2015: Reflection

Here I am again, at the beginning of the new year, expecting to go back to work on Monday, January 4.  Again, as usual, the holidays got away from me (maybe a bit more than usual) and I'm posting this as a substitute for a normal Christmas card, for those who care.  It's also nice to reflect on the things that made me thankful most last year.  Here are some highlights:

We began last year with the family at home, celebrating a just-completed kitchen remodel.

We've enjoyed this remodel ever since, especially since it brings to an end all the major things we had to do on the house.  Now, we've got a resort backyard and a remodel of the interior that's done in all major aspects.

During the summer, I had the special opportunity to hang with Beth at the Cascade Classic, based in Bend, OR, in which she competed.  I helped with driving, fetching, and some lifting, but it was great to just be with her for a few days before driving down to pick up Steve in San Francisco, and down to Redondo Beach to see Nate and Tana, a few days before her (Tana's) delivery (oops, spoiler alert!).

Oh, just as a footnote, on our way back we stopped at Crater lake.  Very scenic.

OK, the big thing--I'M A GRANDFATHER!  (I've even got the Grandfather t-shirt--looks like the Godfather poster)

Otherwise, work continues to be a process of change, and I remain very busy.  Grand Canyon University is not recognizable as the small failing school of 10 years ago--we now have 15,000 students on campus, and several new buildings going up as I write.

So, many things to be thankful for, including my purchase of a new bicycle:  titanium, with top-of-the-line componentry.  It has certainly energized me to exercise more, though I did not reach my stated goal of "160 by 60."  (That is, be down to 160 pounds by age 60, which I turned in October.)  I'm also thankful for the continuing trip tradition with Richard and Maxie:  we've transitioned to static camping at trailheads and doing day hikes from there.  This last year was the Eastern Superstitions, near Globe.  We camped at the Miles Ranch trailhead, and fanned out on the several trails that left from that point, over three days.

Our fall has been taken up with trips to California to see the grandbaby; we've just gotten back from Redondo Beach over Christmas, where 4-month-old Emma has enthralled the grandparents with enjoying reading and singing!

This is definitely a year to count blessings:  new life, continuing happiness with those we love, the place we live (both small-scale--home, and large-scale--the state and country).

Mesa Canals 13 (more info on Mesa Canals 4)

Waaay back in Mesa Canals 4, I rode the Eastern Canal from where it crosses Gilbert Road to where it crosses University Avenue.  At the time, I was interested in distance, but when I rode it yesterday, I discovered a little nugget, on the west bank of the canal south of 8th Street/Adobe.  Easily reachable from the canal path, just north of an apartment complex is a small park, with synthetic climbing rocks.  It's just big enough for smaller folks, and not too hard to climb (unless you're wearing cleated shoes).  Right, see my detail map to the park in Google earth, and, below, a picture of the climbing rocks themselves.  Kudos to the city for this park!

Mesa Canals 12: to the New Desert Trails Mountain Bike Park

On this Easter morning, after going to a sunrise service near Usery Mountain Park, I took the mountain bike out (at long last) just to ride for a while.  On the way back from the service, we had passed the new Desert Trails Mountain Bike Park at McDowell and Recker (NE corner).  So I decided to pedal out.

What a wonderful morning:  clear and 85 degrees, mountains in the distance, some wind out of the south, but not overwhelming.  I rode out on the route to Granite Reef Dam (Mesa Canals 7) to where the canal crosses the Salt River Sand and Gravel road (which becomes Thomas Road).  It's probably good to ride this on a day when there's no business traffic.  At Higley, I turned south, then went around past the Longbow Golf Course to Recker, then south on Recker to the park.

It's a decently-designed park, with a 3/4 mile perimeter trail, plus a number of BMX-style courses (some, suitable for kids).  There are apparently some trails over the hill:  the east side is for climbing, and the west side is for descending (apparently with one-way traffic).  I just tried the perimeter trails.  The only possible problem I see is that two of the downhill trails empty into the perimeter trail on the west side.  But it's very scenic, and it's great that the city has designed this relatively pristine parcel so well.

Cycling Books for Father's Day (1)

My daughter and her boyfriend (both competitive cyclists) bought me two books for Father's Day:  Pro Cycling on $10 a Day (Phil Gaimon) (PCO$10), and Land of Second Chances:  The impossible rise of Rwanda's cycling team (Tim Lewis) (LSC).  Both are great reads, and both raise some interesting questions.  (I noticed that this is getting long, so I'll just talk about Gaimon here and save LSC for later.)

