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.

The Storm Chased

Pt. 3 in the Northwest bike series

Clouds move in north of Mountain View 

Whenever I get that feeling that I am forgetting something, I am correct 99 percent of the time.

If only that feeling could help me remember what that I am forgetting. Instead there’s just a vague nag in the back of my mind that serves to aggravate me later when I finally recall the crucial item I was somehow dumb enough to leave behind.

Come on, tell me! What is it? I pleaded with my subconscious.

Oh don’t worry; you’ll find out later, it sniggered.

I got back to organizing my tent and the rest of my scattered supplies in the cow shit scrubland where I’d been camped.

I’d been slow to get moving that morn, though I didn’t regret the warm bowl of oatmeal I’d cooked for myself over the stove. The fact that it was no longer raining and that the sun looked like it might come out lifted my spirits. Yes, it might have taken a  little longer than it should have to get everything packed, but it was only the second night out and I was still getting used to the weird system I’d made for myself.

The part I didn’t like was hauling my bike and all the gear back over the fence. At least one car passed by while I left my illicit campsite, but I just acted cool like I was supposed to be wrestling a bike and a bunch of random gear over the barbed wire.

Soon, I was peddling northwest along the wet asphalt and feeling pretty