My last ride with Matt Chesaux

October 3, 2008 | Filed Under Bicycling, People, Photos, Sports 

I originally posted these pictures as part of a pictorial blog post, without many words.  Originally I felt that each picture told a thousand words, as they say, so I let the pictures do the talking.  Since Tuesday, the story of these pictures has evolved, so I have included them again in a new post.   I also have one additional picture from that ride that I didn’t post the first time.  It is this closeup shot of Matt at the top.  I intended to add him on as a friend on Facebook and post it there so he could use it as a profile picture.  I didn’t post it on the blog originally, as I preferred the bigger landscape shot.  Matt looks a bit nerdy in this pic anyway!  Well bike nerds are as bike nerds do.  My girlfriend calls me “such a nerd” almost every day.  It used to be bikes for me, now it’s cameras.  And as my inner photo nerd looks at this photo now, more closely, I am really struck by the lighting.  The diffused sun on his back is providing some amazing light; you can see it most clearly on both sides of his red jersey.  Almost angelic, I might dare to say . . .

Matt and Loni moved into the condo next door to mine early last year.  I was pretty happy that another Boulder cyclist/skier type moved in.  Matt’s garage is sandwiched between mine and Mark’s, and together we could boast that we probably have over two dozen bikes in the three garages in our building.  I could always rationalize my own pile of gear and tools and gadgets and miscellaneous Man Things, siting that well, at least my garage wasn’t as overfilled with crap as Matt’s.

One time, a friend of Matt’s came over to feed his and Loni’s cats while they were away, and he managed to punch the correct code to my garage instead of Matt’s.  I happened to come downstairs at the exact time that this was happening, only to find a man in a dark coat fumbling in the dark for a light switch.  As I walk up to him he asks me, “Do you know where Matt keeps the cat food?”.  I replied, ” No, but I’m pretty sure he doesn’t keep it in my garage!”  Humorously, after opening the garage, the friend didn’t realize that he was in the wrong one, well, there was a whole wall full of skis and inordinate amount of bikes and parts everywhere.  Everything seems normal, maybe not this cruiser, but then again, it wouldn’t be a surprise for Matt to pick up another along the way and neglect to mention it.  So anyway, I was shocked to find that Matt had the exact same code as me.  What are the chances?  As it turned out, we didn’t.  The friend accidentally entered the wrong code, which was my code, which doesn’t really make the story any less amazing, humorous, or synchronistic.

Boulder is a funny place.  In any other place when a new mountain biker moves to town, he immediately hooks up with the other mountain bikers in town, goes riding, drinks beer, and makes friends.  Not in Boulder.  There are so many cyclists of every kind, that riding partners are divided into the most segregated of sub clicks.  Like, there is this one group with guys who have VO2 max numbers between 65-67, ride single speed mountain bikes with only 29 inch wheels, ride at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays, and on weekends like to do rides between 3 and 4 hours, at an average pace of 7.3 mph, leave between 10 and 10:15 am, in a group between 2 and 4 people, and drink only microbrewed beer from the Mountain Sun after the ride.  Oh, your bike has 26 inch wheels?  I’m not riding with you.  OK, I’ve got that creative hyperbole out of my system.  The point is, it took Matt and I about a year to figure out that our next door neighbor might actually be a good riding partner.  But once we did figure it out, we had a great time out on the trails.  And your next door neighbor is the best riding partner, because you can walk simply walk next door and say, “want to ride?”

And that’s what happened last Sunday, when Matt and I went to go ride the Little Raven Trail up near Brainard Lake.  The Little Raven is a cross country ski trail that has recently been made ridable with the addition of trail work and some plank bridges to get over some small bogs.  We got on the internet, pulled out some topo maps, and planned our route.  We’d do Little Raven, South St. Vrain, North Sourdough, and Wapiti Trails in a figure 8 fashion.  On the drive up the paved road to the parking area, we were wowed by the aspens, peaking gloriously golden.  The temperature was perfect.  Cool and cloudy, but just warm enough to get a bit of a sweat going.  At one point we took a break in an upper meadow at the top of South St. Vrain.  We discussed the possibilities of why they had deposited lots of tree stumps in the middle of the meadow, as seen in the eerie black and white ‘Dead Bike’ photo below.  We gazed towards the Indian Peaks Wilderness.  Matt pointed out the glaciers, and showed me some of the lines that he had skied in the past. We also talked about making some turns this upcoming spring, and getting some cool photos.  On our last few rides Matt talked about his summer ski adventures.  He managed to get some fresh powder turns on a glacier this August, a rare feat indeed.  At that point Matt had skied every month of 2008.  Part of that was made possible from getting laid off from his latest architecture job.  Initially he thought that he would get another job right away, but I guess that didn’t happen.  Hey, why fight it?  Funemployment paved my way into this photography career, and it was going to grant Matt the free time to ski a day in every month in 2008.  His summer goal.  Why not?

