First light in the east. A balmy 72 degrees, singlet weather, at 5am. You pump up the tires, retrieve the frozen water bottles from the freezer, pocket some almonds and dates. Click in the pedals and roll off into the warming light. Left on Pantano, no need to wait for the light this time of day. Where’s my cannon? Empty streets. You drop gently into Tanque Verde wash, the temperature drops 10 degrees, and the delicious cold air gives the last chill of what will be a triple digit day.

Bicycle sunrise over Redington Pass on the way to Mount Lemmon

A red sun peeks over the Redington Pass, between saguaros and mesquites. You pick up the pace just a bit on Catalina Highway. The temperature warms again, bringing familiar desert scents with sunrise. Still cool, with a hint of the buildup of humidity before the monsoon. Twenty percent today maybe. Enough to make your heart rate monitor work.

Beginning the Climb of the Catalina Mountains, Mount Lemmon

At milepost one the climbing begins. Shift down. Sit up. Spin. Deep breaths now. Heart rate up just a bit. Look up at the rocky ridges studded with saguaros, washed in amber morning. Ignore the growing warmth in quads and glutes. Keep your shoulders relaxed. This is for fun, not just fitness, not just health.

Life Zones Change to the Music of your Breath

Life zones change as you climb higher

Somewhere below 5,000 feet, you notice the saguaros are gone, replaced by oak grasslands and twenty foot agaves in bloom. Another thousand feet and you enter Bear Canyon and feel the cool from Arizona sycamores and alligator junipers. Further up the canyon, you notice the piney vanilla scent of huge ponderosas, their green crowns spiking the now intense blue sky. Breathe deep. Stand on the pedals. Stretch your back and shoulders. Push a little. Feel the burn, the joy of your body, working as it should. A canyon wren’s liquid descending song cheers you on.

City of Rocks at Windy Point

One big hairpin and you enter a city of rocks, white and pink granite spires rising from a recently burned mountainside. The black spikes have sprouted bright new green at their bases, reminders of the cycle of fire and life. The hoodoos present you with more forms than your imagination can count. They distract you from the tightness creeping into your left hamstring. At Windy Point, an expansive view of the Tucson valley tempts you to rest. A few early climbers gear up and head down to favored climbing spires. Someday. A few miles of steep sweeping curves and even more spectacular hoodoos later, and you pierce the pine woods again. More bird calls. Lots of them. Jays and creepers, a redtail hawk overhead. Now bronze barked manzanita, spindly lodgepole pines and larger oaks. There are new smells as the air warms. You are racing the sun up the mountain, and the sun is winning.

To the World of Aspens and Spruce

You climb another couple of thousand feet in the mixed forest, a mile of downhill and then up again. Turn right before the village of Summerhaven, destroyed by fire a decade ago, now sprouting big new houses and a few business. Your goal is higher, Ski Valley, the most southerly ski slope in the U.S. The last mile is steep. Breathe deep. You stand in your lowest gear, and it’s still hard. Finally you see the grassy ski slopes, devoid of snow for months, ringed by aspens quaking shiny silver-green leaves in the breeze, a breeze that brings you the scent of dark spruce deeper in the forest. At just under 9,000 feet, you have arrived, botanically speaking, in southern Canada.

Descent into Hell’s Furnace

A few minutes rest and it’s time to let gravity work for you for awhile. You fill your water bottles, have a snack. Then it’s a bit of down and a bit of up and you begin the 20 mile downhill you have earned. All the smells your nose remembers from the way up assault your senses again, but at high speed this time, fleeting, reminding you of the work behind you. At 30 miles per hour, you lose elevation quickly and the heat begins to rise to you from the valley. The valley furnace awaits. A light tailwind pushes you through a tight curve at 46 miles per hour, demanding full attention and causing you to forget the rising heat. Or was it the extra sweat from the moment of near panic?

