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Roadtrip Vignettes, Part 11: Along I-82, Southern WA

We grow hops in our yard. We have Cascade in the backyard and Centennial in the front, and both varieties share a certain “ohmygod ohmygod the Sun water let’s grow” enthusiasm for life. In June, before they flower, the vines will literally grow 6 inches in a day. (I’ve measured.) And the cones (the fruit of the plant) are so magnificent it’s hard to believe they simply evolved. They’re like something a sculptor would create.

Hops are magnificent plants and I love them.

And I feel that way even before we pick the cones and brew beer with them.

So when I was driving on I-82 through southern Washington west of Richland and I glanced off to the right and saw field after field of trellises, stretching as far as I could see, I had no doubt about what I was looking at. So that’s what commercial hop farms look like, I said. They had that same essential “Hellooooo, World!” enthusiasm about growing, though here their rambunctiousness seemed tempered, perhaps by their relationship to commerce. “Sorry, no time for unruly fun and games,” these plants said. “We’re going to be dried, pelletized, tested for alpha and beta acids and put in precise quantities into beer.” For our plants, beer is a hobby; for these plants it’s a job.

But still, I couldn’t not stop and get a picture. And I dedicate this piece to the hops of the world, who do such diligent work to make beer delicious.

I dedicate this one to Dawn, who worried that my lack of planning might get me into trouble.

By the position of the stars I estimated that I began my hike back from Delicate Arch somewhere between 11pm and midnight. I kept a comfortable but measured pace as I strode down the trail, finding my way under the modest light of my headlamp. Moonrise was still a while off, and the night was dark under a billion stars. First Venus and then Jupiter set in the west.

I hadn’t been hiking for very long when I heard the photography group behind me, chatting merrily away. They were a large group with bright headlamps, and so their pace was quicker than mine. I moved 30 or 40 yard perpendicular to the trail, hunkered down behind a boulder and shut off my lamp to let them pass. I waited until their voices faded away and I could no longer see the lights. The magic of the desert night is a fragile thing, easily broken, and I sought it in the solitude and the quiet. Alone again, I resumed my walk.

I passed a trail-marking cairn and dropped down into a wash I thought I remembered from the way up, but as I continued downhill the brush got thicker and thicker and my sense of time and distance told me it had been too long since I’d see a trail marker. I looked left and right, trying to find my way back to the trail, but the light from the headlamp seemed dimmer, as though perhaps the batteries were failing, and I couldn’t find what I was looking for.

I thought of the group I’d recently let pass. The word hubris rose up in my mind.

The desert does not invite our presence, and there among the sand and the slickrock and the quiet desert plants fear and panic began to creep out into the night’s shadows.

Okay, hold on, I said to myself. Calm down. First of all, I remembered I’d seen another group heading up to the arch. They’d be coming down again at some point, and I could just stay put and wait for them. There was no way I could be very far from the trail. If necessary, I would almost surely be able to meet them.

And if somehow that didn’t work, and I really was lost until daylight, well, I had a half-full Camelbak and the night was pleasantly cool. It wouldn’t be my favorite way to spend a night–I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep, lest something poisonous decide to curl up against my body heat–but if I had to do it, I would, and I’d be fine until morning.

I’d talked myself through the worst-case scenario. The creeping fear and panic abated. Okay, I said, I’m pretty sure I can find my way back to that last cairn. I turned and started back up the wash.

I’d taken only a small handful of steps back uphill when I heard at my feet the unmistakable buzz of a rattlesnake’s rattle.

I froze.

I kept my feet carefully planted as I panned around with my headlamp. “Where are you?” I asked aloud. I couldn’t find the snake.

I stayed there for several long minutes as I continued to sweep the ground with my light. No sign of the snake, no hint of motion, just the slickrock and the low desert vegetation.

Finally, I took a tentative step forward. Nothing. Another step. Still nothing. I had to chance that it had moved away, as rattlesnakes will when they think they safely can, and I made my way slowly up the wash. I had known there were rattlesnakes out there, of course, but now in this moment their presence had ceased to be an abstract notion.

I found the last cairn, reoriented, and proceeded slowly down the path away from it, scanning with my headlamp, hunting for the marker I’d missed. It had to be around here somewhere, I told myself. I found it soon enough, and then the next, and then the one after. I continued down the trail like that.

The run-in with the snake had left me understandably a bit spooked, and with the prospect of blundering into poisonous fangs now a concrete reality, I slowed my progress considerably on the return walk down. When I finally made it back to the car, I checked the time. 1:30am. What should have taken 45 minutes had taken over two hours. But I was safe and no worse for the adventure.

