7:44 pm: Aside from meeting Mark yesterday, yesterday was a wash with the abandoned ride to Colossal Cave and the anti-climatic drive up Mt. Lemmon. Today was about making up for that. After breakfast with Mark, I drove out to Saguaro National Park East on my way to Colossal Cave. I swear, I can't gush enough about these saguaro cactus. I alternatively want to run up to one of them and give it a big hug, but thinking the better of that plan, I alternatively wonder if anyone would offer me a huge grant to undertake individually naming each and every saguaro cactus in the region. Gotta dream.

I took the tour at Colossal Cave and not much to say about that, it's a touristy thing, very cool, but touristy, and then I went to Sabino Canyon for a hike and got lost because of inaccurate trail markers. Fuckers. Sabino Canyon gets the big shaft from me. It crossed my mind what it would be like to die in the desert of exposure, dehydration, and heat exhaustion. It doesn't sound so bad, but it's probably much worse than I'm thinking it out to be.

After Sabino Canyon, I decided that I had to put my bike wheels on Mt. Lemmon. Mt. Lemmon was the first hint to bring me here, what the hell was I doing in Tucson with my bike if I wasn't going to at least put my wheels on Mt. Lemmon? So from yesterday's drive, I knew which overlook to drive to, and parked at 3730'. I kept my expectations low and was just going to climb as much as possible, and stop if it got distressing. Fortunately, I think I've acclimated to the altitude, and after a thousand feet of climbing, I felt fine, so I continued. After I hit the 2000' mark, I thought I'd might as well go for an even 6000' elevation. It was actually fascinating because it was getting chilly at that point and the vegetation visibly changed from desert to temperate, with conifers and pines.

Once I hit 6000', I headed down fast because it was getting dark and I didn't have any lights on me. I blazed my way down because it was a very untechnical descent with only light turns and little traffic. The only mishap I had was when I felt something wrench while I was going 35 mph, and I had a moment of panic thinking it was my derailleur coming apart. I was relieved that is was just the pump holder that snapped off because something caught it. I tucked the pump into my pocket and continued down. A sheriff stopped me a few hundred feet above where I was parked because it was pretty dark and I didn't have any lights. I explained that I underestimated my climb and that I was parked just a short way down, so he let me go on my way.

It felt great when I finished though! 2300' of climbing is just a scratch of the 5000' climb to the 8000' peak of Mt. Lemmon, but in the Bay Area, that would have gotten me close to climbing the whole of Mt. Tamalpais. It took an hour to climb that 2300'. It took 23 minutes to descend, including getting stopped by that sheriff!