A Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven

Long is the way
And hard, that out of Hell leads up to light.
John Milton, Paradise Lost

Like the river we cannot stand in twice, we never see the same face of Death Valley twice in one day.

Every hour the sun highlights different features, shades, shadows. There are earth tones never dreamed of by L.L. Bean. Winds shift direction capriciously and sift the sands around in ever-changing patterns. There is even a place called The Racetrack where rocks seem to move across the ground on their own. Belying its name, Death Valley is alive with sensory temptation.

Bikes at Zabriskie Point

It is also one of the places in North America where you can actually put your life in danger just by going out the door. Merciless sun and wind plus the driest air anywhere can make short work of any soul who ventures outside unprepared. Natural beauty notwithstanding, Death Valley would not at first seem the most welcoming place to spend a week of recreational cycling.

Which is exactly what we did at the annual Adventure Corps Camp this past week. Forty-plus cyclists descended into the Valley for five days of strenuous and stimulating bicycling tours. I think it would be hard to find a participant who would trade away a minute of it. Just to feel part of the overwhelming grandeur of the place is to feel different than you have felt anywhere else. A sudden shaft of sunlight illuminates a striated rock face, sculpted by wind and sand, and all of a sudden you are pedaling through a photo opportunity that could never be captured with a camera. To have such topography as a backdrop to a bike ride is a gift.

Riding up from Badwater

From Tuesday to Friday the weather was flawless: light winds and warm temperatures. We rode to a different corner of the Valley every day, trying out long climbs and descents and enjoying the stark beauty. Each afternoon there was a blessed Yoga session for relief of tired muscles and quieting of overworked minds.

In the evenings my friends and I would sit on the patio up at the Furnace Creek Inn and watch the sun set over the Valley while gentle desert breezes played with the fronds of the palm trees.

Sunset in Death Valley - thanks to Pam and Dave for these photos



The last ride of the week, on Saturday, was the Hell’s Gate Hundred, a tough century ride 4500 feet up through Daylight Pass and into the ghost town of Rhyolite. There was also a 65 mile version, a metric century, which I chose to do as it was more suited to my current talents. The ride begins with a tour of Artists Drive, which looks like an innocuous little loop on the map but is in fact a vicious, sharply-graded climb into the mountains followed by a steep, twisting white-knuckle descent. I rode this loop on my own on Thursday so that I wouldn’t be totally surprised during the Saturday ride.

But of course there are always surprises. That’s why the group is called Adventure Corps and not Boring Corps.

What I have learned, with some help from my friends Pam and Dave, is that cycling in Death Valley is not so much a feat of will or strength as it is a negotiation between oneself and nature. No one defeats the elements here; at best we learn how our abilities or limitations can work with what the Fates throw at us on any given day. My final lesson was about to come at me.

The morning of the Hell’s Gate Hundred dawned hot and clear, and violently windy. As it had at the Spring Century last year, the wind roared out of the south unchecked by anything except the bicyclists who dared to place themselves in its path. Remembering how I had exhausted myself back in 2011, I rode the eight miles south to Artists Drive slowly and patiently. The climb upward was bearable but the descent was positively scary with strong winds tearing through the canyons in all directions. My hands became numb from the death grip I had on the handlebars and brake levers.

There was a welcome respite as I rode the tailwind northbound for about 20 miles. Then a tedious 10-mile climb took me up to Hell’s Gate itself, the turnaround. I had ridden back down this route earlier in the week and had used my brakes to keep from going too fast. This time, with the wind charging up the hill at me, I had to pedal just to keep going downward and to stay upright. But the true challenge was waiting at the bottom of the hill.



Dust in the Wind

Turning due southward towards Furnace Creek for the last 10 miles, the full force of the wind slammed into me. It was scarily hard to stay upright on the bike without being blown over and forward progress was nearly impossible. Into this mix was added a sandstorm that deposited a small quarry’s worth of gravel into my eyes. Looking down at the white line at the side of the road, I pedaled one stroke after another, achieving a speed of perhaps three miles per hour. These conditions were worse than last year’s by far; in short, it was Hell. When riding became too difficult, I began walking my bike along the side of the road.

I continued in this way for about an hour, being buffeted and sandblasted, until my dear friends from Cleveland, Saint Dave and Saint Pamela came by in their car and saved me. I can’t say I was even reluctant to accept their offer of a ride the last five miles to the finish. I had given it everything I had but on this day, Death Valley had the last word, and I accepted it. For the rest of the afternoon a lot of very kind folks in cars spent their time fetching stranded and spent riders from the road; they are the true angels of this story.

All in all I had pedaled 60 miles (one for each year of my life…) in appalling conditions and I am proud of that accomplishment. On top of this I had magnificent riding in beautiful weather in the week leading up to the Hell’s Gate Hundred: thousands of feet of climbing and descending with hundreds of miles of cycling. I count it all as a success. If we pay attention, Death Valley gives us more than it takes away; we don't come here to show off what we can do, we come to learn what the Valley can teach us, and to leave wiser.

John Milton had a point: our minds are indeed capable of making a Heaven of Hell or a Hell of Heaven, sometimes both at once I would add. This past week our minds also had help from Death Valley.

