Fossils, Coke and Idaho

I slept an uncomfortable night on the hillside west of Kemmerer inside my flattened tent.

A tent without its poles is a crappy shelter indeed — especially when there are no trees around to prop it up on I would have just set my sleeping bag up without it, but there were some clouds on the horizon and I worried they would bring rain. To add protection against this, I attached the rain fly as well. It sat on top of my nose, pooling condensation from my breath onto my face. My backpack stayed in the tent next to me in the hope of propping up a little air space, but it still felt like I was smothering.

Eventually, I unzipped the door and ended up sleeping with my head outside and the full moon in my eyes.

When I woke up the next day, I saw that I’d managed to wriggle myself half out of the nylon cocoon to metamorphose into a grimy dude sprawled out on the gravel, wet with dew. Thank God it hadn’t rained.

My first priority was to find water. There were some puddles in the fields of muck and cow droppings beneath my hill, but I decided to pass. It was only a couple more miles to the turnoff to Fossil Butte National Monument, which was bound to have some kind of water fountain or at least a bathroom sink. It would be trouble if there weren’t because I didn’t see any streams, rivers or any major towns on the map for at least another 20 miles.

I got my gear together and started peddling west. The turnoff for the monument showed that the visitor center was 3.5 miles off the main highway. My heart dropped.  I’d be adding seven miles of peddling to my trip because I saved two miles of peddling by not going into Kemmerer to fill my bottles the day before.

Nonetheless, I didn’t want to try a dangerous experiment with dehydration by peddling into the heat of the day without water. I groaned and started biking into the monument. There’d better be some damn good educational displays here, I thought.

There were markers along the road showing the history of life on earth. As I labored up the hill, I moved through the origin of eukaryotic bacteria, the formation of multi-cellular organisms, the colonization of land and the rise of the dinosaurs.

The visitor center had some nifty fossil displays with explanations of geological events that happened amongst the barren desert landscape outside. I filled my bottles at a fountain and then bought a couple post cards, which I filled out on the balcony.

If there had been more time, I’d have liked to have checked out some of the trails in the area, but I was determined to put some miles. I asked one of the rangers if I could get back to the highway without having to retrace my steps, and she said that I could save some time by making a right turn onto the frontage road which reconnected with Highway 30 a couple of miles further west.

I cruised downhill out of the monument, then peddled along a beautiful country road for a few more miles. Sure enough, it took me right back to the highway. There was a long, gradual downhill, that made the miles fly by. I left the buttes and ended up on a flat plain of golden pasture baking beneath the blue sky.

I noticed that the road was going uphill, ever-so-slightly. A hot wind blew into my face. Now I wasn’t going so fast. Several times, my concentration slipped and the wheels went for a jaw-rattling ride over the rumble strip. If I’d learned anything from this trip so far, it was that rumble strips are a royal pain in the ass when you’re on a bicycle.

My first town that day was Cokeville, part of the proud western tradition of naming towns and counties after whatever gets mined there (See Carbon County, Wyo. and Utah; Telluride, Colo.; Gold Bar, Wash.; Radium, Colo.) — the fallback option when they run out of names of white guys who killed Indians (See Sheridan, Wyo.; Crook County, Wyo.; Sturgis, S.D.; Custer, S.D.). Were Cokeville in Columbia, I might have assumed that they mined bales of pharmaceutical-grade cocaine, but of course being Wyoming, the town-name meant that it had been a source of the high-carbon coal used for iron refining.

I set the bike down outside the post office, where I mailed my postcards. I disassembled my stuff and took my soggy sleeping bag out to dry in the heat. The fact that I had no tent-poles was on the back of my mind and I looked for something I could improvise with in the small grocery/hardware store nearby. There was nothing light or versatile enough to be worth carrying on my back. With any luck, I would be camping around trees that night and would be able to improvise something.

I picked up fruit and peanut butter for the eating. A television was blaring reports about a shooting in a navy yard in Washington State. No one was mentioning number of casualties yet.  Soon I would be biking again and it would be at least another day, maybe more before I would get any more word about the tragedy.

I gorged myself on food outside the post office until I felt like I was too bloated to peddle another mile. Too bad. I left town sloshing  and sweating in the 80-degree temperatures. Soon I was incredibly thirsty and managed to drain most of my water supplies in a series of epic swigs. I watched some farmers harvesting hay in the some fields nearby and almost asked them if I could borrow a hose.

I crossed into Idaho with little fanfare. It would only be about another five miles or so before I crossed back into Wyoming. Still it was the first time I had been in the state, and I was proud to have made it somewhere completely new under my own power.

After I re-entered the Cowboy State, I began climbing a gradual ascent into the mountains. I was a bit thirsty, but found a bunch of extra energy from somewhere. Going up the first part of the pass was no problem.

The road paralleled Salt Creek, a potential water source, though I worried that it might actually live up to the name and be too salty to drink. Salt or no salt, there was definitely shit in the water. Herds of sheep were everywhere, even after I entered the Bridger-Teton National Forest.

The sage plains grew up into lofty pines and aspens as I gained altitude.

When I pulled into a campsite nearby, I went to fill my bottles at the pump, only to find out that there were unsafe coliform levels in the water. At that point, I decided that this was the reason why I’d brought iodine tabs with me and used them to purify the water.

I contemplated paying to stay at the campsite, but decided to save money and put in some more miles while there was still daylight and find somewhere off the road where I could sleep.

In the next 20 minutes of peddling the climb got steeper. I cursed when I came to a bend in the road to see the hundreds of feet I still had to climb to get to the top.

      I gritted my teeth and felt my heart pounding in my skull as I forced my legs against gravity. At last, I topped out at the summit of the 7,600-foot pass.

I bombed down the decent, taking turns hard and weaving over the center margin when there were no cars coming the other way. At the edge of the forest, I climbed up a dirt road and made a campsite for myself in the woods.

I used ropes to tie my tent up to several trees and made it into a pathetic, but nonetheless three-dimensional shelter.

There were bears in these woods, so I made sure to hang my food in a tree (though admittedly, a determined bruin might have still been able to snag it), and to sleep with the bear spray close at hand.