Co-Ed Bachelor Party

Squad

In 2019 we started planning for a Canada mountain bike trip this month to celebrate our pending nuptials with Nate and Amanda, Sam and Jordan, and Chrissy, a group of people that could handle basically any ride, conveniently including women that would be happy pedaling all day and guys that were interested in goading each other into hitting gaps and stuff. But COVID happened and closed the border, as well as delaying my and Chrissy's passport renewals, so we cast our eyes elsewhere and came up with Winter Park, Colorado. That was the plan until last Tuesday, when we learned that Jordan, who went down early with Sam, had a major crash and broke bones at Trestle Bike Park. She needed surgery and they wouldn't be able to come along on the trip. 

Suddenly, Cy and I were thinking the same thing: Colorado is hot, Colorado is crowded, why were we planning to go there? He started pacing the kitchen and spouting the benefits of northern Idaho, his beloved old stomping grounds. I was soon convinced, so I called our other group members. Rather than resenting our last-minute change of heart, they were totally game to go northwest instead of southeast. 

Base camp, night one

We departed early on Thursday morning. After finding a campsite outside of Kellogg, we set off for what I'd mistaken for a short afternoon ride nearby. We were all immediately delighted by the dense dark woods and rich creek beds lined with ferns and huckleberries, but less so by the unrelenting climb that continued growing steeper and rockier. (The adjective "unrelenting" was used in the description of the trail, a detail I glossed over.) We finished the slog soaked in sweat, then descended over steep root tangles and scattershot rock piles and through stream crossings. One crossing was studded with the remains of a moose skeleton and Cy claimed a paddle for our bone garden at home.  

Top of a very hard climb

Friday was dedicated to Silver Mountain Bike Park, which quickly proved to be technical, challenging, fun, and humbling. We learned that black diamond trails are accurately rated and that I'm still a bit too skittish for real DH, but it was a great day. Cy and the Careys took extra laps while Chrissy and I drank beers and lounged in the sun, counting our blessings to not have sustained injuries or bike failures on the rough, feature-laden trails.

Silver Mountain was hairy

After sleeping in the Silver parking lot we headed over to Coeur D'Alene for an easy little dog ride, then kept going to Spokane where, Cy promised, there was a rowdy in-town trail system. We rode Beacon Hill despite the devastating (to our delicate mountain bodies) heat and sun, and found some of it absurdly challenging (chunky rock rolls into kitty litter) and some of it quite entertaining, including an impeccable pump track. After a quick splash in the very inviting Spokane River and a brief stop at a dispensary, we headed north into Idaho. The town beach in Sandpoint was wildly crowded so we ate some tacos and drove up to Schweitzer Mountain Resort. Cy's nostalgia grew palpable as we arrived at the ski hill where he held his first season pass and started down the path to becoming the person he is now.

On Sunday, I enjoyed an actual breakfast burrito at an actual coffee shop after a few days of campground granola, then Cy and I took the dog for a short ride. We all regrouped and pedaled a mellow but lovely trail to the Schweitzer summit, where Cy felt all the feelings. We took a rocky, loamy descent back to the base, set a shuttle, and dropped further down the resort road on a purpose-built downhill full of small and large features, ripe with good dirt and giggles. 

You can sense the nostalgia

Although we had planned to spend another night at the resort parking lot because it was easy, the previous night had been marked by strong winds that knocked over camp chairs and filled every crevice with sand, so the Careys lobbied that we descend. Fortuitously, we found a quiet, scenic campsite on the north end of Lake Pend Oreille and enjoyed an evening swim in the choppy but not too cold water.

A lovely evening at Pend Oreille

On Monday morning our paths diverged. The Careys returned to Silver (it was that good) and Chrissy moseyed home, while we had firm plans to go for a run that Cy loved. He truly undersold the experience. After four miles of perfect running trail we summited to massive, breathtaking lake and peak views and visited with some very docile, photogenic mountain goats. Definitely on my top five best runs ever list.

Now we have more photos of us together

Perfect, perfect running

Oh yes, there were goats

Despite obligations looming on Tuesday, we opted to make one last detour on the long drive home, splitting the distance with a Monday night stop at hot springs deep in unknown (to me) territory. Despite being very popular hot springs, we found them nearly empty and devoid of weirdos. An easy night's sleep at the trailhead and a six hour drive home ended one of the best road trips I've ever gone on.

A worthwhile detour

Idaho, it's terrible. Don't come here.

A Belated Announcement

I met a guy.

