Colleen's Journal: Week Eight

An unexpected day off.  What? you ask.  You can't have a day off, cee, you just had a day off a mere five days ago.  You wuss, you.

At least, that's what went through my mind when I woke up this morning at the traditional 5:30 and groaned.  "Agh, no, we don't have time for a day off, we need to save those to get over the mountains."  I tried another ten minutes of sleep, then twenty.  Every minute we don't get up and get on the road is another minute in the indescribable heat in the afternoon, so it was then or never.  I asked Molly how she'd feel about staying another day, and she didn't put up a fight.  And then I went back to sleep for another four hours, after which I actually felt like something resembling a human being again.

We really were bone-tired when we got in yesterday.  We spent most of the rest of the day kinda catatonic.  Even in a hotel room, even when you have a large chunk of afternoon and evening, it can be so hard to get anything useful done - any more than writing your journal entry, feeding yourself something, massaging your legs, and getting some sleep.  So today we caught up on some of the things that we can't seem to get done under normal circumstances, like shopping for aloe, sunscreen, Neoprene with which to fashion water-bottle insulators, stamps.  Then we treated ourselves to a dorky movie.  We sat around reading dorky fluff magazines, just to get out of the hotel room.  It was an uninspiring day, but a necessary one.

And of course, as always, we checked the route to see what it's going to take, to complete the trip to Salt Lake City.  Not too bad, yet.  In terms of miles, if nothing more.

In ways, it may just be a gesture.  My breathing is bad just sitting here, doing nothing.  I may get two more days into the trip and say, welp, that's it.  No can do, Kemosabe.  In which case, the contingency plan seems to be, rent a car from somewhere and tootle around, seeing the southwest until it's time for me to leave to help set up camp at Burning Man.  Molly wants to get over the Rockies; if I can't, I'll meet her on the other side, probably with her trailer, and we'll take a bus from there to SLC.  Or whatever.  So my journal may be suspended for a week or two, or three for that matter, given that you certainly won't be getting entries while I'm in the middle of the desert.  Or it may end soon altogether.

Oh, and to all of you who've written to tell us that a pro football player has died from this heat: thank you, now we know.  I do know the signs of heat stroke and heat exhaustion, and I know how to deal with each.  Girl Scout for fifteen years.  We really are doing our best to take care of ourselves.  I promise.

As usual, Kansans are fabulous, and the state really seems determined to apologize to us in every other way possible for the stupifying heat.  (According to the weather reports, we have only one more day of it to go before it cools off to "normal" highs of 90's.)  The roads continue to be fabulous, the plains are pretty - especially when blazing with sunflowers - and everyone is nice to us.  I wonder if it's true of Nebraskans and Oklahomians (?) as well, or peculiar to this state.

We were exceedngly pleased with ourselves to be on the road by 7:00.  A new record.  That may not impress y'all, but remember that that includes packing our trailers, all of our ice bottles and hydrapacks, and our tummies before we go.  We had made 30 miles by 9:45, pulling into Phillisburg and snagging a quick 'nother brekky, knowing that from then on, it was going to become increasingly unbearable.

Luckily, unbearable didn't really hit until a few miles before our destination.  A big part of that was the stupendous wind that came up.  20 mph, I think, and the most favorable you could ask for: from the southeast, which means both a crosswind to cool us and a tailwind to speed us.  It was fabulous.  We had watched the dorky movie American Sweethearts last night (c'mon, it was all that was playing) in which the hero iterates, as a mantra after cracking up, how he's grateful for the sun and moon and whatnot.  Well, I was indescribably grateful for this wind.  If the day of Godawful Hideous Winds we suffered in New York, alongside Lake Erie, was paying in advance for this day of life-saving refreshment, I'll take it.

