Colleen's Journal: Week Nine

There is no way of adequately starting this entry.  There are no words that will capture what today was like.  A friend of mine, Chuck, whom we'll be joining shortly for Burning Man, has a phrase for the inexpressible, things that cannot be communicated to someone who hasn't experienced them directly, like childbirth, or love: the eternal mysteries.  In ways, I think today qualifies.  I'll try to tell you what it was like, living through today, but it's really going to be a handful of words.

Today, we crossed Loveland Pass.  In the last several weeks, when it became plain to me that I wouldn't make it all the way across America by bike, I'd gained a sense of acceptance, that what I could do, I'd do, and what proved to be beyond the limits of my health and abilities, I'd leave for others.  I wasn't proud to give up the hope of biking all the way across, no, but it what's the alternative?  Self-destruction.  Among the things I'd long since accepted might be beyond my abilities was crossing the Rockies.  Heck, foremost.  A week or so ago, I didn't know if I'd make it another two days - if the altitude was already giving me such knee problems and breathing problems.  I've held my breath, metaphorically, as we've ascended from 2000 feet to 5000+, hoping to acclimate, hoping to baby my knee enough, hoping hoping hoping but knowing that I might just have to stop, any day.

We'd been given plenty of advice on dealing with altitude gain.  Watch your electrolytes, get plenty of extra water, and try not to gain more than 1500 feet in a day, if you're having to exert yourself to do so.  Well, today we started at 7000 feet in Idaho Springs.  Loveland Pass, the lowest route we could find over the Continental Divide (except for along Route 50 to the south, which we'd ditched a couple of weeks back), is at 12,000.  You do the math.  So we knew that we might have to stop, call the Jordans, get them to ferry us across.

We never stopped.

We got up at 6:00 - and ooooh, it's a strange thing, to wake up to 45 degree weather, when you were just bitching and moaning about the 111 degree weather you encountered a few days before - and grabbed some donuts and headed out.  Thirteen miles to Georgetown, gaining 1200 feet.  Congrats, we did it.  Three miles, via a lovely bike path, to Silver Plume, passing an old-but-functional railroad, the Georgetown Loop, as we went.  It was gorgeous.  Just stunning.  Amazing, what a difference from a couple hundred miles east, the prairies.  We gawked and marveled and pedalled steadily, constantly thrilled afresh to be doing it.  Knowing, always, we might have to stop, and grateful for every mile, every hundred feet of ascent, that we managed.

Was it easy?  No.  Yes.  No, we were twirling our pedals along in the granny gears, going four to eight miles an hour.  But did it hurt?  No.  My muscles never complained.  My muscles fair rejoiced, mile by mile.  We didn't have our trailers.  Over and over, I said little prayers of gratitude: this trip sponsored by Billy Romp and the Jordans.  I took sips of Albuterol (as if the challenges facing us weren't enough, I'd forgotten my Protonix - it was in my trailer), we drank lots of water and stopped very frequently.  Every few miles, every mile if necessary.  Rested a lot.  Listened to our bodies very closely.  Bought Gatorade and took it with us, and drank it when it tasted good.  (Gatorade only tastes good, in my experience, when your body needs it.)  Molly announced the altitude frequently, and that was a bizarre experience, because honestly, it really didn't look that steep!  Over and over, we goggled that we'd just put on another few hundred feet and didn't really feel it.  We generally weren't tired.  We were very careful, never let ourselves get to the point of exhaustion.  Congratulated ourselves for the terrific views that we enjoyed, the fact that at our pace, we could so much better enjoy them than the traffic rushing close by on I-70.  Watched the treeline inch closer.  Watched the flora change.  Here, the ground was very sandy and moist - it probably rains most days, aside from the mountain streams - and there was not all that much variety in the plant life, so it was easy to watch the transition.  Spruce, of course, everywhere, braving the peaks as high as it could survive.  Few flowers.  And little animal life.  Very little in the way of insects (a relief from the biting flies of the prairies, saddening that we lost the butterflies and dragonflies too), few birds, hardly even a glimpse of a squirrel or chipmunk.  We could watch it all, easily, because we were going so slowly.  But we were going.  We kept on going.

We passed a half-marathon going east, on the frontage roads.  It was an interesting interlude - for a while, the runners got so thick that we just had to pull off and watch.  About 6000 people, running from Georgetown to Idaho Springs.  My helmet goes off to them.  Running at 8000 feet altitude?  Yeesh.  Congrats.