The Little Raven Trail is very technical in spots.  The bridges are easy enough, but there was a rock garden or two that forced me to dismount.  I remember telling Matt that I just don’t take the chances any more like I used to.  If I hurt myself these days then I’m out of work and I don’t get paid . . . and in my old age (ha ha), I just don’t feel the need to try and ride everything like I used to.  If there is a 75% chance that I’ll make it, well, thats a 1 in 4 chance that I won’t, and I’ll just walk thank you very much.  Matt and I are seasoned riders, we know where the limit is, and we’ll stay right here, pretty close to the edge, but not quite over it.  We’ve had our crashes, we’ve pushed the limits and lost, and we’ve gotten back up wiser men.  This is How It Works.  This is how we do it in Boulder, we work, we make money, and on the weekends we hurtle ourselves down mountains.  This theory was tested a little bit near the end of our ride, when I got to a rocky corner on Sourdough.  I was getting tired, my blood sugar was low, my brain was a little slow from the altitude, and I stuffed it, going down head first towards some rocks.  Fortunately I’m really good at crashing after all these years, and I was only traveling about 2 mph.  So I stuck my hands out and did a big push up, frogging my right shin a bit as it got caught between the handlebar and the top tube.  Ah well, these things happen, and I limped it back to the car.  No major harm done, just another day on the bike.

We drove down the Peak to Peak, taking the long way back to town, via Nederland, in the name of getting gas.  Matt took me where I could shoot some tourist pictures of Peaceful Valley, where there is a cluster of bright yellow aspens mixed with the dark green pines.  There was also another cluster, in the form of Leaf Peepers.  We were there with dozens of other cars pulled off the road to take the same stinkin’ picture.  I usually avoid this sort of thing, but hey, I need to keep my blog readers happy, so I snapped a pic.  As we drove Matt commented how he’s always coming home a bit late from sports adventures.  He and Loni were supposed to go grocery shopping that evening.  But Loni knows how these things go, adventures sometimes wind up taking longer than anticipated.

Tuesday was the last day of September 2008.  It was the last day for Matt to get this ski day in.  As in any other ski day, he began by eating some breakfast and scouring the maps and topos on the internet.  He decided on a route in Rocky Mountain National Park.  He went by himself.  It was Tuesday after all, and everyone else was working away as working people do.  There isn’t any avalanche danger this time of year.  By mid-summer all of the snow pack has melted away, and the glaciers that are left are water-eroded, bumpy, sheets of ice.  The adventure isn’t so much about the joy of skiing; it’s about the exploration, testing yourself, the solitude of the backcountry, the vistas, pushing your edge, living In The Now.  It is everything that desk job is not.  It is dangerous, unpredictable, trilling, athletic, un-nerving and calming at the same time

When Loni returned home at 5:30 she felt that something was wrong.  Matt should have been home by now.  She found his intended route by looking in the browser history of his computer.  She did not sleep that night. The next morning some of his ski mountaineering buddies set out to find him.  By 10am they had.

As of now we don’t know exactly what happened up on Taylor Glacier.  Matt was an expert skier and an accomplished mountaineer. He was methodical, calculated, and smart.  He knew where that edge was, and how to stay over here.  Well, shit happens, and sometimes we fuck up.  Sometimes we get a little tired, our blood sugar gets a little low, and we make a little mistake.  Unfortunately, at the top of a 12,000 foot glacial slope, a little error can cost you your life. According to the reports, he was wearing a helmet and had the appropriate equipment.  He died from multiple blunt trauma. Maybe he fell. Maybe he was hit by rockfall. It doesn’t really matter now, for whatever reason, it was his time to leave this world.

Death.  A trying time for those left behind.  Lots of questions, and ‘what-ifs’. I offer the story of a wise man.

A wise man won a car in a drawing.  Everyone congratulated him.  They all told him, “You are so lucky! The wise man said, “Maybe.”

A few days later, the wise man was driving his new car down the street.  His was hit by a drunk driver, hospitalized, and the car was totaled.  His friends and family came to visit him in the hospital.  They said, “This is terrible! You won this new car, and now it is destroyed, and you are injured in the hospital!”  The wise man said, “Maybe.”

That night, a landslide ripped down the hillside where the wise man lived.  His house was swept away and destroyed.  Once again, family and friends came to visit the wise man in the hospital.  They said, “You are so fortunate!  If you had not been in the hospital, you would have been at home when the landslide came and you surely would have been killed!”  The wise man said . . . “Maybe”

The moral of the story is, that events are not good or bad.  Things are as they are.  There is really no way as little humans in this big big world that we have any way of knowing what the outcome of events are going to be.  Sometimes minor setbacks and unfortunate events pave the way for bigger and better things. And sometimes major losses open the space for  . . .

