Medicine Wheel

Short Version:
A great ride. We learn things.

Long Version:
Dragging ourselves out of bed wasn't easy, but was made much more palatable by the prospect of more illicit trail exploration. And we were rewarded once again by some fairly spectacular balloonrise action in the glorious morning sunshine.

We'd met Ogden* the Alaskan-Jewish Palinist Islamophile over delicous foods the night before, and set off on the bikes from his house late in the morning, in fine spirits and bound for parts unknown. Six hours later, we were back, eating delicious snacks and drinking beer in the hot tub. We figured we'd earned it, having hit slickrock and unslick rocks; soft sand and hard; water-sculpted stonescapes in the midst of the desert; derelict cabins; mesas and buttes; sidehills and steep rollovers and stacked ramps and spiky plants. For the second day in a row Nene nailed a steeply-sloping slickrock sidehill that took some of my skin when I failed to negotiate it appropriately, and for the second day in a row she rolled stuff that looked impassable, impressing the natives and scaring the few remaining bejeebers right out of me.

Picking highlights is a tough ask when the whole ride is that phenomenal, but it would be remiss of us to fail to mention at least a few things:
- The Medicine Wheel: The Doctor*, Renfrew* and Ogden were riding around and around this rock circle when I arrived. Each new arrival on the scene joined the carousel action, and once we were all present and accounted for we peeled off one by one. A seriously cool active way to regroup. And apparently we got luckier and younger each revolution we made, which is a pretty excellent bonus.
- The Steep Thing: It was steep.
- The Snooze: Most of us napped in the sun at the bottom of the steep thing while the Doctor and Ogden and Renfrew repaired trail damage back along the Mescal Mesa traverse. Someone had been performing trail sabotage since the folks last passed that way, and Renfrew's trail-blockage rock removals had become more and more vehement. We felt bad for not helping, but when it comes down to it we (I) would probably have been more hindrance than help. And snoozing in the sun was really, really nice.
- Darch Flies: Darch rides everything, almost always with aplomb, so hearing the tale of the tree-strike from the previous day was pretty special. Seeing him pitch over his handlebars on a minimal drop, with a tiny difficulty level was - once he'd picked himself up and proved he'd survived (relatively, and excepting dignity) unscathed - kind of cool.
- Felix*: Mrs Renfrew appeared about halfway around the Aerie Trail. She was riding solo as she wasn't feeling 100%, and that's borderline scary given how fast and how smooth she rode; not only named after a cat, but catlike in grace and power as well. Kind of like her husband, only with less beardness. And she had a shirt that said "Shit" on it.
- Ogden and the Prickly Pear: The stylish, graceful entirely intentional dismount that landed him on the spiky plant was impressive enough, but the several large chunks of bespined plant matter that then intertwined themselves with the frame of his bike made the whole episode just that little bit specialler.
- Xmas Wash: No, not the annual bathing escapade; rather, an occasional watercourse - dry now - that the hardcore (Ogden, Renfrew, The Doctor) and the stupid (me) rode instead of the fast flowing descent option taken by everyone with an ounce of sense. Right from the (steep, sketchy) get-go, this part of the ride shaped as trouble with a capital everything, and it didn't disappoint. I was inordinately pleased when the Doctor put a foot down, joining me in the Didn't Clear Xmas Wash (Today) Club. Of course, he still rode way more of the head-sized boulder-fields interspersed with evil soft sand than I managed, and we'll not go into how long Renfrew sat awaiting our arrival at the end of the Wash... It was seriously challenging, and bloody hard work, and ultimately really rewarding.

Special mention has to be made of the extreme man-love session partway through the Wash. And of the Lingerie Football League game that Ogden used as a teaching aid whilst instructing us in the joys of Amerikan Football. And politics. And Comparative Religion, the History of the Middle East, the Sociology and Geography of Alaska... This was our first opportunity to hear from the red side of Amerikan**, and we grabbed it with all of our ears.

By the time we left (late!), we were hammered, and learned, and pretty well worn out.







* = Names have been changed to protect the incredibly guilty

** = Those El Bizarro Amerikans have reversed the color scheme in use pretty much everywhere else, so areas controlled by or traditionally associated with their theoretically-left-leaning Democrat party are shaded blue on maps, while the more conservative Republikan party's domains are shaded red. This despite McCarthyism, Reds Under the Bed, all the antipathy towards the former Soviet Union and all their Communist allies, and the fact that they've had not just one Red Scare but two (The First, in 1919/1920 was about worker (socialist) revolution and political radicalism. The Second ran from 1947 to 1957, and was focused on (national and foreign) communists influencing society or infiltrating the federal government, or both)***

*** = Thanks, Wikipedia!