Chapter Nineteen

Stunner Pass

 

I woke up to a re-energizing wash of sunlight, but it was too late. I was alone again.

“Would it really have been so bad to get up at 5:30?” I grumbled as I stuffed chocolate-covered espresso beans in my mouth. “I kept the pace with the home-building bikers yesterday; I certainly could have kept up with Pete for an hour or so today.”

I sighed. The morning pierced my senses with crisp beauty and I longed to share it with somebody. Pete’s company during the ride down the mountain would have been a welcome break from the solitude. Why did I have to be so lazy and slow?

I started down the canyon, which in daylight revealed itself as a place fully entrenched in the Southwestern desert. Smooth, sienna-hued cliffs carved a boxy corridor, and the pink sand was dotted with rabbit brush and yucca plants. The canyon opened into a wide plateau. The route followed a narrow jeep trail that had been dramatically rippled by erosion. I giggled as my bike plummeted into a deep trench and shot back out the other side, sometimes grabbing a few inches of exhilarating air before plunging into the next trench. Where the road wasn’t laced in a roller coaster of dirt mounds, it was piled with boulders. But I wasn’t about to halt a millimeter of momentum, so instead of finessing my bicycle around the rocks, I bounced directly over them at top speed. It was a reckless way to ride, given my mounting fatigue and loaded bike with all of its awkward extra weight. Only sheer luck kept me from crashing, but I never toppled over. I crossed the narrow headwaters of the Rio Grande and rolled into Del Norte with a huge smile on my face.

It was only 9 a.m. and I wasn’t hungry or tired. I felt too good to stop. But remembering the five-dollar bill the bicycle tourist in Poncha Springs had asked me to deliver, I pulled out my maps and looked up the address for Gary and Patti Blakley.

The Blakleys were regular fixtures on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, listed on the maps as people willing to providing food and shelter to bicycle tourists. They also were Tour Divide fans, and had a reputation for meticulously tracking racers’ progress and catering to all of their needs. Patti found me before I had even arrived at the house and waved me down. I hopped off my bike and followed her down the street. She called in her husband, Gary, to let him know I had arrived in Del Norte. She handed me a giant cup of sweet tea and heated up homemade pizza and peach pie. Gary, a thin man with short, silver hair, paused on the other side of the sliding glass door and took a long look at my bike.

“Interesting set-up you have there,” he said as he walked in the door and settled down at the kitchen table. “Frame looks pretty solid, and seems everyone has those frame bags these days. But what’s up with the flat pedals?”

“Well,” I said, hesitating before I launched into my long frostbite story. “Those are actually my favorite parts on the entire bike.” Then I told him why. My toes had bothered me continuously during my summer training, I said, but as soon as I dumped the clipless pretension, the toe pain faded as well. I hadn’t had a single foot problem on the Divide.

“I like that you do what you gotta do,” he said. “That’s one of only a few bikes of any serious Divide racer that I’ve seen without clipless pedals. But good, solid set-up. A good way to go a long way on a budget.”

I handed Gary the five-dollar bill and told him it was from the tourist I had met 150 miles back. Gary flipped open his laptop computer to recite the latest race standings. Matt Lee was going to probably win the race later that day, he told me. Cricket had just called in from Hartsel to drop out of the race. Deanna hadn’t been heard from in days, and was still back in Wyoming. There was a good chance I was the only woman left riding in the Tour Divide. I told Gary about Pete and asked if he had seen him. Gary shook his head.

“Matt told me Pete was doing an ITT this year,” Gary said. “Pete dropped in to visit us in past years, but maybe he’s behind schedule this year.”

“I don’t think he’s behind schedule,” I said. “I don’t know the time he’s making exactly but Mike told me he was flying, and he’s probably planning to ramp it up in New Mexico. Pete’s just a man on a mission, that‘s all.”

By the time I ate heaping portions of pizza and pie, drank a third glass of tea, finished my grocery shopping, and made a few calls, 9 a.m. turned to 11:30 a.m. I announced I really needed to hit the road, and Patti offered to ride with me the first few miles out of town.

“Where are you headed tonight?” Patti asked.

“I was hoping to get beyond Platoro,” I said. “But now I’m not sure. This next pass is monstrous, nearly 12,000 feet. It’s probably going to take me most of the day to do it.”

“We’re about 7,800 feet here,” Patti said. “Yeah, it’s a healthy climb. It’s not gradual like those railroad-grade passes before here, either. Indiana Pass is steep and the surface is pretty loose. And it’s so late in the day now. You’re likely to hit storms up high. Hard to say right now. The weather looks good, but you can see the thunderheads building over those mountains. Indiana Pass is right on the Divide. It’s hard to escape the rain up there.”