Regardless, it can still be really tough to make some rational sense out of these sort of things.  It can be easy to say that he shouldn’t have been up there alone, or up there at all.  We could label the Gen-X and Gen-Y ‘extreme’ image as selfish and egoic.  Why are the current generation drawn to death defying acts?  When I was around 26 I broke my elbow and my pelvis skiing on Mt. Bachelor.  In a split second I could not walk.  I was in a remote part of the mountain, and it took the ski patrol over an hour to find me.  I was taught a very big lesson.  Rocks are hard, and they easily break bones, and if you can’t walk out, you might die out there.  I thought about all the countless times I had done epic mountain bike adventures into the backcountry, all alone, when no one knew my location.  Like the time I drove down to Hole in the Rock way out in B-F-E of southern Utah and was mountain biking in and out of the slickrock bowls 400 miles from nowhere, and no one knew where I was.  If I had fallen and broken my pelvis, I’d have been eaten by the vultures.  But damn that was fun.  I remember that ride so clearly, over the thousands of rides I’ve done in my life.  It was so good.  It’s rides like that that we remember, and tell stories about.  Along with the rides where you get lost, run out of food, get caught in the dark, and are utterly miserable and scared.  It is the epic stories that are remembered and revered.  I learned a lesson on Mt. Bachelor.  I learned to be as careful as possible in risky situations, but it hasn’t stopped me from getting out there.

You know what?  There are worse ways to go.  Matt was doing what he loved to do.  On top of the world.  Out of the office, out of the rut, pushing his physical and mental limits.  When a man loses the drive to push his edge, he is less of a man.  We respect the explorers, the astronauts, the daredevils, the risk takers, the leaders, those who can push fear aside and pursue, endeavor, conquer, suffer, and acheive.  How boring and lifeless would the world be if everyone took the safe route, bought the safest car with the best gas mileage and the biggest airbags?  What car do we really dream of, the Prius or the Porsche?  Someone has to get out there and light the world on fire and make life worth living and to inspire.  I know that I need a reason to get out of bed in the morning, and going to a cubicle never was a very good reason for me. Matt was one of those men who loved pushing his limits. He was a cyclist, a climber, a skier, an adventurer, a competitor. On the softer side, he was an intellect, a wit, a thinker, with many life long friends and companions.

Purpose.  Life just makes sense with some kind of purpose.  It’s what we are passionate about, what we live for, where we want to go, who we want to be, what we want to have.  Back when I was a cube jockey, it was all about the bike.  Faster, harder, higher, longer, and with the latest and greatest 38 gram, pink anodized, unobtainium butted, gadgety widget.  Now I have this drive to just make the best damn pictures that i possibly can.  And sometimes I wonder why the hell I do it.  Then every once in a while I think I take a picture that makes a real difference.  You know what?  I guess I do that at every single wedding.  So anytime anyone ever makes a “what? you’re a wedding photographer?” type crack, I know the answer.  I do make a difference in people’s lives.  I give people memories that they can identify with, and fucking beautiful ones at that.  And on this day, I have a picture of Matt, on his bike, out in the backcountry of the Colorado mountains, doing it his way, our way.  I have made links to all of the pictures of him on this page (just click them), so that his family and friends, or anyone who searches his name can download the full sized images, and they can have these memories as well.  My little gift, in addition to this rambling tribute.

We never know when our time is up.  We never know how it is that we are going to go.  It tears me up to think about his love Loni, and his furry friends Vinny P, Gandalf, and Riley, and how much they are going to miss Matt.  Hopefully Loni will be able to hold on to their condo next door. I also give a shout out to Matt’s sporting friends, who have adventured and suffered with him on many more adventures than myself.  These words go out to anyone who knew Matt, as a memorial of the life, times, and perspective within the Republic of Boulder.  We can’t stop doing all the things that have brought us together at the gateway to the Rockies.  The pursuits that push our limits, test our edges, and give us purpose.  We have to keep on truckin’, doing the things that light our fire, and in some cases, those things are dangerous.  We need to do everything we can to ensure the safety of ourselves and our loved ones.  There are probably extra precautions that we could take . . .  I’m not going to go on any more adventures without letting someone know where I am.  I might even make a will to make some sense out of my stuff and my crazy ass garage full of boy toys.  Think twice before you head into the backcountry, wait another day on that slope with ‘Considerable’ avalanche danger.  Make sure that you are as safe as you possibly can be, for the sake of yourself and those who might be left behind should you fall over the edge.  But after you do all that, go out there and hit it . . . continue pushing your comfort zone.  Continue bouncing down that rocky singletrack.  Continue sending that crack climb.  Continue ripping fresh corn turns on a mid-May morning. Continue getting out into nature and breathing in huge gulps of life. Keep smiling, charging, looking forward, all thrown in will a dash of physical suffering.  Matt wants it that way.

Some of Matt’s friends are planning a memorial service later this month.  Starting Monday, people can send donations to the Matthieu Chesaux Memorial Fund at Wells Fargo.

 

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