RyanHarne.com

For any amateur rider out there interested in climbing Mountain Lake, make sure you select your route to begin with the climb and not require yourself to scale those heights on the way home. The last time I did the front side of Mountain Lake was about two months ago with a small group of VT riders. This time the stakes were somewhat higher: do both climbs but still save room to go all the way to New Castle and back and keep enough energy inside to destroy the Harding climb at the very end.

This ride was absolutely amazing. Totally about 96 miles on my chronometer, I never once stopped, a feat I wasn’t expecting from myself. All said and done, I left at 11:00am and arrived back in town as the sun was just beginning to hide behind the western clouds. A ride time of 5 hours & 23 minutes.

Another hint for riders: the back side of Mountain Lake is terribly difficult. Putting the climbs at the beginning of the rides has a strange catch22 - you either choose to climb at the beginning of the ride when your bike is heavy with water or you choose for the end of your ride when your bike is light but you have no power left. I was carrying a lot of water weight in those early miles, with an extra bottle in one of my jersey pockets. The back side of Mountain Lake only gets hard at the halfway point where it must stay at about 10% grade the rest of the way up. It’s steep enough where you crawl, requiring gravity to help you push your feet down on each stroke. Ugh.

My back was hurting a lot when I returned, but that’s only because I never stopped. Oh, and two black bears were stuck in a tree as I was about to descend Potts (the huge steep drop around mile 60). I’m going to check the news tomorrow to see if there was any story about that. A crowd of people were huddled around the spot which was interesting considering what a bear might do if it fell and survived. Oh well.

Good ride, good times.

Once I complete a variety of lab work tomorrow, I am getting on the racer and traveling north. North to the beginning of the serious Appalachian Mountains. North to where I will meet Anguish.

My goal is to climb both the front and back side of Mountain Lake. The satellite imagery makes it look like the lake is at the top of the mountain, but the mountain just overlooks the lake in that valley. If I continued to the lake, the road changes to a monstrous gravel and becomes insanely steep downward towards the water.

Thanks to a week off of courses - Way to go, Plymouth settlers! Maybe next time, Natives… - I am able to spend a lot of time doing rides I’ve had a nearly uncontrollable urge to complete. Plus, I’ve found a great plug-in for Google Maps to show elevation and grade. So, I’m able to say, “this is what I’m riding tomorrow”.

Of course, that’s just Mountain Lake and not the full ride. For some reason the elevation plug-in says it’s 5 miles up the back side and 6 miles on the front side. Since I’ve done the front side of Mountain Lake before, I know for certain that it is 7 miles on the front side - what both my chronometer and the sign at the bottom of Mountain Lake agreed upon. The extra mile up makes the grade significantly smoother. I’ve heard horror stories about the back side, though. The very last stretch of roughly 1.5 mles of 10% grade is where people pass out. I think, once before, I was able to spot some of the skeletons of abandoned riders.

For comparison, the famous Hautacam ascent that sometimes appears in the Tour de France, and will return in 2008, is 9 miles at 7.2% grade. The back side of Mountain Lake averages out to 5 miles at 7.8% grade. That’s some respectable altitude training, then.

I will need your good luck wishes and oxygen mask donations.

Five things that, in the five+ years of my recorded blogging, I probably have never mentioned:

#1 - I despise The Munsters and cannot force myself to listen to The Addams Family theme song. However, I will watch anything by director Ed Wood.

#2 - For years, I have thought that I enjoy eating tomatoes on their own. In reality, they have to be a part of something - pasta sauce, mozzarella&tomato sandwich, tomato wrapped in cheese - in order for me to stomach them. The instant I put a tomato slice or cherry tomato to my lips, without having covered it in some disguising condiment, I reach nausea.

#3 - In middle school, I was frequently on the all-star baseball team which competed in regional championships. But, I was the loser on the team because I had no batting ability. I was the “pinch runner”, using baseball terms, and was substituted only to steal bases once my teammates had basehits. It’s an ignoble assignment.

#4 - I have 29 unopened Star Wars action figures. Discovering Princess Leia was the highlight of weeks of my childhood.

#5 - In third or fourth grade, I accepted a position as Hall Monitor. Recommended duties included telling kids to stop running to the bus or their parent’s cars and looking killer with my blaze orange sash. It was my first exposure to power and it was wildly intoxicating.

I have seen An Inconvenient Truth multiple times and have read Ishmael even more, a book that details a greater, underlying trouble facing civilization. The past two or three years of my life, I have regularly refreshed my personal stance on the environment and have done whatever possible to reduce my non-biodegradable waste and increase my recycling. Recently, I have been occasionally addressing these cultural habits, always expecting to be hopeful but nevertheless forcing me to become downtrodden and tragically dismembered from my positive outlook.

And what have I concluded in this time, these years of observation, contemplation, and patience:

No one cares.

