Before

After

Behunin starts off of the West Rim meaning you climb up the Angel’s Landing trail to Scout Outlook and then continue to climb as you head up the West Rim. After a bit on the Rim trail you hang a left on what Super D described as a poo trail. And then you descend.

That pretty much sums it up. Once you start going down there isn’t much else to do but keep going down, a long way down.

Super D setting up the first rappel.

On the other side of that ledge is where the descending starts to get epic. The first drop is 90 feet and puts you on another ledge. Then you rappel 150 feet to another ledge which puts you into another 150 foot descent. All of this is finalized by 120 foot rappel to the canyon “floor.” I use floor here almost in jest. Yes it is as low as you can go at this point but there are still 5 more rappels before you are really done. And then you still have to hike down the Emerald Pool trail to get to the real canyon floor.

The first four rappels total out at 510 feet of descent. This means that where you see Super D standing in the above picture it is 510 feet before you can really move without a rope.

Everything went pretty smoothly until we came to these drops. When we arrived at the first rap, there was a group ahead of us. We waited at least 30 minutes before they had all gone down and pulled their ropes and moved on so we could drop without landing on top of them. I would estimate that we waited around 2-3 hours on these first four rappels for this group. Unfortunately, due to the nature of the canyon there wasn’t much space to pass…

Rebecca on the penultimate rappel to the canyon "floor"

When we hit the “floor” they had already moved on so we just continued on our merry way without any more waiting until the third to last rappel of the daynight. We then waited close to 1.5 hours as they tried and tried to set up a guided rappel to skip swimming. Once 7 pm hit, we knew we had to get moving. We basically absorbed them into our group and leapfrogged our way down the last three descents. Even with the rushed effort, Rebecca and Darrin made the last 165 foot drop in the dark.

Super D, Roller Coaster Kim and I were the first to hit the ground. Super D stayed to make sure that no one died on the descent and Kim and I busted ass to try and make the last shuttle. We made it back to the Grotto at 9:09, 21 minutes shy of a full 12 hours in the canyon. We caught the shuttle and made it to the cars.

The rest of the group hit the Grotto closer to 10:30 making their trip closer to 13 hours. I went around all of the signs saying shuttles only and picked up Super D, Rebecca and Darin.

Needless to say we were all a little trashed and extremely tired.

The only way to see up is to look down.

This guy was having a hell of a party in the canyon. Mooseknuckle and all.

Super D gettin' RAD!

Airborne

Roller Coaster Kim on the drop to the canyon "floor"

P. L. and R.

Are you tired? You ask. Why, yes I am.

Jumping in the way back machine and turning the dial to 2002, there was a time that Sir Prattipus and myself rode the Monkey every Tuesday. Riding Monkeys on Tuesday was a lot of fun. Until I went and did something stupid. This time of saddling up on primates coincided with the time that I was working full time at the shop, going to school full time and just for fun, I worked a full time night job as well.

Who cares? Well, you see I quickly found that the more sleep deprived I was, the easier it was to get my sorry excuse for a freerider ass to jump off of stuff. As Prattipus put it, “All we had to do is point, and he would jump off of it.”

I’ve experienced moving walls without drugs. Yup, been down the road of sleep deprivation induced hallucinations. It’s a strange feeling to dream while you are awake.

So we were riding monkeys, right, yup that’s where I got derailed. I loved to ride the Monkey, until the day when I hit the giant double at the bottom of the trail. The Flying Monkey, at the time I haven’t been out there in ages, ended at Bender’s Jump Park. Yup, that Bender. Part of this jump park consisted of a road gap that came off of a steep run in and would give you enough speed, if you didn’t scrub before the drop, to hit a double. And by a double, I mean the launch was as tall as I am and the landing was 38 feet away. Prattipus measured it.

During this sleep deprived time, I started hitting this. After a while, just thinking about riding the Monkey and my hands would start to sweat while my heart beat went through the roof. My anxiety began to overtake the fun that I was having.

Luckily, I had an easy out. I just sold all my bikes and moved to the other side of the world.

