Chapter Eighteen

Untouchable

 

I had become an expert on small-town convenience stores. Even independently owned service stations, buried in the most remote regions of the west, all had a near-identical selection of products laid out in a nearly identical way. Their organization was both simple and highly effective, designed for the maximum obtainment of junk food.

I walked into the Salida 7-Eleven with single-minded purpose, knowing I would not pass another significantly populated town on the route for more than 150 miles. I walked down the first aisle, also known as the candy bar aisle, and selected four king-sized Snickers bars — which not only boasted 500 calories each, but were also usually the most popular and therefore freshest items on the shelf. I then grabbed four pairs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, prone to melting but probably okay in the high mountain air. The next aisle, the salty snack aisle, held my Corn Nuts, regular nuts, and packages of crackers. The next aisle, the specialty candy aisle, was my favorite. It was here that I was treated to the widest and most thrilling range of selection that can only be found in gummy snacks. I was partial to Sour Patch Kids, but I liked to mix it up with gummy bears and sour worms and sometimes something florescent and obnoxious and full of artificially flavored and chemically colored high-fructose corn syrup. 7-Eleven also carried chocolate-covered espresso beans, a special treat for the mornings I anticipated waking up in a sleeping bag. In the “regular food” aisle, I usually picked up tuna packets and the occasional energy bar. The refrigerated shelves along the outer edge of the store held my orange juice and liters of Pepsi and yogurt and never-ending search for wax-coated balls of cheese. I finished with an extra-large cup of coffee and a quick browse of the gourmet cases in front of the store, where I could obtain 600-calorie “homemade” brownies and the cinnamon roll I planned to eat for breakfast before heading out. Then I’d walk to the counter and dump 10,000 calories — about two days’ worth of food — in front of the startled clerk.

“Um, did you find everything you needed?” she asked.

“Oh yes,” I said.

The clerk in Salida was more bold than most, and she smiled wryly. “Having a little celebration are we?” she asked.

I smiled back. If I was more bold, or a better actress, I would have launched into a long sob story about how my husband just cheated on me and I didn’t want to be in the world any more so I was just going to eat my way into a sugar coma. If I had been even bolder than that, I might have just told her the truth, but instead I said, “Ah, I’m just stocking up.”

“Okay then,” she said as she slid a heart attack’s worth of survival food into a plastic bag. “Have a nice day.”

I got another late start in Salida, which I had no excuse for, but the amazing energy I that powered me to Salida carried into the new day. Five miles outside of town, I remembered that I forgot to pick up a pair of sunglasses, having lost a pair the day before, after losing several other individual pairs in unknown spots scattered across the Great Divide. In all, I would lose seven pairs of sunglasses on the Great Divide, but I never fret too much about it because sunglasses, like Sour Patch Kids, were only a convenience store away. I stopped in Poncha Springs, where a man wearing a bicycle helmet stood chatting on a pay phone out front. Propped next to him was a mountain bike bulging with panniers. Given the remote location, I knew he had to be riding the Divide, so I waited until he hung up the phone and walked up to say hello.

The man told me he started in Mexico and was riding the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route north, so he had already crossed paths with most of the Tour Divide racers in front of me. He said having ridden across New Mexico, he couldn’t even fathom the pace of the leaders, but I seemed to be moving at a more reasonable clip. He handed me a $5 bill and asked me if I would deliver it to a couple in Del Norte. “We went out for tamales and I never paid them back,” he said. “But if you call them up, I’m sure they’ll give you something to eat, so there’s something in it for you.”

I folded the bill into my wallet. “I’ll try to remember,” I said. “But I can’t promise I’ll be lucid when I get there.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You have I think three passes before Del Norte, big ones. Are you going to try to get there tonight?”

I shook my head. “Even if I had actually gotten an early start, which as you can see it’s none too early, it wasn’t all that likely. No, I’ll probably camp somewhere before Del Norte and head in tomorrow morning or early afternoon.”

“Yeah, I went through Del Norte three days ago,” he said. “But it’s been a pretty relaxed trip. These passes in Colorado look monstrous, but they’re all on fairly smooth railroad grades and they’re not too bad. What you gotta watch out for is New Mexico. Those mountains don’t look like much on the maps, but I’m telling you, New Mexico will bring you to your knees.”

