Scaling Baldy's Sideburns (USA Day 146)

Reader, I climbed the hill.

After dropping Amy off at the spa with her massage voucher and a list of aches, Jim drove me inland to the foot of Mt Baldy, a deceptively huge hill with one narrow road stretching all the way to the top. As is the case with these kinds of climbs, you can’t actually see the summit for the first couple of hours, which provided the whole experience with a kind of ominous horror. Will the top actually be there? If so, what monsters will lurk on its slopes? And most importantly, how steep will the slopes be upon which the monsters dwell?

This was a minimalist summit attempt: aside from two bottles of water each, and a couple of necessary bicycles, we brought nothing with us. Jim went as far as removing his house key from the rest of the ring and leaving this at home. Bike lights came off. Spare parts were discarded. Not an extra gram would encumber us up this hill (quite the treat after having weighed my bike and its kit last night to discover it’s a hefty 108lb. Amy’s is 82lb, sans food. Honestly, that’s a lot, and quite a bit more than even the average cross-continental tourer, but that just shows how you’ll get used to anything given time.

Give me a bike without bags, after six thousand miles of my pack donkey, and I’ll float up that hill. We climbed diligently, starting at a pace that reflected that 4999 feet left to ascend, and carried that on throughout the afternoon. It was hot, with a dry breeze that whipped up over the crests of each climb and licked the moisture from my lips. Wildfire weather. Every so often we’d pass barriers banning us from continuing, but unlike other, larger vehicles we had the option to ignore them. The multitude of cyclists zipping down the hill towards us was either a very good sign or a bad one, but none had charred hair or cartoon smoking bums so we assumed there weren’t any flames up ahead.

This was, according to Jim, a good hill to do in the morning, and as the sun dropped behind the hills I understood why. The city to our right became obscured, insignificant, and the craggy valleys and lonely mountainsides took over. An intense quiet loomed low. No more cyclists descended. We passed late summer oaks shedding yellow leaves and land-slipped scree encroaching the narrow roadways, and absolute, constant silence. Still we climbed, tapping out a calm rhythm, passing vertiginous false summits and nervy blind corners, each one predicted and announced by Jim, whose familiarity of the route was a constant relief.

“There’s a café at the top,” he said, just as my stomach was beginning to rumble. “This one’s the last big bend, then a downhill,” he called, at the moment my legs began to ache. “Great view ahead on the left,” he announced, just as I was getting bored of the road. Extraordinary prescience.

The summit, it turns out, is 9000 feet up and, in many ways, a ski resort. We didn’t climb that due to the altitude, the gradient and the lack of any actual roads. Instead, we ground our gears up the back end of nowhere, then rounded a corner and descended into a cosy village, which welcomed us without the slightest care about how far we’d climbed to get here. They must see cyclists up here all the time, and being impressed by each and every one would be more exhausting than the climb itself. Over a toasted sandwich and a pot of dippin’ gravy, we stretched our legs and debriefed. Turns out, 5000 feet isn’t nearly as hard when you’re not carrying the weight of an average domestic toilet up with you. (Thanks, Google.) Jim introduced the idea of another 2000 (much steeper) feet up to the base of the ski lift, but with a toasted sandwich this good, who’d want to climb any further?

We descended at eighty-five times the speed we’d ascended and reached the car with blown-back hair and dry eyes. Then it was home to an incredibly relaxed and rather tenderised Amy for a shower, a quick change, then dinner and frozen bananas by the sea.

Tomorrow, we leave California. How the hell has it gone by so fast, even with the panniers on?

I’ve patched these tubes far too many times. Time for new tyres.