Location: Precisely known, but nevertheless Mostly Lost ™
Status: Good. No - Great.
The plan: Get one.
Being here is mostly by circumstance. Business meeting in Scottsdale, Arizona all week and Tuscon is on my way home. Those cramped confined hotel rooms and hot tubs get to be too much to endure after a while. I needed to find some open space and remember what it feels like to type with frozen fingers.
I bring one thing with me that will figure prominently in any team moral building or training event: beer. Ya might need a closeup to see what it is on this, the inaugural event of the High Desert Racing Team.
Made in Tempe, this beer worked for post-business meeting social events, so I figured it ought to work for mountain biking too. Mmm... Washed down some artisan bread stuffed with ham and pepper-jack just a bit ago. Now the second one is helping wash the events of the day out of mind and onto this page.
And what were those events? Well, driving mostly. Then trying to follow directions from memory. For the record: bad idea. I'm somewhere near the actual venue, but I think I took a wrong turn somewhere. It was supposed to be 9.3 miles from highway 77, but I was not paying attention and went farther, doubled back and as twilight loomed, said the hell with it and found a place to camp. Rode up a likely road and went about .3 miles up a hill and got a good look at what lay ahead of me: rolling foothills and a disappearing road.
But wait a minute... What about that bit of orange tape that I saw right before I had the rental car traversing a washout in the road on four wheels? (Hey, who cares? It's a rental...) Mountain bikers use that stuff all the time to mark trails. I thought it meant I was on to something, so I rode back down to investigate. I saw more orange tape just off the road and decided it must be there to mark a turn. Getting closer, I realized it wasn't going anywhere but to a short metal pipe sticking up out of the ground. Oh...! Having seen these before, I got out the camera because (praise be!) I was No Longer Lost. I had found a US-GS survey marker with coordinates telling me exactly where I was. So if my smart phone had a connection at that very moment, I would have been able to enter it directly and see where I was on a satellite view of the area.
As if that would do any good. As I said: Lost, but location known precisely.
The morrow brings a chance to redeem myself in terms of navigational skill and find the actual start of the 24HITOP course, ride it, then go have breakfast. When I get back to town, I get to go visit some friends and go for yet another ride. And, if they let me mooch off there internet, I can enter those coordinates and find out exactly where I spent the night. Yee-haw. Mostly I don't care. But I do care where the 16 miles of mixed single track are, and I think I know... We shall see.
