And Now For Something Completely Different

I woke up in Apache Junction to a cloudy, breezy very cool 60 degrees; I was confused for a second and thought I must be in San Francisco. But then I saw a cactus and some jackrabbits and a Wafflehouse restaurant, just down the street from my motel, and remembered I was in Arizona. I watched the local weather and saw that the area forecast was scattered showers and potential evening thunderstorms, so I scrambled out of Apache Junction at 7:00 a.m. I wanted to put in as many miles as I could and finish up well before the threat of lightning bolts, flash floods and other desert storm miseries.

Man, that forecaster was either hitting the sauce or reading the wrong weather tracking map or something. I had a strange ride that day: it was only 60-65 degrees and pretty windy all day - I was cold. I left my sweatshirt on, even as I began sweating heavily due to the day's climb - I rode from the relative flat of Apache Junction, at 1800 feet, to the uneven, bumpy rock strewn roads leading up to Globe, elevation 3,500 feet. I left my sweatshirt on anyway, I didn't want to get sick. The mountains on the way to Globe were beautiful: dark chocolate brown, dotted with little green shrubs and all kinds of cactus - tall spiky cactus with white flowers on the crown and flowers on their branches; shrub like cactus with lunch plate sized sections hugging the ground; half tree half cactus short to the ground with long branches covered in spikes. The mountains themselves were jagged, sharp little razored teeth pushing up through the ground, looking as though they would chew up everything in their path.

The first shower hit around 11:00 a.m., raining fat little drops at a slant for about five minutes. I took as much shelter as I could from a boulder on the side of the narrow, windy mountain road. Then it passed, and the sun shone through the clouds a minute later. I thought great, hopefully that's all I'll encounter today, the random passing shower, as predicted. I let the wind and the sun dry me out, and pedaled on. Two showers later, as I was winding my way up what turned out to be the steepest hill, the clouds turned an ominous, deadly looking dark , so dark it was almost black. And then I felt like I was in a freezer, the temperature must have dropped ten to fifteen degrees in five minutes. I thought uh-oh, and then like clockwork the heavens opened up: it poured so hard I couldn't see the other side of the road. I ducked underneath the only little tree for miles around, and watched as the rain turned into little beads of hail, bouncing off the oily road, off my bike, off my trailer, off of my helmet. The little beads stopped falling after a few minutes, and I left the cover of little tree to wipe off my bike, and the trailer, and myself and then ran back under the tree as the hail made a triumphant return, a little bigger than beads this time, a little smaller than marbles. I waited out two more rounds under little tree, laughing as I thought how insane the whole storm was: for a week I'd been barbequeing, hiding out from the sun, and now I was freezing, hiding out from a hail storm.

I cleaned everything up again, pulled away from little tree and heard rumbling in the distance; at first I thought a tractor trailer was coming up the hill behind me, but I turned to look back and didn't see any traffic anywhere. I heard it again, but this time it was above me: thunder. The evening storms had arrived a little ahead of schedule (six hours or so, but who's counting?) I started pumping the pedals faster while watching a fork of lightning come flicking out of the sky like a blind white snake striking out at the dark. I didn't want it to bite me, so I pedaled for everything I was worth and was rewarded with a downhill run all the way to Globe, just a few miles from the mountain pass I'd just been stuck in. I made it to the "American" motel just before the rain started to come down for good; it rained hard for hours. The parking lot outside my room was flooded, cars driving through had water up to the top of their rims. I took advantage of a break in the rain to run next door to the local pizza shop next door for a calzone and a homemade churro, yum! The pizza shop crew said the weather wasn't normal at all; apparently Flagstaff had a snow advisory in effect and the northern mountains had two inches of snow today. Living in San Francisco with its year round steady weather has made me forget about strange weather patterns in other parts of the country, though I'm starting to remember now. I made it back to my room with dinner just in front of another downpour that lasted all night, pouring rain while I dreamed of sunstroke in a field of snow.