We made it into Norton at about 2:30 - 63 miles of biking - at which point I collapsed, or about a mile beforehand, actually.  I really hadn't had much of a meal yet, though lots and lots of water, so my body demanded calories of me, of any type whatsoever.  Here's to listening to your body!  It's interesting that neither of us eats much anymore.  I'm sure part of it is the heat, but I think part has to be just acclimating to the rigors of the road.  My body seems to be really efficient about using calories now.  (Which means, what, that I'm going to gain a lot of weight as soon as I stop biking?  *sigh*)  It seems to be really efficient about a lot of things, actually.  It's calmed down about using the sleep I offer it - with the help of Valerian root, I seem to make it  through the night without pain.  It uses water, rest, food, like a streamlined machine.  And it bikes.  Long distances.  Without really noticing.

Today was a much more encouraging day than the last couple have been.  My knee didn't hurt badly - I've been compressing it, using naproxyn, elevating it when possible, and of course staying off of it, when I'm not biking.  Perhaps that'll be enough.  And my breathing was much calmer.  It wasn't perfect, but I made it uphills without fighting to yawn and gulp and draw in enough breath.  And we gained about 400 feet of elevation.  So perhaps I'm acclimating, or perhaps yesterday was a fluke.  I have no clue yet.  But I've made it another day, and that's really about all I can ask, at this point.  If I keep making it another day, eventually I'll be in Denver, and then we'll see from there.

A few days ago, we were warned that this corner of the state would be pretty barren, such that if we saw a prairie dog, we should stop and say hi.  Well, we haven't seen a prairie dog, which is disappointing.  In fact, we seem to have run entirely out of Cute Little Mammals, or even Unappetizing Little Mammals, both alive and long dead.  Woodchucks, raccoons, and skunks are a thing of the past.  About the only critters we pass on the roadside these days are frogs, turtles, and snakes.  A day or two ago, the highway was littered with grasshoppers and butterflies, but today it was inchworms.  No, really.  This mass exodus of inchworms wending their way across the blacktop.  Why?  I guess the grass really is greener.  Anyway, no prairie dogs, and I wonder if we're now beyond prairie dog territory, because we seem to be exiting the prairies.  There's been a sea change, or a land change anyway, today.

Today I saw the first cactus of the trip.  A little pitiful prickly pear, tentatively peeking up beside some pines.  I'd bet you didn't know cacti and sunflowers would grow within a few miles of each other.  That's what you get for not trundling your slow, weary way through rural northwestern Kansas.  We also saw yucca and sagebrush on the hillsides today.  We haven't left grasses behind, not at all, though trees are very sparse: they tend to be either singular or concentrated around a little rivulet of water, for which even "creek" seems a grandiose name.  The air is definitely drier.  The road cuts through more hills, occasionally leaving embankments showing, and it's all gray-brown dust.  There are few crops, few people.  Many of the buildings we pass seem to have been abandoned long before and are falling into dust themselves.  Even grain elevators, gone to seed.  Windmills are broken, looking somehow sorrowful for not twirling jauntily.

As I so frequently do on this trip, I thought a lot today about those who went before.  The people who crossed this land in wagons, with oxen or horses.   How did they do it?  There's nothing here.  The wind scours the land like an over-jealous cleaning lady.  The sun lashes it mercilessly.  From what I'm told, storms are harsh here.  How did people cross this land?  How did they find enough water to get them through?  I've been told they made about seven miles a day, and that amazes me - the tenacity to keep slogging through this area at that pace, for weeks and months at a time.  And we haven't gotten to the worst of it yet, let alone to the mountains.

Today just wasn't fun.  I don't expect the next three to be, either.  Today we left Norton at the
same self-congratulatory hour of 7:00, but just didn't make fabulous time.  I felt sluggish and unimpressive, and bogged down just before our first stop at 17 miles.  We were able to get a little more food, but it didn't seem to help.  Then Molly noticed that the tire on my BOB trailer was completely flat.  We'd tried to find spares for them before leaving, but had been unable to, and comforted ourselves that we'd be able to patch any problems.  So we patched the two obvious holes, where sandburrs had insinuated themselves through the tire and into the tube.  Started pumping up only to hear an unmistakeable hiss still coming from the tube.  Couldn't find another hole, even pouring some water on the tube.  Finally had the brilliant idea of slathering on aloe, which revealed not one more hole, but an entire nine inch long row of them.  Tiny tiny dots.  A sandburr thorn must've broken off between the tire and tube and punctured its way in a merry little scuttle down the tire.  Like an inchworm doing a country line dance in hobnailed boots.  Thinking ourselves innovative, we set out to patch the entire line, using most of the patches between our two kits, but it seemed a rather sketchy project.  It was already getting quite hot out and we knew that we were going to be biking late into the day, from all the time lost and from the slow pace, so we agreed easily to take a ride into the next town when it was offered.

