Ride Preview: Jackson to Game Creek and Trail Foray #2

This ride began as so many do, with me asking Bike Pimp a stupid question and her pointing at maps.
In this instance, the question was: what did a cycling website mean when they mentioned a Highway 89 pathway?
This was a stupid question because it turned out the whole time I'd been using the in-town bike path, I'd been blithely oblivious to a path branching off of it near Smith's grocery store that parallels the highway as it heads west. Bike Pimp pointed it out on a map, then explained that past a certain point, you can either head down Game Creek Road (ie: site of the trailhead for the highly popular Game Creek Trail)  or head on to Hoback Junction (ie: site of one of two gas stations between the Idaho border and Jackson on that highway). 

The highway's on the left, the path is the little road on the right

I was excited (you may have noticed I often am in these circumstances), since driving on Highway 89 is a pretty scenic experience - as are most parts of being outside around here, and decided to spend part of the weekend on the path. I figured I could decide whether I went on to Hoback or Game Creek depending on what I felt like at the time. (Spoiler - I went for Game Creek and tried out some of the Game Creek Trail).

Then I had a conversation that made me nervous, too.

I told another friend - we'll call her Hand Model, since she'll know why and will roll her eyes - of my plans and invited her along. Her response: "Oh man, that's way too hilly." Now, Hand Model doesn't care for hills in general on a bike ride, but around here I once heard a trail that scales a damn mountain described as "a bit hilly," so I decided to investigate a little.

By that I mean I tried out the first mile and a half or so one evening after work. Why I decided that was sufficiently representative of a 6.2-mile trail, I'm not sure. I guess I thought that if I couldn't make it that far, I had no business trying the rest of the ride. Basically I went out as far as The Bird, a restaurant and pub I keep meaning to try, but never quite feel like going to because it's just far enough out of town to feel inconvenient.

Did the path end up with more hills and inclines than the path through town? An unqualified yes. Were some of them steep-ish and sustained-ish? Yes. Ish. But they also weren't hard to manage, so I went home with my mind made up. The ride was on for the weekend.

My route: Russ Garaman Trail to Highway 89 path to Game Creek Road to Game Creek Trail

Surface: Paved to Game Creek Road, then gravel. Dirt, etc. on the trail.

Incline: Jee. Zus. But not impossible. I'll explain later.

Distance: About 10 miles one way, including the trail. 6.2 miles to Game Creek Road alone.

What you'll see: As per usual, there will be Tetons if it's clear. Great overlook of Flat Creek as it runs out to the west. A ton of non-specific natural beauty. 

Summer Cycling Reading List: Roll Around Heaven All Day Part 2

As I mentioned Monday, learning to mountain bike has given me a great deal of curiosity about how other people do this whole cycling thing. I also like to read. So the solution of reading biking books seemed like a good one.

Also Monday, I gave you all the basics on the first book I chose as part of this - Roll Around Heaven All Day: A Piecemeal Journey Across America by Bicycle. I hereby give you the Good, the Bad and the Verdict of reading it.

The book is a first-person travel diary from Stan Purdum, a man who turns 50 and decides to fulfill a childhood dream of biking across the United States. This happens in three chunks because, being 50 and all, he has a job and a family, and the U.S. is pretty freaking huge and time-consuming to travel across.
In one, he goes from Oregon to Wyoming with his younger brother. Then he goes across Virginia with his teenage daughter. He heads across most of the Midwest alone. 
The book switches between straightforward trip narrative with heavy focus on the people he meets and the places he sees, quasi-philosophical musings and facts/reflections on cycling.

The Bad: This is not a man who has a good sense of what details are appropriate where. Especially when he's riding with his family you get either way too much information or not enough about his brother and daughter. Frankly, he isn't very good at weaving the themes of his personal relationships in with the rest of the narrative, so the book gets bogged down when he tries. Lots of detail, not much substance.
For example - it's interesting to hear once that his brother has sleep apnea and requires a special machine to sleep. It's annoying to hear about whether every single campground they stay at is equipped so he can use the machine. I also vowed to find the man and shove a burger up his...yeah...if I heard one more time what everyone's exact order was at every single food stop.
The weakest part of the book is the stretch with his daughter. He is so busy explaining his kid that he hardly gets to the actual trip, and his constant explanations make her seem insipid and weak. You can't ever relate to or like the daughter. We never really see her because her dad is in the way, constantly fluttering about whether she's tired or whether she's in a good mood.
And...and...he skipped Grand Teton National Park and Jackson! You want to beat him a little, because he ends his west coast leg bitching about how Yellowstone is a bad road cycling park - which is pretty common knowledge around here - and if he'd just kept it up maybe one more day, he would have been in the midst of one of the most beautiful and best cycling areas in the country. Frustrating, I tell you!