Gaimon's memoir is alternately funny and inspiring, in a post-modern sort of way:  got to love the grossness and obscenity of some of the stuff that goes on among the riders in practice, races, and training, and it's interesting to see Gaimon work through his emotions about the injustices that necessarily attend when someone is pursuing a labor of love in the context of a money-making sports environment. (Of course, ultimately he is on the cusp of getting what he set out to accomplish.  Uplifting.)

But it's most interesting to see a young one with postmodern ethics attempting to navigate the moral ambiguities of the cycling scene.  Gaimon has one ethical principle that comes to the fore:  ride clean (of performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs)).  So, we get a lot of Lance lancing (don't read this book, Armstrong, it'll make you mad).  Lance is Satan.  I understand this issue, to a point:  certainly the sport of cycling has lost much of its popularity in the U.S. thanks to this, and, to be honest, for me it's not so much Lance's actual drug use (I'm willing to give him a pass to an extent on it anyway; EPO was a survival tool during his treatment).  Instead, it's the bullying, the stonewalling, the abandonment of friends and subordinates, and the cultivated cult of personality that are ultimately the most off-putting, for me personally.  Lance's (can I say tragic? Professionally fatal?) flaw (and he has been capable of great good with the Livestrong foundation) was thus interpersonal and not behavioral.

But what Phil focuses on is the drugging.  I understand this, I understand the soap tattoo, I understand the problems of being an effective teetotaler in the company of the addicted.  And he HATES the hypocrisy of the main user pontificating self-righteously.  I get it--hypocrisy is the worst.

Phil is an example of the uniquely American moralist; American moralists run the gamut from social liberals to conservatives (and have, through American history), some tied to traditional religion, some not.  The Puritans get a bad rap, but primarily because we don't believe in the specific moral principles that they are aggressively forwarding.  But their primary moral characteristics, collectively--censoriousness and legal perfectionism--are mirrored in the discussion of almost every social issue of the last two hundred years in the nation.

This is an accident of history:  it so happens that we had a supreme and heinous evil woven into the fabric of the nation before nationhood--slavery.  That monstrous evil was fought from a moral perspective by Abolitionists of all stripes, who all tied themselves to this principle: that slavery is wrong and must be abolished.  Their methods differed:  Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote a book, Thoreau wrote an essay, harbored fugitive slaves, and spent a night in jail, John Brown attacked Harper's Ferry and was hanged.  That was the great moral principle that divided the nation, and led to 620,000 soldier casualties, besides the unrecorded number of slaves and civilians who died in the war and the centuries of slavery.  Rightly, it is a watershed moral issue, and those on the wrong side of it were (and are) vilified as monsters or despicable.

Of course, we did that with alcohol too (Prohibition), and women's suffrage, and civil rights, and gay marriage, and drugs, and speech, and names, and feminism, and smoking, and global warming (climate change?) . . . and the list goes on.  Feel free to add your own items.  One might be forgiven for thinking that some of these causes are more important than others.

But in every case, there's what I guess I'll call the rhetoric of censoriousness and dismissal.  Just think about how people talk about smokers and tobacco companies, and you get my point.  (It is, of course, the unpardonable sin [registering irony here; I have smoked a bit myself]).

Oops.  Anyhow, back to Phil:  he spends most of the book in the moralist position, but at the end is forced to confront the fact that those who were fighting alongside him on the PED issue were themselves often implicated in PED use.  I would say (as Greg Lemond has said, I think) that it was impossible to remain at the top levels of cycling any time between the mid 1980s and pretty much 2013, and not be involved in the doping scandal somehow.  I applaud Gaimon for his final reflection on the issue.

But I'm old; I was inspired by Lemond, and by Jock Boyer, Lon Haldeman, Susan Notorangelo, and others in the '80s.  I've seen a lot of ups and downs.  But that's grist for my next review.

Whoa, almost a year, really??

I looked at the date on my last blog entry and realized that it's been almost a year since I last posted.  Admittedly, I've done relatively little on the Mesa Canals lately, though I rode in the Ride the Vortex Arizona MS Society 150 ride last weekend.  It was a good ride for me, with a metric century, then a 30-mile distance over the two days.  The event was marred by a fatality on Saturday, however.  I did not find out until Saturday evening, because I did not ride that part of the course, though I have ridden that road in previous years.  The Society did not put out specific information, so I won't either, though this has been reported in news outlets.