And thank god that we did.  I finished patching the line of punctures in the truck, then we went into a gas station and I tested my work in the sink - and found two more such lines of puncture wounds.  Far, far too many to fix with our remaining patches, even if I had wanted to spend the hour or two.  Yug.

The guy who'd given us a lift to Oberlin had told us that if we needed it, he'd carry us on to Atwood - told us his hotel room number and everything - but that really wouldn't have solved our problem, because Atwood wouldn't have been any more likely to have spare trailer-sized bike tires than Oberlin.  But just then, the cashier at the gas station called her husband, who just happened to run a tire store, and he went and got us a couple of special thorn-resistant (double thickness) tubes of the correct size.  Apparently the sandburrs are a familiar problem in the area.

So we got on our way again, to do twenty-seven more miles to Atwood.  They weren't fun.  Dry, unchanging, unpopulated, hilly, and godawful hot.  The wind had switched back to the south, even a little from the west - enough to make it darned unpleasant.  And because we were going much less zippily than yesterday, we didn't have enough water.  I've never before chugged a Gatorade, like one would in a commercial, but I discovered what it was like to do so upon reaching Atwood.

Today, Kansas.  Tomorrow, the world.  Or at least another state.  One that contains the Rockies.  First, three days of hard, boring biking, with very little in between our stops and very little in the way of services at the stops themselves.  Your intrepid heroines will be very careful.  They don't really have much choice.

Well, Molly probably already got all the laughs by previously using the line I'd been squirrelling away for today, but what the heck: "I don't believe we're in Kansas anymore, Toto."  And we really dug Kansas.  Great people, great roads, pretty prairies.  But there's no state that I'll be sorry to leave behind, anymore, because crossing over is just so monumental, with states this big.  We have only four more to go (having completed ten) but that's almost half the distance. (Okay, it would be if I were doing all of it.  Talk to Molly about the math afterwards, should she do it all.)

Surprisingly, today was fun.  I don't know why.  Perhaps the jolt of just getting to Colorado?  It just sounds so much more impressive, to say I've biked all the way to Colorado.  Sounds much further west.  Kansas is the midwest, the prairies; Colorado is the west, the mountains.  No matter how much further I make it, I can always say that I biked from Maine to Colorado.

It was just much more fun than yesterday, and very little difference between the days.  One difference was that yesterday, it was all up and down hills - I'd guess that we climbed about 2000 feet or so, though we only gained 400; today, we gained a lot more elevation but had far fewer downhills, so much less of it was steep uphill.  The other major factors were the same, though: the heat, which we'd been almost desperately counting on being lower today (the Weather Channel lured us into believing "95 to 100" as opposed to the normal "100 to 105" of late), was quite as intolerable as before.  In fact, at one point I gasped to Molly that it was not 95 degrees out, and she checked and found that we'd topped the charts at 111.  Yes.  And for most of the day, we didn't have any wind at all, other than what we could create with our own two feet pushing us forward.  Towards the end, we got some east wind, which can be worse than nothing, as it counteracts the breeze you create yourself, and a little south wind, which was more delicious than I can say.  And still, there was this joy present in today.  We passed a sign that said "Idalia 35 miles" and let out giant whoops of glee, probably causing the people we were passing to deem us irreparably damaged by sunstroke.

