Dropping Latitude
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Slideshow: Alaska to
Alberta |
Not Covered in
Glory
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I was lucky there were no witnesses when I tried to push an |
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Gray, spitting rain, tires slick on the asphalt, a black Volvo with a bike strapped on its roof honked, the driver shot me a thumbs up. At the terminal, I stood last in line: an alien in tights, shoes that click like a dog's overgrown claws, head gear that looks majorly encephalitic, and a diaper between my legs. It's hard to take this sport seriously when it's such a sartorial catastrophe. Sunk in my dweebishness, behind me, a silky voice spiced with German said: You’re riding a bike too? Six foot, bronzed, clear green eyes, with a translucent complexion, she leaned over my bike odometer and said, 13. First day, I murmur. |
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In the ship's hold, she secured her bike and walked away, swaying like a tall ship, her top gallants catching the sea breeze--no clicking shoes, no diapers. It could be done. |
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Without apology, the ferry left me at |
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A tourist asked warmly where I was going and I told her |
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The road turned vertical at 3 mile; it was |
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At seven mile, I crawled into the belly of the clouds. |
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At thirteen mile, deep in the clouds, a van with two bearded twenty-somethings slowed. The window rolled down and with aggressive good cheer they shouted into the rain and wind to ask where I'm going. |
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“Mexico,” I said and they belly-laughed at the utter implausibility of it. |
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Moving at about 3 mph, I wobbled back and forth across the road to take the pitch at an angle. Every few minutes I look between my legs to check that Succotash hadn’t maliciously shifted up a gear. Three times, I quit peddling and walked, but when walking, my inboard leg banged into the pannier behind me. My front wheel was loose in the forks. Procrastination, denial, and foolish hope kicked in and I decided to wait and fix it when I make camp that evening. It was a fateful decision. |
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Some few miles south of the summit, I unpacked a bag looking for some electrolyte flavoring to make the water go down easier. I still hadn't my packing well organized, and things not needed during the day were on top, things needed at the bottom. I found what I was looking for and repacked. Sort of. |
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Over the top, at 3280 feet, around |
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Twelve miles later, I pulled over to set up camp. Even as I |
Hero
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I had no choice but go back over the pass to look for the hammock. I'd spent the previous evening trying to resurrect my short term memory and figured I'd taken it out when searching for the electrolytes and had failed to repack it--leaving it on top of a rear pannier. |
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I hung all but survival gear in a tree, breaking another
rule--never to separate yourself from your gear--and headed back. If I didn't
find it, I'd drop down to |
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I tightened up the bearings and headed out. On the first spin of
the wheel, the bearings cracked and crunched. Clearly, |
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I checked in at customs, but there was nothing in their lost and found. Above customs was a Ministry of Transportation shop. I pushed Succotash up and knocked on the door. A young guy with a backwoods Canadian accent let me in and gave me all the tools I needed to clean the bearings. The bearings were still good--I had five full minutes of joy. Then I took a look at the cone nuts--around which the bearings spin--and they were chewed up. I filed them as smooth as I could, thanked my man, and headed up the pass. |
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A couple miles up the road, there he was filing potholes with asphalt from the back of a pick-up. Throw your bike in the truck. I did. I did my standard interview conversational style, until I ran out of questions and then, stepping out of my box, I told him my story about losing the hammock. |
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“It’s like a fish net?” he asks. |
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“Yeah.” |
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“I think we just passed it.” |
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He three pointed the truck around and raced back the way we came. And there, lying on the road like old road kill, was my sleeping arrangement. Twice in the same 30 mintues this man had saved me: my hero. |
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He couldn’t fix the cone bearings though--and I headed to |
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The Yukon
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Whitehorse
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Blonde with a halo of curls, she was a he; a real Canadian (you
can't fake them) behind the service desk at Icecycle
Sports who spent a long time poking thru rack after rack (Dickensian as in
Bob Cratchet's ledgers) of drawers of spare parts
and found nothing that matched my cone nuts. My mind is whirring with logistics:
could they be ordered and posted in care of general delivery to |
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But it was worse. “These are too big for your bike.” He points to
where the bearings are riding--not in the crook of the nut, but at the edge.