With five miles to go to the base you begin soaking your jersey with water. It’s already well in to the 90′s and you know the eight more miles home from the base will take you over the 100 mark. The sense of becoming one with the heat is intoxicating, a strange thrill. You might as well enjoy it. It’s due to be 1o8 in the afternoon. You are glad to be back before noon.

Your Accomplishment

You’ve ridden your bike 70 miles, from the landscape of Northern Mexico to that of Southern Canada, and back, climbed between 6,000 and 7,000 feet, in six hours or so. Not easy but doable, and oh so rewarding. Those of you who have done it know. The rest of you now have a new goal.

Leftover snow with underlying ice made the going a tad slow in places. Seven miles and 3,000 vertical feet to Linda Vista, a good hike for my feet. Nice to be breathing in the fresh scents of the desert plants and stimulating  conversation with friends. A new trail for me. Maybe next time,after the ice melts, The Finger, a thousand or so feet higher.

Petrified Forest National Park is an easy exit from I-40 in the wide open spaces of Northern Arizona. Perhaps it is those vast desert plains, or deep blue skies, that keep drivers focused on the road to Grand Canyon or beyond. They are missing a starkly haunting place of spectacularly colored patterned petrified logs, and not so easily seen, but just as spectacular: dinosaur remains, petroglyphs, and fossils, and the mystery that surrounds their existence here.

Recently Claire and I were lucky enough to catch a hike guided by the park paleontologist and an interpretive ranger. The short, two mile or so, hike took us away from the road and interpretive signs and into the washes and flats where dinosaurs died 225 million  years ago in the late Triassic Period. We found pieces of bone and Claire even found an intact tooth.  The stark landscape adds to the mystery and amazement of the realization that you are holding a thing that was once part of a living Stagonolepis so long ago. Nothing like science to put one’s lifespan into perspective.

After a wet El Nino winter, the annual brittlebush and ocotillo are blooming strong, with other cactus just beginning a two month bloom. Now we can expect warm and clear days until summer monsoon rains in July.

Halfway through the ride, we visited the border and inspected the relatively new vehicle barrier fence. It is made up of cut and welded railroad ties and rolls across the undulating valley like a row of carefully placed pick-up jacks.

I like that it stops vehicles, capable of carrying large loads of drugs or illegals, without hindering the free flow of wildlife.

The route is on Forest Service roads, very well maintained, but a challenge for some with skinnier tires. A road bike would not survive the trip, but two cross bikes did fine. There was one tire casualty. We rode Zippy, our touring tandem without difficulty.

This ride gives the workout of a longer ride on paved roads, with the upper body workout of a non-technical mountain bike ride, the best of both worlds. There is almost no traffic and the silence is a welcome change from city riding. The San Rafael Valley is surrounded by mountain ranges: Patagonia Mountains on the west, Canelo Hills on the northwest, and the Santa Rita Mountains to the north.

This is the West  of imagination, the Marlboro Man leaning on his saddle horn surveying his herd. The valley is a favorite movie location.

The route climbs steadily into the Patagonia mountains in the Coronado National Forest.

The graded dirt road passes through or near the ghost towns (not all are abandoned) of Hershaw, Washington Camp, Duquesne and descends to the valley at Lochiel, where much of the land is in large ranch holdings.

Ranches in this part of Arizona are commonly in the thousands of acres.

The valley is a wide expanse of treeless grass with a few cattle and ranch houses in the distance. The riding is sublime and in spring and fall, cold in winter, hot in summer. Plan accordingly. Note that there is no water along the route.

The water is snowmelt from high in the Santa Catalina Mountains and is quite cold in late March. However an air temperature of over 80 degrees Fahrenheit makes the cold water feel very pleasant. Most of the year the stream can be crossed by rock hopping, but the heavy snow this winter, at the 7000-9000 ft level, has raised the creek to knee deep wading in places. No worries. Feet and shoes dry.

The wildflowers are late this year, due to the same El Nino conditions that produced so much moisture. Several annual flowers were  in bloom today, and the fat waterlogged cactus promises a spectacular bloom in April through June.

