So Sad and Pathetic (The Long Limp Home)

You thought I'd give up when the going got good and tough, didn't you? You thought I'd wither in the heat and snuggle up in the next air-conditioned Greyhound leaving town, selling my bike and worldly possessions off in a desperate, impromptu, one-man gypsy-bazaar to make the ticket price, and sail the steel beast of budget travel homeward when the thermometer ticked passed 100 for days and days in a row... Didn't you?

Or, you may have thought the days and days of nasty rains in Saudi Coda that washed away many a pheasant farmer's creekside cornfield would certainly send Petey packin' too, didn't you? Nobody believed in me, did they? DID THEY?!

...well, I didn't believe me either, on at least a couple of occasions.

There are trying circumstances that one'll encounter in life, impasses at which one is forced to make tough decisions in a less than comfortable setting, tests of fortitude, of honor- real humdingers; a true leader, a brave warrior may size these forks in the road with a jewelers monocle, turn them over in their hand like a precious gem of opportunity, squeeze the options like a questionably-ripe peach or sniff them (under a carefully manicured mustachio) like heavy, hollow melon- and when the brave one has determined the preferable and most beneficial course, he proceeds with sniper precision and championship gusto- slicing that melon with the deftness of an Iron Chef, pitting the snot outta that proverbial peach; I, on the other hand, have come to realize a decision-making process/coping-mechanism of my very own: it involves a graceless slip into a kind of exasperated despair, a confounding swirl of senselessness, a timeless, hopeless vortex of panic and shame, from which I, quietly whimpering, accept that it may indeed be my time to die.

When I open my eyes, and realize I'm still alive, I eat a candy bar or drink another piss-warm, plasticky mouthful of bottle water, sniffle, and continue pedaling.

Thus far, I've avoided illustrating such examples in the pages of this blog, 'cause, after all, you all were safe at home, hoping your hardest that I'd trip up somewhere, skin my knees, and come crying home on the Greyhound to mama- and I didn't wanna give ya'll the satisfaction. Well now I am home, mostly under my own steam, and I barely even cried to mama. I did call and whine a little bit, to be sure.

A little show and tell illustration of what I'm saying:
Take, for example, this breakfast burrito. I ate it in Greybull, WY. Probably the best breakfast I've ever had. I'm not kidding you. There are perfectly crispy hashbrowns on the outside, sure, but there are also American fries on the inside. Yeah. Two distinct races of breakfast potato living in culinary harmony, it brings a tear to my post-tuber-segregationist eye. I show you this because A) it's beautiful, and B) because I thought this day would continue all peaches and cream to Ten Sleep. Little did I know it was going to be a scorching hot, 117 mile day. Somewhere into the 105th mile, I became utterly convinced that I was going to die.
I had resigned myself to the fact that my salt-encrusted skin (it was too friggin' hot to even sweat my ass off properly- I would occasionally spit, more out of disgust than necessity, and bits of thick spittle would inevitably cling to my parched arms; it felt too cool and refreshing to bother wiping it off. It was hot) meant that I was boiling in my own skin from the inside out, and that the end was near. I mentally prepared my will, and gritted my teeth, telling myself I'd ride till I toppled over, bury me where I lay. It's over, I thought...

Then, I got to Ten Sleep, set up my tent, and went out for a fish sandwich and a beer, bewildered but ambulatory, and thirsty for malt and hops.
Some days later, I pull past Devil's Tower National Monument (the Bear Lodge of Hidatsa/Mandan/Arikara mythology that we outright stole, along with the equally sacred Black Hills- Damn, it feels good to be a [manifest-destined] gangsta) and busted my 5th or 6th flat. Just me; the geologic wonders of the world; slack-jawed, chubby-cheeked tourists in rent-a-RV's; and another roadside staple to dig out of my thinning tire tread. I'd had it with the "Kevlar-belted, Tour-Tough!" Panaracer Pasela Foldables, was down to my last tube, and resolved to just pack it up after the next (inevitable) flat, and hitch-hike home. That was it. Then I got into town and bought a patch kit and some Ice Cream.I'm not quite sure if it was the Bison Burger (I've heard that reversion to carni-voracity is often a bumpy one for the ol' gastro-intestinals), the cow-pie-licious water I pumped the previous day from an algae-n-amoeba-green trickle of a stream on BLM grazing land, or the unsanitized mess kit from which I'd been eating Muesli and re-constituted non-fat milk for breakfast, but something done crawled in my guts and threw a helluva dance party.

But did I give up?

