Chapter Six

The Kokopelli Trail

 

Just beyond a fortress of sandstone pinnacles, sunbeams stabbed through dark clouds. “God light,” my grandmother used to call sunbeams, because they projected peace even as the sky threatened storms.

I turned down the volume on the car stereo and listened for thunder. Interstate 70 cut a razor-straight line through the desert, which was further divided by gold steaks of light and sweeping shadows. Through the open window I could smell subtle hints of sage, and tar.

It had been a week since I left Geoff in San Francisco and drove in a single, angst-ridden, twelve-hour Interstate marathon to my parents’ house in Salt Lake City. I walked through the front door in tears, leaking more resignation and disappointment than anger. My mom and dad greeted me compassionately but quietly wondered what my next step would be. Surely not the Great Divide thing? And although I acknowledged that there were hundreds of more important things I could be doing, I had no idea what they were, and for now I intended to stay the course.

“First,” I said, “I need to see if I even have a long trip in me.”

I spent my first few days at home browsing my Utah maps. I stared blankly at the curving lines and red streaks that represented mountains and trails, failing to make any real sense of the abstraction. Since I couldn’t concentrate long enough to even determine simple mileage breakdowns, I decided planning my own route was out of the question. I settled on a three-day connection of two well-worn mountain bike routes in the desert, the 140-mile Kokopelli Trail linking Fruita, Colorado, and Moab, Utah, followed by the 100-mile White Rim loop in Canyonlands National Park. The beauty of the Kokopelli Trail was that it was marked with reflective trail signs, so I didn’t even need to pay attention to a map. I could just mindlessly follow the markers to my destination.

The established nature of the route made my parents feel more at ease about me striking out alone, but it made me feel complacent. I packed up my bike bags with the bare essentials as I saw them — one change of clothing, light rain gear, a down sleeping bag rated to thirty-two degrees, a light air mattress, a bivy sack, tools, medicine, granola bars, sunflower seeds, chocolate, a sixteen-ounce plastic jar of peanut butter, and a six-liter bladder full of water.

The desert drive to Fruita was unspeakably lonely. I had driven back from San Francisco with my friend, Jen, in the passenger’s seat, and had spent most of the following days with family and friends, taking only the occasional break from companionship to go for a training ride. This was the first time since I left Alaska that I had been completely alone. Solitude seeped like stale rainwater into my core, and I knew there was more where that came from.

I arrived at the Kokopelli trailhead well after dark. With the car still idling, I flicked off the headlights and let my eyes focus on the ominous silhouettes of sandstone cliffs, eerily backlit by the moon. Trickling down my throat was that same layer of vague doom that always seemed to build before I started anything big. I took my bike down from the roof rack and started putting the pieces together. I figured I could get a few miles behind me and sleep near the trail before the hot sun came up. I tested the shifters and lubed the chain, then tested the brakes. As I spun the front wheel, it made a disheartening “clink, clink, clink” sound. I grabbed the rim and ran my hand along the spokes until I connected with the loose one. It was nearly broken off.

“Damn it!” I yelled, and stood up, pacing around my car. Why didn’t I check over my bike before I left Salt Lake? I certainly couldn’t start a three-hundred-mile mountain bike tour with a broken spoke. That was only asking for wheel failure and the possibility of becoming stranded in the middle of the desert. But it seemed just as idiotic to admit defeat right there. If I didn’t even start my first overnight test run, I might as well scrap the entire Great Divide right there.

As I mulled my options, I remembered my friend, Dave, telling me about a bike shop he had worked at in Fruita, about five miles down the road. Despite my resolve to start early and spend as little money as possible, I decided to rent a hotel room in Fruita and visit the bike shop in the morning. The thought of actually interacting with humans before I hit the long and lonely trail made me feel more at ease.

The next morning, the bike mechanic in Fruita had me in and out the door in less than ten minutes, gripping a freshly trued wheel as I walked into the blazing sunlight. The temperature neared 85, more heat than I had been exposed to in nearly a year, and promised to become hotter. I drove back to the trailhead and reconfigured my bike. Between sleeping in at the hotel, breakfast, and the bike shop, it was already nearly 11 a.m. I had hoped to start twelve hours earlier, but I didn’t fret about the late start. I could still ride the route in three days, no problem. It was only 240 miles plus a thirty-mile road connector.

I had everything mounted on my bicycle, my car locked, and my butt on the saddle, seconds away from launching into the sweltering desert, when my cell phone rang.

“Hey Jill. Do you have a minute to talk?” Geoff asked.

