Wednesday, December 21, 2005
Arizona, from bottom to top
Tucsonan Scott Morris needed seven days, eight hours to travel the Arizona Trail.
BRYAN LEE
Tucson Citizen
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On his solo mountain bike trek of the Arizona Trail last fall, Tucsonan Scott Morris encountered a backpacker on the way to the Grand Canyon's North Rim.
Not the ordinary hiker, Morris was carrying his disconnected bike on his back - wheels of any kind are disallowed on Grand Canyon trails - and was about to hike the insanely vertical North Kaibab Trail.
"Are you staying up here (at a campground) or going to the rim?" the backpacker asked.
"Up, up, up," Morris replied, even though his feet were blistered nubs and he soon would be reduced to taking "baby steps."
"You're crazy," was the reaction.
Not crazy, just determined, according to Morris' close friend and fellow bike adventurer Lee Blackwell.
Morris, 27, a University of Arizona computer science doctoral candidate and trails architect, says he has been obsessed with mountain bike racing since age 12.
"Every pedal gets me closer to Utah," he writes in an online diary of his trip, which took seven days and eight hours beginning on a rutted singletrack on the Mexican border. Meaning, it's the challenge, of course, and the sense of being first - to Morris' knowledge, nobody has ever raced the 710-mile bike route devised by author/cyclist Andrea Lankford in "Biking the Arizona Trail." The trip included about 40 percent of the actual trail, the rest on parallel back-country roads.
Comfort certainly wasn't in the equation. Morris carried only a light sleeping bag, a waterproof "bivy" bag and clothing - rainjacket, pants, jersey and shorts. He ate mostly at convenience stores: candy, nuts, milkshakes, "whatever I could find" and containing fewer calories than he was burning daily.
It was ride and keep riding, concentrating on a sensible pace into the dark.
"Disorientation, staying focused was the problem," he said of night riding in a recent interview. "I could only take three-four hours of it, living in the little bubble of light in front of me. It was mentally exhausting."
He didn't sleep well, usually about five hours. He was fatigued "but camping alone is always a little more unnerving; any little noise in the bush wakes you up," he said.
It didn't helped when packs of coyotes, with their incessant chorus, kept getting closer and bolder.
Morris and Blackwell had ridden all of the Arizona Trail hiking course - except for bike-prohibited wilderness areas - last spring and it took 25 days, with the wandering miles that included too much "hike-a-biking." So it was to the faster and easier Lankford course for racing purposes.
"The Arizona Trail is not built for efficiency or travel," Blackwell says. "It's to give the most interesting tour of the north-south corridor."
Last summer, Morris tried racing in the 625-mile Great Divide event, which parallels the Continental Divide.
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