Does this trip to |
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The blonde is way ahead of me. He lays a brand new wheel on the counter. The Gordian knot is severed. |
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In Icecycle's parking lot, I strip the
tire, reflectors, computer sensor off the old wheel and fix them on the
new one. Without remorse or celebration I spin the old into the dumpster and
am quickly back on the road spinning out of |
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So did my procrastination save me? If I had tightened the nuts as soon as I saw the wheel wobbling, no grit or rainwater would have clotted up the bearings and I would have pedaled far into the wilderness where, if the cone nuts had broken because the ball bearings weren't riding where they should have been, I would have been in trouble. |
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In the way of all my dumb mistakes--I skated again? Why? But a secular materialist doesn't poke too enthusiastically at such questions. |
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Instead, back on the bike, I occupied myself with more quotidian concerns: Three days into the trip and two days behind schedule. |
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Context
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The Plan
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The plan was to bike the Great Divide Mountain Bike Trail,
which parallels the Continental Divide from |
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The 2000 mile ride down from |
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British Columbia
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Another three days and I reached the turn onto the |
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Nether Regions |
The Confederacy
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At one time, the |
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Some of it I had to walk. But as the road rose out of the valley the view behind me was spectacular. |
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Up on the plateau, biking into the small town of Anahim, three Native girls on horseback, long black hair flying,
looking like goddesses so perfect was their form, cantered past me. I later
learn they’d placed first in a recent rodeo. I stopped by a little country
store. Three Native men, their faces ravaged by weather and poverty crowded
around me and we laughed about bears, cold weather, and bike computers. An
older Native shuffled out of the store caring two bottles of cheap wine. The
younger ones told him I was biking to |
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“You crazy sun of a bitch,” he said. |
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The high country was ranching country, my introduction to cows,
cow shit, and fences. Many of the ranches had been carved out of the forest
by confederates who wanted nothing more to do with the |
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Succotash ripped down the road as we dropped steeply into the |
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The Great Divide
Trail: Mile 0
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“ |
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“On that?” |
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Poor Succotash. And then I was off. |
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Montana
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Into the Dry
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I saw my first Great Divide biker in |
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I detoured off trail with an auto assist to |
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Friend Ben kindly dropped me back in |
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That night, camped off a gravel road, a fellow biker came
through. We chatted around a late night fire that kept the cold at bay. |
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Marche wasn't a thru-biker as he hadn't the time and wanted to
see other parts of the |
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We lost each other soon after lunch that day and I never saw him again. |
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I camped by a small stream off the road. It was still hot enough to take a bath. |
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The next day, more climbing. Assuming age and decrepitude, the going was slow and full of struggle and I wondered if I was tearing myself apart without enough down days to recover. The map claimed I would be passing a 9500 foot peak and I could not find it--all those around me no higher than 2 or 3000 feet. And then, of course, I realized that I was some 7000' in the air and the mountains didn't have to get much higher to reach 9500'. And maybe the thinness of the air had something to do with my huffing and puffing. |
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It was hot and there was no protection from the sun. My skin dried and cracked as I pedaled across the basin’s floor. There was still surface water; some few days in my future, that too would disappear. |
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Next day, pedaling along busy Interstate 15, I came into |
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Lima, according to a resident born in the town who stopped by to chat, was once a hustling and bustling place; now every block had deserted buildings on it. When it had been bustling, it was a railroad staging area with roundhouses and trains whistling through hourly. The interstate put an end to that. He recommended too, that I come back in April and May when the rains come and the desert is green and abloom. He swept his arm around the distant hills. “It's beautiful,” he said. |
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I biked east along the northern edge. Hours passed and no trucks
passed me. The wind, always out of the southwest pushed against my back and I
made good time. Towards the end of the day, I turned south to cross the valley
and pick up a road that lay at the foot of the hills hemming the southern
border. The wind, now in my face, dropped my speed from 12-15 mph to 4-6. I
pushed the pedals |
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The sun was inches above the western horizon, it was getting cold and I was tired. I stopped at a culvert where a broad, currentless stream ran when under the road. The ever-present fences fell back far enough from the road that there were places I could camp. I walked up and down looking for some small protection from the wind--but there was none. I camped in the lee of the roadbed, 3-4 feet above ground level, but on dried mud that would turn slick and clinging if it rained. |
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A tent gives you a sense of sanctuary that a hammock under an open tarp does not. That sanctuary may be illusory--the tent material is so thin and diaphanous, barely able to keep out the rain much less anything more sinister--yet I get a great comfort from crawling into the tent, my sleeping bag and hearing the world crashing about me on the outside. I didn't eat dinner, the water in the stream too cow-polluted to be used even if treated. |
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One last look outside as the sun fell, turning the grasses golden. The air was nippy. |
