Chapter Nine

Into the Great Divide

 

It didn’t look like the first mile of a grueling 2,700-mile mountain bike race. The freeze-dried leaves of the previous autumn still littered the trail, soft and disarming. Sunlight filtered through hemlock branches and mottled the ground with abstract shadows. Bicycles sporting all manner of bags and panniers and tarp-wrapped bundles streamed past a small group of tourists who had probably just been out for a morning stroll. They cheered in German and snapped a photo of me as I rode by.

Stress pumped through my blood like jet fuel and I pedaled a hard pace that I wouldn’t be able to sustain for twenty-seven miles, let alone a hundred times that. I caught up to several small clusters of cyclists, gasped a quick hello, and surged forward. After one mile, the group of forty-two racers had already significantly spread out, and eventually I found myself somewhere in the mid-pack.

My throbbing lungs forced me to settle into an easier rhythm just as I caught up to two older men: an Italian who did not speak English, and a professor named Steve. The professor was a bald, powerfully built man in his mid to late-forties. The Italian drafted silently behind our new group of three as Steve and I talked through basic introductions: Name, place of origin, and bike set-up. Steve taught creative writing at a small college and lived with his wife in Iowa. He talked quickly, but I gathered that he had children and had ridden the Tour Divide before, but didn’t finish. He said he planned to “take it easier” this time around, and “enjoy the view.”

As I tried to describe my gear choices, I noticed Steve had a camera mounted to his handlebars. He said he intended to film his entire ride, which he would use later as the basis for performance pieces at his college.

“I use the footage mostly for inspiration,” he told me. “I generally do monologues, no costumes or sets. I prefer to set up the scene myself.”

I wondered what inspiration Steve could possibly extract from hundreds of hours of gravel, mud, grass and trees, and then smiled at my delayed self-recognition as a person seeking enlightenment in the same mundane scenario. “So what kinds of images are you hoping to capture?” I asked.

“Oh, everything,” he said. “I have the camera angled up so I can talk into it. I’m going to tell it how I’m feeling, what I’m thinking about, things like that.”

“I guess it would be nice just to have someone to talk to,” I joked.

Steve shot back one of those squinty smiles that artist types tend to use when dealing with uncreative people who will never understand the true nature of their art. “And what brings you to the Tour Divide?” he asked me. “You said you were a journalist?”

“An editor, mostly, but yeah. I’m on leave from my job for a few months. I love bike touring and mountains, and the Tour Divide sounded fun. So I’m just here on vacation.”

“This is your idea of a fun vacation?”

“Yeah, it is,” I said. “Since I’m out here by myself, I needed something challenging to keep me going, but not so extreme that I’d be struggling every second of the day.”

“No husband or partner?”

“Not anymore,” I said. “Recently freed.”

“Ah,” Steve said. He looked ahead and asked no more questions; it seemed that was the end of his curiosity about my own story.

His indifference stung a little, because from what I could discern, Steve and I had a lot in common. We were riding those dusty miles for similar reasons. At its base level, a race like the Tour Divide attracts three kinds of people: Endurance athletes with strong resumes, fast legs, and aspirations for wins and records; wanderers with cheap, heavy bikes, an undying appetite for adventure and an ability to live on dirt; and introspective types similar to Steve and me, who look at the wholesale impossibility of the Tour Divide and hope, quite vainly, that we can cut the challenge into workable parts and then condense the experience into something artful and enlightening.

The interesting thing about these three groups of people is that the athletes and wanderers were the ones who approached the race honestly, with their intentions out in the open and their movements a simple, natural expression of who they are. As dreamers, Steve’s and my place in the race was much more dubious. We had no solid goals or destinations, besides the simple act of just being there and a vague hope of eventually finishing. Our journey awaited in the rugged landscape of our minds.

The Italian surged ahead and Steve fell behind as the trail narrowed to rough singletrack at the edge of Banff National Park. Trees crowded in, so tall and thick that I didn’t notice clumps of afternoon clouds starting to blot out the sunlight. I gripped the handlebars and narrowed my focus to the simple movements of a mountain biker: solid steering, strategic cadence, leaning into turns and avoiding trees. Singletrack has a way of forcing even the most unapologetic dreamers to leave the shadowy worlds of their minds and think only in the simple absolutes of the present: swerve around that stump; hop over those downed trees; steer hard right; jerk hard left; pedal harder, up, harder, up, harder, almost there, hard stroke, gasp for breath, rumble down. Singletrack, though sparse on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, was a fast embodiment of the kind of outside inspiration for which Steve and I were looking. In places of comfort, everything people do is a result of everything they’ve been through. Perspectives are colored and blurred by past experiences. But on tight, narrow trail, a moment is simply a moment, and a movement simply a movement. There is no room for vague indecision. The movement is either right or wrong. Either you swerve around a tree, or slam into it. Everything you did before that moment simply does not matter.

