Molly's Journal: Week Nine

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!

Woo is the word of the day! We made it up and over Loveland Pass, which, at 11,990 feet, is the highest road we will go over all summer. In 30 miles, we went from ~7000 feet of elevation at Idaho Springs to ~12,000 feet. The beginning of the day was easy, as we gradually climbed up and up into the mountains without even noticing. The grade increased to 5 or 6%, and then to 8 - 11% for the final four mile ascent along Route 6 up to Loveland Pass. The amazing thing is that the grades were so constant and steady that they didn't really faze us. I had a bit of trouble with lightheadedness, and we took the last 4 miles at 4 to 6 MPH, but - we didn't walk once. We climbed the whole damn mountain on our bikes. Each switchback brought a new view of the next twist above, and I kept thinking, "Oh, that's it. That's where the road gets really bad. That's going to be horrible, getting up there." Then, a little while later, we'd be up on that road that looked so high and distant, thinking, "What? That was it? And we made it?"

And: we made it. It's all downhill from here.

For those of you who think that downhills are always pleasant, they aren't. Sure, short downhills with big fat shoulders are breezy and fun, but you ain't lived until you've tried braking for ten miles on a wet, two-lane switchback road with no shoulder. Riding up the mountain we went slowly and took frequent breaks to admire the view. Riding down the mountain, it was cold and rainy and our hands were cramping up from braking so much.

I don't think I'm entirely ready to talk about what today meant to me. I have conquered something that I wasn't confident I could do. I have achieved something most people wouldn't even think about trying. I have fought and won a battle against the landscape and against my own body. The rest of the ride is cake. Almost moot. Sure, there will be grueling days. We still have to get over Vail Pass tomorrow, and that will be with trailers in tow. Utah will be constant hills. I'm going to have to get across hot, lonely Nevada by myself. But the fact remains that we're past the highest and hardest mountain, and from now on, the downhills will outnumber the uphills.

Someone out there: drink a pint for me. I'd like to, but I can't. Write me and tell me what you drank. Make it something good, and I'll pay. Drink to your health and the health of everyone you care about. Drink to freedom and to doing what you love just because it's there. May you all live well, whatever that means to you.

Tonight, I suspect I will sleep very well.

In which we marvel at the clout of a well-heeled bike community

Today, we had the incredible pleasure of biking over another mountain pass. This time, instead of clinging to the side of a minor highway whose skinny gravel shoulder was slowly eroding down the mountain, we rode over in style on a paved bike path.

For those who are curious, we haven't dragged rubber across a bike path since we left Maine.  In general, people don't put bike paths in useful places. Ohio had lots, but not where we needed them. We cruised on one in Denver for a few miles, true, but a few miles doesn't really go very far when your scope is coast-to-coast.  Today, however, we spent about 85% of our day on dedicated paved bike trails.

It didn't escape our notice that nearly every other biker we saw today was wearing flashy bike gear, $150 sunglasses, and riding very pricey bikes. I suspect there's some sort of correlation here.  In Colorado, bikers are thick as grad students at a free-food giveaway. Is it any surprise that we biked from Dillon to Avon almost entirely separated from motor traffic? I was surprised that there wasn't a path network extending from Denver or Boulder out here.
 
Yesterday, while stopping for mongo nachos after biking Loveland Pass, we saw a van advertising "Coasting Bike Trips Down Vail Pass". At the time, this was completely unthinkable to us - we had just spent a very unpleasant few miles in cold, rainy weather trying desperately to be seen by passing cars while clinging to the side of the road. Why anyone would want to skip the slow, deliberate climb up the mountain, which provided ample time to admire the view, and head straight for the manic eyes-on-road downhill slalom course was beyond our grasp. Today, we were amused to find several groups of people coming down from Vail pass, but very very few going up. It seems that Coasting Bike Trips are a common sport around here. And why not? Drive to the top, swing a leg over your banana-seat bike, and cruise down. This gave me lots of respect for the other folks biking up the pass, since they were clearly in the minority. That, and it was a hell of a climb.