“I guess,” I said. “I’m in Fruita right now. I’m about to go for a bike tour on the Kokopelli Trail.”

“That’s cool,” Geoff said. “That’s a fun ride. I think you’re really going to enjoy it. I’m still visiting my family in New York. But I wanted to call to talk about our stuff.”

“What stuff?”

“Everything in your car,” Geoff said. “What we’re going to do with it — I’m going to need some of that stuff when I go back to Juneau.”

“Well, you’re either going to have to wait or come here and deal with it,” I said. “Because I’m not going back to Juneau until July, at least, if at all.”

“I’m flying back to Salt Lake tomorrow,” Geoff said. “For a little while. But since I’m not getting into Western States, I’m probably not going to stay down there long.”

“That’s fine,” I said. “You can stop by my parents’ house. I left a lot of stuff there. The rest is in my car, which is going to be parked for the next few days at the Kokopelli trailhead outside of Fruita.”

“Good,” Geoff said. “I was talking to Jen about taking a trip to Moab. Maybe we can swing out there and grab stuff out of your car.”

“Actually, if you’re going to do that, maybe you could just drive my car to Moab,” I said. “I’m going to need it in town when I’m done.”

“That could work,” Geoff said. He paused, and I let the silence ferment. It was the first time Geoff and I had spoken since San Francisco, and I didn’t quite feel comfortable yet dealing with him directly, even if it was only through formalities and logistics. There was still so much anger and hurt flapping out in the open. But the truth was, we were still connected in more tangible ways, ways that involved camping gear and clothing, and the quicker we could break those strained ties, the more likely we’d grow more comfortable with the distance.

“Well, I’ll leave the key on top of the front wheel,” I said. “If my car’s in Moab when I get there, great. If not, just leave a message on my phone letting me know you couldn’t pick it up and I’ll hitchhike.”

“Okay,” Geoff said. “Either way, I think we’ll be able to help you get back. When do you think you’ll be done?”

“Um, Thursday,” I said. “Three days from now. Hopefully. I’m getting a much later start today than I wanted to, so I guess we’ll see.”

“You’re starting right now?” Geoff asked. “At noon?”

“I had bike trouble,” I said. “Broken spoke. It’s fixed now.”

“Hmm,” Geoff said.

“Yeah,” I said. The fermented silence returned. I inhaled and exhaled long and slow, until I started to feel dizzy. Then Geoff said, “I am sorry. I’m sorry for everything.”

“Well, I’m sorry, too,” I said and breathed out. “There’s probably more we need to figure out. But maybe later. I’m standing in direct sunlight. I’m roasting, and I really have to go.”

“Okay. Talk to you later.”

“Bye.” I turned the phone completely off and stuffed it in my pocket. My bike seat felt warm even though I had spent the last ten minutes simply standing next to it. The noon sun bleached the sky white, and washed out the surrounding sandstone cliffs to a sickly pale orange. I placed my last foot on the pedal and started rolling down the gravel road. The road narrowed to a singletrack trail, turned east and started following a sandstone bench several dozen feet above the Colorado River.

The trail skirted the edge of the cliff, rolling over jagged boulders and plunging into sandy basins. One bad error would mean a quick trip to chocolate-covered river far below, and the exposure rattled me. I wasn’t really a desert mountain biker, I was more of a snow rider — soft surfaces and softer falls. Desert trails meant hard rock and cactus and plunges off cliffs, and I was timid, out of practice and loaded with twenty-five extra pounds of weight. I hit a few rocks too far to one side and tipped. I pedaled slower. I ran up against a wall of boulders so I got off my bike and walked. I was two miles into the 140-mile Kokopelli Trail, and already struggling.

Singletrack closed in on my muddled mind, until my thoughts were nothing more than a tunnel filled with rocks and sand. I squinted away from the hard sun and focused solely on the washed-out trail. All of my capacity for hope was directed at maintaining my connectionto to that thin thread of dirt. There was no future beyond the next obstacle, no pain beyond the muscle burn and searing heat. I forgot that there was a Geoff, or a Juneau Empire, or even an Alaska. The desert filled the newly emptied space with hard apathy and sweat-drenched suffering.

