James and Zoe Ride Bikes

July 27th/Day 55 – Lander, WY to Jeffrey City, WY — 79 miles (ridden) 59 miles of progress. (Caleb)

The following is the transcript of a speech delivered by Caleb at 6 pm on July 27^th in Sweetwater, WY (about 19 miles away from Jeffrey City).  The venue was a Rest Area common space – just outside of the family washroom … where the hand-dryer would occasionally start running though no one was using it.  The scribe has done his best to recall all that was said … and more.

Pro Cursu ad Urbem Jeffrionis

“Colleagues, riding companions, friends, it has been a long and arduous day.  The navigation has been at times errant, the hills have been persistent, fickle have been the winds, and the sun so strong, the air so dry, that the breeze blowing over our own sweat has at times seemed a salve.  Indeed, it has been a trying and difficult day.

As is often the case with a new day, promise filled the air.  Unfortunately, our hopes were quickly dashed.  We woke this morning anticipating a delivery of dried elk-meat, but our friend Standing Rock did not come.  Some of us went to the market to send correspondence, but we were received there with a poor connection and a surcharge for milk in our coffee.  But all of this was easily forgotten as we left the otherwise lovely town of Lander, where the beer growlers were freely-loaned and the neighboring  picnic-tables shared of themselves so generously.

I need not remind you of the first obstacle we confronted.  This was the most trying, and it has led us to our current deliberation.  We cannot blame any single individual.  Nay, we must all acknowledge that each and every one of us missed the sign indicating our change of course.  Yes, we went 10 miles in the wrong direction.  Yes, most of those miles were spent climbing.  Yes, there was a mean crosswind.  Don’t forget, though, that yes, we also realized our mistake before climbing the entire pass.  And yes, we were able to fly down those same 10 miles and feel the crosswinds on our other sides.  How nice it was that correcting our error was so much more forgiving than the error itself!  But the effects would be lasting.  One third of our water supplies were already consumed.

That’s when the heat kicked it.  I’m sure you all remember the moment when we cut our lunch short because it felt hotter beside the road than it did when we were riding.  And there were the Tar Rivers—those poorly-repaired cracks in the pavement that gripped our tires with their Siren’s embrace and attempted to lead us astray.  And how could we forget the other perils our tires faced?  James, your tire went flat not once but twice.  What a wretched piece of wire that embedded itself in your tread! 

Throughout this all, our water supplies continued to dwindle, and yet our course demanded that we work ever harder.  The climb to Beaver Rim was full of bad omens.  Constantly shifting winds and that strange turn-off populated by seven deer limbs.  And we were left wonder whether it was better to finish our water supplies outright or save some gulps for our last miles.

I mention all of this not because I think you may have forgotten it.  I mention it because I suspect you are thinking of it only as adversity … and not as “adversity overcome.”  Right now, as we are trying to decide whether we will camp here in Sweetwater or will continue to our originally-planned destination of Jeffrey City, our spirits are low.  Too low.  And this is my worry.  This is why I think it most important that we continue on.  Yes, the day has been tough, but if we stop now, we admit defeat.  And it is an even greater concern that defeat is so inviting to us in our current states.  Defeat means immediate rest.  Defeat means a respite from the heat.  Defeat means avoiding the swarm of mosquitoes outside the doors of this very space.  But it is nonetheless defeat.  We may stay here tonight where the water is sweet, but know that the sunset will also be bitter.  [The speaker thanks James for that turn of phrase.]  And tomorrow we will rise in the morning and we will be forced to contend with yesterday’s task as a new day’s chore.  This is defeat.

And so I ask you to summon the strength in your legs, your lungs, and your very hearts, and let us ride to Jeffrey City.  The winds are now strongly in our favour, and I have heard tell of the Monk King Bird pottery studio whose owner Byron offers free camping to cyclists.  And there is a hospitable bar and cafe across the road under the singular ownership of Vicki.  Imagine, James and Zoe, a burger with all the requisite parts of a BLT piled atop the beef patty.  This can be yours in Jeffrey City.  For my part, I am picturing two patties with a slice of Swiss cheese betwixt them.  That can be mine in Jeffrey City.  True, there is not much more there.  It is an old abandoned Uranium mining town, and you can count its population on your thumbs and toes.  But it is today’s destination, and it can be today’s accomplishment.   