Well, yes, in a way. I marched (or drug my sorry self) 30 miles into Belle Fourche, SD, and got myself a hotel room. But I'm no pushover- I told the shirtless, hairy-pot-bellied, gold-chain festooned Greek guy that he shouldn't go advertising his corporate rate of $31.99 as the going rate, and he could shove his $49.99 (for a non-smoking double) where the sweet Mediterranean sun don't shine, in a manner of speaking. I then bolted to the adjacent Motel 6, where a sweet, greying Indian woman "left the light on for me" (again, in a manner of speaking, as it was not even noon), and, pitying me, hooked me up with a pretty sweet deal. I slept and puked the afternoon away, and then woke to watch all of Season 1 of America's Top Chef. I can't believe Joey got eliminated after that stupid frozen dinner challenge. Gosh.
You can zoom in on the Muesli chunks and cranberry juice swirls, if you'd like. I'll wait.
Ah. Much, much, marginally better. (I have video of this action! Shoot me an email, and I'll shoot one back, so you can watch me shoot a vicious mix of breakfast cereal and Gatorade into the mouth of the porcelain god).
After a headachey, body-achey, gut-rumbling roll in the Motel 6 hay, I set off to make up for lost road-time. I made it about 24 miles when the headwind started kicking up. I don't make it a habit to talk to inanimate objects or forces of nature (at least when sober...) but I gave the Saudi Kota wind the tongue lashing of a lifetime. I'd like to think it cringed at my anti-meteorological-phenomenon tirade, but I think it just got good and mad, and whipped me with drizzle and a wall of E-SE headwinds. I pushed on for another 30 odd miles while quite literally cussing up a storm, until the beasty broke my spirit and forced me to hunker down (like a lost, South Carolinian Boy Scout with an inept and inattentive troop leader) in a cattle culvert for the night. Figured I'd just wait out the storm in the dung-and-pee-dirt-floored comfort of the pre-cast concrete, but no- I had to build dams up around my bike and sleeping bag to hold back the deluge. To my surprise, I woke up mostly dry, dikes intact like a pre-Katrina N.O., minus, of course, the hankering for crawfish gumbo (my tummy was still a bit shy).

On the whole, S.D. was miserable, rainy, and let's face it, plain ugly. For five days I was soaked and pissy. I did manage to hitch a ride with a charitable group of cyclists- they were attempting to cross the whole state in 48 hours... which none did (and so the sag wagons were out in full force, rescuing the bikers (myself thankfully included) and whisking them Eastward, but not out of the downpour). 66 miles and one portable DVD player presentation of "Dodgeball" later, I was deposited in Gettysburg, and put on another good 40 miles, about 150 on the day (with the assist), and was finally back on schedule for a Wednesday arrival.The homecoming was bound to be a bittersweet one, or so I thought, but I waxed seriously nostalgic coming into the great state of MN. These guy wires to nowhere were holding a radio tower upright in the pea-soup-thick fog north of Summit. A pretty little stretch of tar slinks through rolling hills and tallgrass prairie pastures, pothole lakes, and regimented cornfields along the border of Lake Traverse, and then a little spur crosses over and down into Browns Valley, MN, where huge cotton- and dog-wood trees line the tricklin' streams of my birthstate. There is something about this country that's undeniably in my blood, and it feels good to be home.

Two 100+ mile days back to back brought me from Aberdeen to Moorhead (behind the original schedule, ahead of the revised, King James version) the dead frogs and stray sugarbeets mucking up the narrow, patchy shoulders of State Highway 75 let me know that I was a gettin' close. Then, about 20 miles outta town, I see a cute little girl with a pink umbrella and her beautiful, smiling, raincoated momma walking along the side of the road. "What the hell are they doing taking an afternoon stroll in the rural Wolverton outskirts, for cripessakes?" Turns out they were my sis-in-law Jill and my lil' niecey Z.K., out to welcome me early with coffee and kisses (Hershey's and real-deal).
Then I get into town, my sister and mom standing at a busy intersection with a big banner, screaming and yelling. I could feel the embarrassment flushing my wind-burnt cheeks. Dang. They're too much. So we head home where mom has made a huge dinner and dad's bought good beer, and the grandfolks are over with bread, salad, hugs, new socks and clean underwear. What a deal. I toss and turn in a too-soft bed that mom made up all nice and neat. By midnight, I gotta sneak downstairs, eat more food, and finally pass out on a futon strewn with Zaida's toys. No more tent canopy-flapping lullabies.

What do I do now?

Sloth and full fridges have all but sapped my ambition- shoot, it's taken me half a day to write this danged post, even on my third cup of coffee and fourth ice-cream bar. Dang. Today's agenda? Check with my employer, maybe ride a couple of miles, and then drink heavily with old, great friends.

I'll post more homecoming pics soon- and thanks for rootin' for me.

IT'S OVER!!!

I can't even keep track anymore. What is what, where is where, who I've told this or that too... Normally, I am quite horrific with keeping in touch, yes, even in this light-speed, fiber-optic, internets and cellphone tee-ex-teeing generation... but c'mon, I'm on a bike in the middle of the Wyoming wilderness. Cripes.

