The meaning of a storm

After a week of riding hard at lower elevations, I was feeling thoroughly cooked. The weekend came and it was time to head up Lemmon.

Chad and I wove our way around the mountain, finding plenty of challenge and a shocking amount of heat. 9000′, climbing hard in the trees and we were sweating like pigs. We rode 1918 and Sunset trails with Max, who had ridden from Tucson with his bikepacking gear the night before. Glad to see him back on the bike.

“Hello, Cookie Cabin, do you take phone in orders?”

“I’ll take a pizza with everything on it.”

By the time we knocked ourselves out dropping down the Aspen Draw trail, the pizza was ready, and it was well timed after several hours on the bike. We chilled out at the ‘music on the mountain’ tent for a while before leaving the crowds behind.

We commenced the climb back to the Bigelow Towers, and my legs felt top. Am I riding a 34 pound bike? This thing climbs and hops like a dream.

We started hearing thunder near the towers, finally catching a glimpse of the storm, across the San Pedro valley. It was pounding the Galiuro mountains, and we both commented on how loud and close the lightning seemed, yet it was so far away.

I was hoping to get at least six hours moving time, and it almost seemed a waste to hop in the car and drive down the mountain. So I thanked Chad for the great ride (and awesome pizza!) and cruised down to Green Mountain.

Doom approacheth!

At first I was certain it was heading west, and would miss me. Then the storm swallowed the ridge in the foreground of the photo above.

I kicked it into double time, pedaling my brains out on the climb / hike-a-bike to Bear Saddle. “This climb goes on forever.”

It started raining, a relief from the hard effort at first. I popped over the saddle and bounced down the first rock garden against my better judgment. Traction was still available, for the moment.

I was happy to be over the ridge, but the lightning was getting intense, and rain picking up. I doubted my ability to ride much of the trail below. It’s one of the most difficult on the mountain, full of boulders, water bars and tight turns.

My mind went through a few stages of amazement:

1) Wow, it’s raining pretty hard. (above pic, the last I took during the storm)
2) Now it’s REALLY coming down.
3) I didn’t know that air could hold this much water!?
4) Umm, is the world ending?

The sky was being torn apart by electricity. Flash/bang, flash/bang.

It’s impossible to remember just how LOUD thunder is, until it’s right on top of you and all around you. I think it awakens primordial instincts, beyond logical fear and beyond simple adrenaline.

All of the above were coursing through me as I negotiated my way down the trail. Hyper focused riding. Traction held as I manualed off water bars, landing in the flowing trail. The trail was flowing, I was flowing, the sky was flowing, it was all flow.

My clothes felt like a suit of armor, heavy. My feet swimming in my shoes. I was worried about crossing the flooding drainage below (the trail crosses multiple times). When I got there it was feet deep, but still passable.

The moisture was funneling down the canyon, in wild waves of white water. This is where I got to the “is the world ending?” stage. It reminded me of the videos you see on the weather channel of hurricanes. The rain was swirling around, mixed with hail, completely out of control. Now everything was flowing, not just the trail, not just the side drains, but everything was sheeting water. It was too crazy to ride, so I ran alongside my bike, knowing that the campground was not far.

I rolled around to the bathroom and found a group of campers hanging out under the overhang. They called me over… “Dude! Get in here, there’s plenty of room.”

It was ‘free day’ on the mountain, and I don’t think these guys had ever been camping before. Not the kind of twenty-something kids I’d normally find myself talking to, which was really cool. But here we were sharing an overhang, and sharing stories of near misses and crazy rain. They laughed as I wrung my clothes out and tried to describe how crazy it had been to be riding down the trail out there.

I spent over a half hour under the overhang, waiting for it to let up and the lightning to pass. A gauge on Green Mountain recorded nearly 2.5 inches of rain during that half hour! I was worried about hypothermia going down the highway, not wanting to be ‘that guy’ that somehow ends up dangerously cold, in Tucson, in August. Sure enough, I started shivering as I coasted down towards the Bug Spring trail. There was so much water on the road, and so many drivers abandoning the mountain (some of whom were likely drunk from the mountain music festival) that it was an easy choice.

Climb. Climb or die?

I did not clean ‘the scar’. But the warmth from the effort and hiking was welcome.

I broke out into goosebumps as I crested the top and got a look at the big bad anvil the storm had become. The lightning continued, and though the storm was miles away, I didn’t dawdle on the ridgetop.

The soil on Lemmon is something else. Despite inches of rain, things were not muddy. Far from it. It was hero dirt, and I quickly found myself able to tap into the same hyper focused state of riding.

I installed headphones into my ears. The lyrics spoke of emptiness and desolation. The usual uplifting (but perhaps thought provoking) stuff, you know? Like most of us, life has seemed empty and boring to me at times, more in the far past than lately. But as the tunes ran through my head all I could think was how much that has changed. I don’t pretend that riding bikes has any kind of intrinsic meaning, but it definitely has meaning for me. Meaning is a human construct anyway. Beyond ‘meaning’, one thing was certain — this was not an ordinary, meaningless day. No sleepwalking and emptiness here. Riding through that storm woke me up in ways I can’t describe. No doubt, I am here, and I am alive.

The visuals feed my imagination. The air, cool and fresh. Trail, amazing and well known. My bike floats effortlessly over it, grooving and sliding just right.

My brain races with all sorts of wondrous thoughts, while another part of it handles the riding, the speed and the flow.

The sun sets ablaze as I reach the valley floor. Warm air finally drying me out as the thoughts fade into the darkness of smooth pedaling.