Last year, the Alpine County sheriff's office demanded that the name of the annual bicycling tour be changed from "The Markleeville Death Ride" to something else, because they thought the nome hod too many negative connotations. Apparently, however, before the tour was so named, it attracted very few cyclists, and its popularity increased 5-fold with the name change. In order to satisfy the cops, the organizers dutifully changed the name. This year, the ride was called: "The Death Ride -- Tour of the California Alps". I doubt that's exactly what the sheriff's department had in mind. Anyway, the ride this year was slightly different from last year; one of the passes (in Nevada) was eliminated, and we climbed and descended both sides of one of the others, so there remained five major climbs and descents. The order was also different; the passes were climbed in decreasing order of difficulty so we weren't faced with the ugliest climb in the heat of the afternoon. The reason the Nevada portion of the tour was eliminated was that insurance in Nevada would have cost another 20 grand. The Death Ride has three options -- 1 pass, 3 passes, or 5 passes. The 1 pass riders climb Monitor Pass (8314') and return. 3 pass riders climb Ebbetts Pass (8730'), come back down the same way, climb Monitor Pass, go down the other side, and then return the same way. Riders choosing the 5 pass option do the 3 pass ride, and then climb and descend two additional passes -- Luther Pass (7740') and (Kit) Carson Pass (8573'). Except for the back side of Monitor Pass, one can crap out at any paint, turn around, and coast back to the start. (This isn't precisely true -- there is still a 500' climb back to the starting point from the base of any of the passes.) Ellyn signed up for the 3 pass option, and I signed up for all 5 passes. Unfortunately, Ellyn's first night on call conflicted with the ride, and it was impossible for her to trade,so I took off for Markleeville Friday morning instead of waiting until Ellyn got off. Last year, we left after work, and spent two hours waiting to get across the bay bridge due to an accident in the tunnel on Yerba Buena Island. We got to South Lake Tahoe at about 11 PM, and then had to get up at 4 AM to make it to Markleeville in time for the ride. This time, I got to the starting point for the ride (Turtle Rock Park) at about 1 PM, and had 3 hours to kill before I could register for the ride. I decided to hike up a hill take a look around so I started up. At the bottom, the elevation is only about 5000', and the ground was tangled with manzanita and other desert-like shrubs. It wasn't too hard to find a path up, although I occasionally had to back off and try alternate routes. Then I came to a sugar pine forest, and had easy climbing for about a mile. Then the Manzanita came back with a vengeance and I constantly backed off for another try, although it was easy to make relatively steady progress. At 3 o'clock, I figured I should turn around to get back by 4 for registration. I tried to reverse the process to go back down, but I discovered that it's a lot easier to spot openings going up than going down, perhaps because one can see sunlight through breaks above, and not below. After hacking around for 15 minutes, I don't think I had made any progress down, because backtracking was so much easier than going forward, and I didn't pay too much attention to where I was until I noticed that I could look back to where I had started down, and was at the same elevation -- I'd just made a lot of lateral "progress". Anyway, I got a lot more aggressive about descending, and after about a half hour I got down to the pine forest where I found a dry stream bed which I followed down to the bottom. The whole adventure took about 3 1/2 hours. By this time, it was both hot and windy, both bad features on a bicycle ride. I picked up all my stuff, and drove back to the lodge where Ellyn and I had made a reservation, and stopped to get a half gallon of milk, a package of cookies, and a 6-pack of Bud. I wasn't exactly sure where I was going to eat, since although the ride committee had organized a giant spaghetti feed the night before, Ellyn and I had not signed up for it because we planned to arrive pretty late, and to eat on the road on the way up. We had signed up for breakfast the next morning (served at 4 AM -- it would be hard to find any other place open at that hour in a county whose total population is around 400), for lunch during the ride, and for a barbecue dinner after the ride. In our registration packets, there was a ticket for each -- green for lunch, red for the barbeque, and so on. I picked up Ellyn's packet for her T-shirt, and discovered, on opening the packets, that one of my tickets was the wrong color -- I had a night-before dinner ticket instead of breakfast, so when I combined my tickets with Ellyn's, I had more than a complete set. At the dinner, I met a couple of characters who were graduate students in genetics at UC Davis, and who were planning to