After about two hours of tight focus, the trail found its way out of the forest and entered an open river valley, still walled by the sharp purple peaks of the Canadian Rockies. I climbed a steep bluff and caught up to a group of three men sprawled out on the grass in the shade. A large man with bushy facial hair stood up and said, “Uh oh, guys, the women are catching up to us. We better get cranking or we’re going to lose this race.”

The two skinnier guys laughed heartily. Despite the fact I was already subdued by the effort of the afternoon and slightly offended, I couldn’t help but crack a smile. The total distance of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route was actually closer to 2,770 miles, and we had pedaled fifty. Sweat drenched our jerseys and foreheads, and we still had more than 2,700 miles in front of us. There wasn’t even a race yet to lose, but we couldn’t help but size each other up as competitors while laughing at our innate tendency to do so.

I followed the men for several miles through another tight section of singletrack, but couldn’t keep up after a long stretch littered with fallen trees. I was riding solo again. It was the first day of the race and the forty-two racers were never again going to be any closer together. I didn’t know how far in front of me the leaders were, nor did I have any clue how many people were behind me. I suspected I was in the back-center of the pack. But with the exception of my first short encounters, I mostly felt alone amid expansive valleys and granite pinnacles. I began to wonder what the race would feel like when people really spread out.

The afternoon clouds brought frequent showers. Still, the heat of the morning remained and I felt no need to pull a jacket over my short-sleeved jersey. The rain fell in gentle drops. Bursts of sun occasionally cut through the gray ceiling, illuminating the mist-shrouded pines in a virtual forest fire of golden light. Soon the occasional slices of light in the sky turned pink, and then red, and then the world almost imperceptibly fell into the purple shades of evening. I climbed and descended, then climbed and descended again, along a seemingly endless procession of drainages. For hours of effort, I was never fully maxed out, but I never felt completely comfortable, either. Still, the physical strain succeeded in carving away at my race anxiety, until I felt a subdued sort of peace.

I reached Elkford, British Columbia, at about 9 p.m., just as the mountain landscape began to dip into darkness. My maps indicated that I had traveled 110 miles that day. Lightning streaked across the sky and thunder rumbled closer as I pulled up to a campground on the outskirts of the tiny town. Across the street, a motel sign flickered with enviable warmth. I watched it greedily, debating the propriety of an $8 campsite versus a roach motel when it was still early in the race and I was relatively fresh and well-fed. Another bolt of lightning streaked over my head and rain began to fall hard.

“This is stupid,” I grumbled to myself. “The only things that matter to me right now are rest and energy, and I certainly have enough money to obtain both.” I crossed the street.

The bar attached to the motel pounded with the obnoxious vibrations of a cover band. The singer howled bad Van Halen tunes made worse by pounding volume from a cheap amplifier. I propped my bike against the window and walked inside.

“So, another biker,” the woman at the desk chuckled. “I’m almost full with you people tonight.”

“Really?” I asked. “There are quite a few others here?” I had expected most of the riders to go on to Sparwood, which was thirty miles down the route.

“I’d say at least twenty,” she said. “So you’ll be wanting a room, then?”

“Yes,” I said. I didn’t ask her how much it cost.

She drew up a ticket for $109 and I winced. “How late is that band going to be playing?” I asked.

“Probably until 2 a.m., maybe 3,” she said. “We have ear plugs if you’d like.”

Full eardrum removal wasn’t going to be enough to block out that noise. The walls were literally shaking. But thunder continued to rumble outside. I didn’t want to bivy in the rain and I certainly didn’t have the energy for thirty more hard miles, especially after I had let the prospect of sleep enter my consciousness. Bikers can’t be choosers.

Upstairs, I stripped off my sweaty clothes and threw them in the bottom of the bathtub before I stepped beneath the shower head. As hot water stung my rain-numbed skin, I squatted down and scrubbed each article of clothing with a bar of soap. Then I turned the depleted remnants of the soap on my own grungy body. After twenty minutes of joyless washerwoman cleaning, I hung my wet bike clothes all over the room. I sat on the floor, stark naked, too unmotivated to pull my spare set of clothing out of my bike bags. I plunged granola bars into a jar of peanut butter and flipped through six channels until I found the local access weather report. I squinted at the little icons of thunderstorm clouds dangling over every day in the next week while trying convert Celsius temperatures in my head. Four degrees? What did that mean? It was above freezing, but wasn’t that still pretty cold? Rain pelted the window and I felt grateful to be naked in the dry heat of a $109 roach room, even if walls did rattle with the terrible noise of some backwoods British Columbian band.