I nodded vigorously but didn’t feel the sting of his warning. Sure, New Mexico was full of bumps, but in the grand scope of things it was, as the saying goes, “all downhill.”

We shook hands and turned in opposite directions. I pedaled up the canyon toward Marshall Pass. The descent into Salida had dropped me all the way down to 7,000 feet elevation and I had to climb back up to close to 11,000 again, but I tried not to let the scope of the task scare me. The morning was bright and warm and my legs felt inexplicably strong. I had a feedbag full of fresh junk food and a camera clasped in my right hand. The old railroad bed snaked lazily up the mountainside, providing nearly free passage to the pinnacles in the sky. Everything was going my way. I was untouchable.

About a thousand feet below the pass, an oncoming vehicle approached on the narrow road. It slowed as it pulled up beside me and I groaned. I expected questions and I was in too good of a mood to explain my brutal race to another inquisitive local. The window rolled down and a familiar face smiled back at me. I laughed out loud at the surprising recognition. The man and I had met once before, very briefly, but I knew of him quite well. Mike Curiak was an avid mountain biker and wheel builder who live in Grand Junction, Colorado, which was located several hours northwest of Marshall Pass. I had read extensively about Mike’s various exploits and successes via the tight-knit ultra-endurance cycling community of the Internet, but the reason I had met him was because we crossed paths in McGrath, Alaska, in March 2008. Mike had been racing and riding the Iditarod Trail since the mid-1990s and still holds the northern route record to Nome. He had held the McGrath record as well until Pete Basinger surpassed it in 2007. Mike had mostly given up racing, but he still traveled north every year to tour the Iditarod Trail on an expedition-loaded snow bike. When I met Mike in 2008, he had just arrived in McGrath with a broken tent and stove during his latest trek to Nome. We locked eyes just as I was being whisked away to the airport after finishing my own ride the day before.

“Do you think you’ll head back out there soon?” were the only words I said to him as he stood in the front room in his long johns.

“The future is uncertain,” was all he had said to me before I nodded goodbye and ducked into the minus-twenty-degree morning.

Now the future had arrived, on a warm day in June 2009, and our paths had collided again in the middle of nowhere that was central Colorado. I grinned. “What are you doing in this part of the world?” I asked.

“Actually,” he said, “I’m here to surprise Pete.”

“Pete? Pete Basinger? Really?”

Mike nodded.

“So he is riding the Great Divide this year?” I asked. “I had heard rumors he was out there, but he’s been like a phantom on the trail. I wasn’t even sure if they were true.”

“He wanted to keep it on the down-low,” Mike said. “Wanted to do it without all of the hype and noise.”

“Right,” I said. I knew Mike was referring directly to the Tour Divide, a race that was essentially the unwanted stepchild of the Great Divide Race, which Mike helped start in 2004. That inaugural year, Mike recruited a handful of mountain bike racers to join him on the epic race from Montana to Mexico. They aimed to break a record established in 1999 by the grandfather of ultra-endurance mountain bike racing, John Stamstad. One of those racers was Matt Lee, who would eventually fracture away from the Great Divide Race and start the Tour Divide in 2008. Another inaugural Great Divide Race participant was Pete Basinger, a young cyclist from Alaska who didn’t have much more than the Iditarod Trail on his race resume. Pete and Mike battled for the lead the entire distance, before Mike finally snatched it away from Pete in the far southern miles of New Mexico, finishing a heartbreaking twenty minutes ahead of Pete at the end of a sixteen-day race. Mike held the border-to-border Great Divide Mountain Bike Route record until 2007, when Jay Petervary surpassed it by finishing in fifteen days and change. John Nobile took it from Jay in 2008.

“So Pete didn’t start with the Great Divide Race?” I asked.

“No, he started in Banff about two days before the race,” Mike said. “I think he crossed the border close to the GDR, but not with it.”

Since Mike set the record in 2004, he had slowly distanced himself from the Divide. The entire time, he maintained that he wanted the race to adhere to the traditional border-to-border route. Matt Lee, who had raced and finished the Divide every year since 2004, argued that Adventure Cycling Association, the organization that established the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, had since moved the route into Canada; therefore, the race should start in Canada. Mike and Matt would never see eye-to-eye. Matt eventually left the Great Divide Race and created the Tour Divide around a Banff start; he also modified several rules and practices that went against Mike’s aesthetic viewpoints on what self-supported racing should be.