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The next morning, frost was on the grass. I'd suspected that in recent nights there’d been frosts, but this was my first sight of one. I packed up, again without breakfast, and got back on Succotash. The early morning sky was clotted with clouds--usually the early morning is clear and the clouds come as the day warmed. |
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Something about the day, the clouds, the early wind, not hot
meal, soured my mood. I counted the miles and days beforel
I reached |
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I was pedaling toward another crossing of the continental divide,
still 30 miles or so off. This crossing would take me into |
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I stopped at the NWR's campground for lunch and as I was eating, I watched a bilious black cloud leap in slow motion over the high mountain ridge just south of me. It curved as it cleared the ridge and the peaks scored its black belly. It sank as it came into the valley and when it had gathered enough of itself, lightening flashed and thunder ripped the air and the crashes rolled for long seconds around the surrounding mountains and rain streamed from the sky. |
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I cowered under the interpretive sign in the campground, had a good overhang, and waited. When it quit raining, more clouds came over and rained more rain fell. I gave up and pitched the tent and took a nap while the sky did its thing. |
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Late that afternoon, another biker came in. Dave, young,
handsome, a financial headhunter from |
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Dave had been pummeled by both wind and rain and a passing RV had
told us the weather report was for more of the same tomorrow. We agreed to be
up and on the road early the next morning to beat the weather, which tended
to come in the afternoon. I was up at |
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I headed east into the dawn and mid-morning I crested |
Idaho
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Barely a TasteThe Great Divide slices off only a sliver of Idaho—less than 80
miles. Mountain bikes are not permitted off road in National Parks, so the
Trail couldn’t go through either |
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There was an other-worldly change in landscape crossing Red Rock
Pass. From high desert wilderness, largely empty of people, on the Montana
side to verdant valley with the early morning dew lifting off the grass and
bushes as the sun rose, on the Idaho side. A few old homesteads were in the
upper valley, but they soon gave way to second homes plopped in the middle of
old hay fields with all the architectural finesse of a palm tree in |
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Horses, horse-trailers, big pick-ups, and the smell of bacon,
steak, and homefries greeted me at the bottom of the
valley. The cowboys, mostly with |
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And missed the turn back onto the Trail. By the time I realized it, I was a mile or so down the road and not interested in turning back. I followed the paved road out of the valley and into the next, far broader valley until I cut the Trail again. There was a convenience store at the gas station and I loaded up with groceries. The owner, ringing me up, was well familiar with bikers. He warned me that the trail down an old railroad bed to Warm River Campground was riven with soft, nearly impassable volcanic sand. This the guide book corroborated—and, to avoid it, Adventure Cycling had plotted an alternative route 18 miles longer than the Trail. |
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Guidebooks tend to amp up dicey situations, making them sound more dangerous or more arduous than they really are, perhaps worried about liability suits or bad Amazon ratings. After a close reading of a guidebook, you can start a day wondering if you’re going to be alive at the end of it, only to get to the end of it wondering where the dicey part was. Years ago, I learned never to let an inexperienced person read the guidebook before starting a trip, otherwise it would panic my companion and it’d take forever to talk them back into their senses. |
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That said, soft sand had started rising on my list of biking
horrors and, to my later disgust, I opted for the detour. The detour took me
up a waterless ridge forested with widely spaced lodge pole pines. I spent
the night camped just off the road. The next morning, the sky was leaden with
the undifferentiated grey so well known to those of us who live in
rainforests. Rain was imminent and I got back on the road skipping breakfast
just as the water poured from the sky. It was a fast cold ride down off the
ridge to the Warm River Campground, set in a narrow valley with the |
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I fed and watered under a peaked roof that sheltered some picnic
tables. The campground was quiet; the few people there hunkered down in their
RVs wisely huddled around their heaters and TVs. I was chewing trail mix when
the camp host drove up in his SUV. Camp hosts are wondrous folks. The Forest
Service and many state parks “hire” people each summer to maintain the park,
take fees, and generally the campers. The hosts live in their own RVs on
site. |
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Lynn had been over the RR bed, I’d detoured around, in a 4-wheeler and scoffed at any problem. The soft sand stretches, he said were from here to there, pointing to a tree 150 feet away. Otherwise, it’s easy. I was distressed that I’d let myself be intimidated by a guidebook. |
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Bundled in warm clothes and rain gear, I followed the road as it climbed out of the valley up into a broad plain planted in wheat and potatoes. Just 40 miles westward was a desert no potato could have survived in. I headed down backcountry roads toward the Grand Tetons buried in low grey clouds, chased by dogs. I learned I can’t out-pedal them. |
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The road turned to wet gravel and the mud sucked at my tires. I
pushed on, wanting to get to a good campsite before the sun disappeared. I
was some miles into the |
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It sounded like a big trip, looping the entire northwest of the |
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John buzzed off, disappearing quickly at the next bend of the road, although I would follow his tracks for the rest of the day. One barrel of oil is the equivalent to two years of manual labor. The average American utilizes 11 barrels of oil annually, or the equivalent or 22 years of manual labor. It is impossible to imagine life without that subsidy. Even as I biked on, following John’s waffled trail, I helped myself to that subsidy: the roads, my food and clothes, the entire machinery of society which generated the wealth that enabled me to live for months on the stored fat of my labor all depended on the energy assist of petroleum. |
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The road narrowed and deteriorated as I climbed the northern
flank of the Tetons. The transmission popped and crackled as it ground the