The Good: When he sticks to discussing the trip itself, and his own motivations for it, Purdum is really a very personable narrator. He is clearly really into the trip and the experience of a long-distance cycle tour, and his enthusiasm is catching. At its core, this book is about a man living his dream before age makes it impossible to do so, and that is really a powerful thing.
That narrative is the one Purdum tells very well, and when he allows it to dominate the story, his writing gains an authentic voice it just lacks when he's dealing with the family or spiritual aspects. His prose evens out,  the narrative moves and you actually feel like you're on the trip with him.
Plus, he has a good-natured humility about his cycling limitations. He enjoys it, clearly, but doesn't try to prove what a seeeeerious biker he is. Granted, he's on a trip across the country. He kind of doesn't need to.
You get periodically irritated with Purdum, but overall you like him, and that's key to a book like this.
Reviewers on amazon.com get down on him for how light the book is on "technical" stuff regarding both equipment and technique. Since most of those reviews start with "I am a longtime touring cyclist" I tended to think they were full of shit. Purdum actually does include quite a few technical details of cycling in general - enough that I sure expanded my vocabulary, for what it's worth.

The Verdict: I'm glad I read it, but I think once was enough. I think more than anything, my trouble with this book is that it wasn't really my style. But then, Purdum and I don't seem to have much in common aside from the cycling thing and this is a first-person narrative, so that's not terribly surprising.  I know plenty of people whose style this would be, and even recommended the book to one of them a few days ago.

Tuesday Biking Jams: Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard

I'm afraid there are no political reasons for this week's jam. Or really any that make me sound all that profound.

There is a subset of my Bike Ride playlist that I chose as good "biking in town" songs - songs that have a decent rhythm while you're pedaling, but don't need to push you that extra few yards up a steep hill or help you keep up your energy. Lately, one of my favorite members of this subset has been "Me and Julio Down By the Schoolyard," which gives Paul Simon the distinction of being my mother's favorite artist on my iPod.

Every time I listen to this song, I find myself whistling. There is a section where Simon whistles for a few measures, and it usually starts there, but then I keep whistling. This has led to the previously undiscovered knowledge that it is really hard to whistle on a bike. Even if you're only in town, you don't have the air to spare, and being bent over the handlebars you aren't in the greatest position to  use your air in that particular fashion.

You should totally try it if you don't believe me. If nothing else, it's turned out to be a sure-fire way to make everyone on the sidewalk look around to see where the whistling noise is coming from. Sometimes they kind of smile. Sometimes they kind of look at you like you're not right in the head. I feel like those people are probably no fun, because whistling isn't all that weird, even if you are kind of taking a huge breath every so often to keep doing it.

I can actually take or leave Paul Simon for the most part, despite the fact that his Greatest Hits CD was the soundtrack in my family's car on many a childhood road trip. I do love this song, and I hope this week's jam inspires you to try it out as a good, upbeat, rhythmic song for biking around your town. And if you ever figure out just what mama saw that was against the law, let me know.

Oh, and lyrics.

Summer Cycling Reading List: Roll Around Heaven All Day Part 1

Sometimes as you take a break on a longer ride, you read. Or at least, I do. And one of the things I've been curious about since I started becoming my own brand of bike person is - how do other people do it? where do they ride? what happens in the advanced stages of psychosis? So one day at the Teton County Library, I took a stroll through the non-fiction section to find me a book or two on biking.

There were quite a few, even if you don't count the "Cycling for Dummies" variety, which I tend not to. I mean, come on, if you're trying to learn biking from a book you don't need to advertise it - I'm going to just assume you're a dummy. As for the rest of them, it seems that once you start riding, the impulse to ride across something and then tell people about it is pretty strong. I'm sure the only reason there isn't a "Cycling Across the Atlantic" book is because humanity can not yet bike on water.

The first book I chose is one of the many based on the "I biked across something" concept. As the title reveals, in Roll Around Heaven All Day: A Piecemeal Journey Across America By Bicycle, the author bikes across the United States.

