5-10-09
Connor and I finally un-mothballed the mountain bikes and made attempt number 2 at riding down the Toll Road trail, #200 in the Pinals. We would have done this sooner but we had to give the disappointing memories of our first try time to heal. On our first attempt, about this time last year, we had barely ridden for 5 minutes down the Toll Road trail from Pioneer Pass when Mr. “Go-for-it” laid all 250 muscular pounds of his 17 year old body into his pedals while going over a log and broke his chain. Rather than pitching his entire bike down the embankment in anger as I would have done, he chose instead to throw the chain, a poor choice because the chain disappeared beautifully into the heavy pine and oak duff near the creek at the bottom. Even frustrated golfers are smart enough to throw their bagful of clubs in the lake rather than a handful of unsatisfying Titleists that do nothing more for your attitude than to sink irretrievably into the muck.
I needed the old chain in order to get the right measurement for the new one, so I ticked off about 20 minutes of my life walking a tight grid pattern through the leaves at the base of the ravine, while Connor cussed and kicked Ponderosa pine cones in all directions from above. I finally found the broken chain partially wrapped around a pine sapling, so we regrouped and silently pushed our bikes up a steep embankment to the Ice House Canyon road (#112) and began a slow, pitiful coast back towards Globe. I suppose we could have coasted all the way if it was our only choice, but it reeked of failure and impotence; it seemed better to lick our wounds and try it again at full strength. Ann had barely started down the mountain from dropping us off in the Land Cruiser when she received our cell phone request to turn around and pick us up.
Now, almost exactly a year later, we decided to sally forth one more time. I put a new chain on Connor’s bike and I bought spare chains for my bike and his, along with several new tubes, a chain breaker tool, tire repair kit, Allen wrenches, tire removal tools, and toilet paper—everything that we might need to get ourselves out of another jam without having to subject ourselves once again to the humiliation of having to fall back on Mama’s sag wagon.
In order to further stack the deck in our favor, we started below Pioneer Pass on a slightly lower part of the Toll Road trail by starting at the steep Uña de Oso trail #201 and riding it down to Pinal Creek where it intersected with the Toll Road trail. It cut off a mile or so, but even better, it cut off some of the difficult sections that would have been hard to navigate with a bike. It also bypassed that fateful area over the log and down the ravine that grounded us last year.
The Uña de Oso trail is a steep, half mile connector trail from the trailhead at the 112 road that runs steeply all the way down to the creek. In terms of driving time, this trailhead cuts off a mile or two of the drive to Pioneer Pass making it the quickest route to get down to this section of Pinal Creek.
It’s even quicker on a mountain bike and as Mr. “No Fear” raced down ahead of me, he managed to drive a banana yucca leaf into this shin. When I reached him, there wasn’t much bleeding and he claimed no pain, but he did confer that he brushed against something wet on the way down. I had felt the same thing—it felt like dew, like the leaves were still wet at 12 noon, with clear blue skies, and close to 90 degrees of temperature. It just didn’t add up so we walked back a few hundred feet searching for the source and found that the Arizona white oak leaves that we had brushed by as we road were covered with tiny, tan-colored larvae suspended in a viscous liquid at the base of the bottom side of many of the leaves. The liquid had the familiar look and consistency of spit; each ½” wide translucent wad was filled with tiny air bubbles and four or five squirming larvae about one eighth inch long. Our bare arms had picked up some of this slime as we road past and, as it evaporated, we felt the effects of the evaporative cooling, like a nurse had just prepped us with an alcohol swab for a tetanus shot.
When we weren’t carrying our bikes through and across Pinal Creek or up impossibly steep and rocky sections of the trail, Mr. “Better Dead than Late” was riding well ahead of me, allowing me to catch up only to make sure that I hadn’t wrecked and to chide me for riding my brakes too much. The only time that I was ahead of him was when he decided to use that toilet paper that I had brought along—even he had to slow down to pull that off that little operation. It’s the democracy of elimination at work.
As an old guy, I like to convince myself that experience trumps the raw energy of youth, but that self-assurance only lasts as long as there is no youthfulness around to shove it back in my face. On the parts of the trail where I was able to keep up with Connor, his reaction time and pure gut instincts were impossible for me to replicate. I may have been able to follow the S-shaped turns that he used to ride up the steeply-sloped right hand side of the trail and swing around the boulder on the left, but had anyone been watching, there would be no doubt about his fluidity and my slow and shaky imitations.
Only the upper part of Pinal Creek had water still trickling through the rocks. The entire lower section was bone dry. Even the large earthen cattle tank just north of the trail junction with the Ice House Canyon and Check Dam trail had nothing in it but a crusty layer of dried and checked mud. This was the same tank that Paul, Natalie, and I had five dogs swimming in just a few months earlier this year.
I had abandoned this trail in the last month because of the number of disgusting cows and cow shit that was everywhere along the trail. It was tough to keep Bela focused on the good wholesome fun of chasing smells and away from the tasty green slime of the ever present cow pies. She had a tendency to want to chase the cow pie generators too, especially the calves. I remember one time this winter where a strong back kick by a mother cow just missed breaking Bela’s jaw by a few millimeters. I was anxious to teach her the evils of chasing cows myself, rather than having to feed her blenderized dog food through a straw for the next 6 months.