It was after midnight when I finally crawled into bed after burning up more than an hour typing a few e-mails on a tiny little handheld device and working up an iPod playlist for the next day. These were hardly smart activities for a racer, in a race in which every minute not spent eating, sleeping or pedaling was considered waste of time. Still, I felt proud of myself and decided my first day had been a success. I had overcome the personal challenge of starting the race and committed to going the distance. I also felt a tinge of pride just to be part of the Tour Divide, the ultimate mountain biking challenge. Sure, finishing the Divide was still close to impossible. And, yeah, I was still alone. But for a few blissful minutes before exhaustion overtook the roar of Friday night revelry, those realities did not seem relevant. I was there, on the Great Divide. In its own way, the hardest battle had already been won.

The morning of day two dawned as beautiful as the first. I managed to pry myself out of the stiff bed at about 6:30 a.m., well after the sun came up but still early enough to be considered respectable for a Divide racer. The hard rock motel was eerily quiet as I pulled away and pedaled through the streets of Elkford, searching for the route out of town. The maps weren’t completely clear and I was too confused to even ask for directions. Was I on the north side of town or the south? Did the route head straight out of town or did it follow the highway? Was I even in Elkford? Suddenly even that detail wasn’t clear.

I was lost for nearly a half hour, making wider circles around the motel until I finally stopped at a gas station and showed the attendant my map. She laughed and pointed to a gravel road across the street.

“That’s the mining road,” she said. “Besides the highway, it’s the only road out of town.”

I scrunched my nose and tried to suppress a grimace. It seemed obvious to her, but to a foreign cyclist, even the most inconsequential suburban streets look like they might go somewhere, and it takes a very long time to rule out every dead end in town. I sighed. This was going to be a long, frequently confusing race. Oh well. I had wasted nearly an hour but I was finally on the right track. I crossed the street and began climbing back into the mountains.

After I passed the belching smokestacks of the mine, the rutted gravel road dipped into a narrow canyon and wound playfully back to the highway that I had spent all morning bypassing on the primitive, and therefore preferable, forest road. That’s the one big catch of the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route — it never takes the easy way. It takes the most scenic, most challenging, most remote ways, but never the easy way. And the one main stipulation of the race rules was that each racer must follow the marked route with an engineer’s exactness. In some ways, it was nice to have free agency taken away from us, because it removed the doubt and guesswork that often accompany route-finding on bike tours. But in other ways, especially as the days wore on, it often seemed ridiculous to climb many thousands of feet over and down three difficult passes on flooded, rock-strewn roads, just to get around the perfectly good pavement of a smooth, flat highway.

Even though I did relish the rugged riding and scenery of the mountains, I was also grateful to return to the relatively mindless flow of the pavement. I felt like free bird flying into Sparwood, spinning an easy twenty miles per hour while accompanied by tunes on my iPod. I wondered if the time I spent compiling a rocking playlist really had been wasted, as it seemed to ease the burden substantially. I made it to town by 10:30 a.m. despite being lost in Elkford until 8. I stocked up on supplies at a small market and rolled deeper into town to choose a location for my first celebratory meal. The choices of eating establishments in Sparwood included an A&W hamburger stand and — an A&W hamburger stand. I frowned. I’m not a big fan of greasy fast food and would have preferred a Subway or the heaven-sent unlikelihood of a sushi bar, but bikers can’t be choosers.

I tried to stuff down a heavy meal of a grilled chicken sandwich, onion rings, and root beer as I pored over the cue sheet for the next section of the route. While I ate, another Tour Divide rider walked into the restaurant.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

“Good,” I said. “I spent the night in Elkford. Feeling pretty good right now.”

“What do you think about that?” he asked, pointing to the cue sheet I had been browsing.

I frowned. I was not happy about the cue sheet, a wrench that the race organizers had thrown at us the night before the race started. It detailed the directions for an experimental section of the route that was not on the maps. On the sheet, the route was given only in cues about where to make turns, with none of the elevation profiles, detailed course illustrations and trail details that the official maps offered. The race organizers were essentially making guinea pigs out of the 2009 racers by foisting this untested, uncharted section of trail on us the night before the race. I understood that the Tour Divide was supposed to be an adventure race, but still. I had a hard enough time finding my way out of Elkford. I didn’t want a silly cue sheet to become my undoing.