mud and gravel clogging my chain and gears. Somewhere, deep in the forest, I
passed from |
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Wyoming
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A Long Day
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The eastern sky was paling, only the brightest stars still alight
in the sky. The thermometer read 12 degrees. Oatmeal, pre-cooked the night
before for a quick getaway, was rimed with ice. I struck the tent, packed the
panniers and ate breakfast as the sun rose behind me casting my shadow across
the desert grasses. Hat, jacket, fleece pants and down mittens, a gallon and
a half of water: 70 miles across the |
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It was just past |
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I shed clothes as the sun pumped warmth into the air. An hour into the day, I spotted Diagnus Well and turned off the road to check it out. An acre or so of desert fenced off with a pipe gushing water into the ground. The fenced desert was thick with plants unseen on the other side of the fence. A sign stated that the water and area inside the fence were for wildlife, implying what is unvoiced fact, that wilderness must now be protected from man and no longer man from wilderness. |
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I headed back to the road and pushed hard on the pedals. I was moving fast. Succotash bounced and shivered over the gravel and ruts without complaint. The road was flat, with occasional short steep descents and climbs out of gullies and draws—each one very dry. |
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By mid-morning, I was flying, hot in the sun with only bike shorts and a light shirt on, miles were ripping by. I began the mind-fuck of estimating when I would get into camp. As if I were in control of my destiny. |
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I flashed down an easy slope and the front tire plowed into soft sand. Fine as talc, more like dust, and bottomless, the rear wheel fished, I countered with the front wheel, now pushing into the dust instead of riding over it. The wheel snapped left, perpendicular to my line of travel, stopping Succotash as if she’d hit a wall, and shooting me over the handlebars. |
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I crashed into the road on the side of my head and left shoulder. Lying in the dust, staring at the sky, the words: “I’m so committed to helmets” lit up in my stunned brain. I crawled to my feet and swung my arm checking for ripped tendons and broken bones. Everything seemed to work, but it was sore and would get worse. |
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Succotash was nose down in the dust. The front wheel twisted almost back to the down tube; the handle bars yanked off center. The left front pannier had been ripped off its rack; the rear-view mirror lay face down in the road, snapped off its mount. |
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It was a quick job straightening out and remounting everything and I was back on the saddle in a few minutes. But my first push of the pedals and the front wheel jammed up in the forks. A great pie-section of the tire had been twisted mangled way out of alignment. |
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I dragged Succotash over off the road and laid her on the panniers so that I could spin the wheel. Digging out my spoke wrench, I set to work tightening the spokes on the right side of the wheel and slacking off those on the left forcing the bent rim back into alignment. I was laying on my side in the sand, one eye closed as I spun the wheel looking for bends, when I heard a vehicle coming up behind me. |
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A couple of men in a white SUV, the driver in a big, well worn,
cowboy hat and sunglasses, his buddy, 20 years younger, in a military tee,
cameo pants, and dark sunglasses. I never did see his eyes. They asked if I
needed any help. I said no. They were out scouting for elk (did they mean
antelope?)—the season opened the next week. Both had been born and raised in |
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Succotash and I were moving again in about 45 minutes. There was still a wobble in the front wheel—but I was uncertain how tightly I could crank down the spokes before they started snapping or ripping out of the rim. The front wheel took a serious beating on the rock-strewn roads we rode over and in my fears, I saw over-tightened spokes on pop like a string of firecrackers when it hit a particularly nasty bump. I was packing five spare spokes, but I still wanted to avoid having to respoke the wheel. What I didn’t know then, and wouldn’t until I was only a few days from the end of the Trail when I tried to replace a bent spoke, was that the new tire I’d bought in Whitehorse used a different length spoke than the old wheel it replaced and so the spares would have been useless if the spokes had broken. |
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As it was, the front wheel lasted the trip and, over the miles, it trued itself up as if by magic until it spun wobbleless. |
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Remounted, I took off cautiously. I could lean on the handlebars without much pain, but it hurt to shift, and almost any movement, up, left or right flooded my shoulder with pain. I gave up trying to make the reservoir and resigned myself to a dry camp that night—I had plenty of water and slowed way down. Even still there were patches of soft sand I didn’t see until I was in the thick of it, the bike fishing barely in control. |
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Born and raised in Lander, just a ways north, he’d been a welder, owning his own shop. Then a couple of years ago, he’d had gone to work for a mine and in the yard, had tripped over some channel iron buried in snow, fell and broke a bone in his elbow. The local surgeon (“horse doctor”) fixed him, but the bone grew over and pinched his nerve, numbing the outside of his right hand. He’s been on disability since. He and his wife (she stayed in the cab—and, as they’d followed my tracks, had thought I was drunk because they wandered from one side of the road to the other) were scouting for antelope, making ready for the season. |
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“Did you see the buck on the hill back there?” he asked. His eyes lit up in appreciation. |
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The road narrowed and rose. Just before the cut-off onto a little
used road that would take me into the |
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The cut-off narrowed and became a little used two-track. It passed an abandoned cattle loading area and turned more directly south and rose as it climbed the escarpment ringing the Basin. In the dust, occasionally, I saw old bike tracks. Others had been this way. |
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It was now mid-afternoon; already it had been a long day and I still had twenty-odd miles to Crooks Creek. The heat of the sun had built into the 90s. I was sticky with sweat, tired, hot, and dusty and I couldn’t drink enough water to feel hydrated. My shoulder had swollen along the collarbone up to my neck, down my back and chest. Tomorrow it would be worse. |