Though it’s still early May, it feels like summer with the buzzing of insects in the ears and the schizophrenic songs of
Mockingbirds perched high in the surrounding mesquites. Though the creek is dry, there are at least a dozen species of butterflies and several dragonflies darting around. Arctostaphylos pungens (the smaller, greener Manzanita) already has its blueberry size and shaped fruits fully formed and well on their way to being ripe and Rhus trilobata (Lemonade berry) is completely full of its fruits, all red-ripe and sticky to the touch. There are still the blue flowers of Eriastrum growing low along the tread of the trail.
Most of the mesquites are in full flower with the typical golden 3 inch long catkins that appear like skewered caterpillars sticking out in all directions from the branches. Native prickly pears are in nearly full bloom with chiffon yellow flowers that have an incredible back-lit transparency that makes them look electric. It’s a color that lends itself to be captured far more accurately with water colors than oils.
Mourning doves are flying from tree to tree in their typical groupings of three or four. Quail are everywhere, as are sooty colored flycatchers that dash from a strategic exposed branch, grab their target insect, and return to the exact same spot, like someone might retrieve a ball that had rolled into the middle of a street in the path of an oncoming car. I also saw a Scott’s Oriole with its striking contrast of black on pure yellow, a color combination worthy of a high school letter jacket and matching cheerleader pom poms.
Yerba Santa is at its peak with crisp white flowers but the last Penstemon pseudospectabilis flowers are beginning to fade. What Connor calls Indian toilet paper and I call mullein(Verbascum sp.) is 8” to 18” tall in the creek bottom, growing amongst the rapidly fading Verbenas. Monkey flowers are still flowering in the moister parts of the creek bottom.
Connor and I made it back to the car in about 40 minutes with no broken bones, flat tires, or broken chains. Other than Connor’s small yucca puncture wound, we collectively only had the drying blood from the scratches of trailside catclaws to prove that we actually did anything substantial. If it were up to Connor, he would have made it to the bottom in 15 minutes and walked away wallowing in youthful satisfaction, most likely bragging to his friends that he had beat his old man to the bottom by almost a half hour. I’d like to think that I used those extra 30 minutes for some extended father son contact time, something that has become rarer and rarer in the past year or two. Those extra minutes of braking also helped to guarantee me a place in the next adventure, complete with sound ribs, a full set of teeth, and functional knees that can pedal safely past logs and yuccas, and help carry my bike over creek boulders where even Connor can’t ride.
Connor and I finally un-mothballed the mountain bikes and made attempt number 2 at riding down the Toll Road trail, #200 in the Pinals. We would have done this sooner but we had to give the disappointing memories of our first try time to heal. On our first attempt, about this time last year, we had barely ridden for 5 minutes down the Toll Road trail from Pioneer Pass when Mr. “Go-for-it” laid all 250 muscular pounds of his 17 year old body into his pedals while going over a log and broke his chain. Rather than pitching his entire bike down the embankment in anger as I would have done, he chose instead to throw the chain, a poor choice because the chain disappeared beautifully into the heavy pine and oak duff near the creek at the bottom. Even frustrated golfers are smart enough to throw their bagful of clubs in the lake rather than a handful of unsatisfying Titleists that do nothing more for your attitude than to sink irretrievably into the muck.
I needed the old chain in order to get the right measurement for the new one, so I ticked off about 20 minutes of my life walking a tight grid pattern through the leaves at the base of the ravine, while Connor cussed and kicked Ponderosa pine cones in all directions from above. I finally found the broken chain partially wrapped around a pine sapling, so we regrouped and silently pushed our bikes up a steep embankment to the Ice House Canyon road (#112) and began a slow, pitiful coast back towards Globe. I suppose we could have coasted all the way if it was our only choice, but it reeked of failure and impotence; it seemed better to lick our wounds and try it again at full strength. Ann had barely started down the mountain from dropping us off in the Land Cruiser when she received our cell phone request to turn around and pick us up.
Now, almost exactly a year later, we decided to sally forth one more time. I put a new chain on Connor’s bike and I bought spare chains for my bike and his, along with several new tubes, a chain breaker tool, tire repair kit, Allen wrenches, tire removal tools, and toilet paper—everything that we might need to get ourselves out of another jam without having to subject ourselves once again to the humiliation of having to fall back on Mama’s sag wagon.
In order to further stack the deck in our favor, we started below Pioneer Pass on a slightly lower part of the Toll Road trail by starting at the steep Uña de Oso trail #201 and riding it down to Pinal Creek where it intersected with the Toll Road trail. It cut off a mile or so, but even better, it cut off some of the difficult sections that would have been hard to navigate with a bike. It also bypassed that fateful area over the log and down the ravine that grounded us last year.
The Uña de Oso trail is a steep, half mile connector trail from the trailhead at the 112 road that runs steeply all the way down to the creek. In terms of driving time, this trailhead cuts off a mile or two of the drive to Pioneer Pass making it the quickest route to get down to this section of Pinal Creek.