Currently, my anxiety levels have been a little high. I haven’t had a good night’s rest all week. Apparently somewhere in the last 24 months I have developed a serious fear of heights. Which seems strange seeing that I have no problem rappelling or climbing or hiking or sitting on the edge of cliffs. It’s all when I am thinking about the cliff that my anxiety goes over that edge and I am falling. It’s bad enough that my stomach will actually drop when I am wide awake and think about rapping off of an edge. When I am asleep, I have constant nightmares of falling off the ledge. Over and over and over and over again. Ridiculous.

Well, I guess I need an out. All my bikes are now for sale, all I have to do is determine which side of the world to move to…

Out.

I fell in love with my current wife, not that first one that was a disaster, for a lot of reasons but there were two that were huge.

First and for most, she did not have a problem with my signature hair style that was a Krishna tail and bald head. I know she didn’t have a problem with it because that was the look I was rocking when I met her. Now she is forced to deal with my overzealous beard. Second, I quickly learned that she didn’t care too much about what everyone else was doing and kind of just did what made sense to her. This was appealing to me because it’s the way I have tried to live my life, living by my rules.

Well, as two people who are willing to go against the grain and in this case all sanity. KB and I set off for our first backpacking trip of the season. Most people would do something easy and close to home as a warm up for the season. Not us, we jumped in the Mooseknuckler-mobile and headed to Hole-in-the-Rock road. Once we were about 40 miles from anything paved, we unboarded said mobile and dawned our packs. Our goal, to make it to the Escalante River in one day. That’s 14 miles of hiking through sand, water and rock, but mostly just sand and water. If we were successful we would then have to turn around and walk all the way back out. Yup, all of those 14 miles making our round trip 28 miles in two days.

It seemed like a reasonable and good plan.

We had hoped to leave the MCA World Headquarters around 5 am Sunday morning. We left at 7. Then we stopped at the Escalanate Outfitters and then had to drive the hour or so on the dirt road to get to our starting point. All of this meant that we began hiking at about 11:30 on Sunday. Undeterred, we moved with as much quickness as possible. Anyone who has tried to carry a loaded pack through sand knows that this equates to about no miles an hour and a lot of frustration. Luckily the stream appears about a mile in and the sand became wet and easier to move on. But then of course we had to navigate stream crossings every couple of hundred yards.

This stream continues all the way to our end point, the confluence of Coyote Gulch and the Escalante River. The Gulch is a sandstone maze carved by this small stream. Most of the hike the walls are undercut leaving a towering sandstone pinnacle that blocks out the sun. The wind has cut several arches along the way and the river dug through one of these walls leaving a natural bridge. This bridge is aptly named, Natural Bridge. Of all the arches I saw and have seen, this one was just cool. Walking under the bridge was other-worldly. Most arches you just get to see, but this one we were forced to navigate.

Speaking of arches, we stopped for lunch after about three hours of hiking at the edge of Jacob Hamblin Arch. This one is wind created and the river goes all the way around it letting us see it from both sides. After three hours of solid trekking, we were pretty hungry. The Ramen Noodles tasted pretty damn good and we refilled our water bottles before loading our mules (us) and heading on. This arch is maybe a half mile past the confluence of Coyote Gulch and Hurricane Wash which was six miles into our 14 mile day. At this point, I had switched my hiking shoes for sandles and was beginning to question that decision.

We pushed on.

We left from our lunch spot at 3:50. This left us about four hours of daylight left, plenty to hit the Escalante. Unfortunately our pace slowed.

One of the things I like to do that goes against that crowd, is listen to punk rock and go to punk rock shows. About 9 months ago, we attended the Dropkick Murphys show in Vegas. After said concert, I could barely walk. My right foot swelled up like a tomato and limping forward in lunges of pain became my method of pedestrian travel. After putting on my Chacos it took about an hour before my feet began to feel tired. And then my heels really started to hurt. At about 4:30 my right foot started to have pains reminiscent of that punk rock show’s aftermath. I continued not wanting to slow KB’s pace and keep her from her goal.

At about 4:50 KB got sick. Sick enough for her to start wanting to stop. At this point I was hobbling along like a senior citizen trying to make queu at Golden Corral. My limping caught her attention and by 5 we were anxiously looking for a place to camp.