“I know all about the rain,” I said. “I haven’t been able to escape it at all, really, this entire trip. I’ve been rained on nearly every single day.”

“Well, I’d be careful if it hits up high,” Patti said. “You probably shouldn’t plan on going beyond Platoro tonight. There’s not much beyond there.”

“I’ll see how it goes,” I said. “If it’s raining, I’ll definitely stay in Platoro.”

Patti turned around near the dead end of the paved road, and I joined the steep, loose gravel to begin the daunting task of gaining 4,000 feet in twenty-five miles, followed by twenty-five more miles of rolling terrain that didn’t lose much elevation overall. A cursory glance at my maps warned me that as many as 7,000 feet of climbing waited on the grind into Platoro. But I had done at least that much the day before without daytime fatigue, so I felt confident that section of the route wouldn’t be so bad.

As Patti promised, the road took the direct route up the mountain, cutting up fifteen-percent grades on gravel so loose that my rear wheel often just slipped and stopped. I hopped off the bike, walked to a less steep section, and rode until the wheel slipped out again. Keeping my butt planted in the saddle added traction to the wheel, but too much climbing in the saddle made my Achilles tendons scream. It was a brand new source of pain.

Before my GPS even registered 11,000 feet, my energy level had plummeted. My back ached and my legs pumped acid. The sensation was very similar to the discomfort I had felt in the Great Divide Basin but hadn’t really noticed since. I couldn’t pedal hard without aggravating my heels, so I spun low-gear circles until my rear tire lost traction. I wavered and wheezed. I could almost feel my fuel gauge hovering over “E” as my eyes blinked heavily and the sleep monster sang lullabies in the early afternoon. I forced Sour Patch Kids down my throat, but they did nothing. This wasn’t a fuel problem; it was a power problem. I had a full tank and a failing engine.

I rolled over the 11,957-foot summit in a daze. Despite promises from both my maps and GPS that I was at the top, Indiana Pass hardly registered as a summit. It snaked along a talus-coated saddle, dropping ever so slightly into a small bowl before climbing to a new saddle nearly as high. I had become accustomed to sweeping views of valleys on the other side of large passes, but Indiana Pass was simply a doorway into a massive, tightly clustered mountain range. This high point on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route was merely the base of 13,000- and 14,000-foot giants.

I continued along the rolling pass, feeling a little more energetic as the climbing became less sustained. I dropped and climbed a series of steep drainages, battling up another big pitch toward a place called Summitville. The ghost town, once the highest incorporated community in the state of Colorado, was now nothing more than an abandoned Superfund site. The toxic remnants of the old mine manifested in gravel-buried tailings ponds and scarred yellow hillsides — not the kind of place that entices a person to linger. Farther up the mountain, I passed the collapsed and wind-ravaged buildings of the old town site. One sun-bleached log cabin had been snapped clean in two. Rotten lumber and bricks were strewn across the talus, and most of the homes lay in twisted heaps, as though they had been demolished by a tornado rather than the slow decay of time. The only intact building was a large, two-story wooden structure high on the hillside. It loomed over the rest of the town, cast in an ominous shadow. Behind it, a massive thunderhead rose from the barren horizon. The cloud was just one shade lighter than black, so opaque that it plunged the ghost town into an eerie twilight. The cloud surged over the Continental Divide, quickly consuming the sky.

As fast as the storm arrived, streaks of lightning began to rip through the inky darkness. A few distant booms set off a cacophony of thunder and electricity, so frequent and intense that nearby rocks rattled. I took large gulps of panic. I was well above timberline, and the collapsed buildings around me hardly counted as places to seek shelter from an electric storm. Even the intact building on the hill looked like it could come down at any moment, and was not easily accessible. I was at nearly 12,000 feet, the tallest thing on a broad talus heap with nowhere to hide.

In front of me, far beyond the massive storm, I saw a thin strip of blue sky. I rode toward it, knowing my only real option was to go farther down the road and pray that I dropped off the summit soon. The storm enveloped me in fog, until I could see little more than the dark pebbles under my wheels, and vague flashes of light tearing through the gray curtain. But I could hear the storm with clattering clarity, and metallic thunder drove me into a frenzy. Out of seemingly nothing I found an explosion of power, fueled by adrenaline and blind purpose.

