off to the races....

Hello to my people. It's been a while, or at least it seems like it. We have become much more active lately, both work-wise and play-wise. It's really, truly summer. We are loving it. It is almost hot some days.

Work-wise, it is the same old thing... the people come, the people go, they leave a mess, we take care of it. We as in Seymour Lodging. B and I have not cleaned for over a year. Managing the office and appeasing guests is a full time job for him. Inspecting is not such a full time job for me. I get up in the mornings, load my bike on it's rack on the back of the jeep, throw my backpack, helmet, jersey, and bike shoes in the backseat, and haul them around with me while I work. Then, as soon as I get done, i am usually in Keystone anyway, so I park at the Mountain House, change in the parking lot behind the open jeep door, clip in, and hit the service road that winds 2,360 feet up to the summit, over six miles. After the first few brutal turns, the steepest part of the whole uphill route, I usually jump onto a green singletrack. (Bike trails are rated the same as ski trails- green for easiest, blue for more difficult, black for most difficult, and black double-diamond for extreme expert.) I think taking the singletrack adds a few more miles, but it saves one from having to slog through the deep gravel that covers the surface of the service road until about halfway up. It also makes one have to watch out for downhill traffic. Uphill traffic has the right of way on singletrack, but most of the riders who pay to have their bikes hauled to the top on the chairlift posess a sense of entitlement about yielding right-of-way on the way down. Or maybe they just do not reallise... I don't know. I do know it is tempting to give in to the feelings of entitlement myself, since I am the one working my tail off, pedalling uphill... but then, I am just cheap.

Once at the top, there are several options. Keystone has about four blue trails, for intermediate riders, and they are accessed by greens. Greens are good for cruising, a few technical turns, a few rocks and roots, fun, but nothing to really hone one's skills on. The blues have bigger rocks and roots, often ledge or stair type drops that can still be rolled down without catching air, and the hairpin turns are much tighter, but feature turn berms, banked so one can slide around them at much higher speeds. I seem to be a fairly solid intermediate rider. Once I pedal all the way to the top, an hour and forty five minutes, I have a forty minute coast back down, so to make it worth the climb, I have to choose my route carefully, so I do not waste precious feet of vertical drop on the service roads.

The last time i was up, day before yesterday, the plan was to catch the newest blue trail, Eye of the Tiger, that opened just this week. But at the turn-off for TNT, a black that winds along the gulch that marks the edge of "Spring Dipper" in the winter, I was grabbed by a sudden urge to venture onto a black. Warm sun, the scent of pine, not another soul on the mountain, except for a few still-sleepy employees finding their stations (this was before the lifts opened), deer bounding away from my racket, I used the same line of reasoning on myself that gets me into a lot of uncomfortable situations- "If ya don't try it, you'll never know if you can do it, and if you don't like it you won't have to wonder if you would". And, just in case that wasn't enough, "what's the worst that could happen?" At the end, I was glad I had taken it. There were quite a few "babyheads" rocks the size of a baby's head), and the surface of the trail was looser, and it was steeper, but it was still a fun, fast descent down a long-abandoned, overgrown logging road. I was glad to have shaken out from under the stigma I was feeling towards the black trails, because that gives me about fifty percent more options for ways to get down. (Not that that ever was the problem... it's getting up that's the problem!)

I didnt even crash... which was a good thing, because by the time I got home, B was ready to leave for Denver, tickets in hand, to go see the drag races at Bandimere Speedway. We met his dad, brother Jay, Jay's friend Craig, and the Arriba locals Jay and craig are custom harvesting for right now, and spent the day in the stands, alternately baking or soaking and freezing, depending on what the clouds decided to do. Of course the real reason the boys wanted to go was to experience the top fuel and funny cars take off while sitting 150 feet from the starting line. Having never been to a drag race, let alone a nitro qualifier, I wasnt sure just when to put my earplugs in... until the first two cars demonstrated a quarter mile in four and a half seconds. It was a bit traumatic. The shock waves shook the stands, the hairs on my arm stood up and shook, my ribs rattled against each other, car alarms went off in the surrounding parking lots. And my eardrums were so jarred and jiggled they wouldnt stop tickling.

They were also qualifying stock cars and motorcycles for finals the next day. Not 315 miles per hour, more like 150 to 190, but not so bone-jarringly loud either. The stands emptied out for these events, we had our choice of seats, we could carry on an intelligible conversation. We had a several hour rain delay, and huddled on the bleachers, thankful for a respite from the unbearable heat a few hours ago, but now, shivering in the wet and wind.

I think it's something about us and Denver sporting events. We went to a Rockies game last saturday with some friends, and the same thing happened. Oh, yeah, I had never been to a baseball game either. The ADD tends to kick in long before the ninth inning, especially with a rain delay. B says i make him think twice about taking me to these things. The attention span is simply too short. And he is scheming about Nascar this fall. Oh, it sounds like fun, but he wonders if the combination of bleacher seats, ADD, and a four hour event is up to the challenge. I just want to hit fast-forward like b does when he is watching the races he records while he is at work. Two hundred miles per hour is just a little too slow, I guess...