It’s even quicker on a mountain bike and as Mr. “No Fear” raced down ahead of me, he managed to drive a banana yucca leaf into this shin. When I reached him, there wasn’t much bleeding and he claimed no pain, but he did confer that he brushed against something wet on the way down. I had felt the same thing—it felt like dew, like the leaves were still wet at 12 noon, with clear blue skies, and close to 90 degrees of temperature. It just didn’t add up so we walked back a few hundred feet searching for the source and found that the Arizona white oak leaves that we had brushed by as we road were covered with tiny, tan-colored larvae suspended in a viscous liquid at the base of the bottom side of many of the leaves. The liquid had the familiar look and consistency of spit; each ½” wide translucent wad was filled with tiny air bubbles and four or five squirming larvae about one eighth inch long. Our bare arms had picked up some of this slime as we road past and, as it evaporated, we felt the effects of the evaporative cooling, like a nurse had just prepped us with an alcohol swab for a tetanus shot.
When we weren’t carrying our bikes through and across Pinal Creek or up impossibly steep and rocky sections of the trail, Mr. “Better Dead than Late” was riding well ahead of me, allowing me to catch up only to make sure that I hadn’t wrecked and to chide me for riding my brakes too much. The only time that I was ahead of him was when he decided to use that toilet paper that I had brought along—even he had to slow down to pull that off that little operation. It’s the democracy of elimination at work.
As an old guy, I like to convince myself that experience trumps the raw energy of youth, but that self-assurance only lasts as long as there is no youthfulness around to shove it back in my face. On the parts of the trail where I was able to keep up with Connor, his reaction time and pure gut instincts were impossible for me to replicate. I may have been able to follow the S-shaped turns that he used to ride up the steeply-sloped right hand side of the trail and swing around the boulder on the left, but had anyone been watching, there would be no doubt about his fluidity and my slow and shaky imitations.
Only the upper part of Pinal Creek had water still trickling through the rocks. The entire lower section was bone dry. Even the large earthen cattle tank just north of the trail junction with the Ice House Canyon and Check Dam trail had nothing in it but a crusty layer of dried and checked mud. This was the same tank that Paul, Natalie, and I had five dogs swimming in just a few months earlier this year.
I had abandoned this trail in the last month because of the number of disgusting cows and cow shit that was everywhere along the trail. It was tough to keep Bela focused on the good wholesome fun of chasing smells and away from the tasty green slime of the ever present cow pies. She had a tendency to want to chase the cow pie generators too, especially the calves. I remember one time this winter where a strong back kick by a mother cow just missed breaking Bela’s jaw by a few millimeters. I was anxious to teach her the evils of chasing cows myself, rather than having to feed her blenderized dog food through a straw for the next 6 months.
Though it’s still early May, it feels like summer with the buzzing of insects in the ears and the schizophrenic songs of
Mockingbirds perched high in the surrounding mesquites. Though the creek is dry, there are at least a dozen species of butterflies and several dragonflies darting around. Arctostaphylos pungens (the smaller, greener Manzanita) already has its blueberry size and shaped fruits fully formed and well on their way to being ripe and Rhus trilobata (Lemonade berry) is completely full of its fruits, all red-ripe and sticky to the touch. There are still the blue flowers of Eriastrum growing low along the tread of the trail.Most of the mesquites are in full flower with the typical golden 3 inch long catkins that appear like skewered caterpillars sticking out in all directions from the branches. Native prickly pears are in nearly full bloom with chiffon yellow flowers that have an incredible back-lit transparency that makes them look electric. It’s a color that lends itself to be captured far more accurately with water colors than oils.
Mourning doves are flying from tree to tree in their typical groupings of three or four. Quail are everywhere, as are sooty colored flycatchers that dash from a strategic exposed branch, grab their target insect, and return to the exact same spot, like someone might retrieve a ball that had rolled into the middle of a street in the path of an oncoming car. I also saw a Scott’s Oriole with its striking contrast of black on pure yellow, a color combination worthy of a high school letter jacket and matching cheerleader pom poms.
Yerba Santa is at its peak with crisp white flowers but the last Penstemon pseudospectabilis flowers are beginning to fade. What Connor calls Indian toilet paper and I call mullein(Verbascum sp.) is 8” to 18” tall in the creek bottom, growing amongst the rapidly fading Verbenas. Monkey flowers are still flowering in the moister parts of the creek bottom.
Connor and I made it back to the car in about 40 minutes with no broken bones, flat tires, or broken chains. Other than Connor’s small yucca puncture wound, we collectively only had the drying blood from the scratches of trailside catclaws to prove that we actually did anything substantial. If it were up to Connor, he would have made it to the bottom in 15 minutes and walked away wallowing in youthful satisfaction, most likely bragging to his friends that he had beat his old man to the bottom by almost a half hour. I’d like to think that I used those extra 30 minutes for some extended father son contact time, something that has become rarer and rarer in the past year or two. Those extra minutes of braking also helped to guarantee me a place in the next adventure, complete with sound ribs, a full set of teeth, and functional knees that can pedal safely past logs and yuccas, and help carry my bike over creek boulders where even Connor can’t ride.
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