Hero Dirt

When speaking of climate, California is defined primarily by aridity. Sure, people love to spool up images of towering coastal redwoods and the green of those primeval forests, but the reality of the “Golden State” is that those (dwindling) forests are a fringe, a sliver of loamy dank that exists only in a very small part of the western edge of the state. And, aside from the historical chainsaw assisted reduction in the acreage of those forests, the changing climate is turning even their shaded understory dusty during the increasing longer, drier summers. The rest of the state, most of the time, is predominantly a dry, dry place.

The same holds true for much of the American West. Bone dry for the most part, with a brief winter period where the land is either buried in snow or flushed with rains, formerly dry soil transformed by the deluge of water; great for fashioning bricks or dwellings, but hellish to traverse with any wheeled conveyance.

On the shoulders of those two existential realities, there are these brief transitory phases when the soil has just been kissed with the first rains of winter, or is drying out between storms, or as the land bursts green from the hold of winter. A time when traction is abundant, when there is no bad tire choice, when it feels to a rider that he or she cannot put a wheel wrong. Hero Dirt.

It’s unfair to refer to this time as a season, since (speaking for the arid west here, not of the loamy paradise to the north) it is so brief and so fickle that it cannot be relied on the way seasons can. It comes and goes, sometimes so quickly that moments of hero dirt seem as hard to catch as those combinations of swell and offshore winds that make sudden surf breaks appear and disappear in the span of hours, maybe holding for a couple days, leaving riders afterward misty eyed and wistful; “Dude, you shoulda been out yesterday. It was ehhhhhhhpic…”

Hero dirt is so perfectly named. It is this alchemy of soil and moisture content that causes soil to hold together, firm enough that you can push into it and the feedback it offers is so abundant that it almost feels like you’re reading it in slow motion. The soil adheres to itself, it binds, but not so much that it adheres to your tires, and when it gives way beneath the physics of mass and velocity, it does so with such predictability that any discussion about tire compound, maybe even tire pressure, becomes moot. You could probably rail hero dirt on a bare rim and still have fun. It’s the perfect “feel” for riding. And, down here anyway, those brief windows of hero dirt time are also when the soil is so perfectly suited for digging and packing that the heavy work of building trail holds as much appeal as riding.

My personal history of mountain biking has been based almost entirely in California. This is where I first rode a mountain bike, and in spite of having had the privilege of riding all over this blue-green marble, this is where almost all of my mountain biking has taken place. Right next to California on the pie chart of my ridden geography would be Colorado and Utah and Nevada, with a little Arizona thrown in; Arinevutarado, if we were to throw out one of those state border portmanteau place names. Don’t forget to mix in the dry parts of Oregon. Well behind those two big reddish-beige slices you’d find a narrow sliver of the combined green Pacific Northwest, and an even thinner, barely discernable emerald and chocolate slice of British Columbia. So, as such, my memory touchstones, those moments that make me remember why I ride, what I most love about mountain biking, should be defined by hanging motes of dust glittering in filtered sunlight, by the clatter of shale beneath my tires, by the loose relaxed drifting that is absolutely central to riding and surviving in this parched landscape. But that’s not the case. What I remember, when people ask me what I love about mountain biking, what I feel when I close my eyes, is hero dirt.

Way way waaaaay back when I was first learning how to suffer on a bike, busy being a broke college student who was unaware he was months away from dropping out of college to become a bike mechanic, I was living in a cheap apartment in San Francisco (once upon a time, that used to be an attainable reality). The inventory of my personal material worth consisted of a futon on the floor, a couple 2x12 planks on cinderblocks acting as a bookshelf, a 1968 Chrysler Newport purchased for the princely sum of $300 and a hip flask of 100-proof vodka from an old black man named Red Clemmie, and a Yeti FRO. My friends were mostly bike messengers.

One spring weekend, five of us loaded the Chrysler up (it was possible to fit two bicycles completely in the trunk, and three more sat atop the trunk on the fork mounts that I had drilled through the trunk lid), drove up north to the edge of Lake Shasta, camped, partied, and raced the Lemurian Classic. This was a beautiful 30-ish mile beast of a race that started with a 12 mile fire road climb carrying us from the blasted red dirt at lake level up into a lush conifer forest, where the dirt turned almost black and singletrack snaked between massive red firs. The temperature at race start had been close to 90 degrees, but a front was moving in, a rare spring squall, and as we climbed that forever long fireroad, the temperatures dropped and by the time we hit the singeltrack in the firs, we were riding in a cloud. Cool, perfect weather for pedaling all the way into one’s personal red mist, and the texture of the dirt was so perfect I wanted to eat it. I distinctly remember wondering how it would feel to bite into it with my teeth.

It was a transcendent weekend, and we all returned to the city in this exhausted state of reverence, totally in love with mountain biking, with our lives, with our sore muscled kinship. It is entirely possible that some hash brownies were consumed on the drive home. I fell asleep by about 9 that Sunday night; a sleep of complete exhaustion and contentment. Waking up the next morning, still high from the brownie, late for class, I swam toward consciousness amid towering red firs, with the cloud drifting in wispy grey tendrils through the tree branches. I knew I was on a futon on a floor in an apartment in the Upper Haight, but I lay there for a few minutes and just admired the trees, and felt my tires hooking up perfectly as I snaked between them, gentle hip suggestions guiding the bike left to right in a state of total committed harmony.

That weekend may have been the first time I had a sense of calling; that this was something I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I still remember that weekend, and that waking dreamstate, with total clarity. And I have been chasing those hero dirt moments ever since. Thirty five years later, the ledger book of my mountain biking is probably something like 80 percent dust and rocks, 10 percent mud, 5 percent “this is strange and different but here we go” terrain, and if I am lucky, maybe 5 percent of the loamy goodness that we know as hero dirt. But hero dirt is still, to this day, what I think about when I think about mountain biking.

The conditions here in the part of California where I live are predominantly kitty litter over hardpack. Today, as you read this, we are drying out from weeks of rain, and have just hit the inflection point as far as soil moisture is concerned. It is all-time hero dirt. I gotta go.