hut to

Columbine Hut

(Elevation: 9,205 feet)

34.3 miles; 1,800-foot ascent,

1,805-foot descent

We pump across the Umcompahgre Plateau, the nostril-searing scent of sun-baked forest rising like mesquite from a barbecue. Our shorts and jerseys, intricately stained with sweat’s salt residue, look tie-dyed. Eager for the refreshing ponds that the guide sheet promises, we turn off the main route and bicycle slowly into the woods. But one small pond after another is dry. The water we finally find has pooled in a depression bulldozed into a swatch of clear-cut. Dragonflies buzz over clumps of algae and cow dung. (“Had the albatross swum in this stock pond?”) We decide against our long-anticipated swim.

A half hour later, in the stuffy hut, I rustle up a plate of appetizers: Spam and Velveeta, sliced and artistically arrayed on a paper plate. We wolf down two helpings. I can feel the fat and sodium replenishing my grateful cells, while herds of mosquitoes snack on us. Finally I wrap myself in the thin sleeping bag liner the hut people provide, cover my head with netting and try not to let the omnipresent insect whine distract me as I read one of my kids’ Harry Potter books. A few feet away, Anacleto stirs a fire to ward off the skeeters and Bruce and Jack pace. By interrogating Anacleto at every rest break, they’ve figured out that the albatross eater’s wife died in a boat wreck, and that the husband and the skipper survived. Brows furrowed, they continue their grilling:

“Was there a coroner’s inquest? . . . Did he feel guilty because she died?”

Even our small group makes the huts seem claustrophobic. Come bedtime, I lug a tarp into a swatch of grass lined with Queen Anne’s lace and lupine and wriggle into a flannel sleeping bag emblazoned with pheasants and geese. Bruce, who has found a similar spot a few feet away, points out what is by now obvious. The sleeping bags cocooning us previously cocooned other sweat-caked cyclists - perhaps dozens of others - none of whom had access to showers. Still, when the wind blows through the pines, olfactory respite arrives. My lungs fill with crisp mountain air. I drift into a blissful sleep beneath a sky full of stars.

Day Four

Columbine Hut to Big Creek Cabin

(Elevation: 8,300 feet)

37.2 miles; 1,600-foot ascent; 2,505-foot descent

I ride hard and wrestle with why. There seem to be two answers, one that springs from the realm of darkness and negativity, the other from a happy place of affirmation and light. And they come to me with the regularity of the pebble stuck in my knobby front tire. The negative answer is obvious. It announces itself as clearly as a hawk’s shriek when I’m climbing a steep hill in my granny gear and the speedometer is flashing 3.4 mph with 30-something miles left in the day. It comes to me when my mouth is the texture of a stale tortilla and I recall that the weekend before I was with my family in a pool on Coronado Island, where waiters delivered icy drinks as a calypso band played.

The negative answer is: “Because you’re stupid.”

The positive answer has trouble articulating itself. It dances out of my grasp like the red-and-orange butterfly that touches down on my handlebars, unfolding wings as intricate as stained glass. It flirts with me in the wisp of breeze that whispers over my sun-brutalized skin. It’s hinted at in the sound of eight riding shoes clicking confidently into pedal bindings as we set out after an hour spent flat on our backs in a meadow, hypnotized by the quaking aspen rattling overhead.

Thirty-six miles into the fourth day, as I sweat and bang my greasy knuckles repairing a flat, I tell myself that the positive answer may be a mirage.

A few minutes and a few hundred easy pedal turns later, we dismount at the Big Creek Cabin on a small working ranch and are quickly hand-pumping cold spring water over our heads as a nosy horse watches and then a teenage ranch hand gives us a wild ride in a utility trailer behind an ATV down to a pond and we are doing goofy leaps into cool and relatively clean green water and the heat’s baking down and the dirt’s melting off and clouds are tracking across wide-open blue sky and what was the question again?

Day five

Big Creek to Gateway Hut

(Elevation: 4,560 feet)

33.2 miles; 2,100-foot ascent; 5,840-foot descent.

This spot has many unexpected bonuses. For one thing, the hut is a lopsided log cabin instead of a plywood box. For another, instead of a toilet seat mounted over a trash can under a tree (the hut standard), Big Creek offers a bona fide outhouse. Located behind the ranch owners’ house trailer, its walls have been covered with cattle brands and notes from both the cowboys who come to buy horses and the informal bike posses passing through: “Brad’s Boneheads” . . . “Bad Betties on Bikes.”

A hundred years ago, Butch Cassidy and his gang robbed the bank in Telluride and escaped toward Moab, high-tailing it across the same raw country through which we’ve been pedaling - the so-called “Outlaw Trail.” Now, before the sun has fully cleared the tree line, we, too, saddle up and ride. At the edge of the forested plateau we pause to take in a view that goes halfway to Mexico, then drop swiftly into a narrow canyon. Suddenly I’m a kid again, reining in my mount and watching the towering boulders for an ambush.

