Notes From The Green Room

The Aspen were singing quietly today up in the green room. The hour and change of grind from town was behind me, and I was floating along a rolling line of trail that did a good job of giving back some fun rhythm in exchange for the climbing punches it lobbed. Everything seemed so quiet - the scrub of my tires on the dirt, chain and drivetrain mercifully smooth, my own breathing finally contained, and even the wind pushing through the leaves seemed to be muffled. It felt like a gentle velvety swaddling. Tranquil. Calming. Since I wasn’t on any schedule, I slowed down and pulled over in a dappled wide spot and sat there for a while.

This is the time of year when the Western Trembling Aspen is running its photosynthetic engine full gas. The leaves are bright green, soft as cloth to the touch, incredibly pliable. The reason the Aspen leaves Tremble, apparently, is a matter of aerodynamics; they are hinged upon stalks longer than themselves, and that stalk is flattened perpendicular to the blade, thus acting as a pivot. So, when the wind blows, even gently, the Aspen Trembles. Today may have been the first time that I recognized the sound of the wind through the Aspen can vary with the season.

Right now, those leaves are jampacked with chlorophyll. Green and soft, they channel the wind pushing through them into a soothing murmur. In a couple months, their work will be done and they will be starting to turn yellow, carpeting the mountain flanks below timberline with a mesmerizing gold that is the level best autumnal leaf peeping show that can be found on this side of the continent. Those yellow leaves are dead, brittle like parchment, and after the first good storms of the fall, they will carpet the trail with a different kind of textural silence. But while they are still hanging in the breeze the sound they make as the wind blows holds an entirely different timbre than these green leaves. Realizing this for the first time, I sat back against a pale and scarred trunk and listened to the song some more.

Fun facts about Aspen: It is capable of reproducing by borne seed as well as by cloning via its roots, producing suckers that grow into full trees. This lends an incredible level of survivability and opportunism to the species. It can survive fire better than conifers and can reproduce faster in fire damaged soil. It’s not a desirable wood for the timber industry – soft, smallish, burns too fast at too low a temperature to even be decent firewood – so it has survived the commodification of natural timberland which decimated the spectacular forests that used to clothe this continent. But the cloning, that’s where the magic is. While an individual Aspen may only live 150 or so years if it’s lucky, a grove of Aspen can be thousands of years old. Tens of thousands, even. The Pando clone in Utah’s Fishlake National Forest covers 106 acres, is guessed to be anywhere from 16,000 to 80,000 years old, and collectively weighs 6000 tonnes, making it the largest organism by mass on the planet.

(Fun unrelated fact about massive organisms, thanks to Wikipedia fact checking: There’s a clonal colony of Posidonia Oceania – seagrass – just south of Ibiza that is estimated to be around 100,000 years old! And a clonal colony of Posidonia Australis in Australia that is 180km long, covering an area of 200 square kilometers! There’s also a fungus in eastern Oregon that weighs maybe 35,000 tons, so about triple the size of Pando once the ton/tonne conversion is done, but it’s not clear whether it is a single organism or a colony. Nature is so fucking cool!)

The more I learn about Aspen over the years, from the first time I read Basque initials carved in their trunks somewhere above Carson City in the late 1980s all the way to now, living just down the hill from an entire mountainside of it, my sense of wonder about this species just continues to grow. For as long as I have been riding bikes, I have placed the gentle act of riding singletrack through Aspen groves on a pedestal. There is some irony in this, given the compromises involved.

Usually, some substantial climbing is required until one gets up into the Aspen. In the western United States, especially in the mountain states, Aspen really comes into its own at around 9000’ above sea level. So unless you live in Aspen, the town, you are likely to have to pay some climbing dues. But then, if you do live in Aspen, the town, there’s an entirely different sort of dues paying required to get up into the green and gold goodness from that well-heeled zip code. I digress. If you want to get the Aspen goods, there will be climbing involved. Maybe a lot of it. And if you want to get those goods, you’ve got a pretty short window to get them. Given the preferred climate for survival, those beautiful leaves will be gone by sometime in October, leaving ghostly sticks standing bare and deepening snow carpeting the ground until May, or June, maybe July. Four months, more or less.

Meanwhile, from a modern, fully evolved mountain biking perspective, there’s a good chance that once you get up there without getting snowed on, singletrack surfing in the Aspen isn’t going to be the kind of envelope pushing, boundary testing, shredfest that some of us crave.

Which, I am increasingly realizing now that I live just one grueling climb away from some spectacular specimens, is fine by me. Even way back when I was more invested in stretching my skillset, there was something tranquil and mesmerizing about slipping into a rhythm on a buffed smooth but very narrow sliver of dirt weaving between those slender silvery trunks. Something almost holy. My sampling of trails through the populus tremuloides has been pulled from Colorado, Utah, Nevada, California, Idaho, Montana, and Arizona. I have not encountered anything that is textbook RAD in all that sampling, but I have consistently ridden into a state of awe and reverence.

It was so peaceful up there today. I know, calling it the green room is a bit cliché and likely to earn the scorn of surfers. I don’t want to blow too much smoke up its ass and call it the Green cathedral, though. No need to get pretentious here. But man, I felt like I was nestled in the bosom of creation for a good long time there. It felt so peaceful and sweet that I began to nod off to the whispered lullaby.

Then a horsefly bit my shoulder right through my shirt. So much for the poetic wisdom of Donald Culross Peattie. I saddled up and rode home. It wasn’t rad, but it was awesome.