“It’s pretty vague,” I said grumpily. “I’m just hoping I don’t get lost.”

“The cues seem okay,” he said. “I’m just wondering about the climbing and stuff.”

“Either way,” I said, “I will be a happy girl once we cross the border.”

“Are you going to cross it tonight?” he asked.

“We’ll see,” I said. “These cues don’t even say how far it is. For all I know, it could be 200 miles away still.”

Outside of Sparwood, the official maps indicated the route turned left toward southern British Columbia, but the cue sheet directed me to turn right. I grumbled out loud and squinted to scan for bike tracks through the dust on the pavement. The cue sheets directed me to turn on another mine road, which deteriorated into a gravel forest road, which deteriorated further into a rocky double track and finally veered onto a streambed swollen with spring runoff. I bounced over the boulders until I hit a deep rut and had to drop both feet into the cold water. I yelped and swung my leg over the bar, rushing to the shoreline, but it was too late. My feet were soaked.

The road finally veered away from the stream and began climbing steeply. I spotted more bike tracks pressed deep into the mud. All around, red pines towered over the road. The rolling mountains evoked memories of my grandparents’ property in Northern Utah, where as children my sisters and I crawled through a stream to access a redrock cave. The scenery was breathtaking but I was still too annoyed to enjoy it. While I accepted that I was in a race and therefore had to go where the race went, I still resented being told what to do.

The cue sheet was not even remotely helpful in guiding me through its own unrealistic demands. It told me to “gain” a pass and failed to mention that said pass gained 2,000 feet on some of the worst road I had yet encountered on a bicycle — a deeply rutted gravel track that made it difficult to establish any kind of traction or flow. It told me to turn right in 2.9 miles, and five miles went by without any hint of a crossroad. Had it not been for the myriad bicycle tracks curving through the mud at the next right turn, I might have just exploded with frustration and turned back toward Sparwood. I couldn’t fathom how the race leaders found the route.

Steve caught up to me on a section of the route called Cabin Creek Pass that seemed to have neither cabins nor a creek. But the road was quite steep, so it was definitely a pass. He only grunted softly when I said hello but instead of passing me, he sidled up behind my rear wheel. He seemed even more disinterested in talking to me than he had the day before, but I decided his terse replies to my questions could simply be fatigue. After all, the day’s endless climbs had left my head swimming. Why would Steve be any different?

“Did you stay in Elkford last night?” I asked.

“We did,” he said. “Me and Jeff Kirby and, ah, another man. I forget his name. We got in about eleven or so. It was raining pretty hard. We went into the hotel but there was all that awful noise. I couldn’t spend another minute in there, so we sacked out beneath the canopy at the bank next door.”

“Did you stay dry?” I asked.

“Not really,” Steve said in a defeated tone. “I hardly got a lick of sleep. And Kirby snored. I just can’t wait to get to Eureka. I’m going to sleep hard tonight.”

“Think you’ll make it to Eureka tonight?” I asked. Eureka was in Montana, about ten miles south of the United States border. Our cue sheets indicated we only had one more pass after Cabin Creek, but who really knew? There could be several, and they could all be over 6,000 feet high on roads that were nothing more than active streambeds. I had already resigned myself to the idea that I was going to get to Eureka when the cue sheet was good and ready to let me get there, and no sooner.

“I’d better,” Steve said. “I have to make it there tonight. And so I will.”

I admired Steve’s resolve, but I pitied his inflexibility. Steve stuck to my wheel but maintained his silence. As we climbed, I slowly surged ahead until Steve was out of sight. Several thousand feet down the rocky pass, I rejoined a fairly civilized looking stretch of pavement, only to turn onto an even more rugged road that veered right off the cue sheet’s rudimentary photocopied map. It climbed and dropped into a half dozen 200- to 500-feet-deep drainages in a section that didn’t even indicate elevation change. After a dozen miles and another couple thousand feet of unrewarded climbing, I reached the most dreaded section of all — the primitive singletrack connector trail that linked two remote logging roads. Even the race director, who swore that all other directions on the cue sheet were crystal clear, admitted that this section was hard to find.

I approached the bridge that the directions warned I should not cross because it meant I had gone too far. I stopped and scanned the woods but saw nothing that appeared to be a trail. I did see a small tent pitched next to the road. The sun was settling but I figured there was at least another hour of usable twilight, and I wanted to continue moving. As I wheeled my bike past the tent, a woman’s voice called out, “Who’s there?”

“It’s Jill with the Tour Divide,” I said. “Are you Cricket?”

“Yes,” she said.