In 2008, the Great Divide Race and Tour Divide were very much at odds with each other. Because of its historic precedence, its association with Mike and Pete, and because Geoff participated in it, I had remained a vocal Great Divide Race trumpeter right up until it came time to actually choose an event myself. I knew I had become a defector by starting with the Tour Divide. But I had my reasons and I felt they were good ones, and I didn’t feel shame about my choice, even as I looked Mike Curiak directly in the eyes.

“And Pete’s going to pass through here, pretty soon?” I asked.

“I expect him too,” Mike said. “I saw on his tracking page he was getting into Salida this morning.”

“Really?” I said. “Pete’s carrying a SPOT?”

“Just to map his own progress,” Mike said. “Only a few people have the information to get into the Web site. “Geoff Roes is actually one of them.”

“Really? Why Geoff?”

“He asked for it.”

It hadn’t occurred to me before, but Geoff was probably closely tracking everything going on in the Divide, just for the gratification his own interest in the race. This meant there was a good chance he was watching my every move. Or maybe he was purposefully ignoring that information. I wondered, given Geoff‘s and my role reversal as Divide traveler and watcher, what I would do. Our relationship may be fractured, but we were still sports fans.

“Do you mind if I ride with you for a bit?” Mike asked.

“Not at all,” I said. “That would be fun.”

Mike pulled his car over and grabbed a bicycle from the back. He had a frame bag just like mine, made by the same one-man company in Anchorage. He showed me its various pouches, one of which he said was specifically custom-made to hold candy. He opened it up and fished out a handful of Mike and Ikes.

“I also have a Pepsi if you want one,” he said. “It’s Pete’s favorite.”

“I’m not going to drink Pete’s Pepsi!” I cried.

“Don’t worry, I have extras.” He handed me a liter bottle.

“Four hundred calories of sugar goodness,” I said as I raised the bottle in a mock toast and guzzled most of it right in front of Mike.

We pedaled up the mellow grade, spinning easily enough to chat amicably. I did most of the talking, telling Mike about my impressions of the Divide, asking him questions about his Iditarod rides, and plying for information about Pete.

Pete, my Iditarod hero, had a long history with the Great Divide. After just missing out on the record and finishing second in 2004, he returned in 2005 only to experience a Geoff-like “total body shutdown” in central New Mexico. In 2007, he got sick and dropped out in Colorado. But each time, he pushed hard with single-minded drive to set the record, enough so that all the way back in Montana, John expressed anxiety about the rumors that Pete might be riding the Divide. John didn’t want to lose the Great Divide record, and he was pretty sure Pete was the only one who was likely to take it from him.

“So how’s Pete doing?” I asked Mike.

“Really well,” Mike said. “He’s hit some weather like all of you have, and he’s had some mechanical issues. He had a wheel taco on him on the bike path out of Silverthorne. He had to hitch back to town to buy a new one. He called me to ask about whether or not he should buy the wheels the Silverthorne shop had in stock. I said, ‘Do you have a choice?’”

“Man, Pete can not catch a break,” I said.

Near the top of Marshall Pass, Mike announced he was going to stop to take pictures of a field of yellow wildflowers that spanned the road. I stopped as well. Never one for close-up shots, I took photos of the stark mountains and gray-tinted clouds in a dark blue sky. “You know,” Mike said as we joined up again, “You’re one of the few people I’ve seen out where who really seems to be enjoying themselves.”

“That’s my whole goal,” I said. “Take my hits but take them slow and have a good time.”

Mike nodded. “I think you have the right idea.”

We stopped together at the pass, looking out over the rippled expanse of the San Juan Mountains. “Be sure to say hi to Pete for me when you see him,” I told Mike. “Actually, I guess he’s going to pass me today, so I’ll just tell him myself.”

Mike and I shook hands. For the forty-five minutes we spent together, he never said more than what needed to be said, so he simply advised, “Have fun.”

