Chapter Fourteen

Heart of Wyoming

 

The first pass of the day approached 10,000 feet. A stiff blanket of last winter’s snow draped down from granite pinnacles and stretched over open alpine meadows. Deciduous tree branches remained bare in late June. Even the air tasted different in Wyoming, with a cold crispness that masked sweet hints of decay, like a walk-in refrigerator in a butcher’s shop.

The terrain on Togwotee Pass was similar to Richmond Pass — a calm, gradual climb that took Divide riders to their highest elevations yet, continued down the mountain on a smooth road, and then inexplicably veered off the main route into a nearly impassable mess of snow fields, rocky obstacles, and difficult navigation. But I had enjoyed Richmond Pass, so I didn’t feel grumpy when the maps told me I had to turn off the perfectly good, paved surface of Highway 26 and hoist my bicycle up a three-foot-high wall that of snow that covered the alleged Brooks Lake access road, which had been buried since the previous autumn.

I lifted my bike to the top of the snowfield. A single set of footprints and wheel tracks dug a narrow trench down the center of the slushy surface. I wheeled my bike into the tracks and stepped into the footprints. It wasn’t much, but I was grateful that a trail had been broken since the previous day’s melt stripped away all signs of prior passersby. The tracks allowed me to not only walk more easily, but they helped keep my feet dry.

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said out loud, figuring there was a fair chance he wasn’t too far in front of me, although I had started late that morning.

I walked for about a mile when the snowfield started to break up, revealing the dirt below. Saturated with a season’s worth of snowmelt, the road was thickly coated in mud the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream. I planted one foot on the mud and slid forward. The slimy surface grabbed my feet and pulled me butt-first into the soup. Growling with frustration, I righted the bike and shoe-skied toward the next island of snow.

As the road descended, the snow patches grew shorter, the mud patches longer, and the slimy soup started to solidify and clump up. The consistency took on the properties of wet cornstarch — that goopy substance used by science teachers to entertain children because it looks like liquid and even drips like liquid, but instantly solidifies to a clay-like hardness under any kind of pressure. The Brooks Lake Road was liquid cornstarch, glistening in the sunlight and clinging to my shoes and wheels until both became stuck in place. I took off my bike gloves and used my fingers to scrape away the clumps wedged between the frame and tires. But I couldn’t wheel my bike more than a few feet before it locked up with mud again. The adobe clumps were taking on reinforcement from dead pine needles, and the mass was rapidly hardening to the impenetrable density of a solid brick. I felt a sinking sensation of entrapment as I realized that as long as the mud persisted, it wasn’t even possible to push my bike.

I zoomed out the screen of my GPS and tried to figure out how long I was going to be stuck like this. The map showed the Brooks Lake loop covering about six miles, and I had traveled just over a mile. I couldn’t fathom five miles of carrying my fifty-pound bike on my shoulders, but the map also showed a lodge about halfway around the loop. Maybe the road was plowed beyond the lodge, which would mean it would likely be dry. Still, even three miles was a daunting distance.

I unclipped my frame bag, wedged my arm beneath the top tube, and lifted the bike frame onto my right shoulder. I wrapped my fingers around the stem, trying to keep the front wheel from swinging back and hitting my face. With the leaden weight pressing painfully on my shoulder bone, I took halting steps along the slippery surface. The mud still latched onto my shoes, building an adobe fortress around my feet until they were three times as large as normal, and three times as heavy. I staggered to the next patch of snow, about fifty yards away, and dropped my bike onto the ground, gasping as though I had just sprinted a one-hundred-meter dash.

I walked my bike across the snowfield, still panting but relieved for the relative break. The relief was short lived, because just around the next bend was another long, open stretch of mud. I looked down at the shoes that I had nearly scraped clean. “That’s it,” I announced to the Brooks Lake road. “I am not walking through that crap again.”

I walked to the outer edge of the road. Like Richmond Peak, the road was little more than a notch cut into a steep mountainside. A 60-degree wall of talus plunged into the road, which artificially leveled out to goopy mud for only the width of a narrow two-lane road before plunging into a talus and boulder-strewn abyss below. It was actually impossible to not walk on the road, but I refused to accept that reality. I shouldered the bike and stepped onto the lower slope. With its chunkier boulders, it looked easier to negotiate than the steeper, slippery scree above. But the downside of walking the lower slope was that it forced me to balance and scramble across a minefield of large rocks, and I was carrying an awkward and heavy bicycle in one and sometimes both hands. Another disadvantage of the lower slope was that the price of any mistake was a fairly long fall.