We are ambushed - by the heat and a relentless climb we hadn’t gleaned from our guide sheet. We sip from the huge reservoirs of water we carry on our backs and then from the backup bottles of Gatorade in our saddlebags. Finally, at the top of a hill, we crawl into a scrap of shade and suck on oranges as God fires his blow dryer on us point blank from above.

The climb has delivered us to another plateau, and this time we drop down the side of a sheer, twisting, red-rock butte with sweeping views and no guardrails. I strangle my brake levers and wrestle my plummeting bike to a stop every few hundred yards to make sure my smoking brake pads don’t overheat my rims. We’ve figured the canyon bottom will give our legs and lungs a rest. We’re wrong. The sandy jeep trails are so soft we have to pedal madly, as if on a stationary bike, to keep from toppling.

When we finally roll into Gateway, it’s midafternoon and more than 110 degrees. The town, dwarfed by the surrounding cliffs, consists of a bar that doesn’t open till 5 and a combination gas station-restaurant-motel. We step into the air-conditioning with a demented glee that the 26-year-old manager has clearly seen before. Dutch Dolan, with tattoos of the monsters from Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” on his calf and lions covering his arms and back, seems the perfect host for this Mad Max outpost. Within minutes, we’re gulping down sodas and burgers and ice cream bars and listening to Dutch’s stories about the characters who pass through. (Take, for instance, the two female police officers who rode into town the day before. They were hot on the trail of the frat boy bikers from Pennsylvania who had left the huts in such disarray that the cops were determined to catch up and administer a little trail-side justice.)

After hours in the cafe, we force ourselves back into the heat and pedal to the night’s hut. “This will teach me to read the literature more closely,” Bruce says, as we come into view of a ratty structure. It’s enclosed in barbed wire beneath a cottonwood tree on the outskirts of a farm, where someone may or may not be living in an abandoned bus. “When it says, ‘Follow this road past old sheds and junk cars . . .’ I’m going to listen.”

We unlock the door and he shakes his head again and grins. “Look at this, Jack. It’s like the shacks we go into to find transients after a murder . . . . It’s like a sweatbox torture chamber.” Seeking relief, we hike down to the Dolores River and wade into the tepid brown water. Then we pedal back into town and pay Dutch $3 each to shower in a motel room with a sagging bed, water-stained acoustic tiles and an air conditioner so wonderful that I can barely refrain from blubbering when it’s time to return to the reality to which we have committed ourselves. Back at our home for the night, the mosquitoes are so thick, the grass so high and potentially snake-infested, that we opt to sleep inside the kiln-hot hut. I spend the night naked atop yellowed foam rubber padding, swatting bugs and fretting about the next day.

Day Six

Gateway Hut to La Sal Hut

(Elevation: 8,200 feet)

22.7 miles; 4,020-foot ascent;

380-foot descent

We treat today’s ride like an Everest assault. We stumble out the door before dawn, carry our bikes through an alfalfa field strewn with “goatshead” thorns, ride a short stretch of paved road, then turn into John Brown Canyon, a deep slot into which some lunatic engineer has carved a steep dirt road. At the bottom we pass a business - a warehouse-size enterprise built directly into the red rock cliff to mitigate the heat, which even before sunup is trying to wilt anything with a trace of life. I imagine a mutant race of albinos cowering behind the massive iron doors and begin cajoling myself and my partners to push hard, to escape this infernal canyon before it bakes us like that witch tried to bake Hansel and Gretel.

I pump desperately but my speedometer clicks 3.0 . . . 2.9 . . . 2.8 as I climb in granny gear, my tires spitting rocks. Every now and then, I get off and push.

Hours later, we are in the La Sal Mountains, straddling our bikes at a signpost marking the Utah border. A pickup appears from the other direction and a woman with a genuinely puzzled expression rolls down the passenger window. “May I ask you something?” she says. “Do you do this for fun?”

Not one of us knows how to answer.

La Sal Hut to Moab

(Elevation: 4,200 feet)

38.4 miles; 2,500-foot ascent; 6,500-foot descent

Thunder booms. I awaken to clouds roiling past the moon and rain on my face. I immediately fall back to sleep. At sunup, we rise and pack. Bruce and Jack pepper Anacleto with conundrum questions as they grease their chains and stuff peanut butter and jelly sandwiches into saddlebags. Finally, Anacleto relents. The answer, he says, is this: the man died because when he tried the cooked bird, he realized that it tasted nothing like the meat the boat’s skipper fed him to keep him alive after the shipwreck. What else could it have been - horrors! - but pieces of his own drowned wife?

Bruce and Jack glare.

As it happens, the answer to my own conundrum is even more anticlimactic. It comes to me as we descend, in just a few hours, from alpine forest into the Utah desert’s beige, blast-oven dreamscape.