It took me nearly three hours to cover the first fourteen miles. If I really wanted to complete my ride in three days, I was going to have to ride at least seventy miles the first day, and it was already 3 p.m. I sucked on the hose of my water bladder as warm liquid sloshed around in my empty stomach. I tried to stuff down sunflower seeds but they tasted like sawdust, so I went for the chocolate, which was gooey and hot. The trail veered down a slope so steep that I had to balance my bike on my shoulder as I picked my way down a rocky outcropping. At the bottom, I crossed a trickling creek that, according to the small sheet of cues I had printed out, would be the last on-route water I’d see before I crossed the Colorado River at mile seventy. As the rust-colored stream gurgled by, I weighed the prospect of filtering water. The cues also mentioned that the creek was tainted with mining runoff, and could be contaminated with toxic metals. In Fruita, I had filled my large MSR bladder with six liters of water, enough to last two solid days in Alaska. The heavy weight pulling on my shoulders made it difficult to anticipate a water emergency in the first seventy miles.

The trail out of the creek gorge was just as steep, a strenuous climb under the full weight of my bike and gear that left my head spinning and my lungs gasping for hot, dry air. I glanced up the gorge and saw a distance sliver of Interstate 70. Trucks streamed effortlessly east and west, mere minutes from the place I left three hours earlier. I put the bike down and leaned into the sparse shade of the rocks. It wouldn’t be too hard to just follow the stream up the gorge, climb onto the freeway bridge and hitch a ride. I’d probably be back to Fruita in an hour. I couldn’t think of any good reason why I should keep riding my bike in the desert. I certainly wasn’t very good at it. It wasn’t comfortable, or fun, or even purposeful. It was lonely, hot and hard. And yet, my tired mind wouldn’t let me accept the ease of quitting. My mind understood that deeper needs trumped temporary pain. That quitting the Kokopelli Trail probably meant quitting everything.

The trail turned in the opposite direction of the freeway and continued toward the Colorado River, now a distant line through the large, rolling plateau. The open desert seemed to swallow all sound. The shadows of towering buttes slowly devoured the sunlight. An ochre sunset stretched over the horizon, deepening to orange and then red. The summer evening descended the way it would in Alaska, yawning lazily across the sky as though darkness was reluctant to return. I pedaled south toward the growing darkness on an unbroken line of gravel. Velocity came effortlessly as the road dropped toward the river and the heat of the day finally released its suffocating grip. The sudden ease of movement reminded me that I should never quit short of a goal because things are always bound to get better — that is, of course, before they inevitably get worse.

I arrived at the Dewey footbridge across the Colorado River just before midnight, having pedaled for nearly twelve unstopping hours to cover seventy miles. On the first day alone, the Kokopelli Trail had crossed every level of difficulty, from technical rock to smooth gravel to sand so deep that my legs wobbled as I fought to push my bike forward. Streaks of dried salt clung to my face and arms. I had sucked the last drops of my water from my six-liter bladder more than an hour before, and I was already feeling desperately thirsty, though not painfully so. I dropped to my knees in a basin of gelatinous quicksand lining the riverbank and stretched the water filter hose into the cocoa-colored water. I grunted as I pumped the filter, straining to extract precious ounces of water from a prison of silt. I stuck the release hose directly into my mouth and let the slightly bitter water gush down my throat. I had known the enveloping comfort of warmth after deep cold before, but never before had I experienced the intense relief of water after deep thirst. If life had a taste, the muddy water of the Colorado River reflected it perfectly — cool and refreshing, infused with little bits of the world.

I pedaled another two miles up the road and laid out my bivy sack and sleeping bag beneath a juniper tree. The clarity of the nearly full moon revealed a startling pattern of craters and mountains. It was a cartoon moon, a moon out of a children’s book, full of features and laughing. The sky was half white with stars, blazing from the deepest corners of the universe. I pulled a jar of peanut butter from my frame bag and dug two fingers in, relishing its smooth sweetness garnished with the salty flavor of my skin. I excavated nearly half the jar, and confirmed with satisfaction my consumption of a thousand calories. I ate dried cherries and a handful of pumpkin seeds for dessert and lay down with my face to the glittering sky, supremely satisfied with my solitude, my slowness, and the stark simplicity of life on a bike.

The sun woke me up at 7 a.m. The morning sky was still tinted with streaks of pink and purple, but dawn was rapidly disintegrating at a rate inversely proportional to the meandering twilight the night before. The air was sharp and cool. I felt slightly hung over, probably from spending many of the final hours of my ride dehydrated. I had no coffee to combat the feeling, only a few pieces of chocolate, which were dry and chalky from melting all day and nearly freezing all night. My peanut butter also bore no resemblance to the delicacy I had consumed the night before, but instead stuck tastelessly in my throat like a lump of caulk. I packed up my bike and flung my lead-weighted legs over the saddle, knowing the Colorado River crossing had been the low point on the trail, and there was no way out of my current situation except to climb.

