There's a version of me from 2005 packing the car, prepping for Going to the Sun Mountain, buzzing about a weekend that might involve two summits or might just involve hanging back with a camera. That uncertainty, it turns out, was the whole point. Two decades of August 18ths later, the uncertainty never really left, it just changed shape.
By 2008 the mountains had become a battleground of a different kind: Sheep Mountain Ride ended in huckleberry ice cream and Olympic reruns, while smoke from a prescribed fire had me ranting about elk herds and government logic (some things never resolve, they just get filed under "grievances I still hold"). Even the posts with nothing left in them, It's a Heat Wave and Ummm, Recovery ... No?, feel like placeholders for whatever chaos was happening that year.
Then the body started talking back. The mysterious Syndrome of 2010 gave way to real physical reckoning by 2012, when Fitz-Barn Day 2 had me urinating blood on Bloody Dick Pass and still deciding to keep pedaling. Somewhere between the ridgelines of Necklace Lakes and the soggy failure of Little Bear Cabin, I kept making pledges I'd immediately break.
Later years softened into something quieter: coffee and unnamed roads in Another Day in Paradise, river camps along Hunter Peak, graveside curiosity in Finding the Parkers, and finally, this year, the humbling comedy of Jet Pack Friends, where just showing up was the win.
Same restless itch, different decade. Turns out the mountain doesn't need to be conquered every time, sometimes it's enough to just keep going toward it.