I've also been catching up on my reading during the last two weeks out of school.  I decided on a whim to re-read Ed Abbey's Monkeywrench Gang (MG); the introduction to the edition talked about it as one of the great social issue novels of the U.S., comparing it to Uncle Tom's Cabin (UTC) and The Jungle.  Having read UTC, I can now categorically state that MG is the better-written novel by far; many of the Southwestern wilderness descriptions are positively lyrical, and as I re-read it, I also notice the classic satiric construction--there are no heroes without serious flaws in this book, and it's the case that nothing changes for the better on this issue in the book, either.  Hmmm, too much like real life?

So, why did I resonate so much more with the book this time?  (This isn't to say that I didn't resonate with the book before, given my love of the wilderness.)  But this time I personally knew the landscape Abbey was describing, having backpacked, hiked, and explored the Arizona desert for 22 years now.  When I read it first, I was living in Michigan, and the environmental degradation issues were of a different order.  It's also hard to find Western-scale wilderness anywhere east of, say Kansas and Nebraska.

Plus, now, I'm old, tired, and jaded (a regular Doc Sarvis), so the satiric structure seemed more appropriate.

Mesa Canals 11 Attempted Canal Route to Mesa Riverview (Danger, Will Robinson!! Abort! Abort!)

I have had a dream . . .  Several years ago, when light rail came to Main Street and Dobson Road, I thought that I'd be able to cycle from my house to the station and ride to 19th Ave. and Camelback in Phoenix.  That dream died when it took me a total of 2 1/2 hours to traverse a distance that takes, at most, 45 minutes by car.  The final nail in the coffin occurred on May 30, when I scouted the canal route that I thought I could take.  Those few of you who have followed the Mesa Canals series, have also followed me to Hohokam Park via the canal roads.  I thought that it would be great to take the canals to the light rail station, though I never tried it.  I would have been wrong.

Now that the Cubs are moving to Wrigleyville, I thought that I'd still like to bicycle to Spring Training as much as possible.  So, I checked that stretch that I hadn't ridden yet, from Country Club Drive to Rio Salado Parkway (formerly 8th Street).  The Google Earth route photo tells the essential story.

It's probably germane to say at this point that the route above connects to the route in the Mesa Canals 3 post a couple of years ago.  Anyhow, since I've started this series, Mesa has steadily improved right-of-ways on the canals.  Several of the routes that were rough when I wrote about them have now got paved sidewalks, pedestrian bridges, and in some cases pedestrian crosswalk signals.  Such is the Mesa Canals 3 section these days.  It's a civilized ride through the city.  However, when one gets to Mesa Drive east of Country Club Drive, there are no crosswalks, and one finds an ironic situation--one side of the canal is macadam-paved (and gated), marked on Google Earth as "A Street."  The other side is gravel. Take that side (though it doesn't matter).  After crossing Country Club, you will see that one side (the golf course side) is securely fenced, though the other side is not.  The south side of the canal dead ends at an SRP pumping station at the edge of the golf course.  It's a tantalizing view, with a pedestrian bridge visible just on the other side of the secure fence.  That part is not marked on the picture, since after finding the dead end, I did some poking around to find a way around the country club to the north.

I finally found my way to Alma School Road north of the country club, riding on pavement and sidewalks the whole time.  I don't recommend it.  One either rides on the sidewalk, or crosses Country Club Drive twice, if one rides on the street.  So, anyway, I ride south on Alma School to the entrance of the canal.  This is where the map starts.  The south side of the canal is clear to Rio Salado, and gravel.  On the north side, there is a pavement, but this pavement dead-ends at yet another SRP pumping station, though there is a track to a parking lot on Bass Pro Shop (!) Drive.

So . . . I crossed Alma School, and headed east on what I thought was the north side of the canal.  There are a complicated set of canals and spillways in this area, and I ended up having to cross (illegally?) an SRP dam to keep on the north side.  This right-of-way backs onto a number of low-walled back yards, some with Rottweilers in them.  I had the alarming view of a Rottweiler head appearing and disappearing above a 4-foot wall (barking wildly the whole time, of course).  But it didn't matter, as the canal dead-ended at the country club fence.  Back past the Rottweiler, and avoided the dam crossing by taking an alternate path back to Alma School.  After that (since the south side of the canal was basically fenced off) I gestalted my way paralleling the canal via roads as best I could, looking for a way back onto the canal path.  Didn't find one, but I did find the new Mesa Grande ruins museum entrance (open at 10 a.m. Mon-Sat.).