The big highlight of the day was picking up our mail in St. Francis.  Whoooboy.  Some of it was stuff David (Molly's husband) had sent - can you believe I was glad to get a fleece and heavier sleeping bag? believe it or not, we'll probably need them next week - and I was delighted to get a letter forwarded from my little sister in Benin, West Africa.  You think I have a weird life these days, you should talk to her.  Really makes you think about communication: letters back and forth from her village of Goumori, which is 25 kilometers from the nearest phone or electricity, to rural Kansas.  The other stuff we got was vast amazing huge quantities of food, for which I am almost embarrassingly grateful.  You have no idea how good dried cherries and homemade zucchini bread can be, when you haven't had the chance for them in a while.  And it's very heartwarming, to know that people care about you and have put some thought into what will make your trip a little better.  All very sweet.

The day hadn't started spectacularly well - Molly turned up with a thorn in her front tire, replaced the tube, and then found that she hadn't gotten all of the thorn out of the tire, hence it punctured the spare as well.  Best exercise I get these days, pumping up tires - the only thing I'm good for, not being the Gear Bitch of the two.  So with the best of intentions ganged oft agley, or ganged up on, or somesuch, we made it out of Atwood at 7:30, and of course we spend forever and then some in St. Francis, rearranging all our stuff and repacking with about 20 new pounds of gear and food.  So we knew we were in for a long day.  Hence, when we were taking a corn break - and this time, using the corn only for shade, since there were no trees available - and were offered a ride into Idalia, we didn't turn it down as we normally would have.  It was 5:00, we still had an hour of biking to go, in 110 degree heat, having already biked 60 miles and with two days of 75 miles ahead of us.  I felt guilty, cheating a bit, honestly.  There's a part of me that feels like I simply shouldn't accept a ride unless we really really need it, and oddly enough, we didn't feel like we did then.  We could have made it into Idalia and been fine.  But the offer of riding in an 18-wheeler and having a little rest time in the evening, before going to sleep and starting it all over again, was a bit too tempting.  So we rode the last 10 miles or so in the cab, chatting with the very nice truck driver, who offered to take us all the way to Denver if we wished.   But not, that's far too much cheating, even though we know the next two days are going to be really hard ones.

Besides, we'd gain too much elevation too quickly that way.   Y'all keep your fingers crossed for me: so far, my breathing hasn't continued to be a problem.  It's come up here and again, but nothing consistent or really exhausting.  I'm hoping not to exacerbate it.  Hoping still that it'll hold out and I'll be able to tackle the Rockies...

I was amused for a while that I might type this entry from "ten miles beyond Last Chance" or somesuch, but we ended up staying here.  After trying for several days to verify whether or not there was a church here (we already knew there was no motel), we were prepared to just keep going as long as we felt able tonight - why not put some more miles on today, knowing that tomorrow will otherwise probably be the longest of the trip and having to camp anyway?  But there was a church, open because someone was measuring it for a heating system; we waited for quite some time for the pastor to come back and give us permission to stay here, but ultimately left a note on the front door and came in.  It felt strange, but that's another thing about being on the road: you have to learn not to be shy and self-effacing about asking for what you need.  Eventually a guy came in and okayed it, so it's all good.

Today we gained about 1000 feet in altitude - a little more, actually.  My breathing wasn't stellar, but I'm making it okay.  We've topped 5000 feet now.  Knees are, knock wood, holding out as well.  Perhaps I will make it through the Rockies.

You know you've been hot for a long time when you're grateful that it doesn't go over 100 degrees.  Today it didn't, and mostly stayed below 95 - and at 9:00, it's actually quite cool out.  For about a week, we've been receiving reports that it's going to cool down in a couple of days, such that by now we've given up any faith in weather reports.  But tomorrow may really actually be cooler - partly because the mountains have a different weather system than the plains, too.