We had to bike on I-70 for about five miles - and yes, it was permitted - but it wasn't as pleasant.  The drivers weren't nearly as rude as they'd been when we'd been on the interstate in Canton, OH, but they occasionally honked pugnaciously, and they never honked encouragingly.  Not even motorcycles.  And they were noisy and smelly and very distracting.  I was able to take a little sour grapes pleasure in the fact that their views of the mountains weren't nearly as nice as ours had been on the bike paths.

And then we reached Route 6 again.  I'd been worried, but thankfully, it wasn't the road it had been the day before.  Still little shoulder, but the curves weren't nearly as tight, and there was very little traffic.  Route 6 leads up over Loveland Pass.  It's used by trucks carrying hazardous cargo, or that are too large to fit through Eisenhower Tunnel, which must be impressive to see, drilled for, I dunno, a mile or something through the mountain.  Bikers, of course, aren't permitted in the tunnel, and I was glad that they at least posted a sign this time, "no bikes in tunnel a mile ahead."  I'm not sure why other cars would choose to go over Loveland Pass - perhaps for the views, perhaps to cross up over the Continental Divide?  But we had no choice.

We realized, at the bottom of the ascent, that we might not have enough water, so we flagged down a car and they gave us some.  We also didn't have much food left, but we didn't seem to need it.  More worrisome, I was starting to show signs of altitude sickness.  I've had it once before, and for me it started as tiredness - weariness - and depression.  Unclear thinking.  Lack of enthusiasm.  But I figured, I'll monitor it and if we have to stop, we have to stop.  End of story.

So we started up.  We had about 1500 feet to ascend, in four miles.

And we did it.

It wasn't that hard.  It wasn't easy, either.  It was very slow going.  We stopped about every third of a mile.  The road wound back and forth between two mountains, a constant series of switchbacks, which made for a constant sense of "oh god" and "hey, wow!" as we noticed cars driving above us, on the road we'd be tackling, and looked down at what we'd already accomplished.  There were frequent pull-offs, sandy areas where we'd rest and watch the cars going up, slowly as well.  And still, it was hard to believe it was that steep, because it just didn't feel it.  Perhaps because we were surrounded by mountains, with slopes of, oh, forty to seventy degrees.  Our road was, we calculated, between five and eight percent grade, for the most part.  Molly can probably tell you better than I if it got higher than that, as she's the one with the altimeter.  The altitude sickness went away, we drank constantly - sometimes we'd have to stop just to drink, because we were breathing hard, trying to get in enough oxygen.  We stopped to take pictures, to find places to pee, to breathe, and just heck, that was enough, let's stop.  But we always knew we could keep going.  There's no word to capture the sense of delight and wonder and joy, at knowing, over and over, mile by mile, 100 feet of altitude gain at a time, we are doing this.

So we reached the Continental Divide and cheered ourselves, since the people who'd arrived there in cars didn't seem inclined to do it for us.  Hmph.  We didn't really care.  We cared enough for ourselves.  For the last eight weeks, I'd been wondering and worrying about whether we could make it over the Rockies, and for the last week, thinking I probably wouldn't.  And I did.  No matter what else I do or fail to do on this trip, I conquered 12,000 feet, on a bike.  That doesn't make me Lance Armstrong, but it sure as hell makes me a proud Colleen Campbell.

Going down, I'm sure you'll all be surprised to hear, wasn't nearly as fun.  The clouds went from ominous to scary, while we were on the top of the Divide, and it got darn cold, and started spattering down some rain.  We put on all our clothes and ponchos and whatnot and headed down.  We'd biked up for 30 miles, and then coasted down for 10.  And we had to stop a lot, going down, too.  The hands cramp from braking.  The roads were wet and slick.  You can't look up from monitoring the road to enjoy the views.  It's nerve-wracking, especially when your bike is over-sensitive and twitchy.  You just hope it ends soon.

But we coasted into Keystone, which is a lovely little ski resort town, if you like that sort of thing, which apparently I don't.  I was glad there was food to be had, as we really hadn't eaten a decent meal all day, but other than that...whatever.  There was part of me that just couldn't grasp the concept, at that moment, of anyone being pleased at, y'know, being carted up a slope by a a ski lift and then zipping down it.  I'm sure you ski aficionados can give me brilliant defenses of your chosen sport, but at that time, I was so singlemindedly proud and amazed and...suffused with this indescribable joy...that it crowded out anything else.  We'd done it.  We did this amazing thing.  Nothing else could measure up, at that time.

