It is quite a balancing act to find the perfect topography for mountain biking: mountains and canyons that are fun to look at, but are not so harshly vertical to make pedaling a wheeled machine impossible.
There is a beauty to land that is felt rather than seen; felt from the pressure in your feet, butt, and legs. When steering, shifting gears, or leaning your weight, you feel the land like a wind surfer or sea-kayaker feels the surf of the sea.
On the way back we passed a group of hikers who were getting out of their motor vehicles (their most important outdoor equipment, after all) and getting organized to climb the nondescript mountain in the photo, above. There was something un-stereotypical about them that pulled me in. Perhaps it was the high dog/hiker ratio. Maybe it was the vehicles: not a single Honda CR-V or Subaru Forester in the bunch. And everybody was wearing long pants, long-sleeve shirts, and broad brimmed hats. (They were from Arizona.)
They were attempting the trick that I had been thinking about: taking an ATV trail partly up the nondescript mountain, bushwhacking through a dead spruce forest, and then, hopefully, popping out onto that beautiful flowery and grassy ridgeline, for a soft boustrophedon walk to the top.
The next day I came back and tried it. The ATV trail turned out to be flattish and smooth enough. But where was the point to cut away from it and bushwhack through the dead forest? I had hoped to see better through the dead forest, and to get a peek at a bright green spot, the tell-tale hint of the desired grassy ridge.
No such luck. Eventually I realized that the chance was missed. Now what? What a desirable question that is! It is fun to be stymied by nature. To hell with maps or GPS gadgets. Let it be an honest duel between the mountain and the man, with only the sun to steer by.
Would the ATV trail eventually give me a peek through the dead forest to the giant "park" (meadow) that dominates this area? If so, I could tromp my way back to the dirt road.
This time, it worked. We emerged onto miles of open and soggy meadow, graced with una brisa fresca. There is no pleasure sweeter than feeling openness and a breeze after the buggy claustrophobia of a dense and vista-free forest. I felt giddy, and wanted to put my arms out wide and start turning, like Julie Andrews at the beginning of "Sound of Music."
Ahh but Mother Nature still had a few tricks up her sleeve. The meadow looked dry on top. But you never knew when your step down would produce a squish. I was finally appreciating Gore-Tex hiking boots! The meadow was a plurality of semi-parallel swales. A swell word, 'swale', and this is the year for it. One syllable, fun to say, and of "origin unknown" according to Merriam-Webster.
The grassy part of the meadow fell off into a bushy part. One has to be careful not to be suckered into supposed through-routes of grass, only to land in a cul-de-sac of unwalkable bushes.
This was great sport. It was like kayaking through a marshy estuary, and keeping your senses attuned to the slightest current in the water, which might suggest a through-route, and finally debouch into an open bay.
Out in the middle of the soggy meadow there was a good view of the mountain that I had somehow missed:
From this angle it looks so easy to find the isthmus to the soft curves of the mountain.
There is a certain type of land that brings a smile to my face, and why shouldn't it? No shape is more pleasing to the fevered male imagination than a reclining earth-goddess:
Stripped of modern perversions of nature, and spurning the prudishness of the virginal Henry David Thoreau, there is no reason to be uni-sex or puritanical when "nature-writing." Nature means all of nature, not just some of it.
Instead, let us embrace the timeless classics of Mythology 101, by seeking out productive land that embodies the Female and Mother principle, while consigning the Male principle to the sky...
...with all his bombast, showing off, and undependability.
Or better yet, consider the brief drama of the two opposite Principles temporarily cooperating with each other:
Be that as it may, was I ever going to make it back to the van? It helps to look for rocky lines through the soggy meadow, because you stay dry along them. I successfully navigated my way through the bushy cul-de-sacs, only to end up in larger cul-de-sacs of meadows and dead trees. But we kept on until the dirt road could be peeked at through the dendrological detritus of the Rio Grande national forest.
Out we popped onto the dirt road, and just a few feet away from my big white van. An unsuccessful summit, but a successful meandering loop.
There is a beauty to land that is felt rather than seen; felt from the pressure in your feet, butt, and legs. When steering, shifting gears, or leaning your weight, you feel the land like a wind surfer or sea-kayaker feels the surf of the sea.