I teetered and panicked, regained my composure and lost my nerve again. By the time I reached the safety of the snowfield nearly one hundred yards later, my heart was beating so rapidly I could feel it pushing out of my chest. That snowfield only lasted ten yards before dipping into another cauldron of mud. What were my other options? I had no other options. I could mire in mud or teeter on boulders, but either way, life for the next unknown number of miles was going to be exhausting, stressful and hard.

Two miles and two-and-a-half hours passed. The more the road dropped, the drier and less ridiculous the mud became, until the snow was all but gone and the road was almost rideable. I passed the Brooks Lake Lodge and sure enough, the road beyond the resort had been graded and plowed. I hopped on my bike and tore down the hill, gasping at the sudden rush of speed. The crisp air sang out as it rushed past my ears and the patter of mud flinging from my bike joined a symphony of freedom. Within minutes of beginning my effortless, ecstatic descent, I turned back onto Highway 26. Had the race allowed me to stay on the pavement, I would have covered that four-mile downhill section of road in ten minutes. The six-mile Brooks Lake detour cost me more than three hours of the highest intensity, most frustrating effort I had exerted on the Divide. That knowledge made me smile with satisfaction. After all, if you’re going to do something ridiculous like a 2,700-mile mountain bike race, you might as well make it truly ridiculous.

The highway continued to drop along the wide corridor of the Wind River, and despite the obnoxiously slow detour, I was still able to ride forty miles before it was time to start thinking about lunch. At the Union Pass cutoff, I saw a tiny gas station. It didn’t look like I could get much there beyond candy bars, but I remembered that somewhere during his long list of advice, John had told me there was some kind of lodge “at the pass.” I had so enjoyed my real breakfast that the prospect of real lunch was too much of a temptation. I bypassed the gas station without slowing down.

My maps warned me that it was going to be a “tremendous grunt to get to altitude.” But the beautiful thing about starting a day on the Great Divide with a section like the Brooks Lake Road is that it can’t really get any worse. The wide, dusty climb to Union Pass was effortless in comparison.

The route gained 2,500 feet in twelve miles — a standard-issue climb on the Divide, only one of many dozens. Spruce trees started to shorten and thin as I rose into the sub-alpine zone until I was surrounded by nothing but snowfields and talus slopes. The Wind River Range carved a majestic horizon in the distant west. The wind itself, above the reach of any kind of obstruction, blew hard and steady at my side.

I stopped to put on a fleece pullover and hat. The wind howled with an eerie sensation of remoteness, like wind driven out of the Arctic. Out in the open alpine, I could see for many dozens of miles in nearly every direction. It was a world ruled by lichens, rock and distant granite spires, completely devoid of any sign of humanity.

“Is there really a lodge up here?” I said out loud, and the howling wind instantly answered my ridiculous question. What was clear was that I had misunderstood whatever John had said about Union Pass. There was going to be no real lunch up here. I really should have stopped at that gas station 2,500 vertical feet below, because I was a bit low on calories. Surrounded on both sides by hundreds of square miles of designated roadless wilderness, Union Pass was a place humans had largely left alone. I would be alone with it, very much alone, for the next sixty miles.

The road turned directly into the wind and I put my head down, taking the brunt of it through the vents in my helmet while my legs slowed to a familiar headwind plod. Cyclists like to say the wind is a hill you never go down, and in strong wind, with no place to seek shelter, that sense of artificial backward gravity only amplifies. On the gradual, rolling descent, I was slowly losing elevation but fighting a continuous and steep uphill battle.

As I dropped away from the alpine tundra, I found myself no longer in the wooded valleys of western Wyoming, but out on the arid, sagebrush-dotted basins that dominated the rest of the state. The road leveled out in a river valley populated by cows. Thousands of hoof prints had turned the road surface to Swiss cheese, but the mud was dry, so I didn’t complain. I crossed a hundred-foot-wide, dirty emerald-colored canal and realized that trickle of a waterway was the Green River. Where it plunged through the narrow canyon lands of Utah, the Green River was brown, deep, and churning with whitewater rapids that in a not-too-distant past had, on a couple of occasions, frightened me to tears.