Now all that remained before I could rest for the night was to find a place to sleep.

It was the first night of my trip. As beginnings go: auspicious or not?

It takes a lot to get me off my bike voluntarily during a ride (voluntarily–I suffered more pinch flats during the trip than anyone should ever have to deal with), but the wildflowers in Sun Valley and Grand Targhee were too extraordinary to not pause and savor.

In my regular life I almost never carry my smartphone on rides–part of the pleasure I get from mountain biking comes from disconnecting for a few hours from our ever-connected world–but I made exceptions on this trip. A smartphone doubles as a thin and lightweight camera that easily fits into a Camelbak (even one otherwise full of bike gear), and I envisioned wanting to share experiences via photographs with the folks back home.

That choice brings up some interesting questions, though, that I want to acknowledge without really trying to answer today. Does carrying the smartphone (or even just a lightweight camera) distract from the immediacy and hence the value of the experience? That is, does the mere knowledge of carrying a camera mean that the focus moves away from the experience itself into either some kind of grasping (“Memory isn’t enough”), or to some temporal-spatial Other Place because my concern about sharing the experience overwhelms actually experiencing it?

For today, I’ll say simply that those questions are something I’ve struggled with and continue to struggle with. However, there’s this too: it’s several weeks since the trip ended and it’s obvious that a piece in which I just say, “The wildflowers were extraordinary,” isn’t going to be of much interest to anyone. I lack the vocabulary and knowledge to say much more about wildflowers than that they’re pretty. Hence I’m glad I have the photos.

One last thought: I have no training as a photographer, so I have no idea how to capture the majesty of a hillside awash in color through a camera lens, much less the rather limited capabilities of the camera on my smartphone. I did the best I could. The photos remind me of the beauty I saw, but I don’t know if they are able to evoke that beauty in someone else’s eye. Which is another interesting point about stopping to take pictures, isn’t it?

Doc worked as the campground host at Murdock Campground and the other ones nearby. He told me he had owned a bike shop in Tucson, AZ, sold it a few years back and hit the road. He took temporary and seasonal jobs to make ends meet. “Sometimes I don’t even take temporary jobs,” he said, and hesitated.

“Because you don’t have to?” I offered.

“Yeah,” he agreed.

He had a Santa Cruz Tallboy on the rack on the back of his truck, a beautiful bike built up with premium parts. I commented on the bike and he said he didn’t really feel like he had it dialed yet. “I had a Niner that I loved, but it got stolen off the rack,” he said. When I asked how it happened, he said, “I didn’t figure it out until afterwards. I was in Dallas. When I left the trailhead after I was done riding, some guys in a van left too. When I turned left, they turned left. When I turned right, they turned right…”

Unsurprisingly, he had strong opinions about bikes. We talked about frames and forks and tubed versus tubeless and mountain gruppos and and how he’d gotten several sets of full XTR at Interbike a couple of years back for like $900 or something, which is a crazy deal and doesn’t even seem fair. He was a friendly, loquacious fellow. Maybe that had something to do with it.

After he sold the shop, he’d first gone to North Carolina.

“Supposed to be good mountain biking out there,” I said.

“It’s okay,” he said. “But there are no views, not ever. People out there don’t even know what they’re missing.”

“That’s good,” I told him. “It keeps them away from here.”

In the coffeeshop that morning I finished my writing and walked to the bathroom to have the kind of quality time that only a flush toilet can provide, the pit toilet at the campground having been let’s say uninviting.

I had no sooner closed the door when I heard a knock from the other side. I felt a pretty obvious rise of indignation, and I prepared myself to declaim righteously to the apparently weirdly entitled person on the other side of the door that I had literally just gotten in there, and I really needed to go.

I opened the door and had to scan down to meet my adversary. I saw a little kid standing there.

“Can I make a potty?” he asked.

I hesitated for a second as I reconfigured my mental-emotional state around this new information. He was cute and earnest, and I figured if he was knocking he must really need to go. After a moment’s pause I said, “Sure.”

It wasn’t a great hardship in my life. Even a kid who really needs to go doesn’t take very long. When he came out, he glanced over toward where I was standing, made eye contact, and smiled.

Polite, gracious, and not shy: I predict good things for this one.

It was my birthday. I wanted to drink a few beers and have a nice dinner and not have to hunt around for a place to sleep. I didn’t know how far up the road beyond Ketchum I’d have to go to find a campground, and I didn’t really want to be doing it in the dark. So I called the RV campground down in Bellevue, the town a few miles to the south. I asked the nice woman who answered the phone if it would be a problem if I came in late, around 10pm or so.