From there, it was mostly a coast, with a slight bit of up, to get to Dillon, where the wonderful Jordans met us with our trailers.  We got a hotel, went for some dinner.  I wasn't hungry, so I got some cake and went to a free Young Dubliners concert.  Rather fortuitous.  They're a celt-rock band, a bit heavier on the "rock" end of the spectrum than I prefer, but good.  And free.  And when you're jonesing for live music all summer (I normally attend about 90 nights of live music a year; it's one of the things I miss most, in leaving Boston), you sit there and be pleased that a band you enjoy just happens to be playing in the little town you're in for the night.  Still, it was hard to completely forget myself, as I generally do with music.  I would look around at the crowd and think about them and their lives, the choices they'd make, whether they were visiting, lived there, why, and inevitably compare myself and what I'd just done to them.

I was tired, by the end.  Wanted sleep.  Give poor muscles a rest.  I know we've still got many days of biking in the mountains to go, and from here on out, we pull our trailers.  But we've done the worst of it.  There are no passes as high, no more days where we'll have to attempt 5000 feet of ascent.  We'll be better adjusted to the altitude.  And we'll know we can do it.  If nothing else beautiful and meaningful had happened this entire summer, today would have been enough.  Today, I will remember for the rest of my life.

Apparently, when fortune smiles on us, she gives us one of those big crazy toothy grins that takes up your whole face and makes everyone else around you smile too.  Yesterday was plenty splendid enough, in my book.  Today, though, was pretty much a breeze, start to finish.

I take back what I said before about Denver being the biking capital of America.  It's all of Colorado, the whole thing.  We followed bike paths all the way from Dillon to Avon today, and had a wide shoulder that was being improved into a path for the last few miles from Avon to Edwards - about fifty miles, in all.  Parallelling the same mountain stream, and a lovely and cheerful stream it was.  The paths were, for the most part, great.  Well upkept, not too steep - switchbacks when necessary - and often very well signed, including warnings about the steepness of the grade ahead, reminders to keep to the right, and indications of "road damage" upcoming.

We started off the day with a bike around the reservoir, which Dillon, Frisco, and several other small tourist-based towns border, ascending some as we went, but not too hard.  There were parts where we grunted and wheezed with the trailers, waxing nostalgic about yesterday, when we went without thanks to the largesse of the Jordans, but in ways, it just made us more grateful for what we'd been able to do then, knowing all the more clearly how miserable it would have been to carry them ourselves.  Then we headed out of Frisco up to Copper Mountain and thence to Vail Pass, knowing that we'd be gaining a good 1600 feet in the next 10 miles.  That may not sound like anything major to you, but hauling 50+ pounds and operating at 10,000+ feet makes a world of difference.  Still, we were pretty good-natured about it, knowing it wouldn't be as bad as the worst of yesterday, in terms of grade, and really appreciating the bike paths.

We got a small bit of attention from all the bikers that we encountered, but then, a couple of miles into the hike up to Vail Pass, we met a delightful woman who enquired about the trailers we were carrying and, of course, about the whole trip.  I joked with her that she could carry my trailer to the top of the pass if she'd like, and she said, "Well, sure, in my car."  And she wasn't kidding.  She quickly agreed to take on the trailers in Copper Mountain and meet us at the top of the pass.  Wheeeeeeeeee!  Such a relief!  It's not that I'd been dreading the trip up, per se, but it made such a difference from then on, to know that I wouldn't be hauling the trailer.  She stayed with us for the next several miles, listening to our stories (mostly from Molly, because I couldn't find the breath to talk consistently - it was a hardy climb, after all) and telling us about her own life.  And then, when we got to her car parked alongside the trail, she took the trailers and we headed off.

It was hard.  It wasn't even as hard as the day before had been, but it was certainly hard enough that we knew it would have been exhausting, towing 50-odd pounds each.  We stopped less frequently than we had the day before, and mostly didn't need to stay in the lowest gear.  It was beautiful, though, even better than Loveland Pass had been, because we were following the stream and well away from the cars and encountering lots of cyclists.  Interestingly, almost all coming the other way - down from Vail Pass.  We thought about that for a while, pondering whether we were just going the same pace as all the others going uphill, so not meeting any, but when we got to the top, we concluded that no, really, it was that people drove up there and coasted all the way down.  Well sheesh!  Where's the challenge  in that?  Part of me is slightly indignant, as if they're cheating - there's absolutely no effort to that at all.  And it's not that it takes a lot of technical skill, like skiing or mountain biking.  It's just coasting on a path.  But whatever.  We made our way to the top, 10,666 feet, thanked our wonderful benefactress, and then coasted down to Vail ourselves.