In the last few days, we've gotten several reactions of disbelief and and confusion, rather than the admiration and support that we seemed to elicit before.  "You're doing what?  Why?"  It's as if people are simply incapable of imagining that others might derive pleasure from what they themselves do not.  And it makes me wonder, in turn, why they might be that way.  Perhaps because the landscape is so barren and unchanging, it hides nothing, promises nothing - there is nothing here to inspire wonderment or wondering.  We're passing through vast fields that are clearly cultivated, but not right now - they're just tan-gray dirt raked into neat rows, perhaps to be planted in the fall or spring.  Perhaps because there are so few people here, so little to do, so little in the way of interaction, little chance for upbringing that would cause the mind to stay open to non-obvious choices.  Or perhaps the people here don't realize, given little outside stimulation, that America is so vastly different from what's immediately around them.  Perhaps, surrounded by the plains, they don't think about what it would be like to see Louisiana's bayous or Florida's beaches or Utah's alien landscape deserts, and to meet the kind of people that choose to build lives there.  Yesterday we met a man who was startlingly self-deprecatory: even after we'd praised the rural lands through which we'd been passing, speaking of how we'd enjoyed the friendliness of the people, his response was the most neurotic and insecure we've encountered in weeks.  "Oh, there's nothing here, nothing that would interest you," he kept saying.  I tried to explain why we would want to bike through it, reeling off some stock phrases that have developed over the weeks, saying, "We learn so much by biking...", to which he responded incredulously, "You do?"

I don't know if Molly will remember to write about this, but it was something we discussed today: how much we forget about that we want to write.  Little tiny things.  Things that are precious or hilarious or bizarre or thought-provoking at the time, but that somehow get washed away into the day and never recorded.  Like how dorky we can be about sunflowers.  We saw a crop a few days ago that were clearly at fruition, heads bent low with the weight of their mature seeds, and of course anthropomorphized them - "They're ashamed, they want plastic surgery."  One was looming over another and seemed to be reprimanding a chastened colleague.  Today we passed some very young, bright, frolicksome ones - "They're sixteen," I said, and we riffed on that for a while.  "We just got new bras!  Mom's letting us drive the car!"  We give voices to lots of things as we pass.  And we notice, well, everything.  The speed at which butterflies will pass us; dragonflies mating on the wing; everything you could ever possibly observe about the condition of the pavement.  We wonder and hypothesize a lot.  Are these viceroys or monarchs that we're seeing?  Why do all the cows cluster in a corner of a field, whether or not there's shade or water there?  Why do people own burros or mules these days?  Why in the world are they widening this road when we encounter a car only every few minutes on it?  Why are we seeing crops here, but not fifteen miles back on the road?  And over and over, why would someone want to live here?  Not that I have anything against Colorado, but in a world that offers so much variety and entertainment and stimulation and freedom, why settle into a trailer home in a town of 29 people, 12 miles from even a cafe or gas station, let alone a theater showing one movie and a library and an oil co-op?  Poverty would seem to be a reason, but this isn't really a poor country: there are oil derricks and vast fields, both of which take money to prepare and maintain.  One guy, when we asked him why he moved here, answered "Peace."  But that can't be why a twenty-year-old would do so.

The reason I'm bothering to write all this is that I don't want to give the impression that our minds are disintegrating out here.  Yes, the landscape is dull.  Yes, the heat is stifling.  Yes, we pretty much spend the day plotting out how we're going to get from one tiny outpost of civilization to the next with enough ice to make it bearable.  But if that's all we did, well, I think I'd have to go with the guy today who, when we said we were biking cross-country, asked in disbelief, "Why?"

Today is more Molly's day to tell about than mine, as it was her tube that went on the fritz.  This is not to say that she hasn't done an amazing job patching and repatching it for the last few days.  We used about ten of our patches on the BOB trailer tube a few days back, so we were down to four, and she used those, a bunch of rubber cement, some electrical tape, a lot of ingenuity, and as far as I know some portion of her immortal soul, in order to keep her tubes going.  For the last three days, I think, we'd woken up, pumped up the tires, and then sat around for an hour or so while she had a dialogue with her tubes as to what would make them happy.  Would you hold air for two Scooby snacks?