So let us ride, and let us make this long day longer so that our tomorrow may be shorter, so that our tomorrow can once again begin with promise, and, most importantly, so that our spirits may be lighter.  Oh, and we should probably have a couple beers at that bar in Jeffrey City.”

The party rode on for 20 more miles and pitched camp outside of the Monk-King Bird pottery studio They ate and drank well at the Split Rock Cafe and fell asleep … content.

July 26th/Day 54 – Dubois, WY to Lander, WY. 79 miles (Zoe)

Our slumber behind St Thomas’ was not uneventful. At midnight the sprinklers came on – none of us had questioned the presence of lush green grass in the badlands – and hammered our bikes and the tents. James and I got dressed, got up, and stowed our bikes a little more securely, then lay awake hoping that the next sprinkler to come on wouldn’t be under our tent, and that the fly would hold up to being smashed with a high pressure jet. Caleb, apparently, curled into the foetal position and wished it all away. At about 4 an air-raid-type siren went for about 5 minutes – still no clue what that was about. After our visit to Umatilla, we hoped it wasn’t a chemical weapons plant meltdown. At six the garbage man came by, loudly. I dreamed that we opened the back door of the church and discovered a dorm with hot showers.

We revisited the cowboy cafe for breakfast – oatmeal wasn’t so appealing without a tap to do dishes – and rolled out about 9. The descent continued. We’ve dropped over 5000 feet since Togwotee Pass, and it’s so much fun! I realized riding today that I’d started to think we’d just keep climbing forever, that there would always be another giant pass. But today we rode down and down, through red canyons and green tussock. Yesterday’s mosquitoes were absent, and the first half of the ride was just beautiful.

There’s not much out here. After 30 or so miles we hit a store which appears to be the only building in a “town” called Crowheart. Another 25 and we hit Fort Washakie, then another 16 to Lander (during which James got a flat off a pebble - ?). In between there are a few entrances to ranches, but largely just the gently dropping foothills of the Rockies. The ride started to wear on us in the afternoon – it was a long ride, even with the drop, and once the hills started rolling and a cross-wind kicked up, we were all wishing ourselves done. The shoulder of the highway got really bumpy, and I think we’ll all have sore hands and joints in the morning. I did really love being able to look back up to the peaks surrounding the pass, now on the horizon 60 or 70 miles away, and at the bluffs and buttes in between. This vast, open country is so different to the close forests we wound through in Idaho, on the way up the mountains. I like that I got myself here. No car, no plane, just me. (Cycle touring naturally encourages corny low-level philosophizing, but Caleb has me reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which really isn’t helping.)

Camping in the city park at Lander, we had another fantastic encounter – the family group at the table next to us were Shoshone and Cree from the reservation we spent most of the day riding through, in the park for a birthday picnic. They very generously shared their dinner with us (the most amazing steak! Mac n cheese! Cake!) and when we showed interest, started telling us about their history: treaties, misconceptions, their attempts to keep the Shoshone language alive. Cathy, who grew up speaking Shoshone, told us about teaching others, and about how there are only about 10 families in this area who still use it as a first language. Her husband, Standing Rock, told us his Cree version of local history (which is dominated by white and Shoshone narratives). James asked about their perspective on the reintroduction of wolves (we had to know). Standing Rock refused to entertain the notion that wolves had been reintroduced to the area. Apparently on the reservation, where the government and park service don’t do surveys and don’t have sovereignty, the wolves and grizzlies never left. This is super-cool for many reasons, one of which is that it indicates that the wolves absolutely know where it is and isn’t safe to be… so if ranchers in the eastern half of the state gain the right to shoot wolves (which they’re trying for), the wolves can just learn to stay in the west and in the mountains – maybe? So interesting. Anyway, they were fantastically generous, and the conversation really made our night.