The ride down to Vail was wonderful.  Vastly better than the ride from Loveland Pass had been.  Partly, this was because it was much warmer, balmy, no rain, no winds, no slick roads.  No cars, no wishing desperately for a shoulder: a whole bike path all to oneself.  Perhaps it was also less steep (though we're told that we rode down the steeper side); certainly I didn't need to stop so much for hand breaks.  For a good long while of it, we had an entire road to ourselves, now closed off to cars.  Whz!  Vrm!  Much fun.  We passed a few people biking up, and as the distance from the top got longer, I respected them more and more - it was 2500 feet up from Vail and yes, steep.

We noticed a few things as we went.  First off, biking is apparently a designer sport in Colorado.  Almost everyone we met was wearing fancy jerseys, clip-in non-recessed bike shoes (like, for racers), expensive sunglasses.  Every bike was a Trek, Bianchi, Specialized, etc.  This is some serious money to sink into biking, for the purpose of coasting down from Vail Pass.  I honestly felt much more...legit...than these people, these weekend warriors of the bike world.  Okay, that's not fair.  They were in shape.  But I can tell you this, they weren't biking up to Loveland Pass to get into that shape.  Anyway, Coloradians must be rich, because the goods and services here are so expensive, the roads are crammed with Range Rovers and the like, and there are new houses going up everywhere (and SO UGLY!! the dominant style is nouveau 70's ski lodge).

So we coasted into Vail, 17 miles almost entirely down.  A few ups, including through a goat pasture, which is just bizarre - little posted signs requesting that we watch out for "WEED-EATING goats."  But mostly it was a gigantic wheeeeeeeeeee!  (I just did the math, and the grade from Vail to Vail Pass is about the same as from Georgetown to Loveland Pass, which we did yesterday.  Granted, we went almost twice as far up, but still, that's damn impressive, that we did meet some people biking up what we were blithely zooming down.)  Anyway, Vail itself was not to my taste.  It was like Disneyland.  MountainDisney.  The only thing it lacked was people in cartoon character costumes sweeping up cigarette butts.  Oh, and it had more bikes.  It was ludicrously expensive, even a sandwich, and incredibly overdone.  It existed solely for tourists, even in the summer.  Now, granted, I technically am a tourist, but I don't feel like one, because I didn't drive to get there, which makes all the difference in the world.  Or something.  The people seemed either rude or ignorant or both, with a notable exception of one guy who could direct us to the next bit of the bike path and tell us accurately what the elevation of Avon, our next destination, was.

So on we went, to Avon, which we'd intended to be our stopping point, but aw heck, we were still going downhill, we could do a few more, so we ended up in Edwards.  Where there aren't any cheap motels.  So we're at a church again.  And hey, free, too!

From Vail to Edwards, the sun has been pretty blinding, so I haven't looked up much.  But now that we're here, I notice, startled, that the mountains are much, much lower.  Much less commanding.  They don't dominate the landscape, jutting impressively everywhere, throwing their weight around.  They're just...there.  More rolling, more mellow.  Commensurately less beautiful, too.  Sure, we see some fascinating rock faces, where the strata have been exposed by the tools of men, but by themselves, the mountains just don't grab the attention and hold it in an iron grip.  And by Edwards, we're pedalling most of the time.  Still heading downhill - we're still at about 7000 feet, for goodness sake! - but it's nothing like as steep.  The mountains are brown and sere, looking as if they'd just blow away in a strong enough wind.  The foliage has become mostly scrub - sagebrush and the like - on one hill face, and evergreens on the other.  No clue why, whether it's something to do with winds or where moisture collects and is retained or how the sun hits the hills.  Anyway, it's still more interesting than Kansan landscape, and fortunately for us, pretty consistently up or down, no big hills to conquer, just steady pedalling or coasting.  So I'm not complaining.

And I am very, very glad to be here.  Today was the last big pass we'll have to conquer.  I don't know what the topography will be like from here to Salt Lake City, whether we'll be encountering up-and-down mountains again, but I know that from here on out, it's predominantly downhill.  No matter what else, we have 7000 more feet to descend than we do to ascend.  And we're still doing it.  Still okay.  Still thrilled to be here.