“So you’re the Green River,” I said to the gurgling brook. “You’re not so bad up here.”

The valley opened wide in front of a cloud-obscured sunset, which cast a peach light across the plains. The thick vapor of my breath clouded the beam of my headlamp as night descended with me, toward an arid landscape that was different than any I had seen yet on the Divide. I had become accustomed to thick forests in my surroundings, and the ragged sagebrush prairie stretching over the horizon brought me a sense of satisfaction, because it was a whole new climate zone, and I had ridden there, on my bicycle, all the way from Canada.

In purple twilight, the scenery faded to a black void with one glittering island of light, which I assumed must be Pinedale even though my map indicated the small town was still twenty miles away. The paved road rolled in and out of drainages but generally sloped downward. I knew I could reach town fairly quickly, but I longed to hold onto the deep silence that surrounded me on the open plateau. In its solitude the landscape kept me company, held me in peace, and showered me with stars. Out of the corner of my eye, I started to pick out nice, hidden areas where I could bed down in the sagebrush.

“I should just camp out here,” I thought. “I’ve ridden my twelve hours for the day; I’ve done my hundred miles. I can always get an early start tomorrow.”

I stopped near a mound to look for a spot out of sight from the road. I opened my feedbag to check my food supply. The bag of Sour Patch Kids I had been munching from had only a handful of gummy snacks left. There was one package of peanut butter crackers, a regular-sized Snickers Bar, and nothing else. I groaned. I had spent the entire day simply grazing and I was so hungry I could have easily eaten five times that amount, standing right there. It was scarcely enough food to fuel me into Pinedale, let alone serve as dinner and breakfast. No, I was going to have to go to town and stock up.

It was after 11 p.m. when I arrived in Pinedale, population 1,412. I was certain everything would be closed, but I found an open gas station with a hotel right next door. The town, a pit stop on Highway 191, had a number of hotels, and the gas station’s neighbor looked like the most expensive one. But it had access to food, and that fact mattered more than cash — which has no calories — so I booked a room and walked to the gas station to buy Hot Pockets, root beer, oranges, and a fruit smoothie for dinner.

I checked my e-mail on the computer in the front lobby. John had already sent me a message, telling me he was still in Jackson but was checking up on my SPOT tracker. “Looks like you had some trouble near Brooks Lake,” he wrote. “Nice job motivating to ride late into Pinedale tonight.”

I smiled because had I slept out in the sagebrush twenty miles west of town, John would have viewed that as a failure, while I viewed the necessity of riding into town as a defeat. “Thanks a lot, John,” I thought. “You’ve made a total comfort tourist out of me.”

I checked the race tracker myself. It looked like Jeremy had ridden past Pinedale and was spending the night somewhere east of town. The race leaders were moving through Colorado. A handful of people had dropped out but there were still quite a few orange dots on the route behind me, including Cricket, who had inexplicably fallen an entire day behind my pace and was just leaving Idaho.

“She must have had trouble,” I thought. “But she’s tough and she out-pedaled me before, so maybe she’ll catch me.”

I did notice that with John gone and Jeremy little more than a phantom shadow, I was falling into a rather lonely dead zone of the mid-pack. The leaders were surging farther in front, the back-of-pack was dropping farther behind, and I rode alone in my middle bubble, unsure whether I should make a real effort to speed up, slow down, or hold the lonely pace.

I didn’t motivate early the next day, which I justified because I had arrived late in Pinedale late the night before. I spent the morning doing laundry in my motel, typing e-mails on the guest computer, and making myself waffles in the Continental breakfast room.

“Okay, no more comfort touring,” I scolded myself as I walked out of the lobby after 9 a.m. “Tonight we camp in the Great Divide Basin.” I walked into the gas station and bought only a day’s worth of food because I planned to arrive in Atlantic City early, and I knew I’d move faster if I didn’t have a bunch of calories loading me down. John had already told me in his e-mail that Atlantic City was where I should spend the night, so I decided it would be a good place to stock up before setting out into the desert expanse of the Basin.