But I could not have anticipated the climb that lay in front of me. It was straight up, several thousand vertical feet of grinding gravel and slipping in the sand. I cranked with all the energy peanut butter and a full night of sleep could give me, and still I struggled for four miles per hour, and then three. I slumped off the bike and walked, with the 8 a.m. sunlight already hot and bright enough to pierce exposed skin. I reached the summit in a new climate zone, a place where pinion trees grew. A deer streaked across the road, looked back with what I swore was a bemused smile, and bounded down the road in the direction I was heading. It disappeared beneath a horizon line that looked like the edge of a waterfall. I squinted in disbelief because as far as I could see, that was still the road. As I approached it, the other side of the canyon came into view, so close it seemed almost possible to jump the gap. But the road instead plummeted into a narrow chasm down a series of dramatic switchbacks. I couldn’t even tell where exactly the road went after the first bend, fifty feet in front of me. But the fifty feet I could see were the most disheartening of all — broken steps carved out of chunky slickrock, smeared with sand and studded with large boulders.

I throttled the brakes as I dropped over the first step, inching my way down a minefield of rocks and sand. I bashed my knee against a larger rock and swore loudly, cursing the four-wheel-drive maniacs who built this nightmare of a road. I also cursed myself for never, in all of my gusto to become an endurance cyclist, actually learning to ride a mountain bike. The bike screeched and halted and lunged over the hard drops, then screeched and halted again. I couldn’t finesse my way over the boulders like an experienced technical rider, so I would simply ferry awkwardly around them, locking the brakes and piloting the bike through a semi-controlled crash. Downward progress was slower and more physically taxing than climbing. I was quickly running out of steam.

At the bottom of the canyon, the trail started rolling again, climbing and dropping steeply over smaller drainages. My progress was excruciatingly slow. By noon, nearly five hours after I had pulled myself out of my sleeping bag, I had covered twenty-three miles. I pushed my bike to the top of what felt like a near-vertical sandstone wall and rode the brakes to a shady spot at the bottom. I slathered more sunscreen on my skin and checked my water bladder. It was less than half full. I had chugged more than three liters of water in five hours, and there were no known reliable water sources before Moab, forty miles away. Less than five miles down the rugged jeep track, I was supposed to cross a paved road at a place called Onion Creek. I didn’t know whether Onion Creek was actually a creek, if it was an alkaline creek, or if it was simply a name for another barren strip of desert. I did know I would need to get water there before continuing on to Moab. If I couldn’t, riding all the way to Moab was out of the question. I would have to follow that road until I either found water or found my way out.

I sat dejected beneath the tree, stewing about the massive failure that my first big mountain bike trip was becoming, when I head a woman’s voice say, “Jill? Is that you down there?”

I stood up and saw two figures walking around a cluster of trees. They were the first humans I had seen since just a few miles after I left Fruita, twenty-four hours before. I squinted until I recognized them — my friend Jen and her boyfriend, Mike.

“Jen!” I said in a voice that was startlingly hoarse. “What are you doing out here?”

“Mike and I came down here to go camping. Geoff said we might see you around here. He said you were on the Kokopelli Trail.”

“Geoff’s with you?” I asked.

“He’s out for a run right now,” Jen said. “Mike and I drove down here to look for Cottonwood Canyon, but this road is kind of sketchy for my truck. We thought we’d hike and check it out. What’s the road look like beyond here?”

“It gets worse,” I said. “A lot worse.”

“Oh,” Jen said. “That sucks. And how are you doing? You looked kind of tired under that tree.”

“I’m running out of water,” I said as I juggled my backpack. “Do you have any I could borrow?”

“Oh yeah, we have a lot,” Jen said. She directed me to a jug in the back of her truck. I topped off my bladder, took a few large gulps and topped it off again.

“Better?” Jen asked.

“Man, I’m having a hard time with all of this,” I said. “I’m not used to how hot and dry it is, and this trail has been really tough so far. I’m starting to wonder if I should just call it good here.”

“Well, if you want, Geoff’s got your car just a few miles down the road. You could meet him there and get it back if you want. He can ride home with us.”

“Thanks,” I said. “And thanks for the water. I’ll probably see you guys again in Moab.”

I shouldered my guiltily acquired water. This ride was becoming less self-supported and more difficult than I wanted it to be, and quitting at this point would be easy. At the same time, I had no real reason to quit. As in physics, motion sought to prevail. I pedaled because pedaling was the most natural course of action.

