Able Was I

I have been fortunate to have had few encounters with aggressive drivers; today was not one of those days. Traveling south on Highway 9 in Ben Lomond to return to the park where we started our ride, I approached an intersection with deep sand and gravel in my path. What to do? With a steady flow of traffic in the narrow lane to my left and no room to maneuver, I calculated that I could ride through it. Just as I entered the intersection and the first patch of debris, the driver behind me gunned his engine and squealed into the right-hand turn in front of me, losing traction in the sand. The car was old, small, and yellow. A word describing the driver of said car starts with an "a" (hint: I'm not thinking "aggressive"). I stayed upright and lived to cycle another day. Peace and love to you too, bud, here in the harmonic center of hippie-dom in the Santa Cruz Mountains.

I have a fellow cyclist to thank for the high point of my day. Waiting at the base of Alba for the rest of our group to descend, a racer from the San Jose Bike Club rounded the corner to start the climb. As he did, he called out: "Going up?" I replied: "Already been." I knew he was talking to me, because there was nobody else around. And that means, despite being decked out in my recreational club jersey, I somehow looked not only capable of climbing Alba, but worthy of consideration as a climbing partner. Or maybe it means he was nearsighted.

A friendly driver paused at the stop sign to give me an update on the group. "They're a ways back, maybe two-thirds down." I'd had a lovely, somewhat conservative descent (being unfamiliar with the road, but knowing that it would end abruptly at this stop sign, after a blind curve). A small pickup truck had come into view behind me just as the road got twisty and technical. I dropped him in the blink of an eye; he caught up only after I'd stopped at the bottom. That's the way I like it.

Alba loomed large for me this morning. From Roads to Ride (South) by Petersen and Kluge:

This is one of the most difficult short climbs in the Santa Cruz Mountains. ... Descending Alba Rd. isn't great fun, but rather a matter of constantly arresting your speed and looking forward to the bottom.

It's number 76 on a list of the 100 Toughest USA Road Bike Climbs, according to John Summerson (The Complete Guide to Climbing by Bike).

On our club's scale of 3 to 6, Alba is a 6. Our group included five women, four of whom have mountain bike gearing on their road bikes. Uh, guess which one does not? And where were all our able, hard-bodied men this morning?

We arrived at the base of Alba together; our leader wanted to re-group before heading up. I needed not to stop, before I lost my nerve.

I learned a valuable life lesson years ago, the first time I stood at the top of the Cirque at Snowbird and looked down. More or less, straight down. Double Black Diamond. Free fall. I was balancing on a pair of skis between some jagged rocks on a ridge line at 11,000 feet and my heart was in my throat. I wasn't going first, no, not me, no way, no how. The longer I stood there watching the first woman in our group as she repeatedly toppled over below us, the higher my anxiety rose. Somehow, I had to point my skis down the hill. Terrified, I eased into the first turn, and stopped. I was upright. Okay, another turn. Still upright. Maybe I could link two turns together? Soon I was a third of the way down. Near the bottom, my skier extraordinaire friend Dave passed me. He knew there was only one way that I could be at that particular spot on the mountain. "No more blue trails for YOU," he shouted as he flew by.

I'd heard that Alba is really steep at the bottom, and the published profiles showed that it gets really steep again near the top. In the middle, it's merely steep. I made steady progress up the hill, waiting for it to get worse. When the grade relented after the first half mile, I realized it wasn't going to get worse. The grade is uneven, but the steeper bits are short. With apologies to Sheryl Crow, "This ain't no Country View." If Alba is a "6," Country View is, beyond a shadow of a doubt, a 6.