“Hmm,” she said. “How big is your rig?”

Rig, I thought to myself.

See, this is why we travel: to get exposed to cultures foreign to our own. To those of us outside RV culture, it’s just an RV. Inside: it’s a rig.

I hit the road early from my campsite at Hilgard Junction State Park, OR, and was around Richland, WA, when I spoke with Aaron.

“Wow,” he said. “You’re only a few hours away.”

“Yeah. I should be there a little after lunch,” I said

“Cool. I won’t be available until about 8:30 tonight, but I’ll leave the place open for you,” he said.

“Hmmm,” I said. “Maybe I’ll come up with a plan B.”

A little Google searching led me to a Seattle Times article entitled, “Washington’s top ten mountain-bike rides.” I cross-referenced the rides against the map–I don’t know Washington for shit–and found that two of them were more or less along my route. One was substantially off the highway, but the other, a place called Duthie Hill Park, was just a few miles from the Interstate. The article called it, “The most-visited mountain-bike trail system in the state.” (The author apparently had a real thing for hyphens.) I read a few reviews and it sounded like a lot of fun.

Issaquah, WA, is not far on the western side of Snoqualmie Pass, which puts it well into the rain-forest climate for which Seattle is so well known. The trees there are huge and ferns abound on the forest floor. The canopy is so dense, I had to return to the car to replace my sunglasses’ dark lenses with the clear ones. It felt like I was riding in some enchanted forest, or maybe on Endor.

And the riding was incredible. Many of the freeride trails were far beyond my ability, but there were also some nice, progressive stunts so I could practice my rather impoverished technical skills.

And still being acclimatized to high altitude, I was blowing by the locals on all the cross country trails. I felt like a superhero.

It was among the most fun days I’ve ever had on a mountain bike.

Want to get a feel for it? Here’s a video of a trail called Boot Camp, a non-technical little flowy descent that I must have ridden at least six times that day. Notice how quiet the bike is in the video. That should give you some idea of how smooth and flowy those banked turns are.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygvrtHS8EB0

Now that is a hell of a good way to spend an afternoon.

On ID-33 heading eastward out of Sugar City, I caught my first glimpse of the Tetons. They peaked up and around the Snake River Mountains in front of them, appearing through the brownish haze (which I learned later was smoke from Alaskan wildfires) like an idea not fully in focus. I had been about one-fourth debating with myself if I should have just stayed in the Ketchum area one more night and then driven all the way home rather than take this trip to Targhee, but when I saw the Tetons it was like that moment in an argument when your interlocutor says something irrefutable. I said aloud, “Oh. The Tetons.” Like: right. Rising jagged, majestic, unmistakable–though not really as breastlike as the French-Canadian traders who named them apparently wished. (Fellas–there are three of them. You must have been really lonely.)

Debate over. I was doing exactly the right thing.

The first time I went to Delicate Arch, back in April of 2008, I stayed well past nightfall. It hadn’t been my plan, it’s just that it was beautiful and powerful and that as darkness fell more and more people left–as the sun sets into golden hour you’ll be among about a zillion camera-wielding tourists–until I thought maybe I was alone. I lay down beneath the arch and let it block out part of the sky. At some point I did hear a person shift somewhere behind me. In the dry desert air sound carries a long distance and the night is mostly quiet and there is no mistaking human sounds. But nearly alone in a magical place is still magical. I stayed to watch the moon rise.

This time around I planned on staying late. I brought a full Camelbak, a little food, layers in case it got cold. It was the first night of my trip and I sought something like a benediction. I had been scrambling over the past few days to get everything ready, but all that was done now, and I could just sit. I wanted to meet the energy of the moment.

June is a lot warmer than April, and I was never even close to alone. A big guided group of photographers came up after nightfall to try to get shots of the Milky Way behind the arch. I could clearly hear them discussing technical aspects of nighttime shooting, despite being a good 100 yards away.

The moon was two days shy of last quarter and so wasn’t going to rise until very late. The photographers’ guide said that big thunderstorms the night before had washed all the dust out of the air–it was a stunningly clear night. The Milky Way was glorious and bright, and there were a billion stars, and I sat on a rock in the bowl below the arch and watched the heavens and thought about what the light feels as it travels between the stars.

Venus and Jupiter danced together in the west and I sat there in the dark desert night and and let myself feel what I was carrying with me and opened myself to what lay ahead.