We skied Taylor together with mutual friends on a late March morning with the unresolved promise of rain. The snow was subpar. The boy was interesting and fun to talk to. I distinctly recall saying to my friend in the car afterward, "He's cute." My friend would go on to date my ex, so all's fair.

The guy and I developed a pretty great friendship. I inserted him into my big noisy group of roommates and extended friend-family, and when we weren't partying or riding with them he and I did something that I wanted so badly and didn't have a partner for: long runs. We talked constantly. I couldn't stop. I imagined bigger adventures, overnighters, traveling together out of the valley to find new mountains, feeding my craving for novelty.

I was an outlier in my friend group. Our ratio of getting high and drunk and socializing and hanging out versus going hard, going uphill, maintaining constant motion, was a little out of whack for my taste and I would get antsy and agitate for action. They put up with me but I was kind of annoying to them, and they were kind of annoying to me.

Also I had a boyfriend, had had one for over four years. He was strange and so smart and incredibly funny, loyal to a fault, passionate, stubborn, and polarizing. But he didn't run and hadn't read a book in quite some time, and while I thought we were probably going to get married, because I settled into that mindset pretty easily in relationships, I started to dream of climbing mountains, fastpacking, bikepacking, talking for hours about books and ideas. 

And then I did something about it. I poured my sadness and dissatisfaction and longing into a vessel that didn't fit and gave it to my boyfriend with little explanation. I moved out and forfeited the dog we owned together. I hid from our friends and tried to find normalcy and cried a lot.

But I also started pursuing this other opportunity. He was a big reason I did what I did, although I've barely admitted that to anyone. It's probably obvious to everyone now but I so, so, so didn't want to hurt my ex even more by putting that out into the world, that simple, common trope: she left you for someone else.

This guy though, he was sexy and funny and smart and interesting and engaged and kind and full of joy. He wanted to go everywhere and said yes without hesitating to every questionable adventure I cooked up. He was there for me always. Before we were together and I got the job at the newspaper, he was more excited and proud and supportive than anyone besides my parents. He still reads every article I write, and when I bought my house he threw his time, money, and expertise into the task of doubling the property's value. And he puts up with my fixation on the "right" way to wash dishes.

My mom and her sisters met him in 2018. That was five months after he first talked to my parents, when he stood outside the operating room and called to say I was under the knife after a potentially deadly ectopic pregnancy. Fortunately my parents are good, understanding people and appreciated him and that hard call, instead of placing blame.

Anyway, my mom obviously liked him, because he's easy to like. And then he came to New Hampshire,  to the Tellman stronghold itself, even though for a couple years I felt too burned by the decimation of my past relationships to try and draw him further into my family. But it was fine, great, he was an ally and he charmed my sister and was open and kind to everyone and during dinner prep one night my father, who has been able to find something to like in all my young men although he clearly wants the world for me, leaned over and said, "I love him," with that emphasis.

While it rained we talked in the New Hampshire breakfast nook about engagement and titanium rings and none of it was surprising. But then we were back at home and he did manage to surprise me, on one knee with a ring box as I turned back around after applying sunscreen on a mountain plateau during a run in the northern Teton range, with a titanium ring that he had bought even before my whole family asserted that I should have a titanium ring, and I shouted in shock and cried and wasn't sure, because what is marriage? And are all relationships really doomed to failure like I've already convinced myself?

I told almost no one about our engagement for three months because it's a small valley and I still didn't want to hurt the other guy. I couldn't figure out how it wouldn't hurt. It turned out to be okay, ish, and we actually went for a big bike ride, the three of us, on my birthday last year and it wasn't that tense. I also kept the engagement a secret because I didn't see myself as a fiancee, and because I don't talk about relationships a lot or post about them on social media. That was a habit I picked up when I was younger, when I was doing some shady shit. And I have this stupid idea that love makes you weak or vulnerable.

After three years I'm still one hundred percent into this guy. He's just so great and I have friends who still regularly comment on that fact, which I love. So that's why we're getting married in September.

It's hilarious that nearly half of the photos of us that exist are candid, awkward laughing photos at special events. We don't take photos together. Ever.

Super Gully

The other night at the bar, I got good and sandbagged by a local character who loves to climb and ski remote peaks. We were talking about Super Gully on Lost River Peak. It's a straightforward line and not difficult, per se, but the way he described it was a little facile: “You walk uphill on an obvious trail for a bit and then skin and then you boot pack, you can’t miss the line, and I’m sure you can ski all the way back to the car. It’s really popular, there will probably be tons of people at the campsite.”

