March 16, 2013
Day 22: Thatcher, AZ to Coal Creek Campground
Thatcher blends into Safford, which goes from chain motels and fast food places to the remains of its original downtown, and then on to a long string of mobile home parks. After that it's back to the barbed wire fences, tractors, and water pumps of the valley's farms, where everything but the fields of sod lay fallow.
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About a dozen miles in I hang a left and start a push that's more north than east and more mountains than valleys. It will take me up to six, seven, and eight thousand feet of elevation and bring with it the kind of cold nights I haven't felt since I left home. On the heels of three weeks of desert riding and the heat wave of the last few days, I'm ready for the change.
And it starts with another round of awesome riding. The highway rises in a gentle but steady way as it passes through parched lands of squat cacti and future tumbleweeds and then through foothills of pale brown and yellow and red. Farther on, the road starts to jog through a canyon that snakes along the bases of the rocky hills that box it in. The wind picks up and the clouds move in, which help to cool me down, boost my speed, and lift my spirits.
I reach the top — somewhere around 5,000 feet — and don't feel completely gassed. That's a big deal, because I know what's waiting for me in the afternoon and evening.
Unless you're too mature and uptight for your own good, there are a handful of place names in America that will make you laugh or crack a joke every time. There's Bumpass in Virginia, Mianus in Connecticut, and Gaysville in Vermont (which I'll ride through in June). And today, after a brake-melting descent, I reach another: Three Way, Arizona. The Magnetic Fields song of the same name repeats over and over in my head all the way there. I don't know what I'll find when I roll into town, but I'm excited for, well, something.
In the end, the most exciting thing about Three Way is the name. There's a gas station, a store with surly girls behind the counter, and an old drive-in movie theater screen that somehow hasn't fallen down from the wind or the total lack of maintenance. The name doesn't even make sense; Three Way is a four-way highway junction.
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After the disappointment passes, I head back to the road. The climb out starts modest, with a reasonable grade and a strong tailwind to help me up. But in just a few miles the ride becomes both amazing and demoralizing. It's amazing because the highway bobs and weaves and dances along a ridge line that wiggles its way up into a bunch of no-fucking-around mountains. Each one looks different: one is smooth and covered with trees, another turns rocky with near-vertical jagged rock faces at the top, the next has a triangular top like a pyramid with an oval-shaped cloud above that resembles a UFO. The one farthest off stands broad-shouldered and imposing as it looks down with a laugh on the tiny speck of a bicycle rider thousands of feet below. In the folds of a lower canyon, horses wander and eat plants from hillsides that run up at impossible angles. When the wind noise dies for a moment, I hear the metal of their shoes crunch against the rocks and stones, looking for traction.
But this view, when experienced from the seat of a bicycle, doesn't come cheap. The steepness of the climb that follows sends me down into my three lowest gears for all but about ten minutes.
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I reach one of the easier sections just past halfway to the top. For a couple of minutes I think, Hey, this isn't so bad, maybe reaching the summit of this thing won't take every last ounce of energy from my body.
No such luck.
Within a mile I round a corner, look up, and spot a long string of guardrail that bends and cuts and crawls its way up the side of the big mountain that's been watching me all afternoon. I've seen some twisted climbs on bike tours before, but this one blows all of them away. And so begins a period of about three minutes where, standing over the bike at the road's edge and talking to myself and the hills around me, I pass through through the Kubler-Ross model's five stages of grief. Normally the stages apply to people dying of terminal illness, children of divorcing parents, people dealing with substance abuse, and so on. But at this moment they fall into lockstep with the nonsense clanking around in my brain. First there's denial ("I can't believe this road goes all the way up there. That's impossible. It looks like it disappears halfway up!"), then anger ("Shit, I just saw a car go around the corner. It does go all the way up there!"), followed by bargaining ("Maybe I'll just go part of the way up, set up the tent, and then finish it tomorrow morning. Yeah, I could do that."), depression ("This is insane. I don't know if I can do this. Why did I choose to come this way? At what point did that seem like a good idea?"), and at last a resigned acceptance ("Dude, none of this matters. Darkness is coming. You've just gotta crank. Get on with it.").
So I do. I crank and crank and crank, because there's nowhere to camp on a ledge that drops hundreds of feet down to an ominous-looking canyon below. I deal with it the best way I know how: break up the climb into sections, stop every quarter-mile for water and to catch my breath, and talk myself up during the moments in between. It's as tough and grueling as it looked from down below. And yet at a number of points along the way I'm distracted and for a few seconds forget what I'm doing, because the vistas of the mountains around me and the valley out of which I climbed are some of the most beautiful I've ever experienced. It's breathtaking in both senses of the word.
I reach the top as the sun sets. It takes about six seconds for the 6,300 feet of elevation to make itself known. After I piss and moan for a few minutes about the fact that this insane mountain pass has no name and no sign to mark it, I thrown on some layers and head through more switchbacks — at high speed this time — on the five-mile drop to the campground. In an instant the world no longer looks like the one I've grown used to. The squat bushes and trees and rocky soil have been replaced by widely spaced pine trees of deep green and brown that stand arm in arm along the road and litter the ground with fallen needles. It's a wonderful change.
I set up the tent as the sky turns darker and darker shades of blue and the tops of the pine trees frame the bright white crescent moon above. Inside I use my metal tire pump to roll out of my thighs some of the stiffness that comes with 5,500 feet of climbing on a bike with all kinds of heavy shit attached to it. And then I think back on the day, not with frustration or regret, but with a smile and a nod and good feelings. This trip has seen a lot of adversity crammed into a short amount of time, and although I work to stay positive it still wears on me. Every headwind, every mechanical problem, every projectile vomit — there's a cost to bear for all of those. But days like today, full of beauty and challenge and achievement, the kind of days that I'll remember until my memory goes the way of the buffalo, help pay off that debt and give me the fuel I need to keep pushing.
Today's ride: 57 miles (92 km)
Total: 961 miles (1,547 km)
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