I emerged into an open valley and joined the wide gravel road. My car was parked at a junction of another four-wheel-drive track. I intersected Geoff running just a few miles beyond that. He smiled as he approached. His sweat-drenched T-shirt hugged his thin body, and his quads bulged below his shorts. I felt a rush of attraction followed by loathing, and through this wide range of emotions washed a confusing sense of relief. I didn’t know how to feel about Geoff. Our break in San Francisco had been anything but clean, and now he was here muddying it up even more. But the truth was, I needed to see him here. I needed to believe I wasn’t completely alone.

“I thought we might see you here,” he panted as he stopped next to me. “But then I assumed we missed you. I thought you’d be beyond here by now.”

“This is going pretty slow for me,” I said. “I can’t believe you rode the Kokopelli Trail in a day last year. This thing is hard!”

“Eighteen hours,” he corrected me. “But yeah, that Yellowjacket section is the most technical part you’ll have to ride through.”

“And it’s all climbing from here,” I lamented. “I know. I checked the elevation profiles.”

“It’s not so bad,” Geoff said. He looked at his watch. “I bet you’ll be to Moab before sunset.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But tomorrow I was going to ride the White Rim. That’s thirty miles past Moab. I really wanted to do that paved part tonight so I could focus on the century tomorrow.”

“Tell you what,” Geoff said. “I’ll meet you at the end of the trail. We’ll camp there, and then tomorrow I’ll take you to the White Rim trailhead.”

“What about Jen and Mike?”

“They already have a site reserved, so they’ll probably stay here,” Geoff said. “But it’s not a big deal. I have your car. I can meet back up with them tomorrow.”

I bit my bottom lip. If I agreed to meet Geoff in Moab, at least that would mean not quitting at that spot. I had already blown my self-support rule, so catching a thirty-mile shuttle ride on the pavement wasn’t a huge deal, and was probably the only thing that would make this whole ride even possible. Finally, agreeing to his plan would mean spending one more night with Geoff. As we both stood apart in the hot desert sun, drenched in sweat, the thought of making some kind of peace with each other seemed more important than any athletic goal.

We set up a meeting space and parted. I continued up the road, another backbreaking climb that seemed to flow easier than the first of the day. The gravel was still loose, the grade still steep, but my mind was more at ease with the pain — more resigned, maybe. I climbed to nearly 9,000 feet, where I could look toward the La Sal Mountain Range and see snow, although those cool distances couldn’t provide real relief from the midday sun. Sandstone mesas and layered canyons rippled toward infinity, studded with green brush and broken only by the curving stroke of the Colorado River, so far below it almost looked blue.

I plummeted down the next canyon and climbed to yet another pine-choked plateau. My GPS unit registered nearly 12,000 feet of climbing over the course of seventy miles that day, nearly as much vertical space as Mount Everest climbers cover between base camp and the highest summit in the world. The sun dipped behind the canyon-rippled horizon in yet another sweeping light display of crimson and gold. I had ten more miles to ride into Moab, nearly a vertical mile below me. It seemed like an excess of elevation to lose in that short of a distance, and I knew that worst of the day’s riding could still be in front of me. I expected a white-knuckle rock garden. Instead, I found a steep but smooth gravel road plunging through the forest. The red glow of sunset lit the pinion trees on fire, brighter than the brightest sandstone cliff beside them. I coasted effortlessly as my odometer rose to nearly thirty miles per hour. Tears streamed from my eyes and joy poured through my veins. It was the simplest kind of joy, born of raw freedom, blocked from interpersonal clashes and washed with well-earned fatigue. It was joy free of analysis, free of consequence and free of guilt. It was the joy of being, the joy that all animals know, and the joy that self-aware humans only seem to find propped up against the boundaries of fear and turmoil.

Cool purple twilight descended as the jagged canyon swallowed me whole. The ambient temperature climbed even as daylight disappeared. I coasted into the dull beam of my headlamp until I saw orange light dancing on the canyon wall. I approached a flickering campfire and found Geoff sitting on the picnic table beside it. He stood up and waved at me.

“I was just about thinking of going to look for you,” he said. “I thought you’d be here a couple of hours ago.”

“I thought I made good time,” I said. “I told you it was going to be slow.”

He opened a cooler on the table and pulled out a bottle of Diet Pepsi and a container of grocery store sushi. He handed them to me before I had even let go of my bike.

“I got these for you,” he said. “I’ll heat up some pasta for dinner, too, but I thought you might want a snack to eat before.”

I clutched the appetizer that was nutritionally questionable but otherwise my most favorite comfort food in the world. I expressed enthusiastic gratitude, but inwardly I felt suspicious about possible ulterior motives for Geoff’s kindness. It felt like a shallow peace offering, the kind you might make to a neighbor after accidentally burning their house down. “Sorry I ruined your life … brownie?”