I rocketed down Marshall Pass in a fever pitch of excitement. Ever since I learned Jeremy had dropped out of the race, I knew that I had landed in a dead spot of solitude in the Tour Divide. The next racer in front of me was a day and half ahead, and the next person behind me was a full day back. I had already resigned myself to the fact I was not going to see another Divide racer for the rest of the trip. But this wasn’t just another Divide racer, it was Pete! A fellow Alaskan, a friend, and my ultra-endurance racing role model. I expected him to simply pass me, probably saying hello and grunting terse but genuine words of encouragement like “Nice job” or “Good work” before surging ahead toward his record-breaking individual effort. I knew it would only be a few seconds and it would be over, but I looked forward to seeing Pete with buzzing anticipation, just like a shy girl waiting for the most popular guy in school to walk down the hall.

Outside the only store in the town of Sergeants, I met a large group of cyclists that turned out to be the same affordable housing group I had intersected with the day before in Hartsel. The same tall youth who had criticized my choice of bicycle earlier was incredulous about the mystery of how I managed to meet up with them again without taking their route.

“There are no other roads around here,” he said.

“Exactly,” I said. “That’s what I was telling you yesterday. I’m not on the roads. I’m traveling on trails. There are some highways, but mostly it’s mud and dirt. This route does everything it can to avoid pavement.”

“So where are you headed now?” he asked.

I looked at my map. “Well, let’s see … I guess, well, yeah, I guess I’m on Highway 50 for the next twelve miles.”

“Imagine that, we’re going to same way,” he said. “Do you want to ride with us?”

I followed the group out of Sergeants. Nearly thirty cyclists strung out along the shoulder of the highway single file, all wearing identical jerseys and riding nearly identical bikes. With my sagging bike bags and fresh coat of mud, I felt like an ugly duckling drafting a flock of swans.

I joined the tall youth and a short, stocky friend of his at the front of the pack. We quickly put a gap on the next group back as I explained to him in greater detail what the Tour Divide was. He told me his group rode hard every day, covering 70 to 110 miles on their road bikes, and still helped with volunteer home-building projects in every town where they stopped.

“That sounds more exhausting than climbing mountains all day long,” I said. I had to practically yell over the roar of trucks flowing steadily beside us. One driver laid on the horn and his rig skimmed within inches of our shoulders. “And, man, touring on the road all day long, that would be really stressful,” I added. “I forget how much roads suck.”

“You get used to the traffic,” he said. “It’s been a really fun trip.”

He asked more questions about my gear and where I camped at night. I tried to answer but it was becoming harder to reply as I gasped for breath and swallowed gulps of exhaust. I looked down at my odometer. We were riding faster than nineteen miles per hour, sometimes hitting twenty miles per hour on a nearly flat stretch of highway. It was faster than I usually traveled downhill on my loaded bike, and I was feeling the burn, with a racing heart and sweat beading up on my arms and face. It occurred to me that it was idiotic to expend so much energy on flat pavement when I had heaps of climbing in front of me. But this home-building cyclist already thought I was a pansy, and he had criticized my mountain bike. I was determined to keep up with him.

I pumped the pedals and fell behind his rear wheel. He responded with more acceleration. No longer chatting, we were full-out racing. The miles ripped by in a heavy blur, where lactic acid overflowed from the frantic pistons that had once been my legs. It stung my eyes and gurgled into my core. I was in pain, but damn if I wasn’t going to prove that my overstuffed mountain bike could hold its own. Even the home-building cyclist’s friend eventually fell back, and the rest of his group was nowhere in sight when I caught a glimpse of the merciful redemption that was my route cutoff.

“Oh … here’s … my turn,” I gasped. “It was … nice … meeting you.”

“You, too,” he replied. “Good luck in the Tour de … what did you call it?”

“Tour … Divide.”

“Yeah, Tour de Vise,” he said. “I’ll look you up.”

“Have fun,” I panted, whipping a hard left onto the gravel road and slowing to a jerky crawl as soon as he was safely out of sight. Pretty soon the truck traffic was no longer in earshot. Back out in the high mountain plain, I had a full view of every direction for miles, and I could see I was deeply alone again.

I squinted harder, trying to discern any hint of movement down the valley. I knew Mike’s choice of where to wait for Pete meant Pete couldn’t be more than a few miles behind me. I had pedaled hard on both the descent from Marshall Pass and the highway, but my best effort would still be too easy for Pete. I expected to see him soon.

