Messenger Woods

Today, I. and I took a short hike in Messenger Woods Nature Preserve in Homer Glen, IL. In my short lifetime I have visited almost every nature hiking path in the area, but Messenger escaped me. We figured the snow would be too deep to walk, but took a chance on it being a well used trail. we parked in a loop and stopped to read the message board, and to view the map. I determined the trail head to be about two to three hundred meters away. There were no tracks leading to it. My Lovely shook her head and balked at the prospect of lifting legs ten inches high with every step. We returned to the car, and I decided that as long as I was there I would continue to the end of the drive to see where it leads. The drive was short and sure enough there was the official trial head for the short .5 mile loop. The second choice was a 1.3 mile loop which we decided to do at another time. The short loop was well trodden and the path was lumpy but walkable. The lumps made it a bit treacherous, but what the hell let’s do it.

The sun was at it’s peak and the sky was as blue as a sky can be. The brightness required us to wear sunglasses. The temperature was a balmy 26 degrees Fahrenheit. The walking was slow because of the lumps, and the hills. Walking up a hill was easier than walking down. During the downside our shoes tended to ski out from under us and we would up flailing arms and twisting our bodies to keep from falling. We took it slow, and even slower on the downsides. The singing birds were the only noise in the forest. The trees at Messenger are huge and old. It wasn’t obvious how huge until we passed a downed tree, and saw the trunk horizontal and stretched out. Being a Nature Center they are not allowed to remove the fallen trees, but they are allowed to clear a path if a downed one crosses the trail. Many of the fallen seniors were easily sixty feet in length, and two feet or more in diameter.

We didn’t see a single deer during our walk but the forest floor was riddled with foot prints of many different kinds of animals. Deer tracks were the most common. I have yet to learn where deer stay in the day time. One would think that on a sunny day like today they would be easily spotted, but they weren’t.

While walking I had a recollection of a camping trip I took with friends to Yellowstone Park in Wyoming. Five of us, two engineers and three school teachers, stuffed our bikes, gear, and selves into a GM mini van and drove to Jackson Hole in July. The goal was to bicycle around the Yellowstone Park loop, and camp between segments. Before we reached Jackson Hole, one of the teachers who was an experienced camper, skier, and hiker asked if he could stop at a small town maybe Pinedale, forty miles south of Jackson Hole. There was a super sports equipment store there where one could buy neat camping, hiking, fishing, and hunting gear of any kind. During that stop, I bought a pair of polyester wind-pants to wear over my legs on chilly Yellowstone nights. This morning I was trying to remember what year it was that we took that trip so I could peg the age of these pants. Since that trip x-x years ago this is the first year I have worn the wind pants, and I have worn them more than any other time. Talk about being emotionally connected to something like a pair of pants, this is a prime example. Now, I am thinking of all the other stuff I have hidden in drawers, closets, and shelves that are there because the items are too good to throw away, and I might use it again. The easiest way to quantify all that stuff is to call it a house full.

Burning Gas-Moab-1

In nineteen seventy-one I went to the Schwinn Bicycle shop in Oak Lawn, Illinois to buy a bike for my wife. It was near Mother’s Day, and the kids (9,8,4) wanted mom to have a bike so she could ride with them. The shop owner was a middle age man who presented himself as an obnoxious oaf. How he survived with that attitude in a business dealing with customers made me wonder if attitude was necessary to succeed. I finally did buy a nice blue bike with narrow tires, hand brakes, and a five speed transmission for Barb. Maybe that is how the guy survived, he was the only game around.

In the course of my conversation with the man, I asked if Schwinn ever intended to make a heavy balloon tired bike with hand brakes and multiple speeds. He replied, “why would anyone want something like that?”  That was the day I invented the mountain bike in the flat state of Illinois. It wasn’t until a few years later that a kid from California cobbled together the bike I envisioned and began a craze that has not slowed down.

I finally bought my first mountain bike in nineteen seventy-eight, from Schwinn. I loved it. My town at the time was in Cook County, Illinois famous for crooked politicians and graft. One good thing Cook County has is a fabulous Forest Preserve District with thousands of acres of forested land around Chicago. Evidently the politicians of old owned horses because the Forest Preserve boasts of over one hundred miles of horse trails. Those trails became my private mountain bike experience for the next twenty-five years. Biking on horse trails became my passion. I also notched many week-long bicycle tours on my belt.

During the course of my cycling history Moab, Utah became the goal. Cycling magazines featured tours and photo essays of the fabulous bicycling on the rocks of Moab. I longed to take a tour there, but it has never happened. The lure to visit Moab, however, stayed deep in my psyche. When I began to winter in Arizona, I realized that Moab was really very close to where I stayed. Close is a relative term, Moab is still over four hundred miles from the Valley of the Sun. Nevertheless, I kept longing to visit and tour Arches National Park. Finally, the stars and the moon were in correct alignment with Neptune and it happened.

Moab, Utah has built an economy around mountain biking, rafting, rock climbing, off-road touring, and photography. The town is a mecca for young twenty and thirty something outdoor types fascinated by adventure. I believe Peggy and I were the oldest people in town.

We scheduled a day to tour Arches National Park, and I’m glad we did. The park is just a couple of miles from Moab, and very accessible by major highways. My heart beat fast as we crossed a bridge and I spotted a sign that said, “Colorado River.” Are you kidding me? I drove over the mighty Colorado. I’ve never traced the head waters of the Colorado and was totally unaware that it enters Arizona by crossing Utah as it comes from Colorado. Previously, the only glimpse I ever had of the mighty river is from the edge of the Grand Canyon. I asked Peg if she was up to a raft ride on the Colorado, she promptly put the notion out of my mind with a rather short “NO.”

At the gate, I flashed “The National Parks and Federal Recreational Lands Pass” I bought last year at White Sands. The attendant, one of my employees in a Smokey the Bear uniform, handed me a map and waved us through. Thank God there is a seventeen mile road that winds around Arches. We did see some hearty white-haired bicyclists pumping hard up a hill, but motorists out numbered cyclists by about a thousand to one. The scenery is better than Monument Valley of the day before.  There are many arches formed by water erosion of the soft orange-red stone. We saw most of the arches from drive-by view-point. The most popular ones need a vigorous hike to get close too. It made me appreciate all photographs of the arches because the photographer expended enormous energy to take the photos. I did take some point and shoot photos, but  they are not calendar quality. The drive took us four hours to complete before we cried uncle and headed for some food. Just sitting in the car and seeing all the fabulous rock formations that have taken four-hundred thousand years to form burned us out.

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