That was a stretch. Bones, Dapper, Cy and I set out from Driggs, drove through Mackay, and spotted Super Gully. It was very obvious, as promised: a long wide path of snow that swept down from tall rock buttresses into a drainage out of sight. But the ascent looked dry, and steep, and long, and where there was snow it looked thin.

We turned onto a dirt road and followed it until it dead-ended at a clearing with a fire ring. Not another soul in sight. The ground was too slanted to get a good night’s sleep.

The weather the next morning was pretty ideal for a safe ascent of the southwest face: overcast, not too warm, and not too windy. We started out in running shoes and I was happy clambering up the slope despite a heavy pack. When we hit the snow line we switched to skinning and then inevitably started bootpacking at the bottom of the gully. I kind of hate bootpacking.

Instead of booting straight up we opted to thread up and around it from the south, which was maybe a little slower but certainly more interesting. It was pretty easy to kick steps in the firm snow although I was sometimes forced to wallow through unconsolidated sugar.

The pitch steepened further and I was glad I had borrowed both a whippet and an ice axe. If I fell, I wouldn’t stop sliding for a couple thousand feet. The sun teased us and the wind blew cold.

Our roundabout route did require that we traverse a shale field and it scared the shit out of me. I didn’t trust my foothold and fell a couple times, skittering down the slope and clawing my way back up, pissed off and shaking. The guys waited for me to cross. I wanted to descend from there but we decided it would be more feasible to keep going and fortunately the final push was much easier.

We quickly topped out on the false summit and gaped at the panorama of peaks before us. The Lost River Range, mostly hidden from the road, was a wide spread of towering mountains with that signature layer cake geology. To the west the Pioneers sprawled across the horizon and the Lemhi rippled on the eastern front. I love Idaho.

We didn’t sit on the snowy little landing for long. Both of my pairs of gloves were wet from ascending on all fours and I was worried about getting too cold. The drop from the top was steep, firm, and precipitously rocky to the north. The surface was chattery and my legs quaked with 5,000 feet of climbing but the snow provided plenty of grip for my ski edges.

Back in the sun at the apron of the gully, we chose a return route, knowing the skiing would be questionable. We picked our way through some north-facing trees in snow that was rotten to its core and so touchy that it kept collapsing in broad patches, plunging us under the isothermal layers. Not necessarily dangerous but certainly spooky.

Snow turned to runnels of mud and I again fell repeatedly, coating myself with mud. I cursed and removed my ski boots in a fit of pique. Once I put my running shoes on I was much happier, billy-goating down the bushy hill, following trails dotted with elk droppings, until, knees aching, we were back at the truck.

The chances of mishap on a ski tour increase exponentially with every additional group member, but the four of us made it up and down without incident. At the end I was dirty, inexplicably sunburned, and dehydrated, but gratified.

We stopped in a bar in town for margarita pitchers and burgers. The bartender asked us what the hell we had come to Mackay for, and she looked nonplussed when we said skiing. On the drive home rain began to beat on the windshield and then turned to snow in Tetonia, thick wet snow that coated the ground and caused us to groan about the never-ending winter. My gear is still muddy in the garage and I am escaping Idaho to go mountain biking this weekend. Such is life. 

Seasons

Wednesday was the last bike team practice of the season and this weekend’s race was canceled because the forecast called for snow and a deep freeze. Our ride on that golden evening was tinged with melancholy. I asserted that I would take the girls, my favorite group. They cheered. We pedaled around Victor piecing together muddy singletrack laced with aspen leaves.

I watched the four high school girls ride in a little group ahead of me, all smooth cadence and skinny legs and teal accessories. I felt pride and contentment welling up in me.

I think each year of coaching has been more gratifying than the last. The team is huge now. Everyone likes each other. The kids are as happy practicing wheelies on the grass and playing noisy games of bike tag as they are pinning it on singletrack.

The time commitment feels so heavy midseason when I’m running from the office to practice or city council or high school soccer games and spending Saturday mornings with the kids instead of escaping into the high peaks.

I’ve been struggling with a sense of FOMO since it started snowing mid-September and shut me out of big runs in the Tetons. Last year I did around ten runs in the twenty-mile range, and this year I’ve only done three.

On Wednesday I rode the Krampus at practice because the Bronson is in the shop getting prepped for winter storage. I love the Krampus so, so much. It gave me a couple flashbacks to how I spent my summer. I’ve slept outside twenty-five nights this year, not quite the thirty I was shooting for but there’s still time. I’ve done a lot of thirty-six hour trips, bailing the second practice is over on Saturday morning and going for a bikepacking overnighter or driving a couple hours to explore new mountain ranges. I saw so many new trails this year, feeding my ravenous need for novelty. I can’t even count them.