The clouds began to lift but the road continued climbing. Lightning blasted all around me and I wondered out loud how this road could still possibly be below 12,000 feet. The maps must have been wrong, I thought. The road seemed like it was going to keep gaining elevation until I was the only thing left for the lightning to hit. Light sprinkles started to fall from the sky, quickly growing to large droplets and then to hard sheets of rain. The precipitation became so thick and cold I was convinced it was sleet. After fifteen minutes of terror, I finally began dropping with downpour, down from the talus and into the relative safety of tree cover. The lightning fell back but the rain followed, dredging up an uncomfortable chill that even panic couldn’t mask.

I was drenched to the core by the time I finally stopped to put on my rain gear. It didn’t seem to matter. The hard falling rain was going to saturate my clothing no matter what I did. But at least the rain layer would help block the brutal wind-chill of the descent. I put on every piece of clothing I had with me save for one dry base layer. Stopping to deal with my clothes left me so chilled that I was shivering violently by the time I remounted by bicycle.

The road continued to plummet downhill, the rain continued to fall hard, and the chill deepened. Even with all of my clothing on, my body produced only a candle flicker of heat. I occasionally jumped off my bike to try to run with it, just to work up some spark of warmth, but my adrenaline rush had long since flared out and I hardly had the energy to even stagger down the road. I drifted into the early throes of hypothermia. My lips, fingers, and toes went numb. My vision blurred and sometimes doubled. I shivered so uncontrollably that I sometimes jerked my bike randomly in awkward directions, or clumsily wended into turns so wide I almost shot clean off the road. Since I only had a down sleeping bag and bivy sack as immediate shelter, I felt a growing concern for my safety. I’d had mild hypothermia enough times before to know that it’s self-perpetuating. If I kept doing what I was doing, it only stood to get worse until my body ceased to function. I tried to comfort myself with promises that Platoro couldn’t be far, it couldn’t be far now.

But even the bottom of the descent never seemed to come. I had been trembling on top of my bike for what felt like an agonizing eternity when I passed a police car. The car’s presence confused me. The traffic I had seen since Del Norte amounted to two trucks and a handful of ATVs. It had been the least populated pass I had crossed in Colorado. A few feet down from the patrol car, a police officer stood outside in the rain, talking to two people draped in brown ponchos. “Great,” I thought. “This must mean I’m close to town.”

“Hey!” the police officer yelled as I rode past. “Are you alone?”

“I’m alone!” I yelled back. “There’s no one else behind me.”

A few minutes later, I caught up to two ambulances, inching their way down the rough road. With half-frozen fingers I could not feel, I squeeze on the brakes until I slowed to their speed, five miles per hour. “Must have been an ATV accident,” I thought. I rode my brakes behind the ambulances as they negotiated the narrow and rutted road at a pace that could only be described as painful. The awkwardly large vehicles filled up both sides of the narrow road; the thin strips of gravel on both sides didn’t provide much room to pass, and it didn’t seem ethical to try. The worst thing I could do was hit a blind rut and slam into an ambulance, thereby adding to the emergency they were obviously already dealing with.

So I waited. And coasted. And shivered. My frustration boiled up but did nothing to keep me warm. “Can’t they tell I’m in my own emergency back here?” I grumbled beneath clenched teeth. “God, I’m going to pass out from hypothermia behind an ambulance.”

Finally, the road dipped into a clearing. It forked and the ambulances turned left. I could see from my maps that I needed to turn right, and my heart sang. I was free! The vehicles slowed to a stop and I veered past them, finally pedaling again toward the last small pass of the day when a voice called out, “Hey! Are you with this biker?”

I turned around and walked my bike toward the first ambulance driver’s open window. “Wait,” I said with an air of alarm, “There’s a biker in this ambulance?”

The driver nodded slowly.

“You mean like a cyclist?”

The driver nodded again.

“Who is it?”

He shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t tell you.”

My shivering immediately ceased, as though gripped by cold hands of dread. All of the blood drained out of my head and I felt a thick lump of bile gurgle up from my stomach. “Is it Pete Basinger?” I said in almost a whisper.

The driver just nodded again.

A chilled shock of fear shot through my newly empty veins. “Oh, oh no, no,” I squeaked. “Is he okay?”

“He’s responsive,” the driver said. “He’s talking to us.”

“What happened?”

“He was hit by a truck pulling a horse trailer. Head-on.”

“A head-on collision?” I stammered. “With a truck? How fast? Is he going to be okay? Do you know what’s wrong?”

The ambulance driver shook his head. “We have him stabilized and we’re trying to call in to see if we can land a helicopter in here.”

“Where are you taking him?” I said. “Can you tell me where you’re taking him?”

