Where I Stand — Brian Greenspun: Ride on the wild side

Thursday, Sept. 21, 2000 | 9:40 a.m.

Brian Greenspun is editor of the Las Vegas Sun.

This is a column about conservation. It will take me a while to get there.

There are many things I have yet to do in my life that can be categorized as risk-taking, life-threatening, edge-living adventures. One of them is no longer mountain bike riding.

I marked that one off this past weekend when I joined a few friends at Lake Tahoe for what was supposed to be a friendly, laid back get-together that might include, on the strenuous side, a round of golf. Things changed in a hurry when we arrived.

I have known my friend Larry Ruvo practically my entire life, or at least since the age of cognition. He has never been one to take for granted, because just when you think you have seen, heard and done it all, Larry pulls something from his inexhaustible bag of tricks and wows you once again. This time I had witnesses, although not one of them saw the bike trip from the same perspective from which I was able to witness it.

Marlette Lake is one of those beautifully peaceful little mountain lakes that seem to surround majestic Lake Tahoe. While not nearly as spectacular as the lake that made Northern Nevada famous, it has its strong points. Namely, it is hard to find and even harder to get to, which makes what I am about to describe that much more incredible.

Back in the middle 1800s, the Comstock Lode had put Northern Nevada on the map and Virginia City right smack in the middle of the richest place on Earth. Almost. While the early Nevadans and the thousands of transplants who rode their way westward toward untold riches found their treasures in gold by the ton, they were missing a few vital necessities. Two, for example, were water to drink and lumber from which they could build their homes and shore up their mines.

That's where Marlette Lake comes in because someone, someone very smart, decided that a flume could be built from the lake, over the mountains and down into Virginia City. That wooden-troughed engineering marvel would carry fresh water to the thirsty inhabitants and logs for building to the needy miners. In its day it was one of the engineering wonders of the world.

Today there isn't much left of the wooden trough, but the trail over which it traveled along the Earth's edge is still there, all 2 or 3 feet of it. Larry's surprise for this trip was a mountain bike ride over the Flume Trail. Some of us were experienced bike riders. Tom Kaplan, for example, came dressed to kill in his sleek-fitting stretch clothes that carried more sponsorship labels than an Indy 500 car on race day. He not only looked the part but actually knew what he was doing when it came time to shift those gears and pedal his way up mountains that should not have been traversable.

Ruvo, of course, had all the right gear, as did Mike Dermody, Peter Thomas and Ken Knauss, whose mortuary business came this close to a new customer that day. And then there was Jack Abbate, and your humbled servant. Jack is from New Jersey so he had an excuse. All I had was some padded bike shorts that a thoughtful Cindy sent home so I would not hurt in the wrong places. Nice try, Cindy, but they weren't worth a damn and I still can't sit down.

There were two people, though, who made this particular bike trip one for the memory banks. Thanks to Larry's creativity and friendship with one of Nevada's most celebrated citizens, our guide for the day was Olympic speed skier Franz Weber, whose love of speed and things downhill does not stop when the snow melts. In fact, his bike, unlike the rest of ours, does not need brakes because he never uses them! He is also built to last, which did nothing to salve our egos when salving other anatomical sites proved fruitless.

The best part of this adventure, though, had to be with the final member of our team, and that's where Larry gets my respect and my thanks. There was a young lady on the outing whose job it was to follow at the rear of the group and watch for stragglers and others who had a spot of trouble making the grades. Carolyn also happened to be an emergency room doctor which, when you think about it, proves that our over-the-hill gang has come a long way from the early days when we didn't even consider taking a guide.

For those of you who haven't ridden a bike in a while, let me tell you that there is a significant difference between riding on the smooth surfaces of our city streets and the rock-strewn, quicksand-covered, pothole-filled, far-too-narrow trails of the the upper Tahoe basin. There is one thing, though, that does not differ: the immutable laws of physics.

While I spent a considerable amount of time pedaling blindly up hills, shifting more gears than have a right to exist on one machine and braking for what seemed like an unstoppable eternity, I was able to accomplish one thing in lighting-quick speed. And that was reaffirming on far too many occasions Einstein's Theory of Relativity, coupled with Sir Isaac Newton's Law of Gravity. In short, I spent almost as much time on the bike as under it; on the trail as hanging from a tree limb over the edge of it; and on my own seat as opposed to that which came with the bike. Doc Carolyn and I became fast friends.

Most of what is left from that ride are some great memories and some longer-lasting cuts and bruises that will heal with time, although I am not sure just when I will be able to sit without wincing. There is one thing, though, that was brought home as clear to me as the water that fills Lake Tahoe. And that is where I get to the conservation thing I spoke about at the beginning.

Larry explained that a hundred years ago you could see a dinner plate 150 feet below the surface of Lake Tahoe. Years of indifference reduced the clarity of our national treasure to under 70 feet. Recent efforts have extended the ability to see clearly to almost 90 feet. It will take years and many dollars to bring Tahoe back to where it once was.

The message to all Nevadans is that anyone who will tell us that progress at Lake Tahoe requires continued development that threatens the fragile ecosystem, which has kept that lake pristine and pure for hundreds of thousands of years, is not serving us well. Whatever it takes to keep Lake Tahoe beautiful and continue to make it more so is what we must all be committed to do, because we owe it to our children and theirs and theirs.

You don't have to take my word for it, though. You can take a bike ride on the Flume Trail and see the splendor for yourselves. Or you can just listen to me and save the saddle sores and the need for Doctor Carolyn.