Of heat maps, memory, and a remote intersection in Nevada

They tell the story of years upon years of adventures, big and small, close-to-home and far-flung. You can trace the grander journeys by the longer lines that stretch across states, countries, or continents, while the dark, dense networks signify the more familiar: one’s home range and frequented favorite destinations. For me, the lines that spring forth from my home range and dart across the map are particularly special — connecting trips that have started or ended at home with more-distant locales. And even more wondrous are those rare points on the map where two long lines happen to cross, an intersection that represents the exact place where two disparate journeys briefly coexist in the present landscape – the one in that moment and the one amid a cascade of memories.

Earlier this summer, I pedaled away from my house in north-central Arizona, loaded with a packraft strapped to my handlebars and a summer camping kit on the rear rack. My destination? The wild ranges and valleys of central Nevada, a landscape that I find absolutely captivating and intimidating; it’s also one that has remained disconnected from home on my heatmap. This wasn’t a bike trip, per se. It was a week of pedaling, a crossing of Lake Mead in the tiny boat, and then three weeks of hiking to complete a south-to-north traverse of Nevada.

The scale of these vast landscapes always seems to shrink when reached via bike, and places that feel far from home when driving seem to similarly be brought much closer and more intimately related, even if the travel time is far greater. It’s the human-powered nature of travel propelling that heat map line across the map. On this recent trip, that line traced singletrack out of town, dirt roads north to the periphery of the Colorado Plateau, pavement of the old Route 66 down into the desert, and new-to-me dusty gravel toward the mighty Colorado River, impounded into the impoverished Lake Mead. A few days of pedaling and that flooded canyon felt closer to home than ever.

...years ago, I spent many weeks just a half day’s ride from there around St. George, Utah training for a winning run in Tour Divide, and one of the big training loops I did a few times climbed over those mountains and through Mesquite. Those training rides from a decade ago suddenly felt pretty dang close to home, and I remembered vividly a younger, far-less-experienced Kurt who was brave enough to try intimidating big things on bike. Many things have changed in that time, but it was reassuring to be reminded that some powerful elements of who I am sure haven’t.

I bopped farther north in the hot early-summer days, enjoying some of the mountain bike trails built in recent years in Caliente and Pioche and then trading out bikepacking gear for the hiking gear I had stashed in a mini storage unit in Pioche. Proceeding on foot, my daily mileage dropped from 60+ to ~16 miles. Mountain ranges took a day or two to cross rather than a matter of hours. Sometimes I could see where I had slept the night before from the subsequent night’s camp.

Ten days later, I reached one of those rare intersections where past and present journeys suddenly are shared in one moment. I had dropped out of the mountains heights of Great Basin National Park and plodded on fatigued feet into the sprawling Snake Valley, and a 25-mile-long walk stretched out ahead of me through the basin. In that unlikely place, memories swirled through my head. Some were from a 55-hour solo non-stop east-west effort across Nevada a few years prior that passed right through that point. Others were from last summer’s 5-month ride down the new Orogenesis route, which shared miles above Lake Tahoe with that trans-Nevada race effort.

...six thousand miles of memories all coalesced in my head: Washington singletrack through lush old-growth forests, beach camping in Baja with Claire, racing across a bright white playa beneath a 1am moonlight, sharing rowdy miles through the San Gabriels with my friend Huw, each adding to a list too long to put into words. And all those were superimposed on the prior few weeks’ fresh memories created while traveling from home.

But even more significantly, the memories from Orogenesis and racing across Nevada had floated in my head in a unique way, never quite feeling grounded or attached to the rest of my life. Their lines on the heat map were disconnected from all others, until that afternoon’s walk carried with it a line projecting all the way there from home.

As I continued north, it was fascinating to now feel those experiences were no longer isolated from one another. They were collectively anchored to an unlikely remote intersection there in eastern Nevada, one that was also linked right back home to Arizona. Seeing those long lines interconnect on my heat map is merely an aesthetic graphic representation of that significance.

KR