Once stopped, we both just crashed onto the sand. After a few minutes, I hobbled over and unloaded our sleeping pads. Then we fell asleep. After our quick power nap, we ate. At this point, hobbling was a fast verb for what I was doing. Nonetheless, we ate, filled the bottles and relaxed. We took in our surroundings while bathing in the shade of the cottonwoods we were resting under. Around 7 pm we felt rested enough to explore our surrounding a bit. We hiked up the side of the canyon so we could see where we were. It happens we were about 100 yards from Cliff Arch and the waterfalls at the base. Two things we had been hoping to see. We saw them from above and then retreated back to our sleeping pads were we remained until the next morning.

I woke up with the sun. Lying in the comfort of my sleeping bag, my feet felt fine. And then I stood up. The hike out was going to be a long and arduous one. I had two options, hike out or somehow die. Walking out seemed like the better of the options so I pulled my boots on, snugged ‘em up real tight and proceeded to spend the next two hours pretending my foot didn’t kill me every time I stepped on it. By the time we made it back to the Hurricane Wash, I broke down and took some Advil. I didn’t want to do drugs but my foot made me.

It took about 15 minutes for the drugs to kick in. My right foot stopped hurting and my left thought, what the hell why don’t I try this for a while. So I spent the rest of the trip pretending that my left foot didn’t hurt as bad as my right. I guess that’s one way to keep your mind off of the pain.

We climbed out of the desolate wash and to our mobile at about 2 pm. We didn’t meet anyone who had recently lost their girlfriend. However, we stumbled upon a man running in the opposite direction with a sheepish look on his face. When he couldn’t ignore our looks of worry any more, he finally said, “I got walking and forgot my pack.”

And even better, there was no crowd of middle-schoolers rushing down the hill as we tried to climb it. There was only a family of five that looked really out of place and who were concerned with how desolate the wash was…

I have a photographic memory so here are the photographs of the trip in gallery form.

This month’s issue arrived at the same time as my Dirt Rag. As is not my custom, I read the bike mag first. Mostly to see if they had improved their game, which they had. Despite a few typographical errors, they are at least at an acceptable level at this point.

When I got around to reading the Nati I quickly found the content to be, as always, stimulating. One of my newly revived passions is climbing, and they rocked that one out of the park by covering the final ascent needed for the first woman mountaineer to climb all 8,000 meter peaks without oxygen. It was a kick ass story. And then I hit the story about the Titanic.

I am intrigued by the story of this ship. The flamboyant expectations of the design of the ship and the absolute failure in reality of those designs reminds me of how flawed we humans are. I have to laugh. Much in the same way I laugh at most natural disasters. I’m cynical by nature.

James Cameron, the dude that filmed the move, The Titanic wrote a story for the magazine detailing his exploits exploring the wreckage with his robots amongst other shit. Interesting? absolutely (not so much his story as the whole coverage of the wreck).

I bring this up only because of what that film signifies for me. 

The film came out when I was in high school. As you all remember I’m sure, before the film came out we were all tortured by the theme song played over and over and over and over again. And then played again and again and again and again. I can’t be sure, but I think Sunny 93.5 played that damn song every hour for at least 18 months. After a few months of this torture, I couldn’t take it any more and I took a vow. I would not see the movie in protest over how overplayed that song was.

I cannot hear Celine Dion’s voice without beginning to twitch. It takes at least three psychologists and a shit load of medication to bring me back.

I have never seen that movie. And I will never see that fucking movie.

Is it a good movie? I couldn’t tell you and I don’t care. To quote one Captain Sparrow, “There are things a man can do and things a man can’t do.” Well, I can’t watch that movie.

In college, I even turned down a girl and her promises of many physical pleasures if only I would watch that movie with her. I don’t recall her name and I never watched the movie.

Sometimes a man has to take a stand. There are things that are more important than simply doing or not doing, but are a protest of everything that is good and right in the world. These things, these protests are few and far between, but they are worthy of our attention and worthy of our adoration. My protest is against that damn song. I tell you it is a worthy cause.

Sir Prattipus has coined a new Alliance.

As I mentioned above, I have found a revived passion for climbing in the past few months. My arms don’t work any more and all I can think about is getting back on the rock as soon as possible.

There is a moment when a perfectly ridden rock garden takes on a quality of Zen. Your mind is not thinking. Rather, your instinct takes over and you simply react to your surroundings, guiding, bouncing and steering around and over the rocks. This is a feeling that I love about riding. That connection to one’s surroundings. Knowing that if it goes wrong, you are fucked beyond belief and then to let go and watch as your body simply does what you hoped it would. It’s that same feeling that makes me love night riding.

