Bike Tales : Pedalers in Paradise : Utah A neophyte on wheels finds miles of camaraderie

I never thought I’d be caught dead in a pair of those dorky, skin-tight bike shorts--not to mention a crash helmet--but there I was, decked out in both, peddling up a long hill in Utah, headed for Bryce Canyon, 60 miles from where I’d laid my head the night before.

Signing up for a bike tour--of Bryce, Zion and the Grand Canyons--had seemed like a swell idea about six months ago, when all I had to do was shell out the money ($1,364, including meals, lodging and bike rental) and daydream about the romance of seeing the Great West from the seat of my 21-speed touring cycle.

But it’s a little different peddling up some hill that rises, not so gently, for six miles, in 95-degree heat. And when they say in the bicycle books that bike shorts are a good idea, they should underline that sentence in red.

They’re padded, see, in delicate areas, and unless you’re one of those regular, rugged riders (do they develop calluses or what?), by the end of your first 60 miles it feels like you’veinjured yourself for life.

My first day on the road in early July, biking in Utah from Cedar Breaks to Bryce Canyon, I actually did pedal 60 miles. Which amazed me! Because back home, my biggest “training day” had made me wonder if I’d have to exchange my bike for a wheelchair.

“If you are a beginner,” the Backroads Bicycle brochure had advised when I read it months before, “try to work up to a distance of at least 30 miles without feeling exhausted and still having the enthusiasm to ride again the next day.”

I’d gotten up to 20 miles one Sunday on my old 10-speed when a glitch in my knee kicked in--a sharp little pain every time I pushed down on the left pedal--and the next day I could hardly hobble down the stairs.

This worried me a bit, but it was too late to cancel without losing money, and besides, I told myself, that’s what the yuppie van is for.

This was one of those cushy trips, where a van follows along after the stragglers, picking up those who poop out and ferrying them on to the inn, where there are amenities like bathtubs and beds and maybe even a Jacuzzi.

The same tour is available for campers for $500 less, because you’re sleeping on the ground instead of a nice soft mattress.

And though I love to camp, I figured my 40-year-old bod might rebel if I subjected it to seat torture all day and the good hard earth all night. And reading by flashlight, and stumbling at 3 a.m. to the communal john, and so forth.

Throughout my nine days on the road, being able to collapse in an air-conditioned room and soak in a tub and even put on a dress for dinner, which usually was something terrific like fresh trout with a well-earned glass of wine, seemed worth the extra money.

There were 26 of us, from all over the country and spanning a wide range of age (17 to 63) and riding experience. The shortest day’s route was 46 miles, the longest 123, but each day had plenty of options--with pickups at various points along the way--and a decidedly pleasant lack of one-upmanship.

While someone might encourage you to go farther (“It’s all downhill from here,” Basil, one of our two trip leaders, was fond of saying, “with a few rolling hills at the end”--which meant mountains, if you asked any Easterner), nobody was made to feel like a wimp if he or she hitched a ride on down the road.

I was impressed by the camaraderie that quickly developed among us for simply attempting such a venture, and the generosity of the more experienced riders such as “Iron Legs” George, who would always stop to fix someone’s flat or adjust a set of gears that had slipped.

I hadn’t been so sure at first. Most of us had flown into Las Vegas, stayed the night in various casino hotels and hailed a ride in the van the next morning. I was a little nervous as I waited outside the Dunes Hotel with three other cyclists I’d just met.

Peter, a 32-year-old lawyer from Chicago, had the kind of build you see in the Tour de France. And Jose and Wyndam, a glamorous young couple from Massachusetts, had their own mountain bikes and an easy way of discussing the upcoming 123-mile trek to Zion that made me feel queasy.

Wyndam had long blonde hair and the face and body fit for Elle magazine (she didn’t look dorky in bike shorts), only you couldn’t hate her because she was nice and worked as a nurse in a children’s leukemia ward.

Her boyfriend, Jose, was born in Venezuela, grew up in Italy, spoke several languages and ran his own computer-consulting business in Boston.

By the time the van pulled up and our trip leaders, Basil and Meredith, introduced themselves, I felt all the confidence of a 10-year-old headed for camp for the first time--only I couldn’t call mom.

These people were all so impossibly fit. Basil, an former tax attorney in his early 30s, flipped bikes up onto the roof rack as if, hey, this were no problem. He was the kind of guy who jumped rope on the side of the road whenever there was a spare moment.

And Meredith, although she lacked muscles of steel (Basil complained she couldn’t rack bikes, and told her to do push-ups every night), was an exercise physiologist. I mean, I usually don’t hang out with people who do push-ups for a living.

But as we picked up more of our crew--Bob, a wiry, humorous guidance counselor in his 50s from Washington, and Maris, another glamorous jock from Los Angeles who does things like fly into remote mountainous areas in helicopters to ski--I told myself to just relax. I didn’t have to marry any of these people. I just had to enjoy their company for nine days.

A key question anyone contemplating such a trip should consider is: Do you like groups? Remember that you’ll be nose to elbow with these people for much of every day for as long as the trip lasts.

So you better be a go-with-the-flow type, able to ignore the quirks and obsessions of others and to enjoy eating breakfast and dinner with the whole jolly group, every day for a week or more.

There was even one night, in Kanab, Utah, where we had to wear cowboy hats and participate in our own little Western show. It was fun, if you worked hard enough at it, but I wouldn’t want to repeat the experience.

But then again, where would I meet a woman named Barb, who wore a hot-pink, leopard-skin bike helmet with a seat to match, and who, in her 60s, likes to ride down hills we bikers call “screamers”--screaming not with fear, but with delight? Her sense of humor was kind of Lucille Ball mixed with Gracie Allen, and I hope I have her joie de vivre (and legs) when I’m 60.

I also had some good talks on the road with a man named Bob, whose wife, Joyce, would sometimes abandon her husband for the van and her book, “Pillars of Stone.”

It helps, sometimes, to talk each other up a hill, and Bob and I covered everything from nuclear power to our former marriages in that easy way one sometimes finds with a compatible stranger on an airplane. I also had incredible luck with my roommate Carol--who laughed so hard one night talking about everybody else that she fell off her bed.

I liked those long days on the road where, joyfully, no attempt was made to ride as a pack. You could spend the entire day riding alone, if you pleased, with the security of a trip leader riding “sweep” behind.

But naturally--and this is true of any tour--it was impossible to alter the trip to suit your mood. I couldn’t spend an extra day at the Grand Canyon, for example, even though it had rained the day before and I was so tired I’d missed the ride to the fabulous lookout point.

But the scenery was every bit as magnificent as the catalogue had promised. There were descents through the cool aspen and juniper forests of Cedar Breaks to the fiery red rock columns and cliffs that surround Bryce Canyon. We saw high meadowlands full of wild columbine, lupine and poppies as we neared the Grand Canyon.

The temperature was 48 degrees and a downpour that convinced some of us to give up halfway and drink hot coffee at a country store until the van showed up. We rode through vast desert land, with sagebrush and billowing clouds and the monumental rock formations of Zion, Utah, where the waters of the seemingly quiet Virgin River have sculpted stone and clay for 13 million years.

My main regret was never having enough time to hike in those great canyons.

I was really too tired on our “rest” day to rise at the crack of dawn with some of the Type A personalities and go on an all-day hike, so I always got on my bike to leave with a sense of unfulfilled desire. All that energy expended to get there--and no time to appreciate it.

But this was a bike trip, after all, and despite my flab and lack of experience, I really did enjoy those long days on my rented bike. Even with a hot wind blasting your face, it’s good to travel in a landscape with no steel and gas pedal and glass in between, to ride to the top of a long summit and coast all the way down to a cool, clear swimming hole below.

I flopped face first, clothes and all, in such a pool, just outside Kanab. And I was so hot I think the water sizzled. Most of my fellow bikers had gone straight on to the pool and Jacuzzi, six miles down the road.

But for me, the smell of leaves in the water, and the bowl of blue sky overhead, and the swallows that swooped out of their nests in the cliffs, and the young couple kissing in their pickup truck, were why I’d come out here on a bike. To see the countryside and its people and to get back in touch with the self I hadn’t really known since I was a kid.