Let's not fight, huh? Let's try to be civil and just catch up. To the pics! The Salmon-Challis Trail Crew. From L-R, Bill Dickson, long-time part-timer, chainsaw massacrist, and generally cool guy; Sean (oh shit, or was it Shawn? Spellcheck, buddy, help me out), the young gun of the USFS crew, though he's spent as much quality time with a shovel, hoe, and polaski as anyone- former Americorps backcountry trailbuilder, frmr. Denali trail crewer, frmr Guatemalan habitat restorer, and emerging nature photographer extraordinaire; Richard, the Marine turned Mercenary turned thru-hiker/trail builder/N. Idaho wheat farmer and invasive cat killer (what happens when your neighbors cat population gets outta control? a can of tuna and a .22 cal longrifle, that's what)- basically, dude's hard-f'in-core; Henry, our Southern Gentleman, fond of such sayings as (no shit) "dad-gum," "sho-nuff," and "whoo, boy." The Southern Alabama tree-farmer loves the outdoors, the trail, and is perhaps the most friendly, genuine dude I've met on the whole excursion; Jim, the Coloradan, frmr. techie for the D.O.D., retired early to hike more, and used his back vacation pay to purchase the sweet camper-rig pictured in the background. His propane-fired coolerator provided us with cold diet sodas, carrot sticks, and snow peas. A funny man. A nerdy, fatherly, funny man whose wife is the director of the Reptile wing of the CO Humane Society- there are some stories that go with that job, lemme tell ya; Amanda, the fantastic coordinator of the CDTA. She only hung for a day, as she has several other projects to oversee; and myself.
Laying out a reroute over some nasty shale/talas washout. Busting a nice, flattish 12% grade through the woods, 100' feet at a time. Yeah, boy. The bear grass made the slopes good and slip'ry, prompting a string of wipe-outs from our courageous "stick-boy" Henry (stick-elder, really, as the agreeable old hound of our crew), complete with exclamations of "dad-gum..."
Billy D., looking, well, Rangerly at the finish line, the golden spike of day 2, if you will, and I think you will. The 1.5 miles of trail we staked and flagged will have to be aproved by NEPA (a think-tank of "-ologists" to make sure we don't hose up trout habitat or mow over the last remaining spotted mountain Lily patch in the W'ern U.S. Gosh, those frog-kissin', tree-huggin 'viron-Mental-ists sure is touchy) before any real surfacing takes place. Time and bureaucracy will tell if all of our effort was for naught. The forest is always on fire out here. Perhaps it's the zero moisture content of the thickly accumulated duff. Perhaps it is the acres of standing dead lodgepoles or sub-alpines, loaded with pitch and yellowed needles (thank you, pine bark beetles). Perhaps its the dry-firing thunderstorms and stingy rain-makers. Maybe it's all of these things, and little Jim-Bo McHickerson and his 4th of July Fireworks fancy. Whatever it is, it makes for thickly smoked air, and fantastic sunsets... and plenty of overtime and hazard pay bonuses for our seasonal forest rangers, Shawn and Bill.
Skinning a chunk of lodge pole with a polaski for use as a water bar. I love trees, more than life itself, really. If a crazed gunmen held his weapon to the temple of the Western woods, I'd negotiate a trade, my life for theirs, really, really I would... That said, there is something morbidly gratifying in dropping a healthy specimen in three quick cuts, snapping it into sections, and skinning it like the neighbor's cat.
About 100 miles due East of Salmon, Idaho gets, yes, even DRIER. This stretch of road cost me 2 inner tubes and plenny of sweat, but danged if she weren't purdy. Longhorn steers, red-tailed hawks, and prickly pear. Heading towards DuBois, where, due to lack of water, I had to stop early and sleep in a city park before pressing on in the (cooler) morning.

Natty Bridge in Yellowstone- they were gonna pave the top of the sucker and turn it into a spur-route of the main highway. Thankfully, cooler more preservation-minded heads prevailed. Cool to hike around, though- well laid stone steps and the whole works.

Granted, I've never been to the Grand Canyon Grand Canyon, but I'm gonna take a shot in the dark here and say that the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone is one of if not the most breath-taking gouge in Earth's surface that there is or ever will be. Give it a billion years, though, I'm sure something else as spectacular will shape up, who knows. The steam vents and other hydro-thermal features of the parks caldera are still shaping this stretch of rivers steep, sulphur-yellowed rock-canyon walls (hm. that's why they call it Yellowstone... hm), so it may just keep getting prettier. This here's the lower bracket of falls. 115 feet of vert or thereabouts, I do believe. Yeah. Fan. Freakin. Tastic.Mammoth Hotsprings is the end-result of a 21 mile downhill straight out of any touring cyclists dreams. A smooth strip of highway that descends at a good enough clip to swish you through a white-rock garden of giant stones, like the Yellowstone Mountain God came home drunk and threw all his rocky layers of club clothes scattered across the floor, and his sulphury cigarettes burning in a terraced ashtray at the bottom. What a ride. What a view. What a rotten egg funk. I breakfasted on egg-n-cheese sandwiches, nasty hash browns, ice cream and coffee at the cafe here, and toured the (disappointing) historical museum, though they did have a kick ass old penny-farthing high wheel on display. Anyway, I'll load more kickin' Yellowstone wildlife pics (and video of me skirting a band of ornery bison on bikeback, if I can figure that out) when I get homewards.On the way out the park, the Lamar branch of the Yellowstone carves its own sweet canyon, with big, snaky, sand-n-water scoured, pod of beached Beluga boulders, nasty rapids and quiet little eddying pools. I was danged hot, semi-isolated, and feeling nakedly spunky- so, into this crack in the Great Mother I gratefully dipped my own (top of the crack to ya). I know what you're thinking: "He must've photoshopped that, it's incredible!" No, no. I can assure you, the un-sunburned bits and pieces of me are, in sad actuality, that pasty white. Go ahead, zoom in. I'll wait... To conclude, I'll just say this: Ladies? Eh? Eh? That is all.