This is life at its finest, traveling by foot and bike through this beautiful world and watching the next generation do the same.

Thirty-Six Hour Vacation

In Gilmore, Idaho, there is a piece of cardboard nailed to the side of a shack with a handwritten for sale message: “Lot and house $10,000.” There is nothing available in Teton Village for under a million.

But six miles up the road is a campground more beautiful than any car-accessed one in Grand Teton National Park, a small cerulean lake abutted by a towering chunk of rock in a cirque of crumbling spires. On a Saturday afternoon in July, there are two sites free out of fifteen. We claim one and immediately try to figure out how accessible that chunk of rock, Gilmore Peak, is.

Next to the lake there is a broad mellow trail through woods carpeted with rich greenery.  We branch off it and follow a faint trail churned into the talus on the shoulder of the cirque. We are on top barely twenty minutes later, looking across the basic at Gilmore, but a storm is scudding toward us so we bail. Tomorrow!

Waking up is so easy in summer. Oatmeal, coffee, ablutions, and back up to the ridge. We scramble over dalmatian-spotted feldspar, waiting for the difficulty of the route to match the drama of the scenery, but it never does. We summit by nine. Long couloirs and precipitous drops and warm-colored peaks of red and ochre surround us.

Descend fast, feet in the lake, drinking Coors at ten. We get restless and pack up camp to pursue another adventure—a twenty-mile backcountry ride. The road is studded with tombstones that scrape and jolt the little car. A cow-wallow stops us several miles before the trailhead so we start pedaling.

The hot, unpleasant doubletrack turns into a long mellow singletrack climb from the mouth of the gulch to an alpine pass. We contour around the base of Yellow Peak, spot elk cows and calves below us in a clearing, and push up a darkened shale path unlike anything I’ve ever traveled by bike. I throw myself into the snow patch up top and stuff my hydration bladder with snow. I’m out of water, it’s hot, we already climbed a mountain this morning.

The descent is appropriately backcountry’esque, rock-cluttered erosion channels, downed trees, mud bogs, but also huge views of adjacent peaks. We slog through the last five miles thirsty and hot.

The closest open gas station is a hundred miles away but we still have cherries and Oreos and snow to melt and beer to drink. I am shelled, burned, my eyes red and my lips chapped, but I am content. 

Most of my Saturday mornings are consumed by bike practice but I’ve gotten much better about GTFO of the valley the second practice ends and taking advantage of my full thirty-six hours of weekend. There are incredible places within a five-hour drive of here and I’ve only scratched the surface.

2017 Teton Ogre 8-Hour Adventure Race

Abby, the race director, emailed me late on Monday evening:

“There are still a few hours left to sign up for the Ogre. We extended registration through tonight. The course is full of adventure biking- you'd crush it. Just sayin'. Here's a code for 50% off for you and your teammate if you wanna do it.”

I had been waffling hard and had decided against it, but apparently I could be easily swayed by some ego-stroking and a discount code. I registered and bullied Cy into joining without too much trouble.

I wanted to go for a run on Wednesday and I wanted to cover some unfamiliar ground and increase our shot at knowing where the Ogre was. I suspected that the top of Pine Creek Pass could be the venue—on the map there was a tantalizing expanse of land criss-crossed by ATV and pack trails, and there was plenty of parking.

I traced out a little loop south of the pass and we ran it, steep powerline to undulating ridgeline to an incredible descent through balsamroot meadows and lodgepole groves, the Grand prominent far to our northeast. It would’ve been the ideal bike ride and I pledged to get back there ASAP to ride it, maybe the day after the race if I was feeling spicy. Abby and Jason had set the course earlier that week and I kept an eye out for the flags, hoping to get some confirmation of my suspicion, but didn’t see any.

The most important tool

When we checked in and got our maps on Friday, I unrolled it…saw the Teton-Bonneville county line snaking across the middle…let out a whoop. I was right! And, upon further inspection, I realized there were three bike checkpoints on the fun loop. I was utterly delighted. What were the chances?

Cy and I plotted the points and then spent the rest of the evening obsessing over route choice, debating the order, talking contingencies. Last year I had been surprised that all of the top teams cleared the course (found all the CPs) so I decided that was our only option. Plus we move pretty damn fast, running and biking, so I knew the navigation would be the crux.

