Lost in the woods

Made the most of my 3 day weekend and got two days of great riding in. On Sunday Cody and I climbed up the Tahoe Rim Trail to Marlette Peak lookout (see photo evidence above). It was a totally gorgeous day, as you can see. We then dropped down Dirty Harry's, which has some pretty gnar-gnar sections. Gnar trail + roadie + hardtail with a fork that hardly works = dirty socks. But there were some really fun sections that I rode. We then proceeded to get lost for 2 hours and spend waaay too much time riding fire roads. Uck. Anyway, 5 hours later we got back to the car and went to Blue Coyote for burgers. Life is good.

Yesterday I rode up at Donner with my dad. Lovely day except for all the lousy traffic! Gotta take in all the alpine granite I can, because where I'm going we don't have big mountains.

On our Sunday MTB ride we were on a trail that was almost grown in with manzanita bushes for a while. Manzanita has such a distinct smell, and it's one you don't get everywhere you go. I find it terribly familiar, and it evokes hikes up to the Quincy "Q" when I was a kid. Then there's the Tahoe smell, with that particular hint of DG and pine forests. Of course Peavine riding is a smell all its own, too, with sage and rabbit brush. I guess what I'm getting at is that everywhere I go, almost, I ride my bike. And when I ride my bike, I tend to breath pretty heavily and really internalize the particular scent of the place. Don't olfactory senses trigger memories with greater poignancy than either sight or sound? I'm pretty sure they do. When I smell wood smoke from someone's chimney I think of being a kid in Meadow Valley in the wintertime,with 4 feet of snow piling up outside our house and a fire going. Some places totally evoke "home" to me. My new home doesn't smell like home to me yet (well, I'm not there yet, but I've been there in the past, and it doesn't) but it's familiar nonetheless. I can't wait to come back for a visit and be struck by the smell of sagebrush and manzanita.

Blah blah blah.

I was reading the blog of an acquaintance and she said something that really struck me, and I'm going to quote her - "It seemed an ugly injustice to lose someone with plans and hope, until I accepted that our lives are present and vital while we're here and that death doesn't diminish the importance of the love and lessons we leave behind." I'm not trying to be dark and depressing, but I just thought that was so eloquently put that I had to share it with the world.

Anyway, on more frivolous news, I bought a full suspension frame and it's on its way to Gloucester as we speak! Something fun to come "home" to, because I can't possibly ride those east coast roots and rocks on my hardtail. Hells no.