The Companions

Adventures fly or fall based on one's choice of travelling companion. Good companions laugh at your jokes, drink at the same pace you do, light up at the cool things you see and share the pure zen of what you are doing in the great outdoors.

I don't have a lot to say about bad companions, because I have been very, very fortunate to know a few dozen intrepid souls in my life who love adventuring in the same way I do.

My favorite part of sharing an adventure is the moments in which I am completely one with nature, where the place and the experience reach into my soul and take hold and I glance over at my companion, catch his or her eye and know that at that moment, nature got them in the same way it got me. At moments like that, nothing else matters - and I know when I hit that search key and find the next one, these are the people I'll call.

Don and Julian are those kind of people.

I've known Don for thirty years now, and I first met him within an extraordinary group of Frisbee players at Sonoma State University, where I spent my formative years. That was such a fun group of people, and I know all of us still feel that way about each other. Every now and then, I'll see one of this group of 40-50 people, and we all have the same black and white group picture, taken at a tournament in about 1977.

I think Don must smile all the time, and he's got a spirit that doesn't quit. He's a great athlete, and he meets the prerequsites of an appreciation for nearly any kind of bad humor, a taste for beer and owning a servicable mountain bike.

Don did me an amazing favor last year. When I moved east about ten years ago from Marin Country, I had in many ways given up on mountain biking. To leave Mt. Tam and its hundreds of miles of trail and dirt roads was a bummer, and I resisted mountain biking here in favor of the road. I always kept cycling, but I left behind something that was a true passion. Last spring, while I was on a business trip to San Diego, Don borrowed a mountain bike for me from a friend, and took me out into the high desert for a ride. It was like being born again. A week after getting home, I had ordered a new bike. Two weeks later I was back riding every day. A month later I ordered another bike. And now, I can't get it out of my system. Thanks, man.

Don is the star of one of my other blogs, The Big Lemon Tour of Southern Mexico.

Julian is a refugee from New Zealand, now living in New York and dividing his time between is vocation as an ace software designer and his avocation as a filmmaker, African drummer and tribal dancer. He too rides a mountain bike every day, but the path he travels, through downtown traffic with a thirty-pound drum on his back, are far more trecherous than the trails Don and I ride.

I met Julian many years ago through his partner Kate, who I had met in the early eighties while doing my mid-college Eurail trip through Europe. I discovered their love of hiking, and for years, I would entice them to come West for trips into the intense beauty of the Eastern Sierra.

Somewhere in the midst of all these trips, Julian and I learned of the stunning John Muir Trail, and in 1999, we spent an intoxicating three weeks hiking the JMT in celebration of our 40th birthdays. That trip is chronicled here.

This will be a good combination, I think.

The Route

When I entered that search, I was literally thinking in my mind of a trip somewhere REALLY cool, like Telluride or Moab, and a trip where the heavy lifting would be done by someone else. I like traveling by bike, but the idea of schlepping fully-loaded panniers is simply a drag.

The San Juan Hut System is actually two hut systems, one along the route from Telluride, Colorado to Moab, Utah, and the other (the newer of the two) serving Durango, Colorado to Moab. The Telluride route has been described in the popular press as "The Most Spectacular Ride in America," and from all the online journals and articles I've read (including major articles in National Geographic, the New York Times, Backpacker and (shudder) Men's Journal), the reputation is well deserved.

The trip spans 206 miles, starting in the mountain ski village of Telluride. It courses through the San Juan Mountains, across the 100-mile Uncompahgre Plateau, then the La Sal Range of Utah and ends near the Slickrock Trail mountain bike Mecca in Moab. Accommodations are provided in six eight-person huts stocked with food, beer (with limes!), sleeping bags and firewood. This combination means that one can travel light, making the 35 mile days with thousands of feet of elevation change reasonably accessible for a cyclist in decent condition.

But, the trip demands respect. It is a long distance, and you must be in good shape. The combination of elevation and constant sun presents a serious risk of dehydration - and you have to drink a lot of water. There is only one town en route (Gateway, Colorado), so you have to carry tools and bike parts and know how to use them. Altitudes range as high as 11,500 feet, and aclimitization is important. And there are snakes and scorpions and lightning and flash storms and snowfall in every month of the year.

Cool.

The Beginning - Where Vacations Come From

Adventure:: ¹ad·ven·ture
Pronunciation: &d-'ven-ch&r
Function: noun
Etymology: Middle English aventure, chance, risk, from Anglo-French, from Vulgar Latin *adventura, from Latin adventus, past participle of advenire to arrive, from ad- + venire to come
1 a : an undertaking usually involving danger and unknown risks b : the encountering of risks
2 : an exciting or remarkable experience adventure in exotic dining

I'm not sure exactly how my love of adventure crept into my being, but it has been there for a long time, and it never goes away. When I was little, we lived near a long canyon near Berkeley, California - now a regional park. Within walking distance of our house (albeit a long walk) was a retired Nike missile base, numerous run down and abandoned farm buildings, an active earthquake fault, an old National Guard shooting range and dozens of square miles of woodland, trails and dirt roads. And while other kids in our neighborhood played stickball, my friends and I had adventures.

We scavanged the old tunnels at the missile base. We swam in the running muddy streams after it rained. We'd pick a direction between our houses and a nearby shopping center and travel in that direction only - straight through the yards of every house in our path. We climbed trees. We got lost. We rode dirt roads on our bikes, long before anyone ever invented the mountain bike.

These adventures were the result of pure improvisation - often hatched with little more than someone's answer to the question: "what do you guys want to do today?"

A good adventure was defined by coming home too late for dinner. Having your mom make you take your clothes off at the door was a plus. Getting grounded was a badge of honor. Getting brought home by the police in the dark made you a hero.

And being a guilable kid, sometimes I was caused to have an adventure when I didn't want one. The worst example of this was the night some older kids invited me to sneak out of the house and play capture the flag. I did not quite grasp the improbability of a four-person capture the flag game in an area the size of Central Park until I heard my father's concerned voice wafting over the trees . . . at 2:00 in the morning while I sat atop a tall tree awaiting orders from my team captain. Stupid me.

So here I sit, nearly 50, and I can't get adventuring out of my soul. I spend vacations cycling or hiking or kayaking and always have. I love getting lost. I love bad weather. The best mornings of my life are spent on my mountain bike, trying to find new ways to ride the wonderful state park near our home in Maine.

But the responsibilities of adulthood affect my adventures. I have a full time job. I have two wonderful sons. I have a partner and a house. And I like this side of life. But part of me wants to live another life as a merry nomad, living out of the back of a van, climbing and skiing and cycling the world . . .

It was in the context of this collision of adventure and responsibility that one day I went on to Google and typed in the search phrase: "mountain bike hut to hut."

The first hit on the screen was my dream come true and before I had finished the first paragraph of the description on the website, I had sent emails to my friends Don and Julian with the link and the simple message: "we MUST do this trip."

They agreed, and we fly five weeks from today.