I was camping and mountain biking recently on some Utah land that seemed slightly upland. There was nothing spectacular about it, but I was quite fond of it.
Why were the rocks so rounded as they typically are near rivers? (It is not so hard to visualize sand in rivers abrading rocks into a rounded shape.) But we were 8 miles from the mighty Green River. Maybe geology just isn't the right study for appreciating what it is all about.
Something truly amazing caught me by surprise. I biked for a hundred feet on one of the trails and didn't bump into one rock. Not one! Is there anything sweeter to a mountain biker than a smooth trough of packed dirt?
I tell ya, the world ain't fair. How many times does a tourist gush over smooth ground? Poets don't praise it, musicians don't rhapsodize over it, and the local chamber of commerce doesn't offer a free brochure extolling it.
Maybe I am at the phase in my RV career when I don't need to gawk at mountains anymore.
It has been years since a piece of smoothness seemed so nice to me. The last time was on some rocky shithole of a trail outside Madera Canyon, south of Tucson.
Photography isn't the right medium for honoring and appreciating a smooth trail. Music is. Here is an offering from Brahms, his piano quintet in F minor, opus 34, the second movement.
He called it "Andante, un poco adagio." Only a mountain biker, with a Translate app, can really appreciate the beauty of those words when on a playful soft kitten of a trail.
 |
| Maybe I was wrong about photography not being able to appreciate soft trails. (I can't find the photographer's credit, right now.) |
Comments