“How was the ride?” Geoff asked as he fired up the propane stove.

“Fantastically beautiful,” I said. “And hard. Did you realize there are 19,000 feet of climbing in those 140 miles? That’s what my GPS says.”

“That makes sense,” Geoff said. “It was pretty tough when I rode it. But at least you had two days to finish.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Even if I pieced it together without sleep, that would still be … what, like twenty-four or twenty-five hours of continuous riding. Glad I didn’t decide to race this thing. I’m actually pretty terrible at technical desert riding. How come you never warned me about that?”

Geoff shrugged. “I guess I didn’t really get a chance. But you’re going to encounter a lot more rough roads on the Divide, so you might as well get used to it.”

“I’m still really uncertain about the Divide,” I said. “Now more than ever.”

“You’ll be great at it,” Geoff said. “I know you will.”

He smiled disarmingly, and I took a long swig of the Diet Pepsi. The cold carbonation burned as it tumbled down my throat. My head still throbbed from dehydration. My heart still raced from two long days of effort. I knew I needed sleep soon if I stood any chance of riding a full desert century the next day, but I also knew I didn’t have a good chance of achieving sleep, wired and exhausted as I simultaneously was. I gobbled up my dinner, refilled my water bladder, drank the entire bottle of Pepsi and two quarts of Gatorade, and lay down in the tent next to Geoff.

I looked up at the tall nylon ceiling, flapping in the night breeze. It was only my second night in the large tent, the one we purchased together to serve as our home away from home over the long summer. That was in late March, well into our trip planning. Did Geoff know then that he was going to break up with me?

I listened to my restless heart pound as the silence swirled. After what seemed like hours Geoff asked me if I was “okay with things.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I don’t have much of a choice, at this point.”

“Good,” Geoff said. “Because you still mean a lot to me. I want things to be good between us.”

I felt strong affection for Geoff, and I tried to fight it. The words that passed between us were going to be mostly meaningless at this point, because they wouldn’t do much more than assuage his guilt and massage my ego. I was too tired to argue, too resigned to question. I just wanted to sleep beside him for one more night and pretend the big tent still had room for both of us, in a world where two people really could find complete fulfillment in partnership and didn’t have to troll the lonely desert in search of something more. Everything Geoff said only confirmed this delusion wasn’t true, but after two days of solitude, there was something soothing about simply listening to the sound of his voice. We talked until 2 a.m., about running and Juneau, about the Great Divide and the blank slate of the future, until my heart slowed down and I drifted in and out of consciousness. Geoff said good night and I dropped immediately into a hard, dreamless sleep.

The next morning, I chugged two more quarts of Gatorade. Geoff dropped me off at the top of the White Rim, a wide plateau that covered the heights of a region known as Island in the Sky. I dropped down the steep, rocky gravel road and pedaled hard along the rolling sandstone shelf that rose more than a thousand feet from the Colorado River. Towering pinnacles cast long shadows over the red sand, which was dotted with salt brush and yellow sprigs of rice grass. I felt significantly stronger than I had on either the first or second morning of the trip, the result of a couple gallons of liquid and a successful straddle over my typical day-two hump. My theory about long-distance cycling was that it only took two days to get over the worst of the mental and physical fatigue, and then pedaling became second nature for an indefinite number of days after that. I could only hope that my theory was true.

Still, on day three of my desert tour, miles had never come more easily. The hard sun throbbed in a cloudless sky and temperatures climbed into the eighties, and then low nineties. But I was surrounded in the cool breeze of my own swift movement. Sweat streamed down my skin. The day seemed like it had hardly begun when I reached mile fifty. The trail made a series of slow climbs that culminated in a pinnacle-cresting monster of a climb called Murphy’s Hogback. I dismounted my bike and walked up — no need to kill myself — and greeted a group of vehicle-supported, multi-day touring cyclists at the top. Despite that fact that it was mid-May and this was one of the more popular distance rides near Moab, the group was only the second I had seen all day. Six or seven mountain bikers crowded around the bed of a white truck as the driver sat next to a clear five-gallon jug of water and doled out refilled bottles. The jug looked nearly empty — only a thin layer of liquid sloshed around the bottom as he poured — and I didn’t see any other provisions in the back of the truck. Maybe they had another vehicle further down or a nearby camp. Most cyclists take two or three days to ride the White Rim, with vehicle support, and they camp along the way. But as I passed the group, they regarded me indifferently, their eyes glazed with fatigue and their faces coated in white salt. I wondered if they were truly that low on water, but they had that truck, which could certainly head up the canyon and fetch more for them. I didn’t have anything I could offer them, so it didn’t feel right asking them if they had any to spare.