The route continued to parallel the Wind River Mountains on a dusty desert plateau. As I traveled west, erosion intensified and drainages became steeper, sometimes dropping many hundreds of feet into alkaline creek beds. The landscape was aspen-dotted near the top of the drainages but sandstone red at the bottom. I mopped streams of sweat away from my eyes. Beneath unobstructed sunlight I felt the heat sharply; it was the worst I had experienced on the Divide, although the temperature was still only in the high 80s. I slathered sunscreen on my arms and worked up a breeze by pedaling as quickly as I could muster. I covered the first forty miles of the day without even taking a break.

I crossed the Big Sandy River and climbed back to elevation. The ever-thinning groves of aspen trees had disappeared entirely, replaced by thirst-choked sagebrush. The loose-gravel road was becoming increasingly dustier. I dropped and climbed, dropped and climbed, across an arid landscape rippled by dramatic erosion. The climbs were all steep and short, so I kept my shifter locked in the high downhill gears, standing out of the saddle and mashing the pedals to power quickly to the top.

For a few miles, the road contoured the crest of a broad ridge, the exact boundary of the Continental Divide. Cattle grazed on both sides of the road. I thought with a smile that the cows on the right were peeing into the Pacific, while the urine on the left was headed for the Atlantic. Before the Tour Divide, the idea of the Continental Divide had always been a vague one at best, an arbitrary line across America. But after spending more than a week paralleling its jagged peaks and broad passes, I began to understand the mystique of the Divide and the appeal of following it. This was the backbone of the continent, the beginning of everything.

I mashed up a few more steep drainages before suddenly, about twenty miles from Atlantic City, something in my right knee snapped. I was certain I heard an audible “pop.” I cried out in pain and hopped off the bike, staggering to the top before I doubled over and let the pain shudder through. My knee throbbed and I wondered if I had torn a tendon, but after a few minutes I realized I could still bend it slowly. Still, any sudden motion hurt. And the joint was swelling a little and stiffening up. I walked several hundred yards, coasted down the hill, and limped up the next pitch.

The sharp pain began to subside and I started riding uphill again. Spinning the crank lightly helped keep stiffness at bay, but I couldn’t put any power into the pedals without considerable pain. I wondered if this is what had happened to John in Canada. He claimed to have put too much pressure on the joint until the whole thing gave out. But I had also had trouble with my right knee in the past, and wondered if this was a return to something my doctor had diagnosed as “angry knee,” — commonly called chondromalacia, the injury involves acute swelling of the cartilage beneath the patella.

My pace slowed considerably as I pedaled and walked toward Atlantic City. I wondered if I should take John’s advice on staying in town so I could rest my knee and assess the extent of the injury. It was just after 6 p.m. when I arrived. The gravel road dropped into a small valley with weather-beaten houses haphazardly clustered around red dirt roads. There was nothing but open desert beyond. It looked like a set for a Western movie made in the 1950s. A hand-painted sign on the side of the road read “Atlantic City, population 57.”

“Oh no!” I cried out. Fifty-seven people? Towns that small rarely have more than one street, let alone services. I had only a couple liters of water and was nearly out of food. I had been depending on that place to stock up for my ride across 140 barren miles of the Great Divide Basin. What did John mean by Atlantic City being a good place to spend the night? How could this place even possibly have a motel? I’d be lucky if it had a cattle trough where I could filter a few liters of water. I decided that from that point on, I was going to assume I had misunderstood everything John told me and would pay much closer attention to the recommendations on my maps.

That is, if I could even ride beyond Atlantic City. My knee still throbbed as I pedaled into town and tried to push down a rising wave of panic. The Great Divide Basin was the most remote, driest section of the entire trip. There was no way I could embark on the crossing with only a few candy bars as my entire food supply. If anything, I needed at least two days worth of food. If something went wrong and I ended up spending a few days out there, it promised to be a dangerous crossing indeed. Plus, I wanted to start the trek with at least nine liters of water. I hoped I wouldn’t have to gather it from a cattle trough.

I passed the place that had been listed on the map as the accommodations in town, the Atlantic City Mercantile. A sign on the door of the early-20th-century building read, “Closed Tuesdays.” It was, rather conveniently, Tuesday. But a drone of music thumped from the dilapidated looking wooden building next door, and as I approached it, I realized it was a bar.

Inside, at least a dozen people were perched around the counter, and there were even more people in an adjacent dining room.

“Are you guys open?” I asked the woman behind the bar.

“Until seven,” the woman told me.

“Do you have food?”

She smiled. “We have a whole menu. Come in! Do you want anything to drink?”