Today was probably the single most pleasant of the entire trip, thus far.  I can't imagine it getting any better than this.  Top of the charts was the fact that today was the first (and possibly the only to come) day we've had in which we went predominantly and significantly downhill.  This isn't to say that we coasted all of today, not at all.  We went 76 miles and lost 1900 feet.  Just as a quick reminder, yesterday we lost 2500 feet in 17 miles.  Today's downhill was less than one percent grade.  But we could feel it, definitely.  There's no other way we could have done 76 miles, at high altitudes, and not been exhausted.  (Especially because I'm apparently an incredible idiot: yesterday morning, I fell down the stairs carrying my trailer.  I scuffed up a knee and hurt an ankle, but it wasn't until today that the real damage showed up - apparently pulled my left quad but good.  It hurt more today than it ever has from any amount of biking.  I gimped about all day.)

La de da.  So why was today so deliciously wonderful?  Oh, lots of reasons.  Today was the day of wondering, "And why doesn't everyone bike across the country?"  (Well, because they know it would significantly diminish my ability to be self-congratulatory about doing so myself.  Very generous of them all, to refrain.)  We stayed alongside the mountain stream, which went through a quick adolescence and then matured into a full-fledged mountain river, i.e. the Colorado, and alongside that came a treasure trove of delights, including and especially yet another bike path, seventeen miles of bliss.

Why was this bike path there?  We surmise that it's part of an attempt to build a bike path all the way from Denver to Grand Junction, in which case none of you will have any excuse at all for not biking that route.  But for now, it started in the absolute middle of nowhere, honestly, connected with nothing - not even a town, just a frontage road.  But just, absolutely just, in time: right after we got off the highway to join it, the interstate turned into a one-lane-in-each-direction-with-absolutely-no-shoulder-and-construction-work.  Yeek.  Lucky there!  Instead of dealing with that, we got to go on this fabulous, new, excellently thought-out and maintained bike path, which granted us, as I noted yesterday, better views of all the splendiferous scenery than the cars get, along with relative peace and quiet (somehow they'd insulated it from the car noise!) and as leisurely a pace as we cared to set.

And we set a nice pace, but still, barely pedalling for the most part, we coasted down the length of the path.  And it was fascinating.  Back in the real world, I can be pretty down on humanity and our nonchalant attitude towards having our way with nature, but I had to admit, this bike path was a terribly nice job of engineering, accompanying the terribly nice job of engineering that had been done to get the road through there in the first place, after the terribly nice job of engineering to get the railroad through there.  We wound all through and around and under and beside the interstate, which was just terrific - we got to see how it was all done, the pylons and how it was blasted through and around and intertwining with the mountains.  Believe me, when you're driving that puppy, you won't get to see the handiwork that goes into it.  Meanwhile, we were passing through this neat little riparian habitat, the trees and wildlife that grow up right alongside a river.  On the other side of the river was the railroad.  We pondered as to whether it was still in operation - never saw a train on it, but I did see a truck fitted to the track (atop track-spaced wheels), backing up along it, and much later, we saw several trains, including an Amtrak).  It made me think that being an engineer for such a stretch would be one of the more interesting jobs to have had.  And on top of all that, the majority of the bike path passed through the Glenwood Canyon.  It's not tremendously surprising once you put two and two together: the Colorado River also carved out the Grand Canyon.  This was very similar, on a much smaller scale, and honestly, I enjoyed it much more.  Part of that is because there was NO PEOPLE (Grand Canyon gets 5 million visitors a year, hence it's boringly choked with tourists), but part was just getting to traverse the thing from the bottom and see all this fabulous detail of the sides as we passed through.  And then, as if that weren't enough, the bike path joined up with various other recreation sites and activities, such as the launch site for rafting and kayaking trips, which is quite fun to watch and outpace.  And remember, we were pretty much coasting through all of this.  I couldn't have thought of a better way to spend my "altitude gained" points.

The whole day was fascinating, really. We went from these fairly unimpressive mountains at 7000 feet through, well, the whole spectrum of every kind of promontory you could imagine.  Green and verdant and wooded.  Bald, dusty, dry, studded with a few paltry scrub bushes.  Peaked, craggy, thrusting accusing boulders and splinters at the sky.  Mellow and rolling.  Etched with rills.  Buttes of almost every imaginable color, pale beautiful shades of pink, blue, yellow, green, brown, orange, gray.  Red clay rocks.  Mountains tumbling over themselves, trying to fall the fastest.  Bearing the scars of dynamite, of wind, of the forces of water from within.  Long caterpillars of hills, slogging and melting and broadening down to the ground.  Every mile brought you a new view, every five miles a new category of mountain.  I wish I had names for them all - like the infamous and apocryphal fifty-seven names for snow that Eskimos have, it just seems that there must be designations for the variety of mountains we saw today.  If not, someone should go out there and make up some words.

