Lao Tzu said "The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step", or in my case a pedal stroke. I probably average about 70 pedal strokes per minute. I pedaled for 5 and a half hours today which comes out to about 23,000 pedal strokes. Not a bad start.

Climbing up Greensprings It's definitely one stroke at a time. If you think much beyond the next pedal stroke you'll never make it. Likewise in programming you learn to break a big problem into small, manageable pieces.

The problems facing the world, our country, and many of us individually, can seem just as overwhelming as climbing Greensprings (with 50 pounds of gear). The only way to approach them is one small step at at time. We can make changes, both personal and global, if we just take them one pedal stroke at a time. I'm sure that's what Lao Tzu had in mind.

Other stuff:

I ran into a huge group of kids, mostly on mountain bikes, strung out from the Howard Prairie resort all the way to the big hill on highway 37. It was a group of 50+ 7th and 8th graders from Santa Barbara middle school, with some old gray beards herding them on. They drove up and started their supported tour in La Pine. They've been riding for 7 days, having done 57 miles yesterday. The rode to Diamond Lake and Crater Lake. They're camping tonight at Hyatt Lake before finishing their tour tomorrow in Ashland. What a great thing.

Today was probably as good as it gets for riding. It got pretty hot on the climb but there was always a cool breeze. It was quite cool an invigorating on top. It didn't get warm again until Dead Indian. Here at the campground it's nice and warm in the sun, but cool in the shade.