Detours

I decided to hit the Lunch Loop on the way home from work today. I figured I might as well, since I was pedalling home anyway. This picture shows one of my favorite parts of that trail. You drop down into the valley below at insane speeds and then it takes a lot of strength and a lot of skill to get up the other side. Loaded with a backpack full of various supplies for my academic pursuits, I knew this was not going to happen today. Today, I had to push my bike up a couple of rough spots and the burn of carrying all that extra weight on my back ignited my lungs and my neck and my quadraceps. The burn in my lungs made me cough and hack until I had cleared my airway of all the wasted pollenous snot that my glands had decided to manufacture throughout the day.

The single track follows the far hogback up into a box canyon where you decide whether you have had enough and want to come down the easy way or whether you want to crash back down into the canyon and end up back in this little temple to fluvian conglomeration.

I took the long trail.

Once I got back to the business of getting home, I tried to hurry . Normally I can really make some time along the Colorado River Trail, but today, the winds conspired against me. Headwinds of about ten to fifteen miles an hour pulled on me and my backpack like a drag chute. Before long, the storms that were blowing in from the alkali desert south of the valley had started dragging their nets across the river and spilling rain all on the trail, and by extension, me. My detour had not been wise. I decided I could wait it out under a gazebo along the trail overlooking a lake. I can think of worse places to have to wait.

After I got back on the trail, the winds had died down slightly. I made the last mile of my 13 mile trip home, the hardest mile by far, with the wind channelled through the deep furrow of 32 Rd. as it falls off of Orchard Mesa and descends into the meth crippled ghetto of Clifton. A lot of my friends I used to have never made it out of Clifton, detoured by the easy rush of pharmocological masturbation. I crossed the river and shook the rain off of my face. Another two hills until I would be home.

My house and old pickup trucks were waiting in the rain. I pulled up to my little white farm house and realized, probably for the first time what it meant to be living across the street from where my globe trotting detour began one October, five years ago.