“And is this the right way, the connector trail?” I asked.

“I think it’s right over there, right behind me,” she said. “I figured I’d camp here and try to cross it with someone in the morning.”

“You think it’s going to be that bad?”

“No,” she said. “I’ve just gone far enough today. I’m happy here.”

“Well, I think I’m going to cross while there’s still a little daylight,” I said. “Maybe shoot for the border tonight, but probably not. I’m just going to get some water in that stream over there and head out. I’m kind of a sleeper-inner, so I’m sure I’ll see you in the morning.”

“Well, let me know if you decide to camp here,” Cricket said in a way that told me she didn’t really want my company. I wondered if all of these racers I was meeting were as repelled by my presence as they seemed, or if that was just an insecurity born of my own imagination. Either way, I wasn’t quite ready to stop for the night.

“I think I’ll go on,” I said. “But thanks.”

Even in the brightest part of twilight, with Cricket’s assurances that this was the right spot, I had a difficult time picking out the trail entrance from the meadow where she was camped. I doubted if I would have ever found it had her tent not been pitched right in front of it. The so-called “singletrack” barely made an indentation in the grass and moss. A thin ribbon was tied to a tree several feet away from the initial clearing, and only faint footprints on the dewy ground indicated any real passage at all. Obviously, everyone had walked their bikes through this section of “trail.” I switched on my headlamp and picked out more footprints with bike tracks nearby.

In the deep forest, twilight turned quickly to darkness. Within the narrow beam of my headlamp, I pieced my way along the trammeled grass as it wove through the trees near a gurgling stream. Then, almost as imperceptibly as it started, the connector dead-ended in a virtually vertical bluff. I shined my headlight in a large circle, looking for some way around it, but all bike tracks indicated that the route went straight up.

The grade was at least sixty degrees. The cue sheet called it a “hike-a-bike” but it was in fact a virtual wall — a wall built of slippery mud and with chocolate-colored water cascading down the face. I grunted, hoisted the bike a few inches forward and planted my right shoe in the gooey cliff. I took a few more steps before I lost traction and slid all the way back to the bottom. I swore and threw my bike on its side, lodging the handlebars in the mud and using it as an anchor to leverage my body up the first crumbling step. After several “ax” plants, I was drenched in sweat and nowhere near the top of the bluff. The climb was so difficult that I had to tap deep into what I call my “snow bike mode,” a rather defeated state of mind I reserve for only the most ridiculous slog conditions, in which I tell myself that I’m merely living out some kind of bad dream, and to not be so uptight about it because I’ll probably wake up soon.

For the next twenty minutes, I picked my way up 300 vertical feet by throwing my bike down, taking a couple of sliding steps, wedging one foot deep into the mud, picking my bike up and throwing it down again. By the time I reached the top of the bluff, I was exhausted. I staggered out of the forest into an large clear-cut area. The sky had become pitch dark, shrouded with clouds that blocked the stars. Within the faint beam of my headlamp, all I could see were piles of downed trees. There was no road or trail anywhere in sight.

I swore again, probably for the eightieth time in the past half hour, and began lifting my bike over the seemingly endless minefield of logs. The road had to be around here somewhere, but what if I didn’t find it tonight? How far was I going to wander through this fallen-tree obstacle course before I finally just gave up and waited for daylight? I still had my GPS turned on, but the unit didn’t have any embedded maps of for Canada, and was therefore only good at showing me where I had been. The splintered remains of trees lay like bones on a battlefield, revealing nothing.

After fifteen minutes, I was on the verge of collapsing on a log in a shower of tears when I noticed a strip of gravel on the edge of my headlamp beam. As I approached it, the gravel grew wider until I was standing on a road. I clicked on my GPS to check my progress. It had been an hour and fifteen minutes since I left Cricket’s tent. GPS indicated I had traveled less than a mile.

I swore for the eighty-seventh and final time, and set the bike down on a narrow patch of moss only a few feet from the road. I doubted anyone would drive to a dead-end road in the middle of a clear-cut, so I wasn’t worried about being run over by a car. I pulled out my bivy sack and laid it out next to my bike, which held all of my food. I plopped down a few feet away in the middle of the road and ate a chocolate bar and a package of tuna for dinner. I tried to be careful with my crumbs because I was in the middle of the most concentrated bear country on the entire route, but I figured if I were a grizzly bear, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere near this graveyard for murdered trees. I doubted that what I was doing was really safe, but I couldn’t be bothered with technicalities. I curled up with my bear spray propped next to my head and quickly drifted into the unconcerned sleep usually reserved for the dead.