do all 5 passes. Anyway, we yakked and yakked, and I didn't get back to my room until about 11 PM, just like the year before. I set the alarm for 3:45, and then thought better of it, figuring that if I set it for 4:30, I would still have time to drive to Turtle Rock Park, eat breakfast, and get ready in time for the 6 AM ride start. Needless to say, I woke up at 3:45 anyway, and figured I wouldn't be able to go so sleep anyway, so I headed down to breakfast. It's probably a lucky thing that I did, since I got a very good parking place (later on, people had to park as much as a half mile from the park), and I got some extra time to digest the breakfast. (At this time, I should digress, and say that although the Alta Alpina Cycling Club is nominally the host for the Death Ride, the chamber of commerce is also intensely interested, as the event is the largest in the county during the year, bringing a couple thousand tourists into a county with a population of 400.) In any case, the cyclists were not in charge of the breakfast, and although they told the meal organizers that riders would want lots of easily digestible calories like pancakes, toast,etc., they weren't believed, and the main attraction at breakfast was ham and eggs. There were some pancakes, but not enough. Luckily, there was also oatmeal, and I ate a lot of that, and apparently the hour between breakfast and the start of the ride gave my stomach enough time to process enough of the ham and eggs. As was the case the night before, there were plenty of crazies to talk to, but I did manage to pull myself away in time to start riding at the official 6 AM starting time. A lot of folks started early -- the people managing the aid station at the top of Ebbetts Pass said that the first people arrived there at 6 AM. They must have begun at 4:30 AM or earlier to manage it. The early birds were taking a big chance -- I know that if I were managing the first aid station, I wouldn't show up until about 7:30, knowing that nobody would get there until then. I'm not too bad a rider, and it took me almost 2 hours to get there. Without any food or water, it would be a real death ride. Last year, I felt like death warmed over on Ebbetts Pass since it is probably the toughest climb, and I did it fourth. I think all I did was stare at the asphalt 5 feet in front of my tire all the way up. This year I looked around, and the road goes through some of the prettiest country in the Sierras. The road is pretty narrow -- about 1 1/2 lanes, and nothing painted down the center. Luckily, there is very little traffic, but I felt sorry for the people in the few cars that were there. They obviously didn't know about the death ride, and were very sorry they were there. In addition to being narrow, the road is also pretty twisty, and I seldom exceeded 20 mph coming down. There were a few psychopaths, however, who didn't seem to remember how to use their brakes. I saw one such person being hauled off in an ambulance after he missed a corner. As it was early, I wasn't hot, and still had plenty of water when I got to the top. I drank pint or so for insurance, refilled my water bottles, and started down. The best part about the descent was that I got to make use for the first time of something I've been practicing for months -- jumping. Apparently, professionals can actually jump a bike over a fallen rider if they're going fast enough, but my jumping is limited to 2 or 3 inches off the ground, and is useful for pot-holes and speed bumps. I'd never needed to jump more than a foot or so horizontally to get over such obstacles, but I had been practicing much longer ones. On both Ebbetts and Monitor passes, there were a bunch of cattle-guards -- ideal subjects for the long, low jumps I can do. Monitor Pass is not very interesting -- just a long grind up a moderately steep slope for 5 or 6 miles. Last year it was the last pass and very hot, and I had to stop 5 or six times on the way up. This time I was fresher, or in better shape, or it was cooler, but I got all the way up without stopping. I rode up with a fellow who used to be a category 2 racer (the second highest ranking -- the world champs are category 1), but was way out of shape, who also happens to be a particle physicist. Having someone to talk to made the ride up a lot easier. He taught me a new expression to describe the cycling tour that Ellyn and I took earlier -- California Touring -- a Masi and a credit card. (Masi is a very expensive Italian bike, often owned by yuppies.) When we reached the top, we both had plenty of water, so we skipped the aid station at the top, and started down the back. At that point, we invented the running joke about "my other gear". We decided that for the death ride, all you need is a bike with 2 gears, one very low, and one very high. My bike nominally has 12 speeds, but I probably used gears 2-11 less than 5% of the time. Each time we hit the top or bottom of something, we shifted into "the other gear" -- low if we had been in high, or vice-versa. The