Climbing is this at almost every moment. I found that I had a growing fear of heights, something that took me by surprise this past year. I’ve never been woozy or experience vertigo before, but I’ve had nightmares that keep me awake for hours on end because I keep falling off ledges that I didn’t fall off. If I watch a video of a big wall climb, my palms are sweaty and I can hardly control my anxiety.

Yet recently when I’ve climbed, that anxiety doesn’t exist. It’s like cleaning a rock garden. My mind takes over and I focus so intently on the task at hand that there is nothing else. Just me and the move that takes me up.

The Mooseknuckler Climbing Alliance. As Shelby said, there are plenty of mooseknuckles involved when you put a harness on. I like it.

P. L. and R.

Only read this if you care…

Sorry for the double post today, but I feel there needs to be an explanation of some up and coming happenings here at the Mooseknuckler Cycling Alliance World Headquarters website.

The biggest reason that I haven’t been posting on a regular basis is due to the fact that I have been posting in other places, many other places. You have all heard me joke about having more blogs than I know what to do with. The truth is, I have more blogs than I know what to do with. Some of them are a waste of time and some of them have turned on me. I have been trying to post on a regular basis in all my outlets and still keep working on the forever coming guide book.

As is obvious, it isn’t working.

So I have killed several blogs and will be conglomerating the content into this one central location. What this means is you will begin to see posts, like the one below, that are my commentary on the cycling industry. You will also begin to see more maps and guide pages for our local trails. All of this allows me to continue to work on everything that I want to work on and not get stuck posting in 15 different places all at once. I hope you can all enjoy the added content…

Not that any of you cared, but that is my explanation.

Out.

Not a “I woke up screaming in fear” type of nightmare, it was more like “I showed up for school with no clothes” type of nightmare.

The only difference is that it wasn’t school that I showed up for and I didn’t forget my clothes. Rather it was True Grit that I showed up for and I had forgotten all my food. Anyone who has had the misfortune of seeing me hit the threshold of calories knows that it is not a pretty sight and things go downhill fast. And not the “hold onto the bars and point the front wheel” fun kind of downhill fast either. It’s more like an “oh shit I missed the turn and I am now trying to simply not die” downhill adventure. It’s definitely not something that can be controlled once it starts so it is best to avoid at all costs.

Anyway, back to my dream. I show up to True Grit and I have no food. Of course, in my dream the first thing that happens is me rolling into a rest stop and I start looking for my food and there just isn’t any. Also, the rest stops are century styled, in that they have food and water and are spaced evenly throughout the course.

So once the initial shock of not having anything to eat wears off, I am given Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups to fuel me. My desperate requests to know how far the next stop is are replied with a simply quizzical look and refusal to answer.

I take my Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and forge on. What else can I do?

As the nightmare continues, the scene is repeated over and over again. Me standing bewildered, out of food and bonking with a volunteer handing me the only food they have, a  Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I toss it in my jersey pocket and head out with no knowledge of where the next stop is or if they have any food. This keeps going until I finally cross the finish line and collapse as someone hands me a burrito.

I’m not one to put much stock in the idea that dreams have deeper psychological meaning. I find them funny and sometimes slightly insightful of our worries. I’ve shared this nightmare with a few people for the humorous side of it which is also why I share it here. But as I said, I do believe dreams can shed light on the things that worry us.

As of right now, I am positive that I can start and finish the True Grit course just as I did in my dream. However, I am worried about how I am going to stay fueled without carrying PB and J’s in my hydration pack and stopping for lunch every hour or so. It really isn’t good for me to get hungry. It also isn’t good for me to consume gels, blocks or any other high energy type bull shit food. I go from normal to squirrel and then to dead in the course of about 15 minutes.

So I’ve been playing with some food options. One of my more successful forays into nutrition was the Del Taco Macho Veggie Burrito sans sour cream and cheese. I tucked said burrito into my jersey pocket and nibbled on it through the course of a 30 mile ride. I felt good throughout the ride even with the extra bit of exhaust that ensued. I didn’t mind so much and now that I think of it, said exhaust might keep people from trying to pass me. Added bonus.

