Monday, Aug. 23

I worked a little more on the evening painting, adding some lights and detail to the upper portion of the work. Now maybe I can call it done.

We all went for a bike ride yesterday, loading up the mountain bikes on the back of the car and drive up to Little Dell Reservoir at the beginning of East Canyon. For those not from around here, it was once again up into the mountains. From there we biked along an old section of the pony express route. Utah is doted with old trails from days of yore. Traveling just west of here you can follow the old pony express trail, past the remains of outposts all the way to the Nevada border. In 1861 it took them ten days to deliver your letter from St. Louis to Sacramento, California.

We only did about two miles of it, what can I say; Lina, our daughter was with us and besides the skies were beginning to turn really dark and ugly. A front was moving in according to the weather forecast.

Lina had a birthday party to go to up in Park City so Karin took the car leaving me with no real option but to bike the ten or fifteen miles back down to Salt Lake City. The clouds were getting darker and I heard thunder rippling through the air. Within a short time I did the mild uphill climb to get to the top of Immigration Canyon from East Canyon and was ready for the long downhill. With the switchbacks at the top my bike was soon up to freeway speeds, as I blurred my way past the bikers struggling to climb up the opposite direction to the top. I tried to conserve the brake pads as much as possible maybe that had something to do with the acceleration problem! Hey, but it was fun!

At the last hairpin turn the road became less of a vertical fall line and some moderate peddling was needed. At the bottom I zigzagged along small roads and parking lots to keep my elevation over to the area we live in. There on my final decent through Federal Heights the skies opened up with a deluge of water, a few minutes later I was soaked head to foot with small hail hitting my face. “Why the rain couldn’t have held out for another fifteen minutes I’ll never know?” I arrived home looking like a drowned rat and decided a warm shower would help wash all the road grim off my back.

Richard Boyer