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The road was cutting along the base of a low ridge—at the top of the ridge was a rusted 55-gallon drum. As we passed it, the air went out of the rear tire. I hadn’t had a flat for the past 1100 miles and any other day would have been a better day to have one. Dispirited, I laid Succotash on the side of the road and trudged up the gently rising ridge to the barrel, not ready yet to deal with the flat. |
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The rusted barrel reminded me of Wallace Steven’s poem, Anecdote of the Jar, which can be read as a metaphor for how man has tamed and asserted dominion over the wilderness. See the fence around Diagnus Well. |
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Like most things in the west, if it looks like a target, it
becomes one. The barrel had been pierced from every angle by bullets and in
it were crushed and faded Pilsner beer cans. I walked to the top of the ridge
and discovered it wasn’t a ridge, but an escarpment. Its off-side fell
steeply away to the flat desert plain. Below me was the |
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After a time, I turned back toward Succotash. I was worried that my left arm wouldn’t be strong enough to hold the pump when I refilled the tire with air. It took considerable strength to force in air when the tire pressure got above 40 lbs. |
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I took off the rear panniers, found my tools and disassembled the tire. The puncture was quickly found: the lip of the Mr Tuffy tire liner that I’d had inserted between the tire and the tube to prevent punctures had itself worn thru the tube. I sat on the sand, the tube limp in my hands and looked at the wear marks of the liner on the tube feeling betrayed. |
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Neither in the mood nor having the energy to patch the tube, I
put a new one in. I was back on the road by |
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Around 6, the road I was following dead ended into one running north south. Crooks Creek was three miles to the north. The reservoir, my original destination, was still 19 miles away. I couldn’t bring myself to go 6 miles (roundtrip) off the Trail. Nor did I want to spend any more time looking at the giant scar, the high tension wires, and the other industrial ravages all to the north. |
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To make the reservoir, I had six miles to go south—almost directly into the wind, and 13 miles west, nicely downwind, though with my luck, the wind will have laid down by the time I turned west. In two hours, it would be dark. I decide to run for it. |
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The road south was hard packed. Big pick-ups from the mine raced by me swirling up dust that eddied and resettled in hollows and rills in the road. The wind was unrelenting. I put the bike in a lower gear and spun the pedals in a faster cadence than normal pushing into the wind without pause. The sun swelled as it sank to my right. |
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An hour later, I cut the east-west road, stopped for water and
trail-mix, and then headed west. Into the wind, I made 6 mph; downwind, I
made 12. The road was rougher, the traffic from the mine didn’t use this
road, but I kept my pace, letting mile after mile reel by. Behind me the sun
touched the horizon cast my shadow far down the road. My panniers swelled
reminding me of peddlers in |
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The sun was down and the day dusky when I reached the cut off to the reservoir. The last mile was rough, with blocky rocks half-buried in soft sand. I climbed the high berm that had been built around the creek and looked down onto water still ruffled by the wind. |
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There was no good protection from the wind—which was quieter now, but still blowing. The top of the bank was tent-friendly flat, but totally exposed; down by the water’s edge there was only a touch more protection and the ground was uncomfortably sloped and rocky. Curiously, given that hundreds of bikers must camp here every season, I saw no sign of other campers. It was as if I were the first. |
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I set up the tent facing into the wind—now just a gentle breeze—in the only reasonably flat spot by the water. The soil was too hard to pound tent stakes into, and, certain that the wind would continue to die, I didn’t tie off the tent to rocks. I crawled into my sleeping bag after dinner; it was late, the sky black, the stars brilliant, the moon missing, the air sharp and cold. |
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I had done 70 miles that day, all on dirt roads, the last 19 at a run, severely bruised my shoulder, sweated under an unwinking sun, and yet I couldn’t sleep. I read, my left arm limp by my side. |
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An hour passed and without warning a fist of wind slammed into the tent. The poles flexed, the nylon bellied inwards. I struggled into my clothes and shoes, my left arm useless, the bruise swollen and throbbing. I piled everything into the middle of the tent, scurry out into the wind and spin the tent around so that the narrow end is pointing into the wind to better shed the wind. Back in the tent I lay out my sleeping bag with my head is in the tent’s narrow foot so that my weight helps anchor it. |
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I quit reading grateful, as I dozed off that it I was in a desert and didn’t have to worry about rain—the groundcloth hadn’t been properly folded under the tent and the fly hadn’t been properly guyed out—any rain would run onto the ground-cloth and under the tent and up through the floor. I’d be soaked in a flash. |
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A few minutes after mid-night, I was shocked awake by rain pelting the tent. |
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Colorado
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Indiana Pass
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The highest point on the divide: 11,910 feet, two miles in the air. I started that morning at just under 8000 feet and began the long climb up. The golden aspen lit the hillsides and the logepole pine shaded the road. By the time I was approaching the pass, it was cold and blustery, with hard bits of snow—grauple—that stung when wind spit them into you. I was’t dressed warmly enough, and thinking that the descent on the other side of the pass would be as steep as the ascent, I pushed on instead of stopping and putting on jacket and pants. |
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It was late in the day, the sun hidden by the ridge to the west
when I biked into Stunner Campground—as |
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Gary and Tim were from |
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Tim, also a electrical designer, did autocad work for a pipeline company in San Antonio. When he mentioned his home town, he looked at me like he expected a reaction for me. It was “huh?” |
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“Where the |