Wildlife also featured largely in the day.  Early on, I saw quite a variety.  Something that looked like a very large ferret - cream-colored body, darker head, and a distinctly red-brown tail.  Any guesses?  A stoat?  Weasel?  Lemme know, y'all.  I saw squiggly little rodents that looked like a cross between a chipmunk and a black mouse.  Bunnies.  Our first prairie dog!  And lots of birds - the first Stellar's Jay I've seen on this trip, ravens with distinctive white patches on their bodies and wings, the return of the red-wing blackbird (we've seen them in every single state thus far), and a number of very large predatory birds, hawks or eagles, I don't know which, with a wingspan of about 24 to 28 inches.  This may not sound fabulous when just reading about it, but it's pretty darn exciting, seeing it in action.  And lots of domesticated animals, too.  Lots of ranches hereabouts with burros and horses.  We saw one farm that had pigs, sheep, goats, llamas, and horses, all penned separately.  It's no longer touristy area - the mountains are too low for skiing - and it shows, in that life seems to be real again here, not plastic and pre-manufactured, the way it was in Vail.

Anyway, it was a terrific day.  We're still at 5300 feet, just over the official elevation of Denver and a mile up in the air, so we've got a ways to descend yet, but it'll be gentle from here on out, I think, if noticeable at all.  And I'm really looking forward to it all.

Not all that much happened today, actually.  A lot of it was dominated by pain for me, sadly - my butt resumed its tirade against the whole notion of, well, me sitting upon it and biking for hours and hours a day, and my left quad was still incredibly painful.  I look like an utter dork, limping around right after I get off the bike.  Owwwwww.  Amusing, though, that the worst injuries Molly and I seem to have sustained thus far have happened off the bikes.

We lost a good bit of elevation again today, but I didn't really feel it, this time.  We're well below a mile up, now.  I don't feel myself breathing any better, as we descend: perhaps I just acclimated completely, or perhaps it really doesn't matter that much, when you're only a mile up.  My breathing was actually pretty bad today - possibly because of failing to take the Protonix a few days back, it might've thrown everything off.  This continues to worry me, in the long-term, "when is this going to end?"  Ah well.

Today we had plenty of pretty mountains as we went, the ever-changing scenery, but what dominated my attention, nature-wise, was the Colorado.  There was rain last night, apparently very heavy in spots, including flash-flooding.  I wondered if that accounted for the unappealing mud-brown color (actually, it looked startlingly like chocolate milk) of the river, or whether it's just always that shade.  Quite unattractive, I must say.  We saw a few ducks and a couple of herons in it, and fishermen once, and kayakers once, but for the most part, it seemed to be as unattractive to wildlife and people as it was to us.

I felt pretty knowledgeable, today.  I'm hardly an expert on geology, but I've picked up enough here and there (I especially love spelunking) that I could give mini-lectures on the formation of the rocks and structures that lined our way.  "You can see how the river carved all this out," I'd blather to Molly, "how there the water washed away the softer minerals and left behind those deposits, blah blah blah."  The rocks frequently looked like Swiss cheese, or like gigantic worms had riddled them.

We did a lot of biking on the interstate today.  Fortunately, this was completely legal and there was a decent shoulder for almost all of it.  Where we could, we tended to take frontage roads - there was very little in the way of bike paths.  This resulted in the one adventure of today: we blithely headed off on the road paralleling I-70 out of town, only to discover three miles down it that it ended.  For reasons we are entirely unable to discern, the interstate is bordered by a barbed-wire fence.  At first I guessed that this was to keep free-range cattle from wandering on, but no, even the median is fenced in.  Anyway, this left us with two options: bike three miles back to town and three miles out again, or breach the inscrutable defenses of the interstate, just have our intrepidheroine way with it.  We chose the latter, as it's been a good few days since we've done anything particularly intrepid.  That and the fact that we're lazy.  So Molly used a Leatherman to bend the wires out of the way at the bottom and we scuttled underneath, handing the bikes over and pushing the trailers under.  It was time-consuming, because yesterday I busted my rear skewer and my BOB trailer is currently held on by an intricate lacing of bungee cord, which had to be undone and redone.  We probably didn't save any time, scrabbling around underneath the barbed wire.  But hey, we got more butch points that way.

That's most of the excitement of the day.  Pretty mesas and buttes, ugly river; plotting out the remainder of the trip from here to Salt Lake City (yay! we seem to be perfectly on time for the course we've set), gimping about on poor anguished leg, yadda yadda.
Today was still relatively flat, following the river, but we'll lose it soon enough as we head off into the wilds of Utah.  Perhaps exciting news then...