I said hello and goodbye and dropped down the Hogback, toward another open, shadeless plateau. It was just after 1 p.m., and I was proud of the time I was making — fifty-three miles in four hours. At this rate, I’d complete the loop before dark. I had been slightly concerned that six liters of water wasn’t going to be enough, but confident enough in my supply and sure enough about the limited water on the route that I left my filter with Geoff. Which is why I was beyond shocked when hollow slurping sound rang through my water tube, indicating there was nothing left in the bladder.

I stopped and opened up my pack, removing the shriveled red bladder from its pocket with a sinking feeling of dread. What happened? Did it spring a leak? I would have felt the water running down my back. Did I really burn through six liters of liquid in fifty miles? What about the next fifty? I knew the trail dropped down to the Green River eventually, but that was at least twenty miles away. And everything before that was just open, barren plateau, where even puddles of urine only wet the sand for a few short minutes before disappearing.

Sweat evaporated from my skin as I stood in the sun. I felt dizzy. Far below, the Colorado River churned toward its nearby confluence with the Green. As a bird flies, the greatest river in the West was less than two miles away. But the sheer cliffs dividing the river from the plateau made it seem as far away as Alaska.

I pedaled a few more miles, feeling increasingly more distressed. Dark blotches began to cloud my vision, and a thick, salty film formed around my lips. I stopped frequently to try to assess whether or not I was about to pass out, but I genuinely could not tell. I had no knowledge of desert thirst. I had been an Alaska cyclist for too long, too concerned with warding off hypothermia to pay attention to dehydration. But I did know that my strength was flagging, that I felt weaker and more helpless than I had during my mental collapse on the foggy hills of the Marin Headlands, and that I was still a daunting distance from the only thing I truly needed — water.

I stopped near a shallow rock outcropping and crouched beside the hot sandstone. In the afternoon sun it provided just a strip of shade, not even large enough to reach my legs or tall enough to cover my head. It was the only shade for miles. Everything else was barren, open and blazing beneath waves of heat-condensed air. I tried to force down some gummy bears and pumpkin seeds, hoping that the sugar and electrolytes would somehow bring me back to balance. I wondered if I should crouch in this spot until nightfall, and seek out the river when the relentless sun had faded. But shade was nearly nonexistent, and I knew that spending more hours in the hot sun would only hurt my chances.

For the first time in the trip, I felt truly scared. I was in completely unknown territory, a place where heat kills much more swiftly than extreme cold. The heat wasn’t too extreme — my thermometer indicated 94 degrees — but it was more than I had experienced in well over a year, and I was in direct sunlight, atop pale, heat-reflecting sand, without water. I knew the details didn’t really matter. My only choice was to continue moving. I might meet another group of touring cyclists along the way, or campers willing to share with me. I might not. But, either way, I had to find water.

The trail dropped slowly off the plateau, so gradually that I still felt like I was pedaling uphill. The smooth surface of the Green River snaked below, taunting me with obsessions about ice-cold quarts of Gatorade and Coke-flavored Slurpees. After nearly three hours of increasingly slower mileage readings on my odometer, I reached the Green River basin, still out of sight of water. I continued along the road, wondering if I should leave the bike and walk directly toward the river. But the late afternoon sun had dipped low enough to be hidden behind the massive canyon walls, and in the shade I felt a renewed sense of confidence.

The road eventually butted up against the river, which was still below a steep embankment. The loose, sandy slope seemed slightly dangerous; the frothing river looked like dirty dishwater that hadn’t been drained for days. I was desperate, but that was disgusting. I pulled out the complimentary map given to me by Canyonlands rangers and saw that there was a primitive campground not more than three miles away. Perhaps someone there would be able to give me clean water. And, if not, the road was never more than a short distance from the river.

A mile later, the sandy road began to climb again. My throat had withered beyond simply being dry to a hard, almost solid mass that made it difficult to swallow my own saliva, of which I didn’t have much left. The effort of climbing made my vision go dark, but I reasoned that it could only be a short hump because the road, as the nearly featureless map indicated, was supposed to follow the river.

But the route continued to climb. I pedaled until I swooned, actually slumping sideways on my bike and jerking my body in the other direction just in time to stop myself from toppling over. I laughed because I was too tired to feel fear, but I was conscientious enough to realize that I was in bad shape. I slid off the bike and staggered up the road, taking slow, curving steps like a drunk driver trying to walk a straight line. My personal policeman was the bad decision I had made to ride away from the river without collecting water, my drunkenness the dehydration that had worked its way into my blood.