I first met Pete almost exactly three years earlier, in 2006, during a summer when he stayed in Alaska rather than travel south to race the Divide. We both entered as soloists the 24 Hours of Kincaid race in Anchorage. As is the nature of lap races, the fast soloists frequently passed me. Pete always had a determined grimace on his face as he shot by, but he was always friendly enough to say hello, every time. In the middle of the night, I lost track of him. His tent was always empty and I thought he had dropped out of the race. I found out later he took an unplanned nap in the woods after dozing on his bike, but still rallied to win the race with twenty-one laps. I finished as the top female and fifth place overall with sixteen laps. It was a proud moment for me, and I decided that Pete was my cycling hero.

He was more interesting to me than Lance Armstrong or even John Stamstad, because to me, Pete was a real person. He ate junk food, drove a crappy van, and stumbled awkwardly through media interviews. And then, without glory or recognition, he went on to accomplish biking feats that were, in my mind, every bit as inspiring as winning the Tour de France.

As for my endurance racing career, 2007 was the tipping point. I returned from the Susitna 100 in February with a nearly useless “angry knee” (it was actually an advanced stage of chondromalacia patella). I couldn’t ride my bike, run, or even walk without limping, so I spent long mornings in front of my computer, fixated on the reports from the Iditarod Trail Invitational. That year, Pete shot far off the front, moving so quickly in good conditions that people spoke of him breaking the three-day barrier without trying. About halfway through the race, overflow-covered ice forced everyone to take long bypass that added thirty-five miles to the course, but Pete continued charging ahead of record pace. Then he disappeared off the radar for a while, and there were reports of temperatures dropping to forty below. Pete was missing for more than twenty-four hours, and nobody knew exactly where he was. I hit the “refresh” button on my computer incessantly. I watched and waited. I got up in the middle of the night, I snuck peeks at work, and still there was no word from Pete. And then, in his own unceremonious way, Pete popped back on the radar fifty miles from the finish, a mere five hours before the time he needed to break the current record. He reported that he had battled ninety miles of treacherous conditions across the Farewell Burn, riding through a minefield of frozen tussocks that knocked him off his bike “hundreds” of times. It had slowed him too much, I thought. No one can ride fifty miles of snow-drifted frozen river in five hours. But I continued to cheer from afar. I hit “refresh” on my computer. Five hours passed in a blink, and Pete had done it, he had arrived in McGrath, winning the race and shaving a mere twenty minutes off the Iditarod Trail record — Mike Curiak’s record.

I was transfixed, inspired, wholly immersed in the grand, terrifying spectacle of it all. “Next year, I’m going to ride in the Iditarod Trail Invitational,” I announced to Geoff.

“Yeah right,” Geoff had replied.

Two years later, on a lonely high road of the Great Divide, I still credited — and blamed — Pete for being the catalyst who set me on my path, inspiring me to make the amazingly complex leap from single-day races to self-supported multiday and winter events. He even helped with the transition, giving advice every time I asked and offering to fix my bike. And Pete had the added bonus of being a genuinely nice and admittedly good-looking guy, two years younger than me, with a broad chin, a shy smile, and dark, curly hair that exploded in all directions every time he took off his helmet.

I started looking over my shoulder frequently. When I stopped for food or bathroom breaks, I never ventured far off the road lest Pete shoot by as I was hiding behind a bush. I was anxious about the prospect of missing him. I recognized how silly it was to harbor such strong anticipation about something so simple, but I felt helpless to fight it. Ravaged by two weeks of unceasing mood swings between the highest highs and the lowest lows, my emotions had bled out into the open, laid bare to the world, where they could be deeply cut by everything that touched them. My feelings of happiness, pain, agony, excitement, and even love, were as naïve and affecting as a child’s. And just as I had engaged in childlike competition with the home-building cyclist, I developed a childlike fixation on an inevitable meeting with Pete.

I climbed another 10,000-foot pass and descended amid massive sandstone boulders that appeared to have dropped out of the sky, likely deposited by a long-melted glacier. “These rocks are so incredible,” I thought. “This would be a cool place to ride with Pete.”