My take-aways are these:  my dreams are dead (or at least moribund)--my dream of finding a direct canal-road route to the light rail, and my dream of cycling to Wrigleyville as I've cycled to Hohokam.  But I do see that the city is working diligently to improve more and more of the canal right-of-ways.  Let's be honest, S . . I mean, Leisure World has been cursed in this blog, for their high-handed blocking of canal rights-of-way.  I'll hold off on the Mesa Country Club, however, since they've certainly been on the site for a long time, and when they began, I'm sure that no one could have guessed that future suburbanites would attempt to use the canals as bicycle routes.  It would, though, be nice if they opened up a bank right-of-way.

2013 MS 150 Arizona-Ride the Vortex

First, the good news:  NO SNOW (or sleet, or whatever that was last year)!  The weather this year was beautiful, with temps in the 80s to 90s (F).  As one would expect, the course was  beautiful, beginning in Cottonwood, with views of Jerome on Mingus Mountain to the south, and long vistas of valley, the Mogollon Rim to the east, and Sedona to the north.

The bad news (if it can be called really bad) was that they had changed the course from last year, and there were some sections of out-and-back that weren't well-marked.  As well, they had kind of shorted the courses (96 miles for the "century" day, and 48 miles for the 50-mile day).  Thus, I ended up going about 74 miles on Day 1 (see the map above), with numerous "technical difficulties."  Besides missing one of the out-and-back sections in Oak Creek, I accidentally turned off my Garmin for about 2 miles in the middle of the course.  Nor did my Oakley Bluetooth sunglasses really work with my new (dumb) cell phone.  But Chris, Nate, Tana and I (the other three were sightseeing Sedona) did manage to rendezvous in Sedona, just south of uptown at a roundabout (see below).

We also ran across each other as I was riding the out-and-back through Boynton Canyon.  A great day altogether, though the Boynton Canyon section was pretty gnarly in spots, with short 15% grades.  As well, at rest stop 3B, a microburst sent a large and heavy canopy flying.  I ducked, but another rider tried to restrain the canopy, which flew anyway and knocked down two volunteers.

We had had supper at L'Auberge the night before, so I was fully carb-loaded (even after having main course venison).  What a setting, dining creekside under the lights, with great food and company. 

We also routed down through the side road to Oak Creek Crossing State Park, near where Chris and I had stayed at a guest house, which ended up not having direct creek access, though it was a mere 200 yards from the creek itself.  That side road included about a mile of gravel.  All in all, a wonderful and short day of riding, with just a little slogging in Boynton Canyon.

Here's the day 2 route, which ended up being about 46 miles long according to my Garmin, though the route description pegged it at 48.  This one ended up being almost exactly the same as last year, going through the wine country of the Verde Valley, and having an out-and-back to I-17 (though this year, we didn't actually have to ride the shoulder).

I could wax lyrical about the scenery, which was great, but instead, I'll talk about what struck me most this year--pavement types.  I had forgotten how, on long-distance rides, seams in asphalt or (especially) concrete roadways can bang the heck out of hands and arms.  There were many bumps and narrow shoulders in and around Cottonwood; these smoothed out once we were off 89A and onto country roads like the Cornville Road.  I find that I remember the route primarily in terms of three things:  roundabouts (good and interesting intersections in both Sedona and Cottonwood, though drivers seem not to be able to figure out how to use them and signal their intentions, as they do in Great Britain), road incline (which, in concert with tail- or headwinds did the most to slow riders down or speed them up), and surface.  The gravel section was less gnarly than I had thought it would be, and I remembered my daughter's boyfriend, who had ridden the Apache Trail (circa 100 miles, about 20 of it gravel in the middle of nowhere) when he visited for Christmas this year.  89A, outside the seams in the asphalt close to Cottonwood, was freshly tarred and graveled, Macadam fashion.  I'd forgotten how rough those tar-adhered bits of gravel could be.  Regular asphalt is much smoother.  Interesting the things one thinks about on long rides.

I seem to have gained either better fitness, or mental toughness, or both (or neither) this year.  Why was the tour so smooth?  Was it the weather?  My fitness?  My ability to lean into pain?  My missing some turnoffs?  In any case, this ride was one of the most enjoyable I've had at this event.