One Waterbottle and Imminent Danger

I live quite near the trails where I ride.  Near enough to feel a little bit guilty now and then about my seriously awesome proximity to some of the the finest trails in the southwest.

But, we don't really live in the woods; we live in a modest neighborhood, surrounded by houses.  I can see The Peaks from my backyard, but from my house, I can only actually see one trail;  I can see it when I'm standing in my driveway.  It's called The Lost Burrito.

The Lost Burrito is one of the oldest mountain biking trails in Flagstaff.  It was here long before I got here in 1991, making it's official debut as an aptly-named-trail in the very first-edition of my friend Cosmic Ray's Fat Tire Tale and Trails guidebook, which is now in its umpteenth revision.  In fact, before it was a mountain biking trail, The Lost Burrito was a sheep driveway which lead from the Schultz Creek drainage up to the bucolic meadows in the twin calderas collapsed lava domes atop the Dry Lake Hills.  You can follow the blazes, which are still set deep into the bark of the older trees, nearly from the top to the bottom.

Thing is, almost nobody rides The Lost Burrito anymore.

Back in the day, when I first started riding it, it was a hairball of a trail... 1200 vertical feet of crazy, rocky, steep trail, with a few genuinely scary no-fall zones near the top.  It was very difficult to ride up, and always required a few portages.  But it was pretty much rideable down, if you had the courage to stay on your bike while locked into a terminal skid on a steeply sloping trail.

I hadn't been on the Burrito in several years... perhaps as many as five, until today.  Since moving into our new house in June, I've been staring at it daily... and it's been calling to me... quietly but persistently coaxing me to come ride it.

So today I did.

No longer merely a hairball, the upper quarter of The Lost Burrito, quite frankly, humiliated me.  What had once been a rideable test-of-courage was now nothing more than a near-vertical screefield, a rockslide, a viscous, unpredictable talus-slope-of-terror.  I walked several parts of it.

Fortunately, the view from the top is still spectacular.  And descending the much-less-steep, still-swoopy-fun bottom three-quarters of The Lost Burrito trail is great enough to almost make you forget about the fear you tasted on the upper portions.  And seriously, how often does one ever get to descend 1200 feet in under a mile?  So I walked a bit of it.  It's still an amazing claim-to-fame for a trail (or sheep driveway) of any kind, fully rideable or not.

Baaah!

If you're curious you can view my entire Lost Burrito Loop at Everytrail; it was a shortish ride for a Saturday morning... Dogfood to AZ-Onceler to Little Gnarly to The Lost Burrito... about 11 miles... but a perfect just-one-waterbottle ride.  Watch as I descend at under 4 miles an hour!  Better yet: Watch-and-learn as I avoid Schultz Creek Trail in its entirety on a Saturday.

Little Lindy

We watched the new Flag-centric mountain biking movie Changing Gears together as a family the other night.  It's a fine local film, fun to watch and lovingly made; it tends to be about the early days of mountain biking in Flagstaff.  But the best part of all was seeing so many of our old friends in it, including Linden, the former retail manager at Absolute Bikes, and one of the best, fastest, most winningest and friendliest riders around.

My daughter loves Linden, always has, since she was a little-little baby.  Probably because Linden's always made Bekah feel special.  No matter how frazzled Linden's day on the salesfloor has become, whenever we stop in to say hello, she has always taken the time to greet Bekah with a smile, give her a big hug, and a swing around in circles... something cool that only Linden does for her.

So it was extra special to Bek when my wife decided to call her "Little Lindy" as she was riding along on her bike so capably in the woods today.  It's a nickname that just might stick.  Gotta admit, just like Linden, our kid's really got it when it comes to handling her bike on the trails!

balanced a rockstack

balanced a rockstack
marks not a place
but an idea

First Snow

Sir Ken

I've been waiting for more than a month for the chance to see and hear Sir Ken Robinson, one of the great contemporary voices in education, speak at NAU.  Got second row seats, thanks to my cohorts' early arrivals, and found myself completely enthralled during his humorous, provocative, and inspiring 90-minute talk.

Sir Ken, my wife, and me

But the best part was when he approached our table on his own after the luncheon, just to say hello.  I was genuinely thrilled to make his acquaintance personally, and he likewise seemed genuinely interested in our school and how our magnet arts and science programs work to try and instill creativity and innovation into our core curriculum.