Frankly, if I don’t constantly remind myself of environmental concerns, I forget to minimize my electric usage and so on. The marketing environment that exists in America is so consumer-centric that addressing climate change is not possible if corporations continue to value quarterly profits. Some companies try to appear “green” by having some eco-friendly advertising, like when Chevrolet was touting their FlexFuel vehicles in 30 second tv bits. And where is this FlexFuel? Are the gas stations nationwide expected to modify or add tanks to incorporate this ethanol mixture? You’ve got to be kidding me to expect that transition - gas stations scrape by on half-pennies, not dollars & cents.

Most people would consider this a pessimistic view, and, given the cultural tendencies to define hopelessness as pessimism, I would have to agree. However, I define my feelings as resulting from the inevitability of our American culture. Just about every consumer product that is designed, is patented, and is manufactured hopes for accelerating sales. Slowing or stagnant sales are a sign of the need to rebrand, redesign, or replace. Everything our consumer culture embodies encourages acceleration and abhors constancy.

Unfortunately, our environment has a conflicting opinion. While sudden change are prone to occur in nature on the long-term scale, the day-to-day consensus is that the environment prefers normalcy. Our Earth transformed rapidly some billions of years ago but has more or less stayed constant in the past 2 billion years. The natural evolution that served our planet well requires an imaginably slow change that is definitely not compatible with iPod sales or stock exchanges.

So, what’s next for America? Oh, nothing new, to be sure. Our nation has great experience in recent years of forgetting what’s going on. Rapid-fire marketing and entertainment keeps our minds off of present concerns and focuses our attention on the latest news on Dannielynn and hot holiday items. The Iraq War is now under the rug, except for those invovled first-hand; I’m sure it will return to the headlines come primaries and the upcoming presidential debates.

Finally, what’s my point with this unnecessary rant? My point is to offer a bit of redirection and recollection aimed at providing something better for the new generation. Yes, I’m an insignificant blogger but there are dozens of us, I’m sure. I don’t worry about myself in connection to the results of climate change, but I am concerned for the kids growing up today, more pampered than ever and more brainwashed by mindless child-directed advertising that, once again, gets their mind off of important issues. I think about my baby nephew and the world he will experience if we continue to leave the A/C on at night when the temperatures start to freeze, when we leave lights on in every room of the house to feel “safe” (and incandescent lights, at that!), when we throw away #1 & #2 plastics which are accepted at 99% of our nation’s recycling facilities and drop-offs. I hope my nephew doesn’t have to attend a required university course on “environmental responsibility and how to wear your protective face mask when the sky looks purple”.

So, let our actions not concern ourselves but rather those who will experience the various ramifications of our current, viral consumer culture. I try to remember this every morning, but I know how incredibly difficult it is to keep it on the tip of your tongue. Responsibility is often a treasured feature in this society, I’m not sure why we turn it off when considering the environment.

I remember when the guy posted his home-made iPod touch commercial on YouTube and one way or another I actually came across it before blogs and news sites picked up on it. A first. Then a few weeks later, Apple bought the rights or privileges or whatever it was that made the kid some money, and then turned the commercial into a “tv-ready” version, which basically meant that they added the registered trademark symbols, where appropriate. At the time, I didn’t actually like the commercial. But I watched it again yesterday and then this afternoon. Somehow my impression of it has done an about-face. Or maybe I just love the song. It’s possible that this track can be remixed with finesse and success. It’s even more possible that listening to it a couple of times will embed a perpetual rotation of the music in your brain for the entire evening.

After 20 or 24 cups of coffee, I made it through that paper. To celebrate, I got on my bike and let out so much anxiety, frustration, and pent-up energy. A wonderfully fast, slightly chilly, and strangely consistent head-winded ride resulted. Keeping up the positive spirit, I must celebrate that experience with a grand dish of pasta. And celebrating that, perhaps some M&Ms, which I have done a decent job of avoiding lately.

Even before the day began, I had several Sunday afternoon hints that Monday could turn out terrible. For instance, discovering that your area of the lab was invaded and occupied by foreign exchange students who needed your equipment. This isn’t necessarily bad because equipment gets passed around all the time; but, when their estimate of test completion goes from 8pm to 10pm to 8am, you know this portends disaster. And when you are stuck swapping out different equipment to replace what was taken, you’re bound to become more frustrated troubleshooting something that doesn’t belong than just waiting it out.

As I began looking through some data for another report, I discovered it was untouched. Untouched acoustic data is nothing more than a list of complex numbers needing a thorough signal processing whipping similar to hand-to-hand combat between Man and Machine. The Machine always wins these bouts, of course, so, your best bet is to strap on some body armor and have your suicide pill balancing on the tip of your tongue.

I will probably be up all night working on this report, now that I know how I have compromised my success by putting it off. Plus, the thought of compromise is intolerable for my engineering-esque standards, resulting in what could be considered the most diligent march towards project completion to date.

Surely, a long night ahead for my brain. And patience.