Mountains: size may not, after all, matter.
There's a certain rhythm we've slid pleasantly into whilst touring, and it's rather unlike touring alone. We've been waking up together and spending lazy mornings in each each other's company and the dawn light before taking our time over breakfast and choosing when to move on. To some extent, the distances have subjectively shrunk; Harri once worried about 50km days but now that's sometimes done in an afternoon after we sit together in the sun and talk. We are increasingly tight as a team, especially because I've realised quite how lovely it is to be able to trust the person I'm travelling with implicitly. Plenty of approval has gone the other way, and we are currently in a fairly constant virtuous circle of care for each other, steadily increasing trust and a great deal of happiness.
Route wise, Harri left the story at my moment of pain in Western Germany. The drama was just before the Brocken mountain. I was coming down a small country road on the way over to the Harz national park, and it was a steep downhill. My rear disc was a little bent, and so I was using exclusively the front. I turned a corner a little off the apex, and had to brake to avoid overshooting the corner. A perfect plan, were it not for the small stretch of horse manure that my front wheel slid out on. I went down quite hard, and injured my wrist quite intensely on the right side by instinctively putting it on the road to break my fall. Again, a perfect plan, were it not for the fact that I think I instead nearly broke my wrist. For the rest of that day I was unable to even place the lightest of pressure on that side of the handlebar, and so it was interesting having to ride over country roads and non-paved trails. I have become excellent at riding with one hand; apparently Skinner was correct that learning can be reinforced by punishment if required! We spent a little time grabbing a pressure bandage, and carried on over smaller and smaller roads to a little hidden spot to camp.
The next day we climbed Brocken, a 1200m peak with a trail leading up to it. That sounds low. It is low. It sounds easy. It really, really wasn't. The trail was covered in ice at first, and Harri slipped around like a baby deer on an ice lake. We had an amusing moment of her slowly sliding off the trail while standing up, bike freely moving beneath her at the same time as she stood up but steadily disappeared into the bush. It was one of those times where you both have to laugh, even as you're forced to retreat to ice-cold bogs and (in Harri’s case) imperfectly sealed trainers. At 800 meters, the arctic microclimate had already ensured that the puddles all had a little crust of ice, and the near-zero-but-not-reliably-above-or-below-it year round temperature meant that the snow sat as a fine powder over an extremely smooth ice below. We carried on, and as we ascended the snow became a heavier and heavier layer over the ice until we were more fighting against the resistance of the snow against the tyres. The trail went up and up, we went up and up too, and the snow became deeper and deeper. We had quickly been reduced to pushing the bikes as they skidded even when we walked with them, and we got occasional looks of concern, amusement, or outright warnings from the hikers we passed going the other way. Harri was somewhat perturbed. I was driven. It is arguable that Harri was wiser in this case.
About halfway up we bumped into some cheery but drunk men drinking as we pushed our bikes through the much deeper snow, and although Harri was worried that they might be aggressive it quickly turned into a discussion of us having cycled from London, an acknowledgement of our admirable crazy bastards status for getting bikes up past poled-up hikers and a shared little bottle of spirits.
We pushed, newly fortified and very slightly tipsy, up even steeper slopes. At one point we were on a 30 degree slope pushing the bikes up centimetre by centimeter, pausing for breath as we focussed on the next landmark a few meters away. It was pointless in the most glorious of ways, and we eventually made it to a flatter path that hugged the ridge and kept on that for a few km until we made it to the summit tarmac access road for the final 200 meters of altitude gain.
Pushing, we made it to the 1300m(!) summit and an immediate whiteout. We realised rapidly that we had no view, idly considering that the horizontal icicles on the signs were a slight warning about the reliability of the cold wind. We took a moment to consider our situation, noting that the tourist train line up to the summit was no longer operating and the small building selling soup was well and truly shut. There was, frankly, little to see. In addition to that, both of us were shivering almost as soon as we stopped moving.
We decided to cycle down the tarmac access road to avoid dropping body heat further, but quickly realised we were both shaking from the cold headwind from the speed of our descent and our hands were becoming too numb to feel the brake levers properly. After a pause and a break to use some handwarmers (hat tip to Wendy, here), we turned on a trail that descended in roughly the right direction for our evening stop. It quickly and impressively turned to almost complete shit, and we were almost immediately climbing over fallen trees, through exposed boulders, helping each other carry the bikes over, and wincing at each other as we almost slipped onto pointed bits of wood. The path lost a couple of hundred of meters altitude in 500 meters as we scrambled down, eventually turning onto a straighter path with ice covered puddles, bogs, piles of logs, and occasionally uncut fallen trees over the track.
We made it though, laughing with a certain graveyard je ne se quis as the light slowly died away. We eventually crossed onto a forestry access road and sped down dirt tracks, eventually arriving at a closed road covered in hundreds of bare, wet logs next to a sheer drop onto an ongoing set of waterfalls and associated rocks 25 to 30 meters below. On the other side was a possible route over the drier rocks 10 to 15 meters out of the river bed, and while it still wet and slippery I chose the exposed rocks as the best of the ways to avoid spending a night on the mountain. We, frankly, scrambled down a thin route over large boulders, occasionally looking worried as our bikes or feet slipped close to the drop below. I had my heart in my mouth for Harri, and she for me. It was possibly at that moment that I realised how much care we felt for each other; it was a matter of more concern how much she was in danger than my own state, even with a fully loaded bike occasionally falling onto me. It was, in a rather lovely way, clear that Harri felt the same. We descended slowly as the river very, very slowly levelled out, and after maybe 2 hours of clambering down the boulders we were safe. We hugged. I silently hated my wrist. It was good.