“Not sure,” the driver said. He leaned over to a man who had stepped out of the second vehicle and mumbled a few things I didn’t hear. Then he turned back to me. “Do you want to talk to him?”

“Um, I probably should just let you guys go,” I said.

“We’re not in a hurry right now,” the driver said. “Either way we have to wait to see whether we can get him out of here.”

The second man directed me toward his ambulance. I passed the trailer being towed by the first ambulance. In the back, wedged behind a four-wheeler, was the twisted wreckage of a red bicycle, pummeled and gouged with sickening violence. Inside the ambulance, two EMTs sitting next to a stretcher smiled weakly as I opened the door. Pete lay on the stretcher, his entire body covered by a sheet and his head mounted inside an elaborate metal cage that prevented him from moving. His long eyelashes pointed directly at the ceiling; his eyes were fixed and dark. He had several small cuts on his face. Beyond that, there were no signs of injury, but based on the complete covering of his body, the use of that head contraption and the singular severity of a head-on-collision with a truck, I knew his injuries must be serious, possibly grave. I took off my hat and held it like a wet rag, wincing as the icy water trickled down my wrists. The shivering that had momentarily stopped as I talked to the driver came back with powerful force, and it was everything I could do to suppress the urge to rattle like a paint can. I took several deep breaths. “Hey Pete,” I said, startled by the shakiness in my own voice.

“Um, Jill?” Pete said hoarsely.

“Yeah, Jill,” I replied.

Pete smiled. “Heh. This is pretty crazy, isn’t it?” he said.

I didn’t smile back. “It’s intense. How long ago did this happen?”

“It’s been about a three-hour process getting here,” he said. “But I don’t even know ... where are we now?”

“Stunner,” I said at the exact same time he did.

“Stunner Campground,” he repeated. “That’s what I thought. Did you get hit any rain?”

I managed to crack a smile. Clearly, Pete had no way of seeing my dripping hat or soaked hair or rain jacket streaked in mud. “A huge amount of rain,” I said.

“Yeah, that’s why I left Del Norte right away,” he said. “I wanted to beat the rain.”

“Smart man,” I said.

Pete laughed. “I’d say your timing was better than mine.”

I mustered my own chuckle. It was such a bizarre accident, in such a remote place. I couldn’t imagine an instance of worse timing. “How did it happen?”

“I was coming down the road, doing about twenty-five, and these rednecks were coming around a corner on the wrong side of the road, probably thinking no one else was around. I saw them and swerved, but they slammed right into me.”

“Are you in much pain?” I asked.

“It’s not too bad,” he said. “Now. Those rednecks who hit me were walking around me, talking about what they were going to do with me. That was the scariest part.”

We paused and the silence echoed. I looked down, muddling for anything to say.

“So did you see me at the campground last night?” Pete asked.

“Storm King? Yeah, I heard you come in. I was going to get up and talk to you. Sorry I didn’t.”

“That’s okay,” Pete said. “I didn’t want to wake you up.”

“I’m still sorry,” I said. “I’m really sorry this had to happen.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “Shit happens. Just sucks right now, three days from the end.”

Three days,” I laughed. If he really thought the next 700 miles was only going to take him three days, it would have put him in a fifteen or sixteen-day finish from Banff. Pete would have obliterated John’s Divide record. “I was thinking more like seven,” I said.

It won’t take you seven days,” Pete said. “Where are you staying tonight?”

“I think Platoro,” I said. “I’m thinking about just going to Platoro.”

“Platoro’s good,” Pete said. “The cabins there are expensive, but they have good food.”

Another pause lingered in the thick air. I felt a strange surge of panic that had no origin or direction, and let my shivering return just to gulp it down. “Well, I should let you guys go,” I stammered. “You’re in an emergency and stuff.”

“Yeah,” Pete said. “Good luck.”

“You too.”

Outside the ambulance, the rain had stopped. A shock of sunlight escaped through a crack in the clouds, casting a nearly opaque rainbow over the Stunner Valley. The two ambulances passed directly beneath the rainbow’s arch as they rumbled away. It seemed life-flight couldn’t land in this remote hole in Colorado after all.

I watched the vehicles to disappear into the woods. My own helpless inertia lingered long after they were gone. I rubbed my eyes with ice-cold fingers, wiping away a well of tears that felt frozen in place. My hands shook wildly as I pressed them against my cheeks, scraping away clumps of wet mud that were plastered to my skin. I struggled to connect the clasps of my helmet strap over a soggy hat and dripping hair. I straddled my motionless bike. The last climb into Platoro loomed like a sleeping dragon. I stood and faced it, making no movement toward it. My childlike emotions lay in wreckage, disemboweled and scattered along the battlefield of the Divide. I could not cry.