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Both asked the standard questions about my trip and at some point during the conversation Tim asked, “Do you carry a pistol?” I said, I couldn’t imagine pulling a gun on anybody, but both of them had pistols and always traveled with them. We had chili and fire-baked cornbread for dinner and I didn’t leave them any leftovers. This is Tim’s cut on the evening. |
New Mexico
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Pie Town
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Two days later I stopped in |
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An hour later, I was back on the Trail. Ten minutes later my chain jammed between the cassette and the spokes. At this point, I figured the universe was sending me a message and I sat for a while calming down, recentering, changing focus from putting miles behind me to reveling in the stark beauty of the desert. |
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The country was dry. Other than cattle tanks, fed by wind mills, there
were only two good water sources in the 120 miles between |
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I camped next to another wildlife “exclosure”—an artificially generated water source fenced off so the cows couldn’t get to it. The water was stagnant and putrid—I used it to wash my dishes, but not for cooking or drinking. |
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Mid-morning the next day, I came to an abandoned homestead. Made of rock and mud-mortar, at some point, it had been wired for electricity, but now long deserted. Miles from anywhere, it must have been a lonely place a century ago, when it was first settled. |
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Toward afternoon, the country opened up—no more sudden dips into and
steep climbs out of dry arroyos. In the distance was a huge coal mine, run by
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October 19. A quick resupply in Grants. It was six days to |
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Rain is bad news in the desert. It runs off instead of seeping into the sand, causing the violent flash-floods that scour out the deep arroyos and it turns the sand and dust into muck so thick and sticky cars and trucks can’t drive through it, much less bikes. The Great Divide Trail, in fact, has alternative routes that are paved for use when it rains. |
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And late that afternoon, I turned onto a hard-packed red mud road that lead into El Malpais National Monument and was confronted with big signs warning drivers not to continue if the road was wet. Clouds were lumbering out of the southwest, but I had no interest in biking a paved road and so ignored them. The road led onto a broad grassy plain spotted with wildly spaced conifers. And though, it looked nothing like it, it’s feel evoked memories of the Serengeti—even more broad with its lonely acacia trees marking the distance to the horizon. |
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The next morning started with a flat. A tiny thorn, less than a quarter inch long had driven itself thru my front tire and holed the tube, I was in thorn country. By noon, we’d dropped off the plateau and come into wide open country, the trees shrank and became more scattered until they eventually disappeared. I passed a tall windmill cranking loudly in the wind, pumping water into a large fully enclosed fiberglass tank; the cows in their pen eyed me apprehensively. |
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I turned onto a broad long straight road that, on the distant
horizon, disappeared up a ridge. It was thirty miles to |
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As I climbed the ridge, squalls swept in from the southwest,
lightening flashed, thunder ripped and rumbles and rain fell from the sky.
The rain sprinkled the sand, not seriously enough to stop me, but it sucked
at the tires, and the wind blew cold into my face. By my map, the final 16
miles into |
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Cold, wet, pummeled by the wind, dismounted by soft sand, exhausted by climbing out of the dips, but bent on having pie that evening, I pushed on. |
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Late in the afternoon, cold and beat and with no oomph left, I
turned east on Route 603, three miles out from |
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When I got to the Pie-O-Neer it had closed. I’d missed it by twenty minutes. I crossed the street looking for a place to camp in the trees behind the town park. A late model Mazda pulled up behind me; the window slid down and woman with the seamless complexion only possible for people under 30 asked me if I were biking the Great Divide. |
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“I live here,” she said. She was a waiter at the Pie-O-Neer. |
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“I’d guess,” I said, “Brooklyn.” She looked as indigenous as a cactus in a rainforest. |
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“ |
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The Toaster House got its name because the entry way is hung with
10 or 15 toasters. The owner was in |
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Outside the house were two well traveled touring bikes. Inside
was an Australian couple who had started in |
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End of the Trail
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I left Tom and Sarah the next morning and a day and a half later,
slogging into a driving and chilly headwind, I biked into |
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Succotash had been flat-free since the three flats—my personal
best—just south of |
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Tom and Sarah keep a blog at www.crazyguyonabike.com/doc/7186. If you read thru their reflections on the Great Divide Trail, you will find this sentence: |
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If you do it on a $75 rigid bike, you'll
end up replacing a lot of parts and will need a higher level of
bloody-mindedness. |
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I believe it refers to me. |
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It was mid-afternoon, still windy and cool, when I left |
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The road across the desert was flat and soft-sand free. For some |
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Early afternoon, we rode under Interstate 10, the southern most east-west interstate, and stopped at a huge firework and tchsotcky shop. The radio was playing, and as I bought a couple bottles of water, the station broadcast a high wind warning: winds gusting to 70 mph. Back on the road, we paralleled the interstate for a while on a gravel road and then turned south and dead into the wind on a paved road, saying goodbye to dirt and gravel for the last miles of the Trail. The road ran 19 miles with only one turn and that turn came just yards before our final Continental Divide Crossing. The desert was so flat here, that without a sign marking the divide, I would never have known I’d been climbing or, on the far side, descending a divide. |
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The road ended in Hachita, a tiny, desperate town. As I turned east to go through it, the wind, now at our backs, blew dust and trash down the street, a piece of sheet metal slapped against the side of a house. The community building was boarded up, the storefronts deserted, their signs faded by the sun. Front yards were littered with trash, windows broken, grass grown up around fences and sad looking front steps. |
