GMR Friday: All the Way Around...

It was quiet up on the Mountain today; further up on the Ridge it was downright solitary and, though I was climbing well, that quiet as much as anything kept me pushing on. It wouldn't be the usual out and back today, it would be the whole loop or nothing. The quiet stretched out along both sides of the snaking roadway, bending, rising, falling. Butterflies, once again, filled the silence into which I intruded. They swooped down from higher ridge lines. In pairs they kept pace beside me, studying, comparing, contrasting. They challenged fate, darting through the constant movements of arms, legs, bike. They darted left to right, back to the left, imbued with the human capacity for inquisitiveness. Points of distraction hanging in the air, not earth-bound, yet not quite capable of reaching the sky. Comrades, their lives expended, dotted the hard pavement; their wings, little memorials of color.

Up there everything seems exaggerated, enhanced - the sun is sharper, the cut of the road more harsh, colors more severe, distances come quicker. Time, like the road, stretched out in gentle curves and ever lengthening rises, passed slower while pushed by a breeze too lazy to care.

Unless you are racing this weekend, let not time be the determining factor of your rides the next couple of days; and look for the little things hidden amongst the big.

mothering instinct? Ha! You're on your own junior, i'm out of here.

i suppose it is, more accurately, learning by example.

I have descended into Baldy Village from Cow Saddle with the sky darkly threatening rain, in fog soup so thick you couldn't see twenty-five feet over the side, but I don't think I have ever done it with the sky as clear as it was today