The summary on amazon.com reads as follows:

The experiences of a middle-aged, overweight man, mounted on an old bicycle, who is traveling across America along the TransAmerica Bicycle Trail. This inspirational coast-to-coast odyssey is a truly satisfying ride, not only for cyclists, but for anyone who travels for the joy of the journey--or simply dreams of doing so.

As a teaser, this begs so many questions. Why is this man Stan Purdum bicycling across America, aside from the fact that someone apparently will pay him to write a book about it? Does he have any attributes aside from his age, weight and apparent suicide wish? Why is this trip of his so inspirational? What is our standard for inspiration here? Are we using the word "odyssey" because it sounds good in a back cover summary or because the story actually evokes something on the scale of the ancient Greek epic poem? Why don't I work for a publishing company when I could totally pull something like that out of my ass? Does whoever wrote this make more money than I do? And so on.

I chose the book because I liked the idea of starting out with a book that explored areas I was at least familiar with - as opposed to the one I saw on the shelf above it where the author bikes across Siberia. I also liked the idea of hearing from someone who would at worst be obnoxious in a new way, and at best would stick to telling us about his trip and avoid trying to convince us all of his biking bonafides. Plus, knowing Purdum's biography says he lives in Ohio, I was dying to hear about his experiences with some of the West Coast mountains.

So I checked it out of the library and read it over the next few days, finishing it up on the bike ride you'll hear about later this week. I'll tell you all what I thought of it Wednesday, so tune in if you care about that sort of thing.

Ridin' Friday: Trail Fail and Josie's Ridge

~ Note - This was always going to be a tricky one to preview, so in the interest of catching back up, I've decided you're going in cold. You're welcome.~


At the beginning of the month, the U.S. Forest Service opened up a large chunk of the Greater Snow King Recreation Area - ie: the stretch of land with most of the really good cycling trails near Jackson. (During the winter, the land is closed to humans to keep elk and other large wildlife from wasting calories by being startled by people.) Partway down Snow King Avenue, there is an access point to the trail network just off of Wildlife Drive.

I'd been eyeing that sign announcing National Forest Trail Access for months by then, so that weekend I decided to take Little Red for my first cycling foray on a trail.

I was super excited to try something that I could describe as "mountain biking" without having people who actually go mountain biking laugh at me. I stayed excited as I pedaled up the kind of steep, gravelly hill to the trailhead. I stayed excited as I continued pedaling up an equally steep hill that comprises the first stretch of the trail. My legs kind of wanted these hills to be done, but I was making it and I was excited! This was going to be great!

And then I nearly got bucked off by my bike. I was less excited about that.

It seems anyone who has ridden trails before knows - ie: not me at the time -  it is possible for your bike to hit a protruding rock and flip over. When your bike flips over, you do too. It's a physics thing.

As I concentrated on calming my heartbeat, I realized it was time to buy a helmet. Shit would have gotten pretty concussion-y if I'd been going a little faster, or if my reflexes were a little slower. Hell, it could have gotten pretty skull-split-open-y. And this was just one of the hundreds of rocks on that stretch of trail.

So I made the executive decision to leave Little Red at the trailhead and explore on foot. I fully admit, I was a loser in so many different ways on this one, but mostly because:

1) It's really dumb to own a bike but not a helmet
2) It's even dumber to try something like trail riding for the first time and not wear a helmet
3) My first trail ride was about seven minutes long
4) I had a near-death encounter with a freaking rock


That would have been one for the Darwin Awards, yeah?

It made me feel marginally less like a loser when I realized that the trail I'd vaguely intended to seek out - Josie's Ridge - is not really meant for cyclists. In fact, I later found out that it's the only trail in the Greater Snow King Recreation Area that's built to be for hikers only. In short, it is steep as shit, narrow as shit and full of twists and turns. Show me someone who's tried it on a bike and I'll show you someone who isn't very fond of life or limb.

It's also a great hike. Those who are inclined to take a break from the bike should check it out. The trail climbs (and I mean that word more strongly than usual) up to the top of Josie's Ridge and then goes along the top of it for a while.

You start out looking out on this:

Then finally this:

So yeah, worth the climb. And a decent consolation prize for completely failing on my first cycling trip to the trails. Let's just say my evolution as a mountain biker was on hold until I had a way to protect myself on the - as I realized that day - inevitable falls that would entail.

