[We’ve gone riding! For 10 days Bike Intelligencer is mountain biking in places so remote an iPhone 4 can’t even find a signal to drop. We’ll report back on our return, but in the meantime we’re running some “BI Classics” from past adventures. See you on the trails!]
Red Warrior — Mars Ridge Loop, Sun Valley, Idaho
Regrouping, Valor Gives Way to Discretion; Return to Ketchum; The Extraterrestrial Mars Ridge and Rambunctious Red Warrior Beckon; Where Is Jason?
The next morning we did further consultation. At this point I was ready for a return to the comforts of civilization. The East Salmon Fork had seemed just too far out there. There were other rides I wanted to explore in Ketchum. I suggested heading down valley and regrouping at Corral Creek.
Jason went along with it – at least, it seemed that way. But he may not have been too happy with the arrangement, and maybe I was a bit presumptuous. We hadn’t done Boulder Creek-Fisher/Williams, one of the planet’s truly great rides. And there were other rides Jason wanted to “route-find” around Stanley. But I kinda steamrollered ahead, a bit insensitive, and came later to regret it.
Jason wanted to grab breakfast in Stanley, so Jim and I motored on down and grabbed Corral Creek campsite No. 9, which I mistakenly remembered as 7. After Jim pitched his tent we started back to town, passing Jason on the way and giving him the wrong campsite number. It was then that Jason laid a bombshell on us: He wanted to take a rest day. Hit the hot springs, hang out in town, collect his thoughts. Besides, he said, the rides around Sun Valley were all pretty much the same. The last comment was a subtle jab. When we’d been planning this trip as a free-form expedition around Stanley, I’d expressed pretty much that exact sentiment. But now that I was here, I didn’t really believe it. There was lots of exploring to do around Sun Valley. It was just a little needle from Jason, and I have to say I deserved it.
I have nothing against rest days in general. But on epic adventures to places like Moab, Tahoe, Bend, Sun Valley or wherever, all the rest I’m interested in happens between daylight. Jim is pretty much the same way. In reality we suspected Jason just wanted some time out. And although he was too polite to say it, we figured he also was mightily pissed. I realized I’d kind of run roughshod over his Idaho Escape. The rest of the trip I spent having a heart-to-heart with myself.
I wish I’d tried harder to talk Jason out of the rest day, but figured he knew best and we’d be able to cap off the trip with a mondo ride the next day. For the current day’s outing, Jim suggested Red Warrior, which neither of us had done and was at the top of my list. Every time I told someone I’d ridden in Sun Valley, they’d ask: Didja do Red Warrior? I began to feel like a tourist who’d gone to Athens and not seen the Acropolis. The route of choice took us up to Lodgepole Pine, then Mars Ridge, then back down Red Warrior. It looked like a good ride. It turned out to be something a whole lot better.
The ride begins with a creek crossing where your feet just have to get wet. Then there is a gentle climb with innumerable shallower creek crossings. Finally you start some serious climbing up Lodgepole, past Mahoney and to the ridge.
Jim and I had done Mars Ridge the year earlier, but I’d forgotten the nasty hike-a-bike sections and, for that matter, the astounding 360-degree view at the top. I’ve been on a lot of 360s, including most of Washington’s, and while the experience at, say, Juniper Ridge with its 4 peaks is uniquely inspiring, Mars Ridge goes everything a few steps further. First there’s the stark quality of the rock itself. The eerie sienna red, devoid of trees and shrubs, bracketed by mountain ranges all around, and mountain ranges beyond mountain ranges, and views for hundreds of miles. Wow. And the price of admission is just a couple of grunts up scree-laden risers.
It’s times like this I want to spend the rest of my life on a mountain bike. We stood there taking it all in and put off as long as we could the start of the descent. When you’re riding you always want to keep moving. But there are times when your head says stay just a little bit longer.
From the crest you ride down a straight and fast roller, then wind up some switchbacks, then down again, and up and so on. Eventually you come to the crossroads with Red Warrior. This is the section listed on the map as “Downhill Only,” and on the ride up I’d wondered why. In NorCal what that usually means is that hikers have managed to get what would otherwise be a great trail closed on the downhill direction to riders.
But Red Warrior is downhill only because it’d be nothing but a hike with wheels going up. The thing is steep. And rocky. And loose. Into the first couple of sections I was already going too fast for the Turner, whose tail was bouncing around like there was silly putty in the rear tire. They say to learn to let the bike do the leading, which is great until the bike leads you into a tree. I was trying to rein the Turner in. But at the same time, I was having way too much fun to want to slow down.
A couple of weeks earlier I’d ridden one of my favorite downhills anywhere, Mr. Toad’s Wild Ride (Saxon Creek) at Lake Tahoe. Red Warrior has to rank close behind Toad’s. It’s not quite as sphincter-clenching and hairball as Toad’s. But it’s steep and it’s long. At the bottom I was laughing out loud and whooping like a kid on a carny ride. Hey, can we do that one again? Jim gave me a high-five and shouted, “If that’s what you call too much of the same, give me more!”
After the ride we checked out the hot springs, then drove back to town. When we got to the campsite, we found no trace of Jason. No car, no tent. Just a note on the campsite marker. I knew right away what it would say. Jason had left for Seattle. Too much to do back home, he said. He was planning a big ride in Switzerland and needed to pull together the loose ends.
I felt pretty bad, figuring Jason’s Dream Trip had kind of disintegrated from my bullheadedness. We do what we do. I left him voice mail apologizing and saying I hoped he didn’t hate us. When I finally got to talk with him, Jason was pretty cool about the whole thing. For those of us who tend to live in pigeon holes, Jason’s free-spiritedness can be kind of unsettling. But you can’t deny it: If your life had worked out that you could live every day exactly the way you wanted to, why would you bother with anything else?