Thus far no one seems to have posted video of yesterday's talk, but when they do, I'll be sure to update this post with a link to it. In the meantime, some of Sir Ken's best talks are archived at TED.org.  I'd love to recommend that you give him a listen at some point; all TED talks are limited to 18 minutes, so it won't take much time.  But it just might change your perception of what really needs to be reformed when we consider reforming education.  One of my favorite Sir Ken TED talks is embedded below:

Home Coffee Roasting

19 pounds of green coffee beans

Several years ago, I was introduced to home coffee roasting by one of my friends. I've been happily ordering green beans from Sweet Maria's and roasting them in a small roaster in my backyard ever since.

Roasting one's own coffee certainly adds a bit of complexity to the whole coffee-drinking process.  But I think it likewise adds to one's satisfaction with the experience in equal if not greater proportion.

Roasting allows me to find just the right point at which a particular bean's flavor appeals to my palate, and because of this, home-roasting allows me to become just -that-much better acquainted with my coffee.  Similarly, roasting has allowed me to better understand how coffee is grown and processed, and even to identify certain cup-qualities and regions of the world that seem to tend to grow coffee cultivars that we especially enjoy.

Bagged for storage

This week we received our latest shipment of coffee beans...nineteen pounds, in 1 to 5 pound lots... which I transferred into muslin bags for storage.  We order lots of varying size depending on our familiarity with the beans; five pound bags for beans from farms or regions we already know we love; 1 or 2 pound bags for new beans we're trying out.

Sweet Maria's ships faster than any place I know, so just a few days after placing our order a box arrives filled with the unique aroma of green coffee from cool places all over the world... in this case: Sumatra, Ethiopia, and Central America.  This shipment will last us several months.  However, in the interim we're likely to order more as we find we really like particular beans in this order enough to invest in larger quantities.  This is also a good idea because Sweet Maria's inventories are often quite limited.  They're fond of reminding customers that coffee is a commodity, not a drink.

Poster Girl [UPDATED]

We bought our daughter a new bicycle the other day. It's her fourth bike, a real one, for a big-girl, with 20-inch wheels, hand brakes, gears to shift, and front shocks. She's pretty stoked about it. So are we.

She's basically the poster-girl for Specialized Hotrock and Hotwalk bikes.  Chiefly because her daddy sometimes works at Absolute Bikes, but also because they're really great little bikes.  Below, I've thrown together a quick chronology of her bikes, from today all the way back to the beginning...

Hotrock 20" -- Sept. 2011	Hotrock 20" -- Sept. 2011
Hotrock 16" -- October 2010	Hotrock 16" -- February 2011
Hotrock 12" -- April 2010	Hotrock 12" -- July 2009
Hotwalk 12" -- Marsh 2009	Hotwalk 12" -- May 2008

Never had training wheels.  Makes me proud...


UPDATE: 27 October 2016

For her birthday in April 2014, we bought her another Specialized, another Hotrock in fact, this time one with 24" wheels and a triple chainring, 21 gears in all. Bigger wheels and the wider range of gears made a huge difference. She rode this bike with increasing proficiency for about two and a half years, until the seat post was at its max.

This bike made her a mountain biker. A full on, legit, shredder of singletrack.

Then, 'round about the end of the summer of 2016, it became quite obvious that she was going to need yet another upgrade, to a much larger bike with even bigger wheels.

Fortunately, we were given the opportunity to buy her a like-new but slightly-used Surly Pugsley from a fleet of winter rentals that were being off loaded by a local outfitter and friend.  He gave us a great deal and she's been killin' it on her new super-big wheels ever since.  I'm hoping she hangs on to this rig for a long time, perhaps even forever if she doesn't end up too tall.

I love my Surlys.  I'm pretty sure she does, too.

UPDATE: 01 May 2017

Stoked, once again, to have come across a classic steel Ritchey P-bike (a 1995 Crazy Pete) in super-nice condition the other day. Fits my now-12-year-old daughter perfectly and likely will for some time, maybe for always.

So fun to watch her shred on a seriously-classy vintage bike that was built (to shred) some 10 years before she was born.