“Pepsi,” I said.

“Just Pepsi?” she asked. “Nothing in the Pepsi?”

“Plain Pepsi,” I said. “And a glass of water. And maybe an orange juice. Yeah, all three. And do you guys sell any kind of packaged food here, like candy bars and stuff?”

“A little,” she said. She pointed to two shelves in the back of the room. “Over there.”

The shelves were sparse to begin with, and they held a number of boxes that had already been emptied. They were out of peanut butter cups, M&Ms, Snickers Bars and nuts. I wondered if previous Tour Divide racers were the ones who had cleaned them out. All they left for me were a couple of packages of Oreos, a few trans-fat-laden pastries that looked so stale they were on the verge of crumbling to dust, and individual packets of Spam. Everything was food that I would have regarded with a scrunched nose amid the sweeping selection of a modern gas station, but in Atlantic City, Wyoming, I was thrilled to see it. I cleaned the bar out of their Oreos and pastries and reluctantly grabbed four packets of Spam.

From the restaurant I ordered soup and chicken strips. I guzzled my water and dumped the ice into a baggy to place on my knee, and sat contemplating whether or not I should ride out of town that night. It seemed smart to wait out the injury, but I also knew that pain was more likely to nudge me out of the race if I was surrounded in the convenience of a town. Out on the Basin, I’d have no choice but to pedal somewhere.

As I ate, a petite, older woman with shoulder-length gray hair approached me. “Are you the bicycle girl we saw walking out of South Pass City this afternoon?” she asked me.

“It’s highly likely,” I said. “I’m Jill. I’m from Alaska, but I’m riding through town with the Tour Divide. It’s a race from Canada to Mexico. Maybe you’ve seen the other bikers come through?”

She shook her head.

“Strange,” I said. “There’s probably been close to twenty.”

A man that had been sitting in the table next to me turned and said. “I saw them. They came through here three days ago! You’re way behind.”

“And believe it or not, there are people who are three days behind me, some more,” I said. “It’s a long race. We spread out.”

“I think I did see one person in town earlier today,” the woman said. “He had a lot of stuff on the front of his bike.”

“That was probably Jeremy,” I said. “I wonder if he’s around.”

The woman introduced herself as Marjane and asked me if I wanted to bring my plate over to her table, where her husband, Terry, was polishing off a large pile of ribs. We made our introductions and I explained in more detail what the Tour Divide entailed. It was a race, I told her, but I was really more interested in the tour aspect of it. Marjane told me she had been a wanderer in her own youth, but she married Terry and they settled down in an old gold mill, built of rounded stones, that Terry himself converted into a home.

“We love Atlantic City,” she said. “We’ve been all over but we can’t imagine living anywhere else.”

As we chatted, she asked me where I was going to stay that night.

“Actually, I should get going soon,” I said. “I was going to go a little ways into the Basin to camp, and it would be nice to do the riding before dark.”

“Camp out there?” Marjane shook her head. “It’s supposed to be a cold one tonight. Why don’t you come stay with us? You can take a shower and make breakfast in the morning. It’s going to be a cold night for camping out.”

I blinked but didn’t hesitate long. “Yeah,” I said. “That would be great.”

A draft carried through Marjane and Terry’s old stone house, but it was cozy and reassuring. Terry told me he had built the house himself on top of a mill that had been part of a now-defunct gold mine. Atlantic City had the feel of an old mining town that never progressed past the 1930s. But unlike other historic towns that catered to tourists, that feeling was genuine. Atlantic City was so far off the beaten path that its citizens had little reason to change how they lived over the decades, and the dusty road and creaky whitewashed houses held an air of timelessness.

Marjane showed me pictures of her children and grandchildren and the brochure she wrote for the Atlantic City Historical Society. She pointed me to her computer but admitted she didn’t really know how to use it. She gave me a bag of ice cubes for my knee. She opened the cupboards and pointed to the cereal and fruit and filled up the coffee maker with grounds and water so all I had to do in the morning was press “start.” She showed me the spare bedroom and shower and gave me a hug goodbye, because I told her I planned to leave by 5 a.m. and there was “no way” she’d be out of bed that early. Her eyes were moist with compassion. My heart was full with gratitude, because although our entire relationship would only span a handful of hours on a Tuesday evening in June, those few hours were filled with all of the warmth and caring of family.