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.