Mountain Bike Ride to Hell

Apps

I took the trail to right and began riding uphill, the bike trail now part of a long-abandoned logging road that followed a canyon that merged with the Smith Creek valley. After six cycles of my pedals in my lowest gear, struggling to hold on with just my left hand, I got off. Walking the bike was the only option. I mentally calculated that a thousand feet of elevation at this steepness translated into a mile of travel, assuming no flat portions, a distance walkable in thirty minutes.

Thirty minutes delivered no parking lot, just more relentless uphill on the logging road covered with downed trees and enterprising baby pine trees intent on dispatching the faint remains of the road to oblivion. My water was gone. My mouth dry, I remembered the quart of lemon-lime Gatorade I had left in the car. I walked faster.

I had to have gained a thousand feet by now. At a clearing, I took out my phone, looked at the GPS app and saw that I had only climbed 500 feet. I cocked my arm, ready to hurl my phone into the forest. But I couldn't blame my phone.

Hiking to the South Pole had to be easier than this.

Then a thought, masquerading as a brilliant idea, struck me. What if I left my bike? Not rolling the deadweight uphill nor having to pick it up for every tree across the path would be so much easier.

But I couldn't abandon my precious machine, especially after it had escaped injury in the fall so much better than I had. "Just you and me, bud. We're going to complete this ride from hell," I said, hoping somebody could hear me. A squirrel on a tree chirped at me.

The words of the dirt biker revolving in my mind, I sifted for clues as to whether or not he had come across my partners. He must have passed them at some point given he was moving much faster than any bicyclist. What had happened in the encounter? In theory, if he had shot at them, I would have heard the gunshots. He was a menace, no question, but more than anything he just wanted people out of his domain. Killing them would achieve the opposite. Threatening them to leave would be much more effective. This logic made me feel less anxious for my partners, but what had happened to them was a mystery. They should have been waiting for me at the stream, then at the intersection. If they were ahead of me, waiting at the car, drinking beer, I would kill them. The only explanation I could come up with was that they had gone uphill looking for me and gone by me when I was off trail, continuing uphill while I was going downhill.

What would they have done when they couldn't find me by going uphill? They would be completely mystified. Would they think I was lost somewhere? At some point though they would turn around and go back down, in which case, they should have caught up with me by now. That they hadn't could mean I was going up the wrong trail and was truly doomed. I suppressed that thought, concentrated on avoiding obstacles with my feet, and tried to ignore the pulses of pain from my shoulder.

I kept stumbling upward, pulling my bicycle alongside with my good arm, the sky turning darker now that the sun had set. The thought of being off-route was pulling me toward a black hole in my head but I resisted. I had made the best choice possible with the only available information. But I needed to start thinking about a backup plan in case I really had screwed up. My phone still would give me elevation and I knew the elevation of the parking lot. If I climbed higher than the parking lot by a thousand feet, say, that would prove I was on the wrong trail. That would be terrible, but at least I would know. I chose not to think about what I would do then.

In the increasing darkness, I began tripping over branches and rocks, none of my stumbles sending me to the ground but each jarring of my shoulder exploded bolts of pain to my fingertips and jaw. My thoughts jumped to the future, one in which I no longer owned a mountain bike, didn't have friends who wanted to have adventures in the wilderness, had a shoulder that didn't hurt, and binged on Netflix while I drank our local Full Sail micro-brewed beer.