This is one of the busiest trails near Tucson, and long lines of hikers met us on the descent; high school kids on dates, families, college students and we mature hikers were all out to be immersed in the glory of spring.

Clear cold running water is a treat for those of us who love the desert, all the more appreciated because we know months of dry creek beds awaiting us until the monsoon rains descend from the thunderheads of July and August. That is when the real running water comes in flash floods of unimagined fury.

Sudden flash floods can come at this time of year also. Recently some young people were swimming in the pool at the second or third level of the falls, when a wall of water roared down the seven falls, caught them and carried them over one more fall and down the creek. The were lucky to survive. My thought is that an ice dam near the top of the mountain had suddenly breached, unleashing the flood. Life in the Sonoran desert can harbor surprises.

This is one of my favorite times of the year in the desert, flowing water, many colored blossoms, green foliage, cactus looking fat and happy, beginning to bud, and the Arizona sycamores and cottonwoods bursting with green. Soon our exercise days will begin at 5am and we will hibernate in the shade by early afternoon, working on computers or maybe even a cooler aided nap. Then we’ll  be out to see the sunset and twilight, enjoying the perfect temperatures of Tucson’s spring evenings.

We won’t be here for monsoon this summer, since we plan to vagabond through the Southwest into the Northwest and on to Alaska, our first visit here.

But for now we luxuriate in the warm sunshine and wonder at the beauty of it all.

Canyon Near The Wave in N. AZ

This two photo stitch was taken in The Wave permit area on Bureau of Land Management, Coyote Buttes North Unit, wilderness area in Northern Arizona.

I would like to have had a person in the photo for scale, but the sides were way too steep, including the place where I was standing. The green patches are not brush, but reasonable sized Utah Juniper trees. We hiked in at sunrise, we had the place to ourselves four hours. Next trip one of us will walk into the canyon from the lower end. It is probably two hundred feet deep. There are many other spectacular spots in this area for a reasonably short hike. We hiked three miles in and another two while there, so a reasonable eight mile hike, every step spectacular SW landscape.

This is a remembrance of a hike in July of 2009, looking forward to a six month trip in our motorhome, Turtle beginning in May.

Rainy Day Lunch

Claire’s fresh from the oven multi-grain (no knead recipe) bread, Gorgonzola, avocado, tomato, a salad with raspberry vinaigrette and pecans.

Gorgonzola, pears and walnuts for desert

Nice rainy day lunch and together time. Life is good.

Right now, June, we are in what the Australians in Queensland and Northern Territory, Australia, call the buildup. It is also called the silly season, the murder season — you get the idea, it drives people nuts. It is the hottest part of the year, and the humidity rises to uncomfortable levels. The Arizona buildup is nothing compared to say, Darwin, where 110f + temperatures somehow manage to hold 80% humidity. In Tucson we think it is unbearable when the humidity hits 35%, no matter what the temperature. In Phoenix, they get much higher humidity, and temps, because they like to have large lawns they water daily; Karma if you ask me.

As June comes to an end, we can begin to sense the monsoon rains inching closer, and that knowledge produces an interesting mix of physical misery and spiritual hope that is positively intoxicating. We check the Doppler radar on Yahoo Weather constantly: is that blotch of red, ringed with yellow and green, bending in our direction? Dare we hope the monsoon will begin today?

Soon, one 100 + day will, imperceptibly at first, begin to show cute little summer puffy clouds, the ones much of the country gets at some time during the summer. But, surrounding these innocent looking clouds, miles up in the deep blue desert sky, hide huge quantities of moisture. As the afternoon wears on, and the desert floor pumps blistering heat up into the mix, those cute clouds begin to morph, slowly at first, then more rapidly into unbelievably tall white clouds with inky blue/black bottoms, impossibly convoluted, beautiful and powerful. Therein hides lightning not to be believed, thunder to rattle buildings and the nerves of living things, and followed by downpours of Genesis 5 proportions (well, maybe not quite that outrageous).

Will this be the day?

Stay tuned.