Evening fell as I pedaled up a new canyon, still feeling strong even as I surpassed the hundred-mile mark for the day. Sunset hovered in bright strips of crimson over the violet mountains. “So beautiful,” I thought. “I wonder if Pete can see this, wherever he is?”

But only silence and stillness followed. I crested Canaro Pass in the darkness. The sleep monster settled over me with crushing accuracy. I had traveled 125 miles that day. Del Norte was still another thirty in the distance. I thought I could manage a late push into town but I was fading fast. A primitive Forest Service campground named Storm King appeared on my left. I slowed my bike and hesitated.

“If I camp there,” I thought, “Pete’s going to pass me in the night and I’m never going to see him.”

The voice of rationality, so easily repressed by my childlike emotions, finally had to shout to get my attention: “That doesn’t matter! It’s not a big deal!” But the child in me resisted the demand for sleep even as my eyes drooped and body sagged. My maps indicated a long stretch of private property that meant if I didn’t stop at the campground, I’d have no choice but to pedal another thirty miles into Del Norte. There was nowhere to camp before town. With an air of defeat, I coasted down the campground’s entryway.

“Oh well,” I thought as I laid out my sleeping bag and bivy sack. I perked up after a big meal of tuna, Corn Nuts, and gourmet 7-Eleven brownie, and was heartened by the fact I had gotten through another long but physically strong day. I popped my nightly sleeping pill in my mouth and lay down. I blinked rapidly in an effort to keep my eyes open to the blaze of stars overhead, still straining to hear the rattle of bicycle wheels rolling down the gravel road. But as my eyes drooped to a close, I accepted sleep gracefully, feeling pleasantly sad.

I don’t know how much time had passed — an hour, maybe two — when strange noises rustled me awake.

“Bear!” My mind raced as I jolted to a sitting position, jerking my head around for a view through the tiny air opening in my sleeping bag. I swung my entire bivy sack all the way around before I saw the dark, human-shaped figure directly behind me, about twenty feet away. The initial adrenaline rush of my bear scare did almost nothing to cut through the disorienting haze of the sleeping drug. The figure appeared as a shadow, blurry and distorted as though obscured behind a thick plate of glass. A pinprick of light perched on the figure’s head whirled around but never pointed directly at me. It appeared the figure was unpacking something. I couldn’t be sure, but it looked like a bike.

“Has to be Pete,” I thought, though I was strangely indifferent about the prospect. The silhouette seemed to be moving in slow motion. I tried to push the light button on my watch, but it wouldn’t work. I stretched my arm out of the tiny opening in my sack and fumbled around until I found my helmet. I wrestled the opening a little wider and tried to turn on the headlamp mounted on top. That wasn’t working either. “Argh, this is just some kind of weird dream,” I thought as I lay back down. I lost consciousness within seconds.

Then, in what felt like seconds later, I heard noises again. This time, I was much more alert. My head was no longer swimming. I could actually hear specific details in the muffled sounds, such as zippers zipping and water pouring. I opened my bivy sack and sat up. The sky was still thickly dark, and spattered in stars. Frigid air swirled around my skin, causing me to involuntarily gasp. A light-blue layer of frost shimmered on the picnic table beneath a bright moon; the temperature was either at freezing or only barely above. I turned around to see the same dark figure I had seen in my earlier dream, still packing up a bicycle. I pushed my watch, which worked that time. It was 5:30 a.m.

I lay back down and pulled the warm covers around me. “That’s definitely Pete,” I thought. “And he’s leaving now. I should get up, at least go say hi. If I pack up quickly, maybe I could even ride with him for a while.”

The voice of rationality laughed at me. “You couldn’t keep up with him for a half mile. It’s way before your awake time and anyway, it’s freezing. You don’t want to get up.”

The voice was right. I didn’t want to get up. And yet, saying hello to Pete was pretty much everything I had wanted the entire day before. But something held me in stillness on the ground. Maybe it was the cold, or the early hour, or just simple embarrassment about walking up to him with my scarecrow hair and two-day stink and saying something as monumentally inconsequential as “hi.” Pete was going on to do great things and the last thing I needed to do was get in his way. I closed my eyes and listened as his bicycle coasted by, with a whir of wind and rattle of bike parts that faded quickly into the cold night, and then it was gone