Fortune hit again, this time in the form of a kindly stranger. (Fancy that! That never happens to us!) When we were at about 9700 feet, a woman biked up alongside us to ask about our trailers. We told her about the journey and she was intrigued, so we swapped stories for a while. She was very impressed by our plans, and by what we'd done so far; I, on the other hand, was humbled to have praise lavished on us by an accomplished athlete who had been into ultra-running and was actively involved in weightlifting, running, yoga, and triathloning. She and her husband brought our trailers up to the top of the pass in their Jeep, allowing us to climb it unfettered. It was a hard climb, but very doable. I felt less lightheaded than I had yesterday, which made me happy. Having a pleasant little trail winding alongside a creek didn't hurt, either. I feel confident that we could have made it to the top with our trailers, but it would have been a much less pleasant ride. I felt like I'd accomplished something in just making it over Loveland Pass and Vail Pass on consecutive days, weight be damned. I admit it does make me want to try to do them both in one day someday - anyone want to try it with me? But now isn't the time for machismo. Now is the time for feeling secure in the knowledge that we've conquered what we set out to conquer and, and for knowing that the downhills will outnumber the uphills and no matter what, we've got something  almost 12,000 feet tall to be proud of.

Which was, quite literally, Easy Street

When we were biking across Kansas, the slow, slight uphill climb was almost imperceptible to me. I thought, hey, a few hundred feet doesn't really seem to matter, right? Well, today we biked 76 miles, lost about 1900 feet of elevation (a piddling 0.5% grade), and coasted almost the whole way. Sure, there was some pedaling - our feet were turning around, anyway - but a goodly portion of today was spent laughing, resting, and ogling the countryside. All in all, it was much more leisurely than the past two days of grunting, sweating, and goggling at how high the altimeter was climbing. What a perfectly beautiful day.  I know that the rest of our days won't be like this, but wouldn't it be great if they were? 76 sweet-n-easy miles, ma'am, just sign on the dotted line...

Every time I try to think about events in the past, they all seem impossibly distant. Even this morning seems distant - did we really wake up in a church left accidentally unlocked just for us, to find that a Christian football team was starting practice there in 45 minutes? Wasn't that days ago? So many little things happen over the course of the day that it's hard to see it as a coherent whole. The mountains changed dramatically in form and composition several times today. Edwards was nothing like smelly but gorgeous Glenwood Springs was nothing like weird tourist-trap-wannabe Rifle. How long did we bike before we got on the beautifully constructed bike path along I-70 and through Glenwood Canyon? Was it really today? It's hard to not reduce the day's events to just how I'm feeling at the end of the day. It's no surprise, then, that things that happened a week ago seem as far away as Upstate New York. A week ago today, we got a ride in a Mack truck full of dog food. Today, we grooved on through a fantastic canyon bike path. At home, a week seems like a tiny stretch of time - sure, things happen, but the world remains pretty consistent. Out here, a week can put an entire mountain range between you and your starting point. Wild. I got a letter today from a friend who asked if I'd be able to re-adjust to living in the "stationary world" and staying in one place for more than two days. The answer: yes, but man, will it feel different!

In which we dismantle a fence

Sadly, the act of wanton property destruction we committed today was entirely reversible, despite having caught Fight Club on TV a few days ago. Emboldened by our recent discovery of miles and miles of bike paths and lanes, we took nearly-empty frontage roads for most of this morning's ride. Until, that is, the frontage road suddenly turned left, crossed the highway, and headed back to the barely-there town six miles back. We spent some time trying to figure out why it was that an entire bridge was built to connect one unused highway frontage road to another, but this was moot. We didn't want to backtrack and add twelve miles onto our day, but the highway was fenced off with barbed wire. What's a girl to do?

Undaunted, we whipped out the handy leatherman tool, unbent some wires, and hoisted the bottom of the fence up another eight inches or so. I slipped underneath, Colleen passed me the bikes, we rolled the trailers under the bottom, and everything got hooked back up together in the breakdown lane. We probably didn't save any time doing it this way, but it was fun and we got some good, curious looks from motorists.

It was fun today to see the landscape changing every five or ten miles. Biking gives you a closeness and an intimacy with the land that you don't get by any other means of transportation. You have time to slowly notice every feature of a landscape - the softness of limestone, the relative scarcity of flowers, the sandy soil or even the colorful pavement - it's all there. When it takes you twenty minutes to pass a big mountain, you have nothing but time to study its faces. Today felt like a breakpoint - we passed from dry, green mountain land to arid brown and yellow desert land. The mountains have become rocky red-brown buttes, and the air is so dry it sometimes hurts my nose. There is so much beauty in this land that would be lost on me if I were in a car - I'm sure I would fail to notice the blue of the dust, choosing instead to flip through the radio stations or try to figure out when I can next stop for a Coke and a pee break.  Aside: we did see plenty of prairie dogs today, now that we've left the prairies almost a full state behind in Kansas. Is that normal? Do prairie dogs only live in the desert, or do some of them actually inhabit prairies somewhere?