This morning we got up and were out the door, fedpackedstretchedreadytogo, by shortly after six a.m.  Yulch, as it hath been said, but we had eighty-five miles or so to go, and the first thirty-five of it in lands with absolutely no services, so we wanted to get a good head-start.  Didnae happen.  I tried exercising my Hey Look Ma, I Can Pump Up A Tire butchness points, but apparently overdid it, because right after I proudly attained 75 psi, the tire started whingeing at us.  And after that, there was nothing for it.  No more spare tubes.  No more patches.  No miraculous tire guys.  No way to appease it back into holding air.  No way to turn back time.  Just eighty-five miles to our destination.

So we walked a few miles out from Last Chance (that bastion of Nothing: it really was pretty much the Dairy King and a church), to make it the more clear that we were Well-Intentioned But Stranded, Not Quite Helpless (lest we lose all our butch points) But Really Inoffensive And In Need of Aid Biker Chicks.  In Kansas, when we'd sit down by the roadside to eat our lunch, people would stop to ask us if we were okay.  An eighteen-wheeler, totally 80,000 pounds of truck and freight, stopped to offer us a ride into Idalia.  ((Okay, it did happen in Colorado, but he'd heard us talking in Kansas.)  Here, we couldn't seem to get someone to stop for love or money, let alone a hopefully hoisted thumb.  A whole fleet of empty pickup trucks passed us, some of them with an insouciant wave.  Yup, see you there, just won't bother stopping.  What did we need to do, inflict injury on ourselves?  Toss our arms into the road?

Finally, two nice people stopped and took us straight to our destination, where we are again relying on the hospitality and generosity of strangers - this time, completely unsolicited!  They offered!  A friend of mine in Boston tipped off a friend of hers, whom I know a little, to our website, and he pointed his sister in Denver at it.  "We'd love to see you!  Anything I can possibly do for you?  Any dietary restrictions/preferences/fantasies?" she asks.  And confirms that Coloradians are mean.  Sad.  We'd gotten used to the nice people in Kansas.  Sure, it's instantly cooler here - the high today was 92. 92! - but I'd almost rather take the heat.

Anyway, an unexpected day of rest, as many of ours seem to be.  And perhaps a necessary one.  We've been told that we really need a couple or three days to acclimate to the altitude, and we weren't sure how we were going to go about it, without losing any of our time plotted to cross the mountains.  This gives us two days of rest, plus more time to enjoy the company of our delightful hosts, without making us feel guilty about being bums.  Not what we'd planned, but apparently what we needed, and our trip thus far seems to be much more inclined to grant us the latter than the former.

I'm not going to write an entry for tday.  It was a day of rest, spent with the Jordans, very pleasant but not particularly relevant to the trip.  We saw some of Denver, enjoyed their company, I got to give massages (yay! how I miss massage...), ate some really good food, they helped us do errands, and we plotted out our route from here to Salt Lake City, including trying to gather a lot of opinions from the Denverites as to the quality of various roads.

Sort of.

We had, like sensible intrepid heroines, dropped off our bikes to be pampered and doctored, when we arrived in the area, at the Wheat Ridge Cyclery.  They told us the bikes would be ready at 10:30 this morning, which is quite long enough to wait, in my opinion.  It was an interesting experience, going in there.  Normally when we enter bike shops - and as you can imagine, with the travails we've had on this front so far, it's been frequent - we have some clout, some cred: we come in biking shorts and shirts and shoes, begrimed and sweaty, and we obviously know what we're talking about.  But when we entered here, I felt I was getting slightly more of a "you're a chick, shall I show you our Luna Bar selection?" sort of vibe.  Not bad, but enough to prick my hackles.  "We've just biked from Maine and we'd like our bikes checked up, brakes tightened before we go over the Rockies, that sort of thing."  And I was surprised with the turnaround we got.  "You did what?  You're biking across the country?"  This is Denver, self-proclaimed bike capital of America, you'd think they'd be pretty blase about it; but no, they said that they'd never gotten any cross-country cyclists in there before.  We finally decided it was because it was buried in the city, patronized by the locals - that people going all the way across would avoid such a place, go for a smaller shop out of the city and try to avoid Denver traffic.