Our last day in Colorado; tomorrow we cross into a new state.  Strange that it feels like we've been in CO less than we were in KS, though (not doing the math at the moment) I suspect it was similar lengths of time.  Colorado was just so varied, so challenging and rewarding, and while I liked Kansas, I really didn't need to see more than three days of it to get the point.  Anyway, today we rested, and it was pleasant.  Got my BOB trailer fixed (all it took was a single bolt), bought a new saddle in the hopes of placating my butt, and then lolled about all day.  Watched a dumb special-effects-laiden summer flick.  Did our laundry (ah, the luxury of really clean clothes!).  Hung around in downtown shopping district, which was truly splendid.  Apparently there's been a public works arts project going on there, accumulating pieces, for about 17 years.  Blocks and blocks and blocks of sculpture of every type - realistic, modern, fountains, whimsical stuff, brass and chrome and marble and glass chips.  It was beautiful and moving and actually made me jealous.  "Boston doesn't have this.  Why doesn't Boston have this?  I'm movin' here."  We met cool bikers, who shared a photo-journalistic book of mountain bike treks with us.  Made it pretty clear that mountain bikers must think road bikers are wusses.  (We are, if it means doing wheelies off cliffs.)

Anyway, it was our last rest day from now until Salt Lake City.  Six days of Utah, which we're told will be both hard and boring.  Oh good.  Wish us luck.

Well, technically, Utah has been neither hard nor boring.  Except in that by the end of the day, when you want to stop and there's no place to stop, everywhere is hard and boring.

We got a brisk start this morning, tailwind and everything, but our energy flagged somewhat when, at our last stop before crossing into Utah, we were told that Utah had substantial hills and that it was all desert.  Not really encouraging.  And then we actually crossed over, and whoo! that was a surprise.  We passed a sign, "Leaving Colorful Colorado," and my smart-ass mental rejoinder, of course, was "What, now we're in the ugly monochromatic Colorado?"  No, in fact, we were in startlingly beautiful Utah.  Of course, very little of it has been as startling beautiful as our first view, but that was enough to reassure me that Utah wouldn't be six solid days of ugh.  There was a valley spread before us, a vista with classic mountain ranges shuffling off endlessly as a backdrop, and oh, the colors - blues and oranges and reds, a huge variety of browns and yellows and grays.  We stopped for a little lunch in the only shade in that county, under a juniper tree, with shards of boulders tumbling down the hills, a dry gully filled with gorgeous rounded rocks of every imagineable shade (blues, greens, purples, pinks), and neon-green lichens.  A lot of it struck me, passing it slowly, that this is stuff I never would have noticed from the window of a car at 75 mph.  Sure, everyone would rather drive through more interesting, attractive scenery, but most people aren't going to idle along at 10 mph for the sake of really absorbing it.  It was a strong reminder of why we're biking across.

Not all of the day has been so pleasant, though.  We were wending our way pretty leisurely along, when we realized that the storm front to the north was headed, not to the east, but southwest.  I.e., not only could we not outrun it, it would be pursuing us.  It was an impressive front, though - it totally obscured the mountains with sweeping sheets of blue-gray and plenty of jagged lightning. We gave it our darndest, but after awhile it was pretty miserable, when the rain pelting us was painful.  We laid our bikes on their sides and clambered down in a ditch with a big piece of plastic cradled around us.  And watched the hail ping down all around.  Ah, so that's why it hurt!  The storm passed over us fairly quickly, once we weren't, well, keeping pace within it, and soon thereafter we left the highway for what we hoped was our destination, Cisco.

Cisco was not our destination.  Cisco was not anyone's destination.  Cisco had ceased to exist some years before, apparently.  We didn't realize this, at first, because while there had been several signs to let us know, "No Services," we met a fair number of cars coming down the road, so we thought it was still a liveable place which might have a church.  When we arrived, though, we pedalled through in numb disbelief.  All of the buildings were boarded up, falling in, and painted with "no trespassing."& There was no one there.  A railroad running through, some heaps of trash, and lots of nothing.  It was eerie - especially given that there were power and phone lines strung through, so obviously people had lived there not too far in the past.