I topped out on a narrow ledge five-hundred feet above the river, and saw with overwhelming relief that the road dropped quickly back to the dark brown line that mocked me far below. Although I felt too drunk to ride, I couldn’t help but coast as quickly as gravity would carry me to the bottom. I pushed my bike through a tangle of tamarisk, propped it against a cottonwood tree over a small clearing and started stripping off all my clothing. The Green River was known to be polluted with a number of parasites. I didn’t want to become too eager while I waited for my iodine tablets to kick in, so I planned to soak my body in the cool water for the entire half hour I was supposed to wait. I was certain I couldn’t ride another meter until I had liquid in my cells, so waiting seemed to be my only option. I walked naked to the silt-choked shoreline, where I sank to my knees in quicksand. I grabbed a tamarisk branch and yanked myself out, only to sink in even deeper with my other leg. The chocolate-colored water lapped alongside me, and I could see no way to drop into it without becoming treacherously stuck in mud. Defeated, I crawled back onto the more solid, sandy part of the bank, gripped a tamarisk branch to support my outstretched body, and reached my bladder as far as I could into the putrid water. I collected three liters, dropped in my iodine tablets in and continued down the bank, looking for a solid entrance.

That’s when the mosquitoes found me. At first, I just felt pinpricks on my bare butt, and then the stinging sensation moved up my back. As I looked behind me, I noticed a large cluster of black insects latched onto my shoulders. I yelped and tore into the tamarisk, unconcerned about the sharp branches scratching my skin as I slapped at my back. I sprinted back to my bike and pulled on my shorts and jersey, grabbed my toxic bug repellent, and sprayed every square inch of exposed skin, which was at that point coated in either the foul quicksand of the river bank or a gritty film of sand and sweat. I had never felt so disgusting or dirty, and I wanted nothing more than to jump in the river and swim upstream as long as I could, maybe until I reached the road junction or even the town of Green River, more than a hundred miles away. Even if both were impossible, I never wanted to leave the river. But there was no way to even enter it.

I pushed through the tamarisk to retrieve my bladder, grabbed my bike, and continued down the road. I looked at my watch and promised myself that I’d wait a half hour, but that seemed like an eternity. I pedaled to a raft-launching point called Mineral Bottom and began climbing a steep series of switchbacks that carved their way into the side of a thousand-foot-high canyon wall. I stopped often to look at my watch. It seemed like seconds were moving as minutes, and minutes as hours. I couldn’t believe a half hour hadn’t passed yet.

When it finally did, I stopped beside the narrow ledge of the road and sucked greedily at my bladder. A thick, silty liquid filled my throat, cool and bitter and more than slightly foul. I gagged, rubbed my watering eyes, and sucked at the bladder again. The water was sickening but I needed it. Despite my revulsion, coolness began to return to my light head, and I felt more grounded than I had since early afternoon.

I reached the plateau and continued the long, infuriatingly gradual climb to the paved road, where Geoff had promised to meet me at a nearby campground. Clouds had begun to collect on the now-open horizon, and a muted sunset slipped somewhat imperceptibly into twilight. I continued to force muddy water down my throat; the grit coated my teeth and I couldn’t stomach the thought of eating. My energy was flagging fast and I felt a strong urge to roll out my bivy on the slickrock and sleep, but I knew that if I did, Geoff would come looking at me. And, anyway, the one thing I could think of that sounded more appealing than sleep was a shower, and I certainly wasn’t going to find one of those on this desert Island in the Sky.

Soon I was simply following the yellow orb of my headlamp, a small oasis of light in a sea of night. The sky had become overcast. There were no stars, no distant town lights, just seemingly infinite black space that my headlamp did little to diminish. Logic dictated that the road had to go somewhere eventually, but I continued to pedal for what felt like hours, going nowhere.

And yet, despite my fatigue and hunger and the horrific state of my hygiene, the farther I pedaled into the darkness, the more I felt connected with the space outside my body. Some philosophers have speculated that if you could peer inside of the particles that make up an atom, you would find small particles surrounded by empty space, and if you looked inside of those particles, you would find even smaller particles surrounded by yet more empty space, on and on into infinity. Therefore, the world and everything in it was nothing more than infinitely smaller particles of energy and empty space. Substance was an illusion, a construct of perception from a vast distance. That theory had never made more sense to me than it did that night. The hardness of the world had stripped my needs down the barest of essentials. I emerged in the darkness with understanding that, for all of the convention we inject to fill the remaining space, those throbbing particles of energy really are all we have, and all we are.