That's right, punks. I might've schickened on out when it came to the Beartooth, but I'll show you the gradient profile on this nasty climb when I can scan it in. As my late, great, ever-oddly expressive grand-pop would say: "Jiminy Whiskers." 20 miles of 6 percent grade, and the view from the top wasn't even all that... I mean, it was nice, but man. I shoulda taken more pics on the way up, but dang, the last thing I wanted to do was waste any precious Snicker-fueled kilocalories.

Speaking of food: I had to take a break at a picnic area halfways up, and what did I do? I ate two cans of tuna- tuna in oil. What should've been about 32 grams of fat per can (a goodly amount, to be sure) turns out is the fat per can when said can is DRAINED. I was soaking up all that fishy, salty, soybeany goodness with some thick slices of flax and sunflower seed whole wheat. I must've sucked up a good 3 tablespoons of straight oil. Then, guts churning in a maelstrom of vomitous twistiness and horrendous gas, I slept, hard, for about 2 hours, til the nausea passed. Dang. From now on, it's kippered snacks or tuna in spring water only. Let this be a lesson to all of us wayward vegetarians.

The Bighorns, the bighorns, and the aforementioned view from the top. This is all I get for 5k vertical feet of climbing. I want my money back. I want my 7% downhill grade- and got it, the next day, after a refreshing but not too cold camp-out at about 8000 feet. Nothing like the rush of an effortless descent, huh?

Tomorrow, I hope to cross into South Dakota (state No. 5!) and, in short order, all misty-eyed into Moorhead, the land of my birth, and the loving arms of the North-Flowing red. All that stand between me and it? A 65-mile strip of I-90, the grizzled remnants of the Sturgis rally, pheasants, farmers, and a whole damned state of prairie. My climbing days are over, kids. It's all downhill from here.

Cody, quick for now...

I could be ashamed of myself right now... when you stare up from the bottom of Beartooth Pass, you tend to poop your pants a little... and it's squishy and unflattering... and so you take the alternate route, down south to Cody... you are a pansy. You are me.

Or are you me?

You're not a pansy, because, low and behold, what's this-a here squiggly line on my map? It's as if the cartographer had a nasty little epileptic episode for a good half inch. But there are no brackets to denote a pass. There is no elevation listed. Well damned if it isn't the NASTIEST, STEEPEST, HOTTEST, and to be fair, most beautiful damned pass I've crossed thus far. It was a terror of an uphill slog- granted, no Beartooth, but I'm not exaggerating when I make the outlandish claim that it was 5600 vertical feet straight up, no switch backs... Honestly, I don't know how much I climbed, but I know that there was a wicked, 7% grade that followed after the summit (my mantra on the climb? "What goes UP, must come DOWN") for a good 11 miles. Then it was a rolly, sweaty, black fly-swatting climb through the Wyoming sagebrush to drop me in Cody, WY. I'll put in pics when I can... but the librarians coming to KILL MY COMPUTER!

Back after a shorter-than-expected stint in the woods; back in Salmon, ID's wonderful little main street library... seconds are ticking off my 30-min. time limit clock. What do you do when you get out of the woods? You shed your dead skin- in this case, a jump into the North Fork of the Salmon River and Dr. Bronner's Eucalyptus soap take off the initial layer of trail grime; the UPS store helps me shed some of the deadsy weight I've been hauling around. Now my rig is so streamlined I could kick out a quick crit if I wanted to. I don't want to. I want to stick around for yet another night in this six-horse town, drink beer, and mingle with the locals (love or fistfights are in my immediate future, I reckon, and I'm ready for either or both). To the Pictures!My illustrious and faintly-smokey smelly home in Missoula, MT. 65 dollars gets you all this, the history channel (Watched a documentary about silver, then aluminum, back to back, but had too much metal to stick around for gold, so I switched to a PBSer about Prison Towns (see my previous post)). Oh, Ruby's Hotel and Conference Center, yer grease-stained towels and ravaged breakfast buffet will be in my heart for always...

Perhaps you've heard of MT's Meth problem. They're fighting back, with wicked, wicked propaganda. I mean, c'mon, meth ain't that bad fer ya.

This here's Greg Siple, founder and acting head (I think?) of Adventure Cycling. I posed for his wall of thru-biker fame, then made him return the favor. What a nice guy, and still, after 30 years of helping tourists help themselves, is still uber-jazzed on bike culture and travel. He and his now-wife and a few pals biked from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego in the early '70s, a two-year odyssey featured in the annals of National Geographic (some issue in 1973, wild white horses fighting on the cover... I've got one laying around at home, I'm sure...)
A nice little creekside campspot on the North Side of Lost Trail Pass, only 10 miles off the beaten path to the summit.