July 25th/Day 53 – Colter Bay to Dubois (DOO-boyz) (65 miles, + 7 in a pickup) (James)

This was one of the strangest, best, most epic days of the tour. We woke up a bit before 7:00 to a text message from Caleb saying that he was in Colter Bay and was keen for the local breakfast buffet. Cue epic: I ate 2 pancakes, 1 piece of French toast with blueberries and blackberries, scrambled eggs, 2 sausages, 4 rashers of bacon, potato hash, 2 orange juices, more blueberries, cantaloupe, yoghurt; Caleb ate 4 pancakes, 2 pieces of French toast, eggs, hash, at least 10 pieces of bacon, a sausage, blueberries, a banana, a bowl of lucky charms, 2 glasses OJ and a cup of coffee;  Zoe consumed a meagre 2 half-pancakes, 3 pieces bacon, a plum, 2 cups coffee, 1 OJ. I think they lost money on us.

All fuelled up with places to go, we set out and tried to make it to the enormous Togwotee Pass before the heat kicked in. This loomed as our biggest climb yet – 3000 feet over about 20 miles – but we were warned that there was a lot of construction and that any number of changes might be imposed on our route. We arrived at the work site to find a hill of gravel. No cyclists allowed. But on the plus side, the pilot car would take us and our bikes over the 7 miles of construction and drop us off about 1/3 of the way up the mountain. Score! Caleb was a little disappointed, and we all felt like we were cheating, but there was no alternative, so our consciences were clean.

We kept riding, made the pass (seeing snow below us and not above us for the first time) and pulled into a little park by a lake at the top of the hill. As soon as we were off our bikes, we started to chatting to Dean, the unquestioned highlight of our day. Dean is a 71 year old retiree who used to own a sporting goods store (it should be pointed out that sporting goods in this part of the country refer almost exclusively to hunting and fishing equipment), now runs the church op-shop and actually says things like, “Well, I’ll be darned.” He was watching his grandsons paddle around the lake in a canoe trying to find trout. He made (yes, made) his first gun at 11 years old, once shot a bear between the eyes at 80 yards and just loves firearms as a safe and responsible part of a well-lived life. We continued our wolf conversation, and he almost teared up with emotion. The wolves, we had heard from rangers in Yellowstone, were an integral part of the ecosystem and trimmed populations of elk; but for Dean, game like elk support the economy through hunting and tourism, so to trim their numbers was to send people out of business. He also argued that there never were wolves in Yellowstone until white men drove them up there from the plains. The debate rolls on. We began talking about bears, and the uselessness of bear spray if you’re being charged from upwind, and I said that having never shot a gun I’d be pretty nervous about carrying one around. He was shocked, and soon leant in mischievously: “you want a shoot one? I have two with me in the truck.” Well, who were we to miss a cultural opportunity like this? He offered us a choice between big and little, Caleb chose little and before we knew it we were being taught the basics of pistol management. He checked that nobody was around – partly to prevent anyone from being caught near the action, and partly to ensure that we didn’t get in trouble – and set a small rock on a hill side, perfect for a target at about 15 yards. Ladies first. Zoe loaded the Smith and Wesson .22 according to instructions. Her first shot went high, but she sent the rock tumbling with her second, setting the bar pretty high. I did the same, and Caleb hit with his first but missed with his second. We were naturals. He wanted us to know that “guns don’t jump up and kill people,” and while he didn’t make us NRA members, he did remind us that people with very different political views are still top notch super people. And he had perspective. Take the assault weapon ban: as background info, Clinton outlawed assault rifles in about 1995 and the Republicans let the ban expire ten years later, which we in the city all assume was pretty stupid. But Dean has sold guns all his life, and said he couldn’t have sold more than three of these things over 25 years until someone came and said you can’t have them. All of a sudden, he was selling them by the crate. Now everyone has them, and the regulation completely backfired (at least in this part of the country – people in the ghetto may well disagree). Not that he understands why people want them, since they’re not powerful enough to hunt with, but apparently they’re now symbolic of something that they never were before.