Here Comes the Sun

“You will never find anybody who can give you a clear and compelling reason why we observe Daylight Saving Time”
-- Dave Barry, 25 Things I Have Learned in 50 Years

One thing that the arrival of Daylight Saving Time does for me: I have gotten back on my bike and have started riding to work again. This winter we had almost no snow and unseasonably high temperatures throughout; if there had ever been a winter to ride to work this was it. The thing is that I have had too many near misses and scary encounters in the dark of winter – snow or not – to make the practice appealing to me anymore. And so from November to mid-March I took the subway to work, reading my New Yorker and trying not to look like an off duty cyclist.



My commute: part of the Don Valley Trail

 The fortunate thing is that with no snow and ice around this spring, I can ride most of the way to work along off-road bike paths – usually blocked till April - leaving the pathetically gridlocked Toronto drivers to take out their rage on each other rather than on me. To boot, I have new shifters on my handlebars this spring, courtesy of my talented son who is a bike mechanic in his spare time.

In a couple of weeks I am off to Death Valley National Park for a week of cycling organized by the good people at Adventure Corps. The format of the training camp suits my Type B personality, with not a lot of compulsory hard core work and yoga and “Tea Social” breaks in the afternoons.

Badwater - love it or hate it

The week concludes with a Century event called the Hell’s Gate Hundred; with a name like that I expect it’s going to be a good workout. Within the first ten miles there is a vicious little climb along the innocuously named Artists’ Palette. Last winter I drove up to the turnaround point at the ghost town of Rhyolite and all I can recall is an endless climb to a mountain pass that was covered in snow. So no day at the beach at that end either.

I feel though that after surviving the infernal headwinds in the Death Valley Spring Century last year I am ready for anything.

My Cervélo R3 is beautifully tuned up and cleaned (also courtesy of a bike mechanic in the family). All I have to do now is lose 10 pounds and figure out how to climb 8,500 feet on my bike in the next three weeks.



Spring Flowers in Death Valley

 Or more likely…after a week of Corps Camp Shivasana poses and chamomile tea I might just be more in the mood to sit on the grass and watch the riders come and go.

As always, simply getting there with my bike box will be there greatest workout. The first time I went to Death Valley was in October 2008, three weeks after I had crashed and torn the ligaments in my Acromial Clavicular Joint; I carried my bags and pulled my bike box through the airports all with one arm. It should be half as hard this time, assuming I retain the use of both limbs for the next week.

Post-Idiot Stress Syndrome

“We may not be able to prevent every fatality on our roads but we owe it to those who have died — and to each other — to do what we can to make our roads safer”.
Toronto Star op-ed article, August 28, 2011

Call me prejudiced. To me, a person who would get in his car, drive a few blocks, line up with other cars, and then remain seated behind the wheel to order, pay for, pick up and consume his breakfast would not seem like a big supporter of cycling in the city. I’ve often joked to myself that it can be dangerous to get between a McDonald’s customer and his Sausage McMuffin. This morning I did, and almost became a Sausage McMuffin myself.

I was riding to work, westbound in the bike lane on Cosburn. A car turning left very rapidly in front of me into the McDonald’s drive-through came within inches of knocking me down, hard. Did the driver later think later about the fact that he could have killed me? Or did he think: “stupid bikes; shouldn’t be on the goddamn road”?

I don’t think I am a stupid bike. I try to be a safe rider. I wear a helmet, signal my turns and use lots of bright lights at night. I actually come to a stop at stop signs. This last action causes some bemusement among drivers, who take it as an invitation to roll on through in front of me without stopping themselves. So what more can I do?

This section of Cosburn is a bit of a graveyard. There is always a crowd of vehicles trying to squeeze into the hopelessly un-supersized McDonald’s parking lot. The last thing any of the burger-for-breakfast club are looking out for is a bicycle, despite the fact that a painted bike lane runs right down the side of the road. Should I expect less from the drive-through demographic then?

The frightening thing is that this morning’s scare was only one of many such near misses, and every cyclist has a compendium of similar there-I-wuz stories. (As I write this, a driver has been charged with driving up onto the sidewalk and knocking a woman off her bike with his car following an altercation, then fleeing the scene.)

What defense do we have against this? Almost daily I have to take some kind of evasive action to escape a sloppy or selfish driver while I’m riding to work. The other day I was cut off by a car making a last-minute unannounced exit off the Bloor Viaduct towards the Don Valley Parkway. His car sported a bumper sticker reading “Jesus is the Answer”. No, I thought, signalling your turns is the answer.

I can testify that nearly being run over, even if it happens often, is not something you get used to.

A female cyclist was killed the other day by a right-turning truck. Although there is no way to know if this particular accident could have been avoided, what I do know is that the circumstances of her tragic death lessen the value of living in this city. To borrow from John Donne, the death of anyone on our streets diminishes us all.

Bike lanes are not the answer; side guards on trucks are not the answer; pitched war between cyclists and motorists is definitely not the answer. Awareness and enlightenment might be the beginning to an answer, and sadly I suspect that neither of these things will happen here any time soon. Our mayor has implied that we cyclists – along with streetcars and other forms of above ground transit - are part of some perversely imagined ‘war on the car’, which he pledged to end when he took office. He was elected by a landslide.

Mayor McCheese and his Sausage McMuffin Brigade have won this battle for now; I am weary of the stress. After this week, my commuting bike is going away for the winter. Even though the roads are still clear and there is plenty of autumn riding left to do, it is getting too dark and cold and mean out there.