We decided we'd head on, get to the Visitor's Center (40 miles within Utah; I'm guessing, because they didn't want to run pipes 40 miles to the nothingness that is the state border), but first have a bite to eat.  This was possibly a mistake.  It was an extremely jittery meal.  We realized that there was one single person in town, a man banging on equipment on the railroad.  We couldn't figure out what we was doing, but we knew we didn't want to attract his attention - somehow, one person there felt more wrong than none.  And the whole place...well, I felt like I was in a thriller movie, like Aliens, where the heroes enter a situation that's spooky, begrimed, and claustrophobic, look around, deduce that everyone's dead - and then it dawns on them, the monster that did the work is still lurking, and they scream and run just as it leaps into their midst.  Whatever wrongness had killed off Cisco still felt very present.

We hightailed it out of there, and soon after Cisco we found out why there were still cars on the road - new cars at that, many with bikes on them.  There was a turnoff to Moab from the road.  Moab has been repeatedly recommended to us for biking, in the last several days, but it's 45 miles out of our way, so no go.  We returned to the highway and continued on.

By this point, though, we were pretty tired.  My new seat alleviated a lot of the pain, but not all, and when you've biked 60-odd miles and thought you were going to stop, your body rebels.  My knee started hurting badly.  I could hardly make 8 or 9 mph.  We tried to reach the Visitor's Center, but we didn't know how much farther it was, and finally we pooped out  at 76 miles and made camp off the highway.  It's not ideal, but there's a point at which you just have to stop hoping you're going to make it another mile or two and settle down.  Tomorrow will be a very short day, and thank goodness - I'm already exhausted.

As predicted, a short day, zippedidodah'ing along for 33 miles.  It was pleasant, mostly because we knew it would be so short and we could rest.  Good thing, too - tomorrow we want to get an early start before it gets hot, because we're going to be biking over 50 miles in which there may or may not be a single stop for water.  (If not, we'll flag down an RV, as we did yesterday when I spilled half of my water.)

The Visitor's Center turned out to be about four miles from where we'd camped.  Surely you could have biked four more miles, cee?  Um, you first.  The water there was pretty foul, but we loaded up anyway, having no choice.  Dawdled there, actually, reading and watching various bits of Utah's self-promotion.  What's the first word that snaps into your head when you think of Utah?  If it's anything other than "Salt Lake City" or "Mormons," go reward yourself with a cookie.  Utah, though, knows it ain't gonna collect much tourist revenue from those thoughts, so they try hard to put other ones into your head.  And admittedly, there's an awful lot of tremendously beautiful, moving, striking landscape here.  We don't happen to be passing through much of the officially declared Beautiful Landscape - we're on the dusty highway with the brooding gray-brown buttes and strings of low mountains bordering us - but you can't deny it's there.  Which, as many things do, strengthens my resolve to spend some time next summer seeing some of the states at greater length: driving out, god forbid, so I can actually go to the museums and national parks and such.  Maybe getting a mountain bike and bringing it with me, to see Moab and Zion and Bryce and all these natural wonders up close and personal.  With all due respect to Edward Abbey, I am glad that they're available for me to see, and, y'know, I live here.  I might as well make use of the fact that I'm a citizen of a nation with endless possibilities in terms of landscape and terrain and natural history.

Today is fairly hot again, and hot in a new and interesting way.  There's...nothing... between you and the sun.  It feels like a sequence from one of Stephen R. Donaldson's books, the Thomas Covenant chronicles, in which the hero lands in a world where the sun's rising predicts the kind of day it's going to be.  During a "desert sun," the world sucks itself into parchedness, everything wilts and crackles away into brittleness and then dust, the marrow just evaporates from life.  That's the feeling you get, passing these gray flats and endless buttes.  It's fascinating, striking in an alien way, but there's no denying the essential aridity of the area.  It's so constant, so present.  Yesterday's rain was apparently a fluke: the area receives less than 8 inches a year.  The ground is cracked, the plants are peaked and sallow, the land is unforgiving.  It's all very stark, and it makes me wonder if anyone has ever tried to hack a life out of this land.  I suspect not.  The rivers we pass are dry, there are few animals (one prairie dog and one lizard today), and there are no trees.  (Interestingly, no cacti, either.  Grasses, bushes, but no cacti.  Wonder why.)  And yes, I got dehydrated as well.  Easy to do, when you wake up with little water left and try to conserve it, not knowing how long it'll be before you acquire more.

Now we're at a little oasis, where the Green River crosses the highway.  Even here, there's little more than motels and restaurants.  Life flourishes in a compact sort of way - we saw a hummingbird and a heron and lots of swallows, all crowded into the same few hundred square yards.  Not birds I would strongly associate with each other.

Tomorrow we tackle a long waterless stretch, and the day after we're in the mountains again.  Gah.  Well, at least it's not monotonous...