Dean shook our hands and after a five minute story justifying his intimacy, allowed himself to give Zoe a hug. We helped him pack up his canoe on his ingenious homemade racks and waved goodbye to him and his grandsons, and began the pretty epic descent down the pass. We stopped to chat with Eva and Jack, two young siblings from New York who, with very little preparation, were mountain-biking along the entire continental divide. Respect.  They’re the only people we’ve met who have the same cavalier attitude to their cycling we do: it really doesn’t make us hardcore, it probably makes us pretty stupid, and they certainly didn’t want to get into any sort of pissing content over what they’re attempting (rare).

But this was the last pause we were allowed. Not long after we came across a swarm of mosquitoes who began to devour us. Every time we stopped we were set upon instantaneously, and we couldn’t figure out how they could find us in each place within a second of stopping. We then figured out that there were hordes of them clinging to all of the rear-facing surfaces of the bikes and bags, clinging on as we rode at speed, staring at our legs and waiting for us to slow to about 5mph before immediately going for our skin. So every time we lost speed, we had literal swarms on our legs. Stunning scenery went by unphotographed  because we couldn’t stop riding, until we devised a special pitstop. We screeched to a halt, smacking our legs  as Caleb rushed to pull the toxic deet repellent out of his bag. He ran around us spraying while Zoe tried to take a photo of the badland hills. It worked. We even had to spray all our bags and bikes, but the little buggers went away. I have dozens of bites and itch all over, but at least they’re gone.

In Dubois, we found showers at the laundromat and camped in the grounds of the church, which are open to cyclists. Great burgers and pie for dinner. Lovely town.

July 24th/Day 52 – Grant, Yellowstone to Colter Bay, Grand Teton National Park. 41 miles.

Our bike gang split up today. Caleb has a cousin who lives in Jackson Hole, about 50 miles off route, and we’d all planned to bike down to Jackson to see the Tetons and visit with him and his family. After getting to Yellowstone, though, James and I were reluctant to motor through it at the rate we’d have needed to to make Jackson when we don’t know when we’ll make it back here. Plus, after our crash yesterday, I was really not keen to leap out of bed at 5am to ride 70 miles. So: Caleb split very early, and James and I slept until after 8 for the first time in a long while. My arm didn’t hurt nearly as much as I’d have thought a really scraped elbow would, though it looks pretty intense. We pulled out at about 10 and made our way slowly south out of the park. The road is pretty awful – two narrow lanes, the only shoulder is sloping gravel, and on a Sunday morning hundreds of holiday-makers are heading back to work in their RVs – hair-raising riding.

We ‘d been hearing from cyclists coming west about a kiwi couple we’d meet on the road, and today was the day. On one of Yellowstone’s perilous shoulders we met Graham and Wendy Selkirk, who’d met Caleb earlier that morning and knew both that I’m from NZ and that I’d had a crash. Graham rode right up and hugged me, and Wendy followed suit. And for those of you who think NZ is a tiny, tiny place, let me confirm: they’re from Devonport, and their daughter Claire was a year behind me at TGS. They’re riding east to west, so are on the home-stretch of their trip. We commiserated about mountain passes and traded Devonport gossip – so nice! I wish we’d run into them at a camp, rather than in a place that was putting all our lives in danger.  Good luck Selkirks!

Midafternoon we crested a hill and got our first view of Jackson Lake and the Tetons. Wow. Because of really cool geological stuff I won’t go into, the Tetons rise straight out of the lake with no foothills. I don’t know who looked at these jagged, icy peaks and thought ‘mmm, breasts’, but I think he’d have got on well with Freud. Many attempts to photograph them, none of which do them justice. As a treat after the crash we got a cabin at Colter Bay, and ate ourselves silly after a swim in the lake – we’re 7 or 8 thousand feet up, and this is the first body of water we’ve found warm enough to swim in! We’ll meet up with Caleb in the morning to tackle Togwatee, the biggest pass yet…pretty nervous…

July 23rd/Day 51 – Madison Junction, Yellowstone National Park to Grant Village, Yellowstone National Park. 53 miles (James)

It’s all happening in Yellowstone! We’ve had highs and lows. Spectacle and tragedy. There’s literally been blood, sweat and tears, from hilarity and from pain. Where to start…?