So then you'd think they'd actually have the bikes ready on time, having recognized us as the fabulous attention-worthy chicks that we are.  But no, they surprised us again: they apparently forgot to service Molly's bike, so when we arrived to pick ours up, they wheeled mine out apologetically and gave us runaround for about an hour while probably working feverishly in the back.  And gave us lots of gifts to appease us.  Expensive jerseys and socks, at first.  And then, when they finally brought Molly's bike out, an hour after we'd been sitting around, they kind of elided over the fact that we owed them anything.  Service, the parts we wanted to pick up, etc - no, don't worry about it, we'll take care of it.  We guesstimated that we came out of there with about $400 of labor and items, gratis.  Very strange.

So we got a late start on the road.  Now, this isn't the tragedy it might have been, because we knew we were going to make excellent time.  Because - drum roll please - the Jordans turned out to be just about the coolest people on the face of the planet, and certainly in Denver.  They offered to let us ride without our trailers and bring them to us at the end of the day, howsoever far we got.  And to put themselves pretty much at our disposal, if we found we couldn't handle the altitude or the hills or what have you.  So we made ourselves a small daypack of some gorp, extra shirts and raingear (we were assured it would rain), sunscreen, and books, and set off.

We made it to Golden with a small amount of difficulty - Denver is combed with bike paths, but they aren't all that clearly labeled on the maps - but enjoyed the ride all the same.  Watching the city progress from suburbs to ranches and farms (which we're told will be swallowed up shortly, as the burgeoning city demands more housing) and thence to ugly mining factories and such.  And we gained altitude, as we headed west.  You know what's on your mind when you see a fire escape going up the side of a factory and think, "switchbacks on a building!"  But it wasn't bad.  I monitored my breathing very closely, and it was behaving itself nicely.

Then from Golden, we turned onto Route 6, intending to take it to I-70.  We'd spent many days deliberating over our possible courses of action and had done all the research we knew how, up to pretty much polling local bikers.  What kind of traffic would we encounter; what was the altitude; what were the grades up to that dreaded altitude; what kind of shoulder would we have; what services would be present along the way.  We'd finally decided on following I-70, which is interlaced with bike paths and frontage roads, and where it isn't, bikes are permitted to ride.  Route 6 would presumably take us there.

Route 6 declined to do so, fairly loudly and rudely.

It was an incredibly narrow road, no shoulder at all.  None.  We were riding on a white line.  Meanwhile, semis and buses were passing us at 60 mph, going around twisty curves and unable to give us any elbow room because there was no chance to move over: it was a grooved double yellow line, a rumble strip, as in, it'll rattle your bones if you even drift over.  Yeesh.

And then we came upon the first tunnel.  Now, most of you aren't ardent bikers, therefore you probably don't give a second thought to whether or not tunnels are built to accommodate a bike alongside a car.  I'll make it plain: they aren't.  And at this point, the department of transportation finally deigned to tell us that this road was simply impossible for cyclists: right before the tunnel, they posted a "no bikes" sign.  Now, if a bike can't go through the tunnel, it can't go on the road, because there ain't no other way around.  The road follows a river, as most of the best mountain roads tend to, but where the engineers can't hack away enough of the mountainside to build a road, they punch a hole right through.  Meaning, our options were to turn back, to climb over the mountain with our bikes, or to go through the tunnel.

We chose the tunnel.  I went behind, because I was riding the bike that had a blinking red LED at the moment, we tried to wait until there was little traffic approaching, and we headed in.

I've rarely been so scared in my entire life.  Now, not only are buses and trucks rushing by a foot away, at 60 mph, they're doing so in a dimly lit tunnel, in which I'm not at all sure I can be seen, and where I can't shove off into the sand if something comes too close.  I was freakin' terrified.  After a very short period of this, I got off and walked my bike along the narrow walkway, presumably built for people who've broken down or people servicing the tunnel or somesuch.  Just enough room for me and bike.