the back side of Monitor was very impressive. It drops in one shot more than 3000' through a series of switchbacks down the eastern side of the Sierras to highway 395. You could see the whole road from the top, hundreds of miles to the east, and quite a ways north and south. Except for a couple of turns, you could see hundreds of yards ahead, the road was fine, and we hardly had to touch the brakes. A lot of the 3 pass people were stopped on the road right where the view opened up. It was at that point that you could see what you were committing to if you went down the other side. I think that a lot of people turned around at that point and were satisfied with a 2 pass death ride. Going down, I kept up with my companion for about 100 yards -- he was an absolutely amazing bike handler. He beat me to the bottom by a couple of minutes, so he must have been over 50 mph most of the way down. I refilled my bottles at the bottom, turned around, and finally caught him a mile or so up the road. We rode together for a few more miles, and he decided to take it a bit slower. I got to the top at about 11:45, and the aid station was jammed. The Monitor summit aid station served riders from all three groups, and by the time I'd finished 3 passes, a lot of the 1 pass people had just arrived, and a lot of the 3 pass people had just finished their second, an there were a lot of 5 pass riders there as well, some having finished 2 and some 3 passes. (I learned later that about 1500 people were registered for one of the options.) Anyway, I now know the true meaning of the term "feeding frenzy". There were four or five tables covered with orange slices, bananas, melon slices, cookies, etc., with volunteers desperately hacking up fruit in a vain attempt to keep up with the riders. It wasn't hard to tell which riders were which -- those who had finished 1 pass were generally destroyed; those finishing 2 were in fair shape, and those finishing their third looked pretty good. I lost count of the melon slices I ate, and I drank about a quart of water, and then started down. I got to jump a bunch more cattle guards on the way down with varying success, but I found that any jump was better than rolling over them. From the base of the pass, I climbed the last 500 feet back to Turtle Rock Park for lunch. Lunch was the only part of the ride that was poorly organized. There was a long, long line, and it took me an hour to get any food. The problem was that there was only one line, and lots and lots of 1 pass riders were done. I'd already done about BO hard miles, and the hour and a half wait to get going again caused my leg muscles to tighten up quite a bit, and the longer you wait, the harder it is psychologically to get going again. After the ride, I talked to a lot of folks who took one look at the lunch line, and skipped it. I should have done so, and eaten a "lunch" at the aid station at the top on the next pass. The other problem was that the lunch was organized by the same folks who did the breakfast, and high in fats and low in carbohydrates. I started the afternoon climbs with my stomach full of hard to digest food. The next climb up Luther Pass was horrible -- I was "bonking" (not enough blood sugar), the climb was anything but gentle, it was heating up, and there was a strong headwind. When I got to the top, I felt awful -completely out of energy, and my stomach was packed so full that I couldn't eat or drink anything. The same thing had happened the year before, and the solution is easy -- just sit down and wait for 20 minutes so digestion can make some progress. As soon as I was starting to feel better, I started down, since I got another 20 minutes to digest on the coast down to the base of the last pass -- Carson. That climb didn't seem too bad, either because I'd digested some food, or the wind had died down, or because the end was in sight. Probably, it was a combination of the three. The people manning the aid station at the top of the last pass did a good job. They wouldn't even let us set our bikes down ourselves; they helped us off, took care of the bikes, and pointed us to the food and water. The ride back was easy, and even the final climb back to Turtle Rock Park wasn't too bad. Counting all the stops, it took me about 11 1/2 hours to do the whole ride. Even though the ride was significantly shorter than it was last year, I think it was harder because the back side of Monitor was much worse than the Nevada pass. Most of the other people I talked to felt the same way. I must be in better shape this year, since I remember that after I finished the ride last year, I swore that I'd never do it again, and it was 3 months before I began to think about re-registering. This year, I was ready to sign up the next morning. I had the barbecue dinner, and swapped stories with people until about 7 PM, drove back to the lodge, and was sound asleep by 8. I woke up at 6 the next morning, ate breakfast, and arrived home in time to watch the coverage of the Tour de France on TV.