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I turned onto Route 81 and passed a cathedral with a high rock
campanile. A window had been smashed and the door boarded up. We fled south. The
valley bottom here was flat—without dip or roll—and stretched between two
parallel north-south mountain ridges. The wind was strong, but we could still
make seven miles an hour and so I muscled into it. The road is called, by New
Mexicans at least, the loneliest highway in |
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The border patrol, however, was everywhere. Big white SUVs or pick-ups with mini-jails built into their beds, they had a big green vertical stripe, like the Coast Guard’s orange stripe down their sides, that instantly identified them. A border patrol vehicle passed me every 10 or 15 minutes. At first, thinking it was politic, I waved as they zoomed by, but there were so many, that after a while, I gave up. |
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About ten miles down the road, I stopped to take a break. Sitting on the side of the road to pick the thorns out of my socks, a border patrol vehicle stopped to see if I was OK. Immediately, a second pulled up. You guys are like an invading army, I said. You’re everywhere. What I didn’t know. There were agents out in the desert, up on the mountain ridges, there were hidden sensors in the ground and infra-red cameras in planes flying overhead. |
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“So you guys have me on your radar?” I ask. |
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They laughed, “Oh yeah.” |
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Sixteen miles from Hachita, the road went through Hatchet Gap, two low mountains to either side of the road. The wind accelerated as I neared the Gap and I leaned into the pedals. I assumed the wind sped up because of the Venturi effect of the mountains speeding the wind, but a mile further on and it hadn’t let up at all. I was making less than 4 miles an hour and struggling to stay upright when the wind danced around and slugged me from the side. |
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In the end, I pitched the tent in the lee of a tree by the old homestead and run lines over it tying it down. If I stayed low, the wind was tolerable. I kicked the dried cow patties out from in front of the tent and sat on a weatherworn log lying on the ground. |
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I had passed many deserted homesteads on my way south, tucked in the woods, by streams, or out on the broad flat desert plains. They evoke in me the sense of great dreams and hopes, of tremendous work and struggle, and then loss and defeat. |
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This campsite was particularly poignant, with its lonely chimney, its two out buildings, one of adobe with its roof blown off—the roof hadn’t collapsed into the building, but was behind, downwind from it, and disheveled wood plank one. It reminded me of a poem by Frost, about the reconquest by nature of a homestead lost to fire, The Need to Versed in Country Things: |
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Now the chimney was all of the house that stood, |
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Like a pistil after the petals go. |
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The birds that came to it through the air |
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At broken windows flew out and in, |
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For them there was really nothing sad. |
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But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, |
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One had to be versed in country things |
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Not to believe the phoebes wept. |
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So I sat on the log and let the sun go down and the stars come out and the wind kick and thrash and let a gentle wash of melancholy subsume me. One journey was over, and new one, still foggy, was about to begin. Then I tucked into my sleeping bag, my last night on the trail. |
Antelope Wells
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Antelope Wells appeared, a bump on the
horizon. I rolled in at |
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I rolled across the border into |
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“Dos minutos,” I said. He looked confused
and I pointed the bike back towards the |
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Back in the |
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He slid my passport through his scanner and handed it back to me. |
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“Could you stamp it?” I wanted an Antelope Wells stamp right next to my Fraser B.C. one. |
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“We don’t do that any more.” He pointed to the computer. “It’s all automatic.” But he was a good man and knelt and poked around under the counter. He pulled out a spindly wooden stand with branches; attached to end of each branch were metal clips from which hung a collection of rubber stamps. It looked like last year’s sorry, mange-eaten Christmas tree or something out of Kafka. A couple of the other officials leaned over to look at this relic of the pre-computer age. |
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He found the appropriate stamp, a pad of red ink, and a piece of
scrap paper, pushed them across the counter to me. “You might want to
practice.” Apart from its other problems, |
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overloaded 
reached for the straps securing the
pannier, I knew my hammock's not there. What synaptic failure precluded my
brain from letting me know miles and hours ago? I search anyway--without
luck. I rigged the tarp as a lean-to and the light drizzle whispered on the
green nylon during the night.
Early morning, the sky light but
colorless, I powered off the ferry and through the little town of Bella
Coola, founded by Norwegians a century ago at the very end of a very long
fjord, in the hopes of building a Utopian community, and onto the 
I camped that night in an old horse
corral in 
After I’d been laboring up it for some
time, a Ministry of Transport truck came by. I asked the driver how much
farther to the top of the pass. He said, a long way. Fifteen minutes later,
he came back to clarify: “It ‘s a real
long way.” 
“Yeah,” I said, “But next winter when
it’s thirty below here, I’ll be toasting buns on some beach down there.” It
didn’t impress him
By the time I had done my shopping,
packed up, and found my way to the back parking lot of the massive Victorian
Banff Hotel where the north end of the Great Divide Trail begins, it was past
The trail ran south beside a clear fast
flowing stream, the rugged mountains of the Canadian Rockies bracing the sky,
the forest deep and green, and the trail, at first smooth, perhaps groomed
for the many tourists, soon turned rough and rocky. Succotash was banged and
jarred, she rattled and lurched. I couldn’t, for the life of me, see how she
could withstand 2,700 miles of this kind of abuse. I was right.