Thimbleberry PB and H on Birdman Seedbread (it's got freakin' polenta in it, which to my hummingbird-like metabolism is somewhat more addictive than crack, or even a fresh batch of MT meth).

Roads have been friendly, generally, but apparently some highway repairs are taken on rattle-can vigilante style. This little warning sign musta got the attention of the DOT, as fresh asphalt salved the once gapin wound.

Yeah, this one speaks for it's un-pc self.

Missoula MT and the Idaho Beneath it...

Well rested after a night in a ritzy hotel, you might think, eh? Well, you'd be wrong. Dead wrong. I got caught up in television- not even cable/satellite television, just good, old fashioned PBS, which was running a documentary on a "Prison Town" in California. It was danged heartwrenching... shoplifting and broken families and law enforcement school and prison life and one milk man's struggle to keep his contract with the pen... so I stayed up til 2 a.m. watching PBfreekin'S. Does this make me a loser? Yes, yes it does.

Woke early to capitalize on the breakfast buffet, and capitalize I did. I musta crammed 2000 calories worth of biscuits, scrambied eggs, Total and Cocoa Puffs (the kid in me likes the chocolatey-ness, the adult in me likes the complete nutrition), and scone after nasty little scone, down the hatch and into the boiler room.

After about 16 or 18 additional cups of crappy in house coffee, I hit the streets. Stopped in at the Lolo Forest Ranger station to talk about bears, coyotes, and fires (oh my) and got some hot leads on free camping towards the top of Lost Trail Pass. Then, it was off to downtown, by way of about 4 nifty little independent bike shops. I had missed downtown on my little twilight ride the night before, but glad I didn't haul out of Missoula after judging it solely on the suburbs. The place is bike crazy! Imagine a little denser, slightly-larger than Moorhead-sized downtown, with shopfronts from the Fargo-downtown era and design school, add a tube-, kayak,- and raft-able version of the Red River (and rename it the Clark Fork), then place the MSUM campus next to this fine waterway (and replace Dragons with Grizzlies), srout mountains to about 2300 ft and dry the landscape a bit, add a brewery, several additional bike shops, and independent bakeries, subtract a few coffee shops and tuck away some of the banks, and there you have it: Missoula, the beautiful, the bike friendly, the cosmo city of hicksville proper. Crazy. I may well settle down there someday.

The bike shops are 'cross crazy, and I hear that 29ers and hardtails are pretty much all the rage there too (odd, coming from the NW where you're either a spandexed-to-the-maxxx roadie, a safety yellow commuter, or a 8 inches of travel, full-body-armor-bombadier), beings that the surrounding countryside is laced with forest service roads that are easy up (I mean, relatively easy up) and screaming down. Fun folks at the shops, too.

I hop into the bank to change my permanent mailing address (whoops... yeah, my ex-roommates are gonna get real used to my mail in their box for a month or so...) and got pointed to the Karbala of all cyclo tourists: Adventure Cycling's World Headquarters... that's right, the folks who make all the sweet, uber-detailed trans-america bike maps are hunkered down, busy cartographer-ing and magazine-ing there in the middle of Missoula, MT. I can't believe I hadn't remembered that.

So I bolt to HQ. There's a sign on the door (whose doorknobs are a pair of drop bars wrapped in orange tape) that says a staff meeting is just about to close down the operation for an hour or two. I rush inside, asking for quick directions on easier routes south of the city and or favorite camp spots, etc... Calm down, they tell me, share some info, and then INVITE ME TO THE FRIGGIN' STAFF MEETING.

I was like, "Wha?"

And they're all like "It's really more of a presentation than a meeting. Other tourists are coming. too." [translation: don't be so weirded out, dude. you didn't win the publisher's clearinghouse, dude. dude.]

And so I wheel my bike (which I'm sorta calling Kanker-Sore-Ass-Rex, have I mentioned that? I don't talk to it constantly, but dang if she ain't a good listener...) into the courtyard, where it is free to rest with all the other cool bikes (some japanese guy named Poi has been rolling around the world with a 20" foldalble loaded with what looks like 600 pounds of gear) and then into the conference room.

Apparently, some young fella from one of them Bay Area colleges took off after his grad-gee-ation to spread the [false] gospel of climate change to the ign'ant masses of 'Merica and South 'Merica, logging 16,000 miles (yeah, the comma is in the right place- 16mo-foinK) on bike. On BIKE. With a powerpoint presentation and a list of schools, public and private, to show it off to. I have to say, the journey was impressive, but the information he doled out was less than impressive (And I'm not just saying that because global warming is a commie-pinko-muslim-ec0-weirdo conspiracy to make me feel guilty about my pickup truck). Still, it was quite the show.

Afterwards, the Adventure Cycling folks put on a little barbeque in the courtyard, and I again shamelessly carbo-loaded to my gut's content. After posing with Kankasaurus for Greg Siple's (the founder of AC) permanent collection, I thanked 'em all and moseyed.