We began with bacon and eggs as a treat, cycle touring style. You fry up 1/3 of a pound of bacon for each person, crack two eggs over the top and then slide it between two pieces of bread. Yummo. All fuelled up, we rode north for several miles passing geysers, meadows, mule deer and the fantastic Gibbon Falls. I think we must have been passed by a car from every state in the Union, such was the variety of number plates, but the drivers were courteous and the roads – at this point at least – were good. But Yellowstone is massive, way bigger than three cycle tourists can see in a couple of days, so we had to decide whether to go north to canyons and waterfalls or whether to go south to geysers. On little more than the toss of a coin, we went south: had we missed Old Faithful, it would have been hard to look some true loyalists in the eye. I tried telling the ranger that as a non-American I have no sentimental attachment to the famous geyser, but she seemed unimpressed. As it turns out, Old Faithful was a real highlight for me. The eruption itself is spectacular, and the thousands of people who sit in the sun waiting for it to blow offer their own kind of theatre. On the dark side, I saw a teenager physically abused by his brother and father for straying out of line, but on the lighter side, we saw a woman walking a goose on a leash, decide that it must be tired and put it in the baby bassinet she had with her for just such a contingency (see photos).

Before and after Old Faithful, we saw phenomenal colours in various pools, springs, rivers, creeks, forests, geysers and lakes. The water here is constantly thrilling: it cascades in some places, it meanders in others and drops down falls in yet others, but always it is either crystal clear or brilliantly coloured by minerals. I heard one mother ask her young daughter to name all the colours she could see, and in the end both searched for words that fell between green and blue or yellow and brown

We never saw beavers (my priority) or moose (Caleb’s) or wolves or bears (universally sought after), but we did see a bison stop traffic while it grazed by the side of the road. In Yellowstone, traffic jams mean that something great is happening. We overtook all the cars as they backed up, and then pulled into the turn out to gaze at the behemoth. Its neck is beyond anything I can describe, as are its coat, its horns, its sheer bulk. It was a bit weird to see such a powerful beast nonchalantly munching away while so many cars and trucks and vans came alongside it. Equally thrilling was watching cars slowly drive up trying to figure out what all the fuss was about. Most would quickly see the 2000 pound bison and start clicking photos from their still-moving driver’s seat. One sedan of middle-aged Chinese tourists, however, took the cake. Picture the scene: on the left side of the road is megafauna; on the right are three cycling tourists; up the middle is a string of slowly moving cars. These poor tourists slowly drove up poised to capture anything they saw on film, but unfortunately they were all facing to the right. As they reached the action zone, all they saw were Zoe, Caleb and me, so they started furiously taking photos of us, most of which will have us pointing in the other direction saying, “over there, bison!” Only at the very end did one of them get the message, but I think the traffic had pushed them on by the time they has a chance to take any photos of the bison. We collapsed in laughter. Or maybe lycra-wearing white devils (or at least two and a half white devils – 5/6 white?) who ride across mountain ranges really are more of a thrill.

After all of this, we had to cross the continental divide twice, going up one 1200 foot pass and then going several hundred feet further for our highest point yet – 8391 feet. At the top of the first pass, however, was a special pond. It was only about 50 metres long, but because it was on the very top of the Rockies, one of its outlets flowed west to the Pacific and the other flowed east to the Atlantic. It was nothing special to look at and it had a lot of mozzies (I killed 43 before sunset), but it was a very cool little phenomenon.