The only downside I had to the burrito experiment was when I was done riding. I had about four bights left and finished them off and then dropped into the bath tub for a soak. Things were great until I tried to get out of the bath tub which happened to coincide with the point in time that my blood sugar dropped to that dangerous point and I headed down into zombieville. Yup I bonked getting out of the bath tube.

This can only be seen as a downside due to the fact that it happened. However, in hindsight I should have eaten a little more than a few swallows of a burrito when I got done. The burrito nutrition plan cannot be faulted for my oversight.

The other side of the dream is the fact that I was handed a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I don’t eat sweets. I don’t like them and I don’t tend to crave them. As of January 3rd, I stopped drinking gallons of Mtn Dew every day. By eliminating said elixir from my diet, I basically eliminated my sugar intake. Since then those cravings I haven’t had in years, have slowly been creeping back into my mind. Hmmm sugar.

I haven’t tried the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup nutrition plan, other than in my dream, so I can’t say how well it works. I think I might give it a try.

P. L. and R.

KB and I sat down to breakfast, as we often do, at St. Helen’s. I had already had some coffee so I was in Jabber Jaws Pratt mode. KB on the other hand has been stuck in “obsessing over touring” mode for a couple of weeks. Since her birth month (yup she celebrates for a whole month), she has been nagging me about getting a touring bike or getting a bike set up for touring, or whatever. She even rode into the shop on Saturday to get a feel for her Trek she has kept around for the past 43 years just so she could tour on it. Oh and she bought some knickers. I love knickers.

Anyway, she was nagging me about getting a touring bike. Now, I’m a fan of having bikes. I love bikes. I don’t really care for riding said bikes as can be deduced by my riding habits, but I do love bikes and I love having my shed full of them. So her wanting another bike shouldn’t really be an issue. However, we recently ran into this,

We, for some odd non-logical reason, decided that the Mooseknuckler Cycling Alliance World Headquarters needed an actual guest room. This effected our bike storage situation negatively. Prior to said decision, the guest room was the gear room and road bikes were stored next to the drum kit and sleeping bags. Converting sleeping bag hanging space into bed space required some rethinking of the bike situation. Being the bicycle storage genius that I am, I simply moved them to the shed and hung them up. After which, I noticed the real problem.

You see at five bikes a piece, we are at capacity. We could in fact fit more bikes into the space, but this would hinder ever being able to ride them. It’s already hard enough to get a bike out of the shed for said activity without adding more bikes to move.

So we were having breakfast at St. Helen’s and KB was going on and on about how she “needed” a touring bike. Normally, I would immediately begin looking for how to go about procuring another bike but for some odd reason all I could think about was the space issue. Five bikes each, that is the capacity. Ergo, if she wants another bike we need to eliminate one to maintain our bike storage equilibrium. Maybe its my mathematically trained brain that says if 10 equals total space use, then 10 is max. Sure you can subtract one from ten and get 9 and then add one more to get back to ten, but if ten is capacity…

Before going to breakfast at St. Helen’s, I like to read Yehuda Moon. Half of the fun of reading the comic is reading the incessant comments by bicycle commuters and junkies like myself that love bikes. Often the subject of the perfect number of bikes has been covered. After exhaustive research it has been determined, by the commentors on Yehuda Moon not myself, that the perfect number of bikes is, X-1=Perfect. Where X is the number of bikes that would cause you to get a divorce. As long as you maintain one bike under this number (remember X-1) you will have the perfect amount.

In relation to this equation goes the following, if X is the amount of bikes that will cause you to get a divorce and X is equal to one there is no way around not getting a divorce. It’s in the math. You should just go ahead and get it over with.

Now I relate this all to you for your benefit. Remember we were eating breakfast at St. Helen’s, and I found myself in a conversation I’ve had many times. What is odd is that I was caught on the opposite side of the conversation. For the first time in my life, I was telling someone that they didn’t need any more bikes and if they wanted another bike they needed to eliminate one they already had.

At this point in time, my brain completely froze. This is the equivalent to the pinwheel of death for Mac users or the Blue Circle of death for Windows folk. My brain basically melted. The hard drive ceased to function and all data stored up to this point was about to be lost. Luckily I’m a Windows user so I Alt-Control-Deleted the context and everything went back to normal.

Now I’ve got to figure out how to get another bike in the shed…