The next day was clear--unlike 
invaded and deported to 
Succotash and I pedaled
up the Big Hole valley--beautiful trout streams amid the 
It took hours to cross the Medicine
Lodge-Sheep Creek Pass. Finally at the top, I could see for miles and miles
and all around me the land was treeless and brown. Succotash and I sped down
the far side into a wide flat basin, ringed by distant mountains, that was
stunning in its starkness. Sage and saltbush, brown grasses, antelope and
cows for miles and miles; 
Exiting the basin through a high rocky
canyon with a rushing stream to my right, a brutal headwind whistled up pass
and even hunkered down, in lowest gear, and going downhill, it was a struggle
to come out the other side. It felt like pushing through a birth canal; it
was a hard birth, the labor all mine. I camped in a 
West out of 
and pushed into the bullying wind. The
road turned to soft dust and the bike skittered. A truck hauling a horse
trailer passed me--the first almost since Lima--and I didn't hear it coming
as it was coming from down wind and I'd quit looking in my mirror. Startled I
pulled right and the bike lost traction in the soft dust and ran off the
road. No injuries, but I was learning the perils of soft, depthless sand. I'd
learn more in coming days.
Lynn was trained as an accountant and
after he retired had worked for H & R Block, “
That night it snowed.
I biked on, feeling more at ease at the
slower pace. The temperature still mild, in 80s, and the land flattened out,
sage green and brown stretching for tens of miles to distant colorless
mountains. As I moved into it, the desert grew drier and more sparse. Off to
the east on a high knoll stood a pronghorn buck, regal, cut against the sky. 
I was alone, only rarely, did a truck
pass. In the afternoon, as I was struggling up a rocky hill, a pick-up edged
around me and disappeared over a rise. I crested the rise and found the truck
parked a ways down the slope. As I approached a white haired, white bearded,
stocky, man with the deeply etched lines of a weather-worn face climbed out
of the cab and walked back toward me. He stopped at the end of the truck’s
bed, opened a cooler, rooted around in the ice and pulled out a bottle of
water and handed it to me. I rolled it over my face before cracking the top.
But the trail stayed high. I came into
the industrial wasteland of Summitville, site of a large abandoned gold mine.
When 
Still the trail stayed at altitude traversing
several sub-alpine basins already brown and leafless this late in the season,
with snow on occasional north facing or shadowed slopes. When the road began
to drop, I was cold and the air rushing into as Succotash accelerated drew
pulled any remaining heat out of me. The pine were replaced by large, dusty
green, and comfortingly familiar spruce. Dropping fast, I came to a high
polychrome mountain streaked with reds, oranges and purples; barren of life
so mineralized was its soil.
Tim made knives from stainless steel
and bone or wood for the handles. The craftsmanship was exquisite. He doesn’t
have a website, but Google “Churchman blades” in Google Images to see pictures.
Early the next morning, ignoring my
map, I raced past my turn-off and ignoring the sun which would have told me I
was headed west not south, I biked seven miles off trail until the dirt road
emptied into a paved road, which shouldn’t have been there. I biked back,
paying super attention to my 
Down off the ridges, the Trail nosed
into desert again and with the desert came the soft sand. Long stretches of
sand the tires of my bike sank into. The rear wheel dug itself deeper the
harder I pedaled, and time and again I had to walk Succotash, hauling her by
the saddle to the next patch of solid roadbed. It was constant for almost six
miles and of those miles, I must have walked at least one. Adding insult to
injury, I was following two other bike tracks, both tires about mine in width
and I never saw footprints by either or 
Biker shorts don’t hide a thing. She
directed me to the Toaster House where I could stay for a small donation. I
asked her what her connection to Pie Town was. 
At dusk, I found a thicket of prickly
bushes with leaves like holly, to nestle the tent among out of the wind. The
sinking sun left a ribbon of rich pink resting on the western horizon and the
stars soon spangled the sky. I curled into my bag and slept, my next to last
night on the trail.
miles, it ran atop the Continental
Divide. Succotash and I blasted along, reveling in the desert’s beauty, 
I gave up. I leaned Succotash against a
road sign and searched the surrounding desert for a wind break. There was
nothing. I bent down behind bushes and the rare little bump in the valley
floor and still the wind powered into me. I got back on the bike and turned
back the way I’d come, sailing down wind, not having to pedal at all, and
turned off onto a gravel road that led back to a standing stone chimney. The
old ranch house having been completely torn off its foundation and the debris
scattered in the brush. I spent the next forty minutes looking for a camp
site out of the wind, running off a herd of cattle clustered around a water
trough, in the process.
I was up before the sun and on the road
before it had cracked the eastern horizon, racing south. Without the wind,
Succotash ripped along at 15 mph, the desert flashing by, the sky pale blue, 
The road was ruler straight, reeling
over the horizon in front of me, disappearing over the one behind. The desert
bushes shrank and browned. The sun elbowed into the sky flooding the western
ridge with light and, as it lifted, the 