July 12, 2011
Day 91: Near Hot Sulphur Springs, CO to Walden, CO
Colorado doesn't become any less huge overnight. I return to the highway and ride through the bottom of a canyon, where the orange and brown sides rise almost straight up beside me and stand ready to send a boulder or two my way. Past Hot Sulphur Springs the hills soften, with acre upon acre of light green sagebrush making them look almost blurry. The sky reflects a rich blue, the air is cold and perfectly clean, and the wind kicks up a snowstorm of dandelion fuzz.
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I ride behind a pair of women on unloaded bicycles as I head north on Highway 125, the road that will eventually take me out of Colorado and into Wyoming. When cars and trucks pass me, the best I get is the left-side tires touching the center line, or maybe slightly over. When the drivers reach the women a quarter mile on, they move entirely over into the opposite lane, whether oncoming traffic is close or not. For the sake of my own safety I need to start wearing pink.
Almost no drivers wave when I pass anymore—they just stare without smiling as they speed by.
Along the highway I pass ranches with names like Lazy U, Shadow M, and Moose Run. Willow Creek runs next to the road and the riding is perfect in the sun but immediately turns frigid when I head through the shade of the hills, a sudden reminder that I'm still way the hell up in the mountains. Soon I enter National Forest land that's pure and untouched and spectacular. Red and purple wildflowers line the road's edge, and soon the creek starts to run aggressively, snaking its way down the valley in tight hairpins that change direction 180 degrees before immediately reversing course and continuing south. More than once I pass impossibly steep mountain sides and look up to find a herd of deer staring down at me, waiting to see what the crazy guy on a bike will do next. Just when I think the ride can't turn more amazing, I round a corner and a snow-topped mountain comes into view. The stunning scenery literally never stops.
The ride up to Willow Creek Pass is one of the most wonderful stretches of the trip, rivaling anything on the Blue Ridge Parkway in both beauty and scale. But the show stops abruptly on the other side of the Continental Divide. As soon as I start coasting down the skies turn gray and I see more trees lying on the ground than standing. Tractors work hard to collect the logs and giant semi trucks stand ready to haul them away to the lumber yard.
Rand will always hold a place in my memory for one thing: horrible, awful, swarming mosquitoes that descend on me within ten seconds of stopping. All I want, more than anything in the world, is to sit on the porch of the closed store, rest my ass cheeks, and eat a fucking granola bar or two. Instead I spend two horrendous minutes swatting wildly, hitting some of the buggers but missing others, and leaving wet streaks of blood on both my shoulders and calves. If this is a preview of what's to come in Wyoming, I expect to have lost my mind completely by the time I reach Yellowstone.
Trees and hills soon give way to a sweeping valley. I look out across the thousands of acres of open land all around me and count no more than a dozen homes or farms. With long, straight stretches ahead and bastard mosquitoes all around, I keep myself somewhat sane by trying to answer important questions about the country I'm passing through. What's on fire and causing all that dark gray smoke in the distance? If you allow hunting in a national wildlife refuge, doesn't that defeat the point? How do bugs manage to fly into my mouth when I'm the only thing within ten square miles that they have to avoid? I see a fresh splatter of roadkill blood but no animal body. Who took it?
Cracks in the road crop up every hundred feet and shake and rattle the bike as I roll north to Walden, the self-proclaimed moose viewing capital of Colorado. By the time I hit town I'm completely cooked. Some bikers can ride and ride and ride for hours without stopping, but that's never been my speed, and the more than 30 miles of nearly non-stop pedaling from the bottom of the pass to Walden confirm what I already knew. The seven five-year-olds sitting at the table behind me at the cafe do everything they can to help me feel better by repeating the same thing over and over again, spilling their drinks, smacking their heads into the table and crying, and asking dumb questions in high-pitched voices.
Dinner time is much quieter. I treat myself to a local specialty: Rocky Mountain Oysters—or, more simply, bull's balls. They're deep-fried and delicious and taste vaguely like the alligator meat I ate back in Florida. As I finish the last slice of testicle I silently thank the bull that sacrificed his nuts so that I could enjoy a tasty evening snack.
Over dessert the skies turn dark. Then the wind kicks up and blows dust, dirt, and garbage down Main Street in huge gusts. Rain starts within a few minutes, but almost instantly turns into a hellish downpour of pea-sized hail stones that fly across the sky at a 45-degree angle. Lightning flashes, thunder booms, and every surface echoes with the sound of a thousand deflecting ice pellets. I wait for the power to go out, for the door to blow clean off its hinges, or for one of the small children from earlier to go flying past, but Walden stands strong in the face of a thunderstorm that's more intense than anything I've ever seen.
Ten minutes later the world is quiet again. I hope like hell that the worst has passed, because sunset approaches and I'm nearly ready to head to sleep outside.
With another gray-black mass moving slowly toward the north I pack up and hurry to the town park and set up underneath a metal picnic shelter. Rain clanks against the roof on and off throughout the night, but never more intensely than a shower. Even though it's cold and wet outside I'm happy, because I lay inside a dry tent in a ridiculously warm sleeping bag, toasty and comfortable and feeling like I've beaten the weather at its own miserable game.
Today's ride: 67 miles (108 km)
Total: 4,519 miles (7,273 km)
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