It was an ugly October for cyclists up in Portland. If you haven't heard, two were crushed to death by right-turning trucks in separate incidents less than two weeks apart. Final reports have been issued for both tragedies and each report sports some eyebrow raisers.

In the first incident, on October 11, a 19-year-old rider pulled up alongside a cement truck at a red light in downtown Portland, apparently intending to continue straight. The driver didn't notice her ride up next to his truck, and where she stopped she didn't appear in any of his mirrors. When the light turned green the truck turned and the rider didn't stand a chance.

My men can eat their belts. Give me fuel for my tanks!
-- General Patton

In the second edition of Art of Urban Cycling (which was retitled Art of Cycling), I added a lengthy footnote about what I felt to be a troubling societal dilemma looming in our near future – a growing inability of global energy supply to meet global demand. (Page 37, for those playing along at home.) Anyway, I wanted to check in and see how we’re doing on the energy front one year later.

When Rich Ryon accepted a job in the field of construction engineering recently, he ended a long stint during which everyone knew he was the fastest and most skilled courier in Denver. With his preference for huge gears and low cadence, Richard was an amazingly smooth rider who could produce blazing speed with what appeared to be very little effort. He won pretty much every race he entered, seemingly at will. In the past year he had taken to riding a fixed gear on occasion. His chosen gearing? 53 x 12. Rich complained of spinning this gear out. In short, Rich was faster than spit goin' East. But his riding downtown was about more than just speed. Rich is also an ultra-smooth trials rider with masterful balance. The ultimate Rich Ryon messenger moments were those that combined his easy speed with some jaw-dropping spectacle of skill. Rich made his stripped down flat-bar GT road bike do some improbable things.

[From now on any moose-related blog postings will be titled with straightforward alpha-numeric labels to minimize the possibility of adding still more cutesy moose blog titles to the interweb lexicon. Thank you for your cooperation in this matter.]

Our peaceful enounter with the giant bull moose near Breckenridge a few weeks ago was a bit of an eye-opener for this old trail hound. Unexpected, to say the least. Like many Coloradans, I knew moose had been introduced into an area near Walden and that folks occasionally drove up there to gawk at them. But if you had ever claimed to have spotted a moose near Breckenridge I would have given you a funny look and assumed you didn't know the difference between a moose and an elk. Which is exactly what people have been doing to me for the past few weeks.

On a day when the looming change of seasons became impossible to ignore, a weekend of stellar trail riding ended on a decidedly sour note.

After spending a good deal of time riding trails out of Breckendridge this summer, we've really come to love the extensive singletrack trail network that connects Breck with Keystone and Frisco. More than that, we've learned to respect the propensity for heavy clouds to gather, coalesce and dump their colossal loads of rain and hail here before rolling eastward over the Kenosha Mountains. After a notably dry first half of the season we'd been thrashed on four consecutive trips to the slopes of Georgia Pass. With this in mind we started Friday's ride carrying backpacks full of rain and cold weather gear, but the familiar 'storm tubes' never formed. Crazy ol' Mother Nature would challenge us in a new and exciting way, however.

A recent grueling cross-country drive brought us right to the base of the Arch in the 90-degree, impossibly humid air of St. Louis. Christie always thought it was red. She's not sure why. But there it shone, silvery. We decided not to take the unique tram to the top, citing the $14 adult ticket and length of the roundtrip, but piled back into our prairie schooner and commenced slogging westward ho toward Fort Laramie and St. Charles Town. Should the good Lord be merciful we will make it to the base of the mountains before the first snowfall (we are driving a Volvo). A few weeks after we left, one of the tram's (many) cables broke and slapped against an electrical line, and the whole monument went pfffffttt. Hundreds of tourists were stranded for several hours and a few of them began to freak out, naturally.

I'll quickly report on a few interesting race results.

First, Leadville. The news that Lance Armstrong would not ride (I'm admitting this) kept us from following up on our tentative plans to lookey-loo up in Leadville, race-side, and sent us up to Vail to mountain bike instead, so I can't provide any firsthand accounts. But it was good to hear/read that Dave Wiens defended his 'title' and Flandis pushed him the whole way, beating a whole crowd of eager enduro elites, even after mangling his leg in a crash relatively early on. An epic ride from Floyd, without a doubt. (It would have been fun to watch, but really, it's just some dudes riding by for a few seconds with their tongues hanging out -- not a particularly mindblowing spectacle if we're honest with ourselves -- and then they're gone.)

In a very different sort of race, the 15th annual Cycle Messenger World Championships in Dublin, controversy swirled around like an Irish potato storm.

He's in. He's out. He's back in! He's ... out.

Armstrong's mouthpiece says he won't ride in Leadville after all. Guy came to his senses. Although there is still time for another change of mind or two before the pre-dawn start on Saturday.

First Lance said he was probably going to enter the Leadville 100 mountain bike race. "Wow!" we all said. Then Flandis said he too would probably do it, and everybody clapped hands, danced jigs and said "it's on, suckas!" But then Lance said, hey, I forgot I have this crazy 'scheduling conflict,' you know, sorry. And everyone sighed with disappointment. But recently, it's been reported, Armstrong was up at Leadville with his familiar cohort Chris Carmichael, and he was checking out the course's multiple climbs -- just like he used to pre-ride the climbs of the Tour's mountain stages. Seems like he just might go for it.