It Was Never About the Summit

Much of the road up Ebbetts Pass runs alongside Silver Creek. You can see the rushing cold water, hear it, and almost feel it for an hour while you cook on your road bike climbing the vertical grade. I start imagining fly fishing the hidden trout in the shaded pools. But I can’t stop to look for them.

Ebbetts Pass rises to 8,750 feet in the High Sierra, eighteen miles outside Markleeville. The upper half repeatedly kicks into double digits, with short pitches approaching fifteen percent. It comes midway in the ride, but by then you’ve already gone up and over Monitor Pass, down the backside, and back up again and earned two ink stamps on your card — roughly 7,000 vertical feet in your legs. The temperature has climbed from around forty degrees to ninety and it isn’t done.

That July it was in the high nineties and the air was radiating up off the hot black asphalt.

Somewhere on the climb, a man pulled alongside me. Six foot six, built like Little John, almost comically large for a bicycle. Forest-green jersey. I nodded and managed to get out, “Hot!” He didn’t say anything, but pulled a bottle off his frame and sprayed me in the face.

I was saving my breath for the climb and didn’t have any words. So I grabbed my own bottle and sprayed him back — which wasn’t smart, because I ran out of water before the top.

We fought like that the rest of the way up. Both of us smiling, neither of us with the energy for a real laugh, neither of us fast. More like crawling up the endless waves of asphalt. At the summit we got off our bikes and hugged. I came up to his shoulders. He refueled and then turned around and descended, and I never saw him again.

I don’t know his name. I never asked.

Last July I came back and rode it again. My fifth Death Ride. Five was the number I’d set out to reach, and I was sixty-five.

I’d trained on Mt. Diablo in hundred-degree heat and was riding disciplined, inside my heart rate and power numbers.

I’d finished five climbs and started up the last one — Ebbetts again, this time from the back side. It was ninety degrees. As I was beginning to feel confident I had this last climb in the bag, the sky changed and came down on us like we were being punished. The temperature plunged toward freezing and the hail hit us face-on as we continued climbing, adding to the 14,000 feet of vertical already earned. I had no rain gear. Just a light jacket and arm warmers. But my body heat helped me pedal one stroke at a time. It was both comical and a nightmare. A few other riders were nearby. We just shook our heads at each other, unable to speak or find words.

At the top, riders huddled around a large stove and the largest pot of hot soup I’d ever seen, more like a small pool. I nudged my way into the circle and put my hands out over the rising heat. Some of them were eating like it was their last meal. I didn’t want to move my hands.

The ride helpers were handing out black garbage bags to wear as a protective layer. I slotted my head through the hole in the top, and then slotted my arms through the holes and tied a knot at the bottom to hold my body heat. I looked homeless and felt desperate.

Six ink stamps on the rider’s summit pass card. That’s how they mark it: one at each summit, and six means you did the whole thing.

Mine had washed out. I wondered whether I’d still get my finisher’s jersey.

When the hail let up, a man yelled “Go!” through a loudspeaker, and a hundred of us descended the front of Ebbetts like our lives depended on it, flapping in black trash bags.

At the bottom I packed up my tent in record time, changed into dry clothes, and drove off as fast as I could to get home. But I needed to charge the car first, at the nearest Supercharger, about sixty miles away in Pollock Pines on US-50.

Once I parked there, I bent down to tie my shoes before plugging in, and my right hamstring seized like a lightning bolt. I couldn’t straighten my leg. I stood there bent in half for what felt like an hour, waiting for the jolts to stop. I hadn’t even plugged the car in.

Nobody came. Nobody was looking.

I had climbed all six. I was doubled over alone in a parking lot, clinging to a card with six stamps that had washed off.

My fourth book comes out in eight weeks.

Every time I’ve written one, some part of me has believed something I’ve rarely said out loud: that when the book goes into the world, my world will change. That the years of work resolve into a moment. That I climb and climb and finally stand on top of something, and that standing on top will feel different from the climbing.

What actually happens is you finish, and then you see another mountain. Usually a taller one.

I’m not writing this from the far side of that date. Maybe something really is waiting at the summit this time.

I don’t know.

Why do it, then?

Because I want to make a difference. To leave something behind. Because somewhere inside me I still need to know that my life mattered. I see a crisis and can’t stand on the sidelines mute.

And to simply feel.

People I know and people I don’t tell me it made a difference.

I hear it and try to feel it, but it doesn’t always take. Somewhere underneath it I hear: not good enough.

But I keep thinking about the man in the forest-green jersey.

And about another cyclist, years ago on Mt. Diablo. I was blown up, with a lot of mountain still ahead of me, on my first Diablo Challenge race up 3,249 vertical feet, without any training. He looked like a cowboy, riding an old steel bike and blasting country music. I was dead last except for him, crawling, barely making forward momentum. He didn't ask. Reached over, handed me a Hammer gel, and rode away.

I never got his name either.

Two strangers saw me when I needed something. One sprayed me with his water. One gave me his gel. I remember both of them years later and I don’t know who either one was.

There can’t be many six-foot-six cyclists who rode Ebbetts Pass that year in a forest-green jersey.

I could probably find him.

I haven’t.

Regen360 launches October 20 at Greenbuild in New York. Preorders available here.