After that, it was on to Berlin...
Route wise, Harri left the story at my moment of pain in Western Germany. The drama was just before the Brocken mountain. I was coming down a small country road on the way over to the Harz national park, and it was a steep downhill. My rear disc was a little bent, and so I was using exclusively the front. I turned a corner a little off the apex, and had to brake to avoid overshooting the corner. A perfect plan, were it not for the small stretch of horse manure that my front wheel slid out on. I went down quite hard, and injured my wrist quite intensely on the right side by instinctively putting it on the road to break my fall. Again, a perfect plan, were it not for the fact that I think I instead nearly broke my wrist. For the rest of that day I was unable to even place the lightest of pressure on that side of the handlebar, and so it was interesting having to ride over country roads and non-paved trails. I have become excellent at riding with one hand; apparently Skinner was correct that learning can be reinforced by punishment if required! We spent a little time grabbing a pressure bandage, and carried on over smaller and smaller roads to a little hidden spot to camp.
The next day we climbed Brocken, a 1200m peak with a trail leading up to it. That sounds low. It is low. It sounds easy. It really, really wasn't. The trail was covered in ice at first, and Harri slipped around like a baby deer on an ice lake. We had an amusing moment of her slowly sliding off the trail while standing up, bike freely moving beneath her at the same time as she stood up but steadily disappeared into the bush. It was one of those times where you both have to laugh, even as you're forced to retreat to ice-cold bogs and (in Harri’s case) imperfectly sealed trainers. At 800 meters, the arctic microclimate had already ensured that the puddles all had a little crust of ice, and the near-zero-but-not-reliably-above-or-below-it year round temperature meant that the snow sat as a fine powder over an extremely smooth ice below. We carried on, and as we ascended the snow became a heavier and heavier layer over the ice until we were more fighting against the resistance of the snow against the tyres. The trail went up and up, we went up and up too, and the snow became deeper and deeper. We had quickly been reduced to pushing the bikes as they skidded even when we walked with them, and we got occasional looks of concern, amusement, or outright warnings from the hikers we passed going the other way. Harri was somewhat perturbed. I was driven. It is arguable that Harri was wiser in this case.
About halfway up we bumped into some cheery but drunk men drinking as we pushed our bikes through the much deeper snow, and although Harri was worried that they might be aggressive it quickly turned into a discussion of us having cycled from London, an acknowledgement of our admirable crazy bastards status for getting bikes up past poled-up hikers and a shared little bottle of spirits.
We pushed, newly fortified and very slightly tipsy, up even steeper slopes. At one point we were on a 30 degree slope pushing the bikes up centimetre by centimeter, pausing for breath as we focussed on the next landmark a few meters away. It was pointless in the most glorious of ways, and we eventually made it to a flatter path that hugged the ridge and kept on that for a few km until we made it to the summit tarmac access road for the final 200 meters of altitude gain.
Pushing, we made it to the 1300m(!) summit and an immediate whiteout. We realised rapidly that we had no view, idly considering that the horizontal icicles on the signs were a slight warning about the reliability of the cold wind. We took a moment to consider our situation, noting that the tourist train line up to the summit was no longer operating and the small building selling soup was well and truly shut. There was, frankly, little to see. In addition to that, both of us were shivering almost as soon as we stopped moving.
We decided to cycle down the tarmac access road to avoid dropping body heat further, but quickly realised we were both shaking from the cold headwind from the speed of our descent and our hands were becoming too numb to feel the brake levers properly. After a pause and a break to use some handwarmers (hat tip to Wendy, here), we turned on a trail that descended in roughly the right direction for our evening stop. It quickly and impressively turned to almost complete shit, and we were almost immediately climbing over fallen trees, through exposed boulders, helping each other carry the bikes over, and wincing at each other as we almost slipped onto pointed bits of wood. The path lost a couple of hundred of meters altitude in 500 meters as we scrambled down, eventually turning onto a straighter path with ice covered puddles, bogs, piles of logs, and occasionally uncut fallen trees over the track.
We made it though, laughing with a certain graveyard je ne se quis as the light slowly died away. We eventually crossed onto a forestry access road and sped down dirt tracks, eventually arriving at a closed road covered in hundreds of bare, wet logs next to a sheer drop onto an ongoing set of waterfalls and associated rocks 25 to 30 meters below. On the other side was a possible route over the drier rocks 10 to 15 meters out of the river bed, and while it still wet and slippery I chose the exposed rocks as the best of the ways to avoid spending a night on the mountain. We, frankly, scrambled down a thin route over large boulders, occasionally looking worried as our bikes or feet slipped close to the drop below. I had my heart in my mouth for Harri, and she for me. It was possibly at that moment that I realised how much care we felt for each other; it was a matter of more concern how much she was in danger than my own state, even with a fully loaded bike occasionally falling onto me. It was, in a rather lovely way, clear that Harri felt the same. We descended slowly as the river very, very slowly levelled out, and after maybe 2 hours of clambering down the boulders we were safe. We hugged. I silently hated my wrist. It was good.
After that, it was on to Berlin...
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