From the passes we flew downhill, past Yellowstone Lake and paused only to take photos of a bull elk. The elk was great, but Caleb was right that the whole thing would have been more exciting if a pack of wolves had run out and eaten the thing. Deciding that a wolf attack amid all the photographers was unlikely, we headed for our campsite, but about 1.5 miles from the end, disaster struck. A deep spray of gravel had taken over the shoulder of the road and we couldn’t avoid it. Caleb swerved at the last moment and managed to stay on his bike, but riding too close behind him I saw it even later than he did and my bike slid out from under me. The next thing I remember, Zoe gave a scream and I saw her coming down the same way I did. Caleb quickly took the bikes off the road. Zoe and I checked that we were both alright. Luckily there was no traffic around. As we gathered ourselves and our stuff, I noticed that one of the tracks in the gravel made a right angle turn to the left, more or less revealing what happened. I took the impact on my hip and shoulder, both of which were clothed, and I escaped with miraculously little in the way of grazes. Zoe, however, has a deep graze on her elbow, but despite washing it out with alcohol and having to ride on for ten minutes before any rest, she took it like an absolute trooper. It made the rest of the night a bit of a downer, and the shock from which we were all suffering was only partly softened by our camping neighbour who brought us all beer. And we made s’mores – they always help. It was a rough end to an epic day, one of the best of the tour until the last two miles. But awesome nonetheless.

July 22nd/day 50– to Madison Junction, Yellowstone. 41 miles (Zoe)

Woke up bear free – tick.

We rode the last 22 miles to West Yellowstone pretty quickly, excited to get into the park. The shores of Hebgen Lake were beautiful, and electronic roadside signs warned us that animals were on the road up ahead, but these were only teasers. Our arrival in town was complicated by James getting a slow flat 2 miles out of town – riding became a matter of stopping, pumping furiously, and then riding like crazy so we could change it in town rather than on the side of the road. Success, but stressful success.

West Yellowstone has two bike shops. One is run by a 70 year old who also sells handbags, toys, and houses the local video rental. The other is run entirely by young, Nordic-looking super-fit women, and has a boutique coffee house attached. Needless to say, the later was far more helpful than the former. And as it turned out, we needed quite a bit of help. Once James had a new tube in, we ate lunch (buffalo burger! Tastes just like beef, sigh) and relocated to a laudromat/shower place for a long stay. James headed off on his own to the supermarket, and reappeared 10 minutes, wheeling his bike. The good news was he’d found an entrepreneurial  kid selling blackberries (J: “how much are they?” K: “$3.50…” [looks J up and down] “…but for you, $3.”). The bad news: his rear tire had exploded while he was in the supermarket – he re-emerged from the shop to find a crowd ofgawkers standing around his bike, and his tube in tatters. The rim of the tire had failed - exactly the same thing that happened to me in the Columbia Gorge. Ergo, women’s bike shop and a new tire. Schwalbe, you fail us again. There is no way that this is supposed to happen this often. We did our research – these tires can go for 8 or 10 000 miles, and we’ve lost two with less than 2k on them. Either there was something wrong with that batch, the tires don’t like our rims (though we checked with bike store people in NYC about the match), or we’re seating the tires like muppets (though Caleb, who knows his bikes, doesn’t think so). Grrr.

Losing a lot of the day to shopping, showering, laundering, and yelling at inner tubes, we finally entered Yellowstone about 4pm. It’s hard to describe how quickly and completely our moods changed. The road followed a river bubbling slowly through grassy meadows and craggy canyons, and young pines rose up around us. Very different than any landscape we’d seen before, and completely magical. We hit our first traffic jam – traffic in Yellowstone is normal, but stopped cars equal animals on the roads. A small group of mule deer are hanging out, completely unfazed by the 50 or so people climbing out of their cars with their cameras. It’s easy to see why real wilderness aficionados don’t like this aspect of Yellowstone, but for now, it’s just entertaining.

Madison campground has specific hiker-biker spots, always nice. A cool French guy called Antoine pulled in. He offered us his cherries, we offered him our Yellowtail red (always a classy move when meeting frenchies), and we had a good night. A ranger gave a talk in the campground’s amphitheatre gave a talk about the reintroduction of wolves to Yellowstone, which The Citizen’s Idahoan editor would have deeply disapproved of, but which was really cool. Wolves were exterminated from the park years ago, and brought back in 95 to mixed reviews. In their favour: wolves have brought down rampant Elk numbers, which allows beaver and moose back into the eco-system. They keep down coyote numbers, also good for small animals, and bears can feed on their kills. It is interesting to see both sides of the argument fudging their numbers, though. True, only two people have been killed by wolves in the USA in the last century. But given that wolves were almost entirely exterminated in the contiguous states for that century, the number doesn’t mean much.