What a day, what a welcoming little town.

Then, Karma balanced itself by giving me 2 flat tires in 5 miles, riding on the glass riddled HWY-93.

Down to a campsite not too far away (I was moving slow- forgot to mention I stopped at the Kettle House brewery for a pint of IPA after the BBQ), and then to Sula, MT (a little crossroads further on with a nice lady clerk who called me "hon" and even "baby" in what a think was a southern drawl, though it was muddled by her bullfroggish emphysema croakyness) to camp again before the pass.

Lost Trail is apparently a pass surrounded by much controversy in the world of Lewis and Clark sholarship and lore: where and when did they actually swing through here? Which creek were they describing in this passage? Which rock did they think looked like a castle here? But it's a breeze of a climb (I was panting and beat toward the top, don't get me wrong. I'm still a pansy- a pansy with 50-odd lbs. of CRAP behind him). At the top I met a family of nomadic, methed-out skateboarders. Yeah. I was weirded out too when the young mother says, between sips of Coors in a 32 oz. can "Hold on, let me get my board from the camper." "Yer headed where? Shoot, we're just goin' up to Missoula to do some boardin'." But they were friendly enough and wished me luck. I did the same.

Then down to Idaho, where the climate turns arid again and smoke hangs thick in the air. It keeps on faking like it wants to rain, so I'll haul tail and set up my tent; throw everything in and then follow after it; there I'll sit, mostly naked and sweating like a banshee, waiting for the clouds to let loose, and they never do.

Two days I've been here now, lollygagging until tomorrow, when I head back to North Fork to hook up with the work crew for the Continental Divide Trail, and it finally rains- thankfully after I portion out 35 bucks worth of dehydrated mashed potatoes, oatmeal, cous cous and trail mix into heavy duty ziploc bags and bolt to the dry comfort of the local Library. Now it's time to read the paper- (ooh, the local weekly is an editors nightmare- Kim, you'd shudder at the shoddy attempt at AP style, and Katie, you'd cringe at the grammar. Dr. Sprunger, if you're reading this (you're probably wringing your hands with disgust at my own prose, and I do apologize, I do, but I warn you against the Salmon Register and Record) and then off to the laundromat.

Take care of yourselves... and peace... pics to come soon, but I'm pushing my 1 hr. limit here, so I best skeedaddle...

Over the Panhandle and Into the Fire

Well kiddos, it's 3 states into the mix and just over five-hondo miles - well, to be exact 591 miles- covered to date. Yeah, my bum is sore. Sure, my legs are a bit sleepy... Pics to see, anyone?

See now, there are wonderful things in Spokane, not just the people. It's much bigger than I expected it to be (quarter million or so, I've been told) and full of great old buildings. This is the Newspaper, and it's surrounded by a bunch of Mason-approved stone-chitecture.

The heavy, heavy necking and petting between WA State Utilities and the power generating capacity of her rivers has reached sweaty, third-base levels. They are so in love, and it's gonna last. This little damsy-doozy's been around awhile (as have most of the Spokane buildings, the rusting, rustling, semi-rural city of when- see my previous post if you think this sounds patronizing...) and serves as a cornerstone of a beautiful riverfront- no foolin', it is the pretty.

Who knew that the bookstore sells Temporary, Olde-Tymey tattoos? Well, they do. That's my boob and Mandy-Jo's wicked pipe- she's got a serpent and swashbuckling sword, I've got the "Homeward" ship that sweated off in the first day. (Also, sorry for the nipple shot. I'll try and keep 'er PG13, for the kiddies, you know...)

There are eco-terrorists in Spokane, too. Hmm. Contact Homeland Security.

\

Speaking of Homeland Security, the terror alert matches my sunburn pattern, sorta: this year's hot new colors range from Pale and Pimply to Pink and Puffy to Reddish Brownish almost Tannish and then to a shade I couldn't include for lack of a good nose close-up: we have Blistery! (Mom, I'll wear sunscreen from now on, I swear). The Canoes at Katie's Camp Sweyolaken are as old as the camp itself. They are in amazingly great shape (continuously patched, varnished and repainted, I assume) for being (drumroll) friggin' Eighty or Ninety years old. Who wants to drop everything and devote their LIVES to building wooden watercraft? Check out the Center for Wooden Boats in Seattle or Port Townsend, if you're serious about this...

"Miss Katie," the lovely camp counselor and star of Sweyolaken. I did my damndest to get her to cry on departure, but she is like a rock... Besides, summer camp is a continual series of hellos and goodbyes, she's used to it. She's got the best friend/drill sargeant/teacher/songstress thing down, and her campers love/fear/adore and are shaped by her steady guiding hand. That's water in the "Five Years of Service" stein, by the way.

The Sweyolakenites were kind enough to hoist me up on the giant swing and let her rip. Somewhat less comfortable than a roofers harness, but the odd pressure in odd places reminded me of days spent with a nail gun on the third floor of Patterson Park. I also managed to get some archery in, and some snack, but no arts and crafts, unfortunately, because of the fire drill. Katie's and my strategy for survival? Escape the blaze by jumping in the lake fully clothed. Bonsai.