Rest in Green River - movies and relaxin', hanging out in cool bike shops and spending lots of time not writing this entry...

Through fire and hail and threat of drought, but not in that order

Today was a gift-of-the-magi answer to our prayers. Yesterday, I think we were both feeling the weight of the trip. We've crossed the Rockies, done the hardest part, so now what? 6 days of boring biking through Utah didn't really get our juices flowing. We were homesick. Yesterday's rest day was funny - it didn't feel like an indulgence, it just felt like a day where I woke up and didn't bike. It was just like that, an easy offhand choice. Let's not bike today! Let's go get good food and see a movie instead! the world called to us. You don't want to bike anyway! Sounds lame! Let's play! So play we did, and it was good. I bought a book ("Bimbos of the Death Sun") and finished reading it that day. I slept in and played with photos and had a really really good smoothie for lunch. Nothing, it seemed, could be this interesting in Utah.

I promise I will never think anything like that again.

For starters, the map was on bad crack. One "town" that we'd counted on for at least some water, and hopefully a church floor to sleep on, was really a collection of ten or twelve abandoned houselets. Not a one of them had all four walls and a roof, much less such niceties as doors and windows. The buildings had graffiti tags all over them and bits of metal and wood and car parts strewn liberally about. It was the most horribly eerie place - it felt as if the resident Evil was lying in wait. There was one occupied trailer next to the railroad tracks, but no force was strong enough to make me want to go talk to the Man in the Yellow Coveralls. Actually, it looked and felt very much like the movie "Tremors". I imagine that something like that happened to this place ten years ago but was never resolved. Kevin Bacon's gone, but the worms are still around. You can feel them. Creepy.

This entire encounter followed a particularly scary thunderstorm where we had to pull off the side of the road, lay our bikes down in the dirt, and cower in a ditch under a plastic dropcloth until the rain and hail subsided. It made a handy temporary shelter, and we didn't get struck by lightning, so I count it as a  success. Lightning in the big, flat, scrubby desert is pretty exciting. It was gorgeous, but only because it was striking everywhere around us, thereby making it scarier than a blind date with Rush Limbaugh. And, to top it all off, the Welcome Center which was our backup camping plan is nowhere to be found. So, tonight, your intrepid heroines are camping on unnamed desert lands. I almost set them on fire, too - spilled some coleman fuel, so lighting the camp stove was a bit of an adventure. Here we are, low on water and perhaps morale, but at least we can't complain of boredom.

We're goin' down, down down down....

Today we had a blissfully short day. We spent probably an hour in the Utah Welcome Center while we re-hydrated, cooled off, and prodded the keen-o profile map. It looks like we'll slowly gain some elevation tomorrow, go over some lowish but still mildly daunting mountain passes the next day, and then have hilly but smooth sailing up to Salt Lake City. The pleasant bit of doing 75 unexpected miles yesterday is that we got to stop after only 32 today. Luxury! Not to mention the fact that we lost about 1000 feet of elevation (sigh) so the whole day was a coast.

Since it was so short, the day itself wasn't too eventful. I've discovered that there aren't many places to hide while peeing in the desert, and that "dry heat" may feel better than sticky heat but it still melts ice in five minutes. I'm hoping that if we do have Water Crisis Problems tomorrow that there will be plenty of friendly RV's around to flag down for water. There seems to be nothing on the road but semi's, RV's, and Jeep-y cars with mountain bikes strapped to the top, so I don't think this will be a problem.

Frightened by our encounter with Cisco yesterday, we decided to check up on "Woodside". This is a town that has been marked on some maps and not on others. Personally, I didn't hold out much hope for it being anything more than some footprints and a stray dog; if Cisco was marked as a town on my map and Woodside was not, I reasoned, then Woodside must contain less than Cisco. And given that Cisco as a whole wouldn't fetch $5 at a flea market, well, you get the idea. Our waiter at lunch today gave us the lowdown on Woodside - there's one guy there who owns a gas station. Sometimes it's open, sometimes it isn't. It depends on how he feels that day. The waiter figured that there would probably be a water spigot outside that we could use, and besides, the gas guy just lives out back of the station anyway and would probably be willing to give us water if we asked.

That's a town? One guy? Beggars can't be choosers, I suppose, but still. That leaves us with just over 50 miles with no dependable water-refilling points tomorrow. Wow.

Side note: I put up new pictures! They're now organized by time zone. Please note that since I am lazy, there are pictures from Kansas (i.e. in the Central time zone) that I hadn't posted until now. Photographic evidence for those of you that don't believe how unutterably dull the landscape is...