Bike Away From Work Party or Badgering the National Forest Service

~Note - This post should have gone up yesterday. It didn't. I'm sorry. Read it anyway, you'll like it.~

Now that it's getting close to summer, there are small-ish biking events up the wazoo going on in Jackson Hole. I've missed a lot of them what with actually riding my bike sometimes and having a job and a pressing need to buy groceries, but I did manage to make it to one on Friday.

Bike Away From Work was a party/information fair to mark Bike To Work Day. I'll go ahead and confess that I don't really know what day actually is Bike To Work Day, but I do consider it good and celebrated.

Most of these events feature some version of free food and cheap booze, which is really nice. You also run into a lot of locals. Since it turns out a lot of the trails and pathways in the area have only acquired adequate signs to mark them in the past 10 years or so, word-of-mouth can be a good way to find out about rides and actually be able to find them.

This particular event featured booths from both Friends of Pathways and the U.S. Forest Service, the two major agencies that build and maintain local bike paths and trails.

Now, I've heard so many things about the great mountain biking trails and the extensive bike path network throughout the area, but finding them is a smidge more difficult. At least, it is when your sense of direction is something of a family joke and the trails criss cross in a not-especially-straightforward manner.

So I spent about an hour and a half pestering the ranger the Forest Service sent. They had some very good maps there that aren't available online, and with someone paid to know where things are to point at things for me, I came away with an actual idea of where I'd need to go to try out some of the best local rides. I'm not certain that I didn't frighten the poor man, though whether he was frightened at the barrage of questions or the idea that someone so bad at reading maps on her own would be trying to navigate in land he is responsible for is kind of up for debate.

He was very good about recommending trails that aren't too difficult for mountain biking rookies - even enthusiastic, sarcastic, sometimes fantastic ones. He mentioned that the good maps and several other rangers are available during weekdays at the Forest Service's local offices on Cache St. I'd highly recommend stopping by if you're as hopeless at this sort of thing as I am, since those maps really were good, and so was the advice.

I also swung by Friends of Pathways and picked up the maps they put out for the public of where one can find bike paths both in the Jackson area and near Wilson and Teton Village. They have local offices too, on South Millward St., but I liked catching them here better. Remember - free food and cheap booze.

I also solved the  mystery of what the faded writing on my bike bell says! And where it must have come from:

It says Jackson Hole Community Pathways on it, and was one of those free bells community organizations give out, as I mentioned in this post, where I also talk more about my own bell, which was already on Little Red when I bought her. I'd also like to take this moment to note that those Friends of Pathways socks are kind of awesome, in an "I'd probably never wear those" kind of way.

I'll swing by as many of the biking events as I can in the coming weeks, but I definitely can't manage them all. Friends of Pathways usually lists good ones on its website, if any of you happen to be in the area and want to see for yourself.

Tuesday...er, Wednesday Biking Jams: Only Prettier

~Note - This is the post that should have gone up Tuesday, May 22. Find out why it didn't here, and enjoy your third post of the day to make up for it.  ~

I don't usually go in for country, but there are a few exceptions to that on my Bike Ride playlist. This one in particular went a long way toward helping me deal with some folks in town this week that made me pretty angry.

Operation Save America, a group of particularly rabid abortion protesters, visited Jackson this week to  "minister" to a doctor in town who "kills babies" in his "killing center" (aka: offers pregnancy terminations along with his general practitioner services). They brought huge signs with pictures of bloody fetuses and were generally pretty hateful when the town objected to those signs. 


Because of my job, I had to be polite to these people instead of just ignoring them, and there were days it threatened to make my blood boil. So as I was biking by them, I found myself skipping my iPod to "Only Prettier," Miranda Lambert's tongue-in-cheek ode to tolerance. 

Between the lampooning lyrics and pedaling just a little harder than usual, I worked out  my frustration without actually punching anyone. And I managed to get past them more quickly, which was kind of a perk. The group left Sunday, but not before they protested outside the churches that asked them not to come. Such charming people. 

So Dear Operation Save America, 

I hope you enjoyed Jackson, and please don't come back. 

And to my readers, enjoy this week's jam and don't let the bastards get you down. 

Love and Kisses, 

Little Red Mountain Bike

P.S. - Lyrics can be found here