Came out the other side and said - and if profanity offends you, skip this paragraph - "WHAT THE FUCK?!"  Why wasn't the road labeled "no bikes"?  Why, when everyone gave us their opinion on the route we were choosing, did no one mention that this was no "frontage" road, but a highly-traveled mountain path?

I was adrenaline girl, trembling and heart pounding for the next twenty minutes.  We discussed our options, which did not include going forward in the same way, and decided on calling Our Personal Heroes, the Jordans, and asking them to save our butts.  If they couldn't, we would first try flagging down a pickup and getting a ride out to Idaho Springs, where we knew a bike path existed, or walking back through the tunnel and having to take an entirely different route, wasting an entire day of biking.  Our Personal Heroes came through, though, drove out and rescued us and dropped us off in Idaho Springs, where Route 6 joins I-70.  Tony even brought out our trailers, in case we wanted them for the rest of the time.  But we thought about it, decided we could make do with the stuff in our daypack and fake the rest.

While we were waiting by the side of the road, I spent a good bit of time marveling at the mountains surrounding us.  These weren't the most amazing mountains we'd encounter, but they were certainly enough to set me thinking.  What causes the darn things, anyway?  Tony explained that it's the work of millions of years, continental drift shoving the rocks higher and higher into the air.  It gives you such a sense of scope, looking at the work of the hand of time and comparing it to, say, what the hand of an engineer can do.  Now, people are pretty impressive, too: they can blow up in a few seconds (with plenty of preparation) what took all that time to create.  They can carve roads through these millions of tons of rock, slice through the sides of mountains - heck, get the darn equipment in there to even do it.  That thought impressed me for a while, the ingenuity required.  How do you build a road when you don't have a road there to get the equipment in on?

At the same time, I pondered the forces that tear these things back down, and that was pretty clear, too.  Molly tried to ascend one, to get high enough to get some cell phone reception to call the Jordans, and it was very difficult going for her, because the face of the mountain was crumbly dirt and sand, no footholds.  When you think about mountains, you might think first about the forces that create them, and that's all monumental and such, but then you get around to the forces that destroy them, that whittle away at them, and that's impressive in its own way.  The wind scouring off a tiny bit at a time.  A lichen growing in a crevasse, breaking down rock into dirt over hundreds of years.  Water etching its way through the cracks, breaking the mountain down from within.  Pretty wild.  As many things do on this trip, it makes me want to know more.

And, as many things do on this trip, it made me think of the people who had been here before.  Now, it's pretty clear that settlers didn't tramp through here.  No oxen here, baby.  Just ain't happenin'.  But at what point did the settlers stop pushing westward and conclude, "um, maybe I had better turn south"?  How far in did they get? - all without roads, of course, just plugging along.  And the prospectors, how did they make their way in to discover that there might be gold five or ten miles up a mountain stream?  For that matter, what kind of life did the natives have here?  It would be a hard life, I can tell you that.

So, getting back to the day's events, we set off from Idaho Springs to Georgetown.  Or tried to, at least.  The directions were very confusing, and we wasted another good half hour or so doodling around, looking for the entrance to the bike path.  By that time, it was about six p.m. and there were thunderclouds looming that looked like they wanted to redefine "ominous" personally.  And my breathing was, finally, getting bad.  The muscles in the front of my throat were clenching up, trying to pull in enough air.  (Idaho Springs is at about 7000 feet.)  Should I take Albuterol?  Would that just make me more anxious?  Could I control the breathing well enough to ascend another 1200 feet to Georgetown?  Would the light hold?  Finally, as we headed toward what really was the entrance to the path, the rains came.  And I said, nope, let's not do this, let's stop now.  Molly agreed quite readily, we got a hotel room and some dinner and made an early night - especially since we had no gear with us, no computer, nuthin' - with the intent of getting an early start.

An inauspicious day.  We covered about 14 miles from Arvada to Golden & beyond, a few more wasted in Idaho Springs.  Tony carried us another 10 or 15 to Idaho Springs.  But sometimes you just don't get to ladle any butch points onto yourself.  You do what you can, you stop when you have to.  And that's the only attitude that I believe will work, when crossing the Rockies.