Thirty miles south of Coeur d'Alene lies Plummer, ID and the start of the Trail of the Coeur d'Alenes (am I spelling that right? irritating. am I spelling that right?). It's a beautifully re-surfaced rail to trail system, spans about 70 miles, and is full of cool features like this bridge across the lake...
...And this stretch of blacktop, which is in part to encourage bike tourism, part to cover up Super-Fund levels of soil toxicity. Apparently the old railbed was built up with mine tailings that contain heavy metals, mercury, and lead. Of course I only read this after I pumped a few bottles worth of water from the creeks... my filter don't do shit for lead, I'm afraid. Luckily Tom, owner of the Snakepit B&G (best damn $4.50 salad bar I've ever exploited. Potato salad and macaroni salad? Carbo-loading on the cheap) refilled my tainted containers and pointed me toward a nice campspot in the bushes...
And this nifty little bike shop in Kellogg, ID. It was the old railroad warehouse, but it has a loading platform (the overhang on the right) now filled with the used stock, and a nice little interior with some no-nonsense merchandise. Wormwood trimwork, too... real classy. Mike, the amiable owner, hooked me up with some trail info, including the final act to the Panhandle drama...
This snotty little stretch of ATV track that put me up and over Lookout Pass in about 11 miles of shale-n-washout ecstasy. It's a curvy little passage, but hard-packed enough to be do-able, and much more scenic than the slow, upward grind of I-90. I was about to try the gravel on the east side of the pass, but was unsure of how far it paralleled 90 (it seems like it does, but there may have been some creek fording involved, perhaps a rail bridge or too... worth investigating, because 90 was a beat up mess of a road. When you can feel the sidepanels of a 53' tractor-trailer with your ear hairs, the shoulder is a bit narrow for bikin', methinks).

I descended 33 miles (safely, mom, that ear-hair stuff was a slight exaggeration) to St. Regis, where MT-HWY 135 rakes NE along the River Runs Through It-esque Regis River. I camped at a little USFS pullout underneath this trestle. First order of business was a swim, which was refreshing and relaxing, until I swam a few feet over the back of a snapping turtle. That was, well, butt-clenchingly freaky. He wasn't interested in what I had to offer, nutritionally, however. Then, I watched a half dozen crayfish fight over the heads and tails of some trout that a fisherperson had left bobbing in the shallows. They're stupid and relentless, pinching each others' noses and whatnot... Next morning, er, ah- this morning I guess it was, I rolled up 135 for a couple of miles until I came on a fairly tame looking gravel road: USFS 412. I was only 2 miles into my climb and ready to turn back to the highway when a USFS truck sidled up longside me. "This should hook up with I-90, right? Maybe 30 miles on?" I ask. "Yeah, yeah, it will, but I don't think it's that far. You've got about five, six miles to the saddle, but after that it's pretty much downhill." I watch him drive away at a pace that ruins my 3 mph slug, with an empty pickup bed. I could've punched myself for being so stupid... ask him for a lift, you idiot. Seven miles, thousands of vertical feet, one lynx sighting (I thought it was a bobcat at first, though this is cougar country, too, I reckon- goodness knows I'da been toast had mama cougs decided sweaty bicyclist looked tasty or cub-threatening... mom, relax), and countless, breathless bike-pushing sessions later, I summit......And what do I see? Forty freegin' miles total (yeah, that's a 6 behind that 2 that somebody used for sighting in his or her elk rifle. "Oh, I don't think it's that far" says mr. forest ranger, that liar...) It starts cooking pretty good, and the view from the top is pretty sweet, though none of my pics do it any justice. I slap on my shades and ride the roller-coaster of gnarly-assed pits and gullies downhill at a slightly less than suicidal rate. I haven't checked my poor, poor wheels for trueness yet, but I'm not holding out much hope.

So, the journey ends, right? Well, no. After riding another some-odd-teen miles of gravel, passing by big old ranch houses and herds of cattle and horses who spook then gawk then spook then gawk as I pass, I wind up at Nine-Mile township. (It should be noted here that Washington state has a charming habit of naming roads for their endpoints, Carnation-Redmond Road, for example. This makes navigation a snap. I'm here, I'd like to go here. Done. Montana, I had wrongly assumed by some of it's place names has a similar habit of naming creeks and townships and other little landmarks by their proximity to other, larger landmarks. By this logic then, I assumed I'd be just a hop away from Missoula, but no). I finished a cheese sandwich and a beer and an Almond Joy at the Nine Mile House B&G (see? see the name?) when the waitress informs me that I'm 28, maybe 32 miles out. What the hell, right?