On the way back we passed a group of hikers who were getting out of their motor vehicles (their most important outdoor equipment, after all) and getting organized to climb the nondescript mountain in the photo, above. There was something un-stereotypical about them that pulled me in. Perhaps it was the high dog/hiker ratio. Maybe it was the vehicles: not a single Honda CR-V or Subaru Forester in the bunch. And everybody was wearing long pants, long-sleeve shirts, and broad brimmed hats. (They were from Arizona.)
They were attempting the trick that I had been thinking about: taking an ATV trail partly up the nondescript mountain, bushwhacking through a dead spruce forest, and then, hopefully, popping out onto that beautiful flowery and grassy ridgeline, for a soft boustrophedon walk to the top.
The next day I came back and tried it. The ATV trail turned out to be flattish and smooth enough. But where was the point to cut away from it and bushwhack through the dead forest? I had hoped to see better through the dead forest, and to get a peek at a bright green spot, the tell-tale hint of the desired grassy ridge.
No such luck. Eventually I realized that the chance was missed. Now what? What a desirable question that is! It is fun to be stymied by nature. To hell with maps or GPS gadgets. Let it be an honest duel between the mountain and the man, with only the sun to steer by.
Would the ATV trail eventually give me a peek through the dead forest to the giant "park" (meadow) that dominates this area? If so, I could tromp my way back to the dirt road.
This time, it worked. We emerged onto miles of open and soggy meadow, graced with una brisa fresca. There is no pleasure sweeter than feeling openness and a breeze after the buggy claustrophobia of a dense and vista-free forest. I felt giddy, and wanted to put my arms out wide and start turning, like Julie Andrews at the beginning of "Sound of Music."
Ahh but Mother Nature still had a few tricks up her sleeve. The meadow looked dry on top. But you never knew when your step down would produce a squish. I was finally appreciating Gore-Tex hiking boots! The meadow was a plurality of semi-parallel swales. A swell word, 'swale', and this is the year for it. One syllable, fun to say, and of "origin unknown" according to Merriam-Webster.
The grassy part of the meadow fell off into a bushy part. One has to be careful not to be suckered into supposed through-routes of grass, only to land in a cul-de-sac of unwalkable bushes.
This was great sport. It was like kayaking through a marshy estuary, and keeping your senses attuned to the slightest current in the water, which might suggest a through-route, and finally debouch into an open bay.
Out in the middle of the soggy meadow there was a good view of the mountain that I had somehow missed:
From this angle it looks so easy to find the isthmus to the soft curves of the mountain.
There is a certain type of land that brings a smile to my face, and why shouldn't it? No shape is more pleasing to the fevered male imagination than a reclining earth-goddess:
Instead, let us embrace the timeless classics of Mythology 101, by seeking out productive land that embodies the Female and Mother principle, while consigning the Male principle to the sky...
...with all his bombast, showing off, and undependability.
Or better yet, consider the brief drama of the two opposite Principles temporarily cooperating with each other:
Be that as it may, was I ever going to make it back to the van? It helps to look for rocky lines through the soggy meadow, because you stay dry along them. I successfully navigated my way through the bushy cul-de-sacs, only to end up in larger cul-de-sacs of meadows and dead trees. But we kept on until the dirt road could be peeked at through the dendrological detritus of the Rio Grande national forest.
Out we popped onto the dirt road, and just a few feet away from my big white van. An unsuccessful summit, but a successful meandering loop.
Comments
An early eighteenth century non-conformist and Swedenborgian and older contemporary of William Blake, Boustrophedon Jones’ philosophy was influential on Hamann and thereby a key figure in the counter-enlightenment. His greatest work “Midnight Thoughts of a Solitary Walker” makes an analogy between thinking and walking, emphasizing that like walking thinking is a series of falls or stumbles, and fulminating against “The Projectile Fallacy” the view that man is a projectile flying towards a pre-determined goal. For Jones, rather, goals are imminent in the practice of falling. His followers have worked out the implications in more or less radical directions. For Queene, Jones is a fallibilist and an empiricist, for De Rakauer he is a proto-fascist.
I could not find a link to his 'greatest work' but the description leads me to believe that you have read it. A series of falls and stumbles is what your posting was about, a failure to summit but a successful loop ride.
Actually I was using 'boustrophedon', half-facetiously, as a fancy-pants way of saying 'switchbacks up a mountain."
But I was trying to turn that into an advantage by wallowing in misery for 30 minutes when walking through such an ugly forest, and then popping out onto the grass for a blast of euphoria.