There is a quote that I saw in my cross-country rides on a memorial in a very rural area of Missouri, “Happy are those who dream dreams and are willing to pay the price to make them come true.” Today was the first day of the paying part.

When you do a ride like this, to some extent your life depends on your Garmin. My Garmin, an Edge 1000 is made for cycling but I have had some issues with it. We load GPX tracks on the unit that provides a map that we follow. We are riding in some remote and desolate parts of the wilderness, no cell coverage and no other humans. If you take a wrong turn, the Garmin will generally tell you “Off Course”. Sometimes when I stop for more than a few minutes, the unit shuts down and when I restart, it thinks that I am “Off Course”. When you are by yourself, which happens quite a bit the way I ride, mistakes can be very costly.

The day started off with about 20 miles on a real paved road. I rode with the fast group until we hit the first part of the off-road segment which was the rest of the day. Immediately, the double track got muddy and a little rough and we started a many mile climb. After the tarmac portion, the ride was basically 4 segments, climb, descend, climb, descend.

The first ascent was long, hard but uneventful. I walked a bit on the steep parts. Then I started the descent. This is when my Garmin started to play tricks on me. The down-hill portion was crisscrossed by a stream that was chock-full of medium sized rounded rocks, the kind you find in a rushing stream, rubbed smooth by the constant force of water and grit on the sharp edges. It looked more like a stream bed (with water) than a road. Suddenly, my Garmin said, “off course”. This caused me to wait, retrace and ultimately decide to push forward in the stream bed.

Eventually, my Garmin determined that I really was “On Course”, so that made me happy that I wasn’t on track to be a statistic or the source of a multi-million-dollar search and rescue mission. After the stream bed, much the descent was rideable, albeit at my granny crossing the street pace. I came out onto a large stream about 50 feet across with no bridge. Across the stream in a small chair, sat Avert, a rider from Holland, who was sitting out a few days due to a mysterious injury to his thumb. David, a retired doctor from Steamboat, speculated that it was infected from sticking it in a wrong, but unmentionable place. Avert told me where to ford the stream and it wasn’t very deep, but it was cold. Before coming across, I asked if anyone had ridden across and it turns out that several had tried, but failed. I walked across. As luck would have it, lunch was around the bend.

I was happy to have something to eat and was overjoyed that I was on course. David and Steve (my roommate from Wisconsin on the few days that we aren’t camping) were drying their cloths and eating lunch. They were the two who tried to ride across the stream. David almost made it, but that reminds me of a horseshoe reference.

After lunch, I began the second climb and it was quite a bit harder than the first. It just keeps going on and when you think you have reached the top, you haven’t. One other thing about the Tour Divide, there are no flat, level roads. At their best, the trails undulate and at worst, mountain goats might consider an alternate route. Beginning the second descent, my Garmin started to act up again. It was low on power and once again, I was unsure, if I was on course or not. I came upon Wallace who was in a similar quandary and together, after wasting a bit of time, figured out that we missed an obscure turn. The double track that we found ourselves on was extremely dusty and had quite a bit of heavy truck (i.e. logging and pickup trucks). We were delighted to see some more humans, but they liked to drive past at high speeds and in close proximity, so we ate a lot of dust. In what started to be a pattern. Wallace, would speed off and I’d catch him down the road, trying to determine the correct route.

I found that I was taking the descents, faster as I gained experience so I was hitting speeds of 25 mph hoping there was not a bear, a cliff or someone taking photos around the next bend. I rode into camp at Wigwam which was a camp ground near a river. There were no real facilities so I bathed in the extremely cold river. The single outhouse, was about the worst that I had seen (or smelled). Due to the proximity to the river, there were also a lot of mosquitos.

Every day as we enter camp, they have a small buffet of food and drink. I didn’t drink enough most of the day, and drank so much Tang (yes, they still make it) that I thought I’d burst. It also makes for frequent trips to the stinky outhouse when the temperatures drop near freezing. At least it slows down the mosquitos.

I set up my tent and was very sore and tired before dinner. Rob said that this was the hardest day …… in Canada. Unfortunately, I would argue that the next day was far worse. Rob kind of sounds like Arnold Swazenegger and I could imagine him saying, “I lied”. Pir from Denmark, sounds quite a bit like the Terminator. He has had both Achilles tendons reconstituted as well as both knees and is an awesome athlete.

I was looking forward to the next day, an easier ride and reentry into the USA! The last day was one of the hardest ever and I would up with almost 90 miles due to backtracking and wrong turns.

Tailwinds

Chuck