We spread apart. The temperature is back into the 100s. The wind shrieks faintly in rocks it has sculpted into demons, dinosaur heads, creatures from Dr. Seuss. It takes a long time for me to think anything at all in the solitude. Then I hear my mind tell itself that that’s the point. Why do people do this sort of trip? Because we need to be reminded that the brain is not as important as we modern creatures think. Because being stripped to muscles, lungs and beating heart feels good and right.

The trip’s final miles carry us on a steep paved road through Castle Valley and the slick rock country that has made Moab a mountain biking mecca. Near the bottom, a cluster of young, hard-core cyclists lie sprawled like gasping horned toads in a sliver of shade cast by a tour company van. Moving fast now, we blast by in formation. This must be how range riders felt when they galloped out of the mountains 100 years ago. The ride has hardened us. We are not to be messed with. Bruce and Jack grin. Anacleto spreads his arms like a hawk.

In Moab, I throw myself with gusto into a steak dinner, cold beer, swimming pool and soft bed. I awaken in the morning thinking of the shuttle back to Telluride and the plane back home. What’s odd and unexpected is this: My muscles and lungs and heart are champing to head for the hills and ride on.

Guidebook

Hard Days’ Ride

Prices: Hotel rates are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only, unless otherwise noted.

Getting there: At 9,078 feet, Telluride Regional Airport (TEX) bills itself as the highest commercial airport in the United States. United Express flies turboprops into TEX from Denver several times a day. America West Express flies several times daily from Phoenix. Shuttles routinely haul passengers from airports in Montrose (65 miles away) and Cortez (71 miles away). San Juan Huts will help riders arrange van shuttles for themselves and their bikes from Moab back to Telluride for about $250 per group.

To Ride Hut to Hut: The San Juan Hut System, P.O. Box 773, Ridgway, Colo. 81432; (970) 626-3033, fax (970) 626-4212, www.sanjuanhuts.com. Telluride to Moab, unguided trip, $395 per person.

Easy Rider Mountain Sports, P.O. Box 3089, 101 W. Colorado Ave., Telluride, Colo. 81435; (970) 728-4734 or toll free (800) 433-9733, fax (970) 728-6372, www.ezriders.com. Bikes with panniers and front suspension rent for $28 a day.

Where to stay: In Telluride, the Bear Creek Bed & Breakfast offers nice rooms and fine views. 221 E. Colorado Ave., (970) 728-6681 (800) 338-7064, fax (970) 728-3636, www.bearcreektelluride.com. Rates: $78 to $268. The New Sheridan Hotel, a 100-year-old Victorian in the center of town, offers 32 rooms and suites and rooftop hot tubs. 231 W. Colorado Ave, (970) 728-4351 or (800) 200-1891, fax (970) 728-5024, www.newsheridan.com. Rates: $80 to $400.

In Moab, the Gonzo Inn is among the newer and nicer hotels. 100 W. 200 South, (435) 259-2515 or (800) Go-Gonzo, fax 259-6992, www.moab-utah.com/gonzo/inn.html. Rates: Rooms from $119, suites from $155. The Sorrel River Ranch Resort, outside Moab, spreads along the banks of the Colorado River and in the shadows of red-rock buttes. P.O. Box K, Moab, Utah 84532, (435) 259-4642 or toll free (877) 359-2715, fax (435) 259-3016, www.sorrelriver.com. Rates: $179 to $339. Where to eat: Telluride boasts a full range of dining, from upscale bistros to taco carts and pizza dives. Campagna, rated by several publications as the best Italian restaurant in Colorado, offers Tuscan-style meals in a homey setting, 435 W. Pacific Ave., (970) 728-6190; $80.

Moab’s cuisine choices are less expansive than Telluride’s but include excellent coffee shops and brew pubs. Eddie McStiff’s microbrews can slake a seven-day thirst, the kitchen offers burgers, pizza and the like. 57 S. Main St., (435) 259-2337; $40 for two, including a couple of brewskis. The Moab Diner is a fine spot for burgers or a shake. 189 S. Main, (435) 259-4006; $15.

What to see and do: Telluride offers spectacular biking, hiking and horseback riding, and the ski resort’s gondola is free to the public in the summer.

Moab is surrounded by national parks, including Arches and Canyonlands, and makes a fine base camp for hiking, rafting, jeep tours and mountain biking.

For more information: Telluride: www.telluride.com/index.cfm. Moab: www.moab-utah.com. Colorado Tourism Office, 1625 Broadway, Suite 1700, Denver, Colo. 80202; (800) COLORADO or (303) 892-3885, fax (303) 892-3848, www.colorado.com. Utah Travel Council, Council Hall, 300 N. State St., Salt Lake City, Utah 84114; (800) 200-1160 or (801) 538-1030, fax 538-1399, www.utah.com.