So it's ninety-five damned degrees out; not a shade tree to save my life- danged, spindly-assed ponderosas can't cast a shadow for nothin'; I had just read the house copy of the Missoulian Newspaper over lunch, which highlighted the fish kill in a nearby lake that had been happening steadily since Friday the Thirteenth (turns out the Artic Char couldn't handle the unprecedentedly hot, "bath-water warm" lake, thank you heat wave), and the heat-lighting-initiated string of forest fires raging in the W.MT woods (the moisture content of the ground cover and forest litter was "at about 2 to 3 percent. Now, to my way of thinking, that means a 97% chance of forest fires" a ranger was quoted as saying (but what do they know, am I right?)). So I'm mulling over all of that information, sweating like a banshee (and kinda sorta regretting that rich, refreshing, effervescent Moose Drool beer that really tied my lunch together) and thinking "Shit, I could concievably keel over and die out here. I'm getting a damned hotel room."

And this thought goes cycling through my head, and I think "when I get to Missoula I'll change my tune. I'm not that much of a pansy, am I?"

Before I know it, I'm waltzing up to the front desk of every hotel off of Exit 104. I promise myself I'll not pay more than 50 bucks. Maybe I'll just catch the KOA down the road. Maybe I can make it to the river outside of town and squat there...

Then there I am, swiping my credit card at Rubies Inn for a double-bed smoking at the sympathetic corporate rate of 64.99, tax incl.

How have I stooped so low?

But this is gonna be a "working vacation," and I'm wringing my money's worth outta this dive, baby. I wash my clothes in the bathtub, smear the complementary lotion all over my sunburnt self, make the pot of in-room Farmer Bros. Decaf, then watch TV and make the Caffeinated version, then run clean water through the coffee pot and rehydrate some lentil stew, then watch TV, use the hotel towels to wipe down my embarrassingly dusty ride and dirty saddlebags, lube every link and squeaky, grindy pivot on the bike, right there in the room, poop in a real toilet, and take full advantage of the security of a lockable door: I unhook the wagon and go for a ride (this is after the sun sinks plenty low and the temp dips to 85, mind you. I'm still a big pansy).

My Surly Cross-Check, which I've now dubbed "Kanka-Sore-Ass-Rex", or just "Kanks", for short, is as squirrely as a Missoula meth-head when I first get cranking. It's amazing how nimble the thing is when the 60 pounds of crap are offloaded. I blaze a ten mile loop around Missoula without dropping out of my big ring- but can't find downtown to save my life. I do find historic Fort Missoula, a pretty little collection of Military buildings and timber-industry memerobilia, so I mill around, then head hotel ward for snacks and free interned access (milking it, milking it...)

Tomorrow is continental breakfast at 6. It goes til 9, and I plan on doing nothing else for those three hours. Living the high life in Missoula, MT.

Peace.

The E.WA Retraction

First and Foremost: A Retraction, of sorts...

It has been politely brought to my attention that I spent a lot of time and energy diggin' and rippin' on the old E.WA in my last post.

Allow me to clear the air: I've never been treated so well and respectfully as a stranger in a strange land. In chronological order: Carl and the cute waitress at the biker bar in Bridgeport; the truckers 'long the gravel path who durn near bent backwards to see that I had some fresh water for my empty bottles (and offered to use their nifty trucking software to print me up a "delivery route" of sorts, an offer which I declined, so as not to interrupt the game of Warcraft that the operations manager seemed fully engaged in- hospitable, nerdy, responsibility- and paper-work-shirking, but hospitable none the less); The Woman at the Gas Stop near Dry Falls who directed me, kindly, to the camp host in Coulee City park, and when I couldn't find her, the shirtless, mulleted, beer-drinking man in an RV who told me to "go ahead and pick a spot and pitch yer tent- she'll never check on ya," (and then, when she did, in fact, check on me, waived the fee when she learned of my limited budget and long road ahead); Rick, who, at the FREE DNR campground at Long Lake satisfied my curiousity about Alaska, commercial fishing, being a grandparent, opening a floating, fast-food pontoon restaurant/RV with government grant money, spousal abuse, drug abuse, and living on "a bit of a, well, a kind of a limited income..."; and then, of course my Spokanian brethren and sisterthen, Mandy's MFA mates who are nothing if not hospitable (Michelle and Nick generously opened their homes to us, and entertained us with smooth LP favorites, homespun YouTube videos, an endless string of snapshots, a giant bunny, a hookah, and a breakneck game of Backgammon); all of the aforementioned, honestly, my hosts and heroes.

In fact, the only person- the ONLY person who gave me any guff was a cordial Park Ranger, who stamped out our riverside BBQ when he sauntered on up, saying: "Now, the reason for the contact is, of course, your campfire... perhaps you didn't see the giant "NO CAMPFIRES" signs on the way in, but we are under a burn ban, and I'd hate to have you be responsible for a forest fire here..." We honestly hadn't noticed the giant signs. And he gave us a good half hour to finish cooking our burgers, brats, mushrooms and corn, wolf them, and head out.

So, Eastern Washington, your streets may have maneating potholes, and your buildings may sag grumpily with age, heat, and neglect. You may not be the shining star you once were, but you are, as Spokane's slogan surlily states: "Near Nature, Near Perfect."

Still not convinced? I'll try to post some photos that'll do it justice.