What just happened? Pete was immobilized in an ambulance. He had been hit by a truck. A large trailer-dragging truck, and they had both been traveling fast. He had survived; that was a relief. But how could he not be badly injured? Dread pierced my cold-numbed skin. Maybe Pete had been paralyzed. Maybe his legs or back had been irrecoverably broken. Maybe his whole life had just changed in an unspeakably cruel instant, right there on the lonely descent from Summitville.

Where my joy and anticipation and even fear had dissolved, I felt only grief. I lifted my feet and pressed down on the pedals, turning slow circles that promised no reward. Pete and I had both been out there on the Great Divide, riding the same muddy roads, climbing the same sweeping passes, watching the same spectacular sunsets. Despite our mutual solitude, we had both been bound by this one thing, this totally unique thing, this effort to ride across the spine of the continent as fast as we possibly could. And to what end? To what end? What did we possibly stand to gain? Pete rode heroically for two weeks right into a head-on collision. I rode into a place of lasting isolation, where no friends could wrap their arms around me and tell me everything was going to be okay.

The sunlight disappeared and the clouds plunged the tight canyon into more midday twilight. The rain returned and released my grief from the initial shock of discovering Pete’s accident. It trickled through my veins and dissolved the intense focus that had sustained my sanity through the Tour Divide. The race may have been hard, but it was all I had. My eight-year relationship lay in ruins. My demanding job simply waited to fill that empty space with workday drudgery. I no longer had a home. I barely had a car. My bicycle had become my closest companion. And I was lost in a fruitless struggle, chasing phantoms toward nowhere.

Hopelessness loomed and I fought it back with thoughts of the things that were important to me. My family was important to me, my mom and dad and sisters. No matter what stupid decisions I made, or crazy adventures I embarked on, they had always been there for me. My old friends were important to me, the people scattered across the country in Utah and Colorado and California, people I had known for years and even decades, who had watched my entire journey and knew exactly where I came from. My new friends were important to me, my friends in Alaska and acquaintances from the Internet, who understood and shared my passions. My career was important to me; even stressful and demanding as the job could be, journalism embodied the very meaning of life, the pursuit of knowledge and recording of experience. And Alaska was important to me, with a yearning for its beauty and scope that even the Great Divide could not quite fill. And all of that, I thought, was nowhere near. In fact, the longer I pedaled south, the farther I distanced myself from my family and friends and the simple fact that I needed to get on with my life. The future was a shapeless mass that contained nothing I loved. Suddenly, following maps in a silly bicycle race seemed monumentally unimportant.

I crested Stunner Pass in a depth of sadness. Pete had been on pace to break the Great Divide record, something that at least on paper looked important. But what was I? A straggler. An imposter. I stopped pedaling and let the coasting bicycle creep down the road. I could not see beyond the next bend; vile forest swallowed the road into darkness. Above the trees, cloud-filtered sunlight mocked my grief with stoic indifference. I wiped more rain from my eyes, or perhaps the moisture came from tears. I tried to summon the energy to move forward.

“You just have to get to Platoro,” I told myself. “There’s certainly nothing you can do out here.”

I coasted a few hundred feet and stopped again. Through the grayness of grief, a single hopeful idea cast a dull light. I could quit the Tour Divide in Platoro. I could board a bus and head back toward Denver, then fly home to Utah, where I could return to the love of my family and friends and start the daunting journey of getting on with the life I so obviously needed to get on with. This new idea pushed energy back into my legs, and I started pedaling harder down the hill.

I leveled out in a wide valley that still stood above 10,000 feet. Trees choked out the view, but through the woods I started to see cabins. My heart soared. I rode a bit farther and saw more cabins, and a sign that said “Sky View Lodge.” I flew beyond that, looking for the gas station or bus station or something that could supply a swift exit from a world of purposeless suffering. Beyond the Sky View Lodge, the town abruptly ceased. I rode to the next bend, but the unpopulated forest persisted. There was nothing ahead but more hateful wilderness, mountains, and rivers stretching beyond the horizon. Platoro was noting more than a small mountain resort community. There was no bus station. There was no store. There was almost certainly no cell phone reception, and I’d be lucky if there was even a public-use phone. Waves of sadness, no longer relegated behind a dam of shock and confusion, suddenly burst out in a gush of tears. There was nothing in Platoro. Nothing, nothing, nothing.