It rained through the night and the morning was chilly and wet with heavy clouds that never released their burden. Twenty-six teams poured off the start line heading mostly in the opposite direction of our route, but some of the most experienced racers, including my future landlord, went the same way we did, which was a nice route validation.

Skeletons from last year's Tie Canyon fire

We rode a powerline track through tire sucking sandy mud and then dropped off-trail into the Tie Canyon drainage, catching the first CP. Cy got to experience the high of punching the passport, a better rush than doing a bump of coke. Then we traveled up marshy singletrack, grabbed another CP and dropped the other teams.

We got to the transition area and swapped into running gear. The trail was ankle deep in muck and thrashed by horses. We got the first trekking CP off a tree in a saddle, churning through thigh-high wet greenery. I was glad I decided to wear tights, protected from the burn of nettles and the slash of grass. 

Wet and green

We climbed a bump on the landscape, barely noteworthy on the map with its spacious contour lines that hid steep climbs, and got our fourth point. Then everything went sideways. We didn’t pay close attention to the oh so critical topo lines on the map and plunged into a drainage northeast of the ridge, convinced we’d hit a trail in the creek bottom. We stomped around down there for far too long, befuddled and frustrated, before reexamining the map and realizing our expensive error. We regained the ridge, cursing our stupidity, and swept up a couple points to placate our disappointment. Damn.

During each bushwack and hike-a-bike, we remembered some of the other thankless crap we’ve done recently. Turns out pushing through peanut-butter mud in the Caribous, exploring new trails during an endless spring of swollen creek crossings and bogs, getting lost on Teton Pass and skinning up 2000 feet at 7:00 pm, and running countless miles over stupid-deep snow was great training for the Ogre. 

Back on track after an hour of faffing about

The CPs were whimsically placed and it seemed like Abby and Jason were sharing with us these special little pieces of land. Cy climbed a dead tree, and we dropped a knife ridge and gained another mini slice of ridge, a place you would never have a reason to be if it weren’t for the Ogre. We then traversed overland to another bump on the map and were rewarded with the sight of a photographer up there with her dogs, and another flag flapping from a tree.

Then we dropped, a long and precipitous descent to a rushing creek, tripping over the wealth of downed trees, pushing through alder and baby aspens, slipping on the layer of organic matter on the ground.

We occasionally followed the trail of others, leaves and stems left bruised and muddied, a subtle confirmation that even if we were off-route, someone else had already made the same mistake. We called these invisible predecessors the herd of cats, and eventually just the cat herd, as in “Oh, here’s the cat herd again.”

I promptly fell in the creek when we reached it but was already so wet it didn’t matter. We bushwhacked downstream hunting fruitlessly for the next CP, until we saw a gang of girls clustered around…the wrong CP. We had blown by one somehow. We punched the passport and decided to backtrack for the missed one because…no regrets, right?

It was hung high above us on a steep embankment. So worth it. We hauled ass back down the stream, trekking portion of the course complete with a comfortable margin of time to finish the bike leg. We jogged back to the transition area and remounted our bikes to start climbing.

Ouch. I was more shelled than I’d thought, and somehow the anticipated fun bike loop was way harder than it seemed when it was a mellow after-work run. We scored two more CPs and rode the descent, which was as flowy and awesome as anticipated. A real gigglefest.

The beginning of the most fun rarely-ridden descent in the valley

Then we put our heads down for the final brutal powerline climb from the bottom of the pass to the top. We happened upon another team that gave us a heads-up about the last CP, and Cy backtracked and found it hiding down a hollow. We were really pushing it on time so the only thing to do was keep slogging, gasping in pain. And then we emerged on the mellow road at the top and booked it to the finish line.

Jason greeted us. We were three minutes late, which meant nine points docked from our score. He saw our passport, raised his eyebrows, seemed impressed. Everyone else was clean and relaxed at the finish line and I convinced myself that we’d been crushed, hadn’t even scratched the top five. I cursed that mistake again, knowing we could’ve been there at least forty-five minutes earlier.

But we discovered at the after party, reclining in the grass drinking beer in the sun, that we were one of the few teams to clear the course, and we took second in co-ed behind seasoned Ogres Maura and Shane, and we were fourth overall. And got a big cookie as a prize. My stoke immediately returned because I’m terribly addicted to podiums.

We ruminated over the experience and analyzed the good and the bad. I was really pleased at how smoothly (ish) it had gone relative to how unpleasant it could’ve been. Another incredible Ogre in the books, eight hours of getting lost in beautiful country.