Adventures on a Bike

This weekend, I’m headed back to the Sierra with the Descenders for our annual Monster Climbs trip. I’ll be posting some photos this week to get you drooling for all the beautiful roads we’ll be climbing. Sorting through the photos this weekend got me thinking a lot about home.

A lot of people think of the place where they grew up as their “Home”. My wife, for example, has been living in the US for over 17 years, but still tells people she’s “going home” when she visits Germany. Technically, then, my home is gone. My parents sold the house I grew up in years ago and to be honest, I’m pretty happy not to call Orange County, California my “home”.

My home is the Sierra Nevada mountains. I’ve been traveling to the Sierras since I was about 18 months old. I used to vacation with my parents in the Bridgeport area for a couple of weeks every year. More recently, I’ve been taking my family to Yosemite Valley, Tuolumne and Mammoth.

Now, I’m no expert on the Sierra and I’ve really only spent time in a few of it’s special places, but for some reason, when I’m headed northbound on Hwy 395 just past Inyokern and I look up to my left at the great mountains of the southern Sierra rising out of the Mojave desert, I get this overwhelming sense of returning to where I came from.

Maybe it’s all the summers I spent as a kid fishing, hiking, being bored, playing with rocks, chasing girls and just generally growing up. Maybe it’s the majestic beauty of these mountains. Maybe it’s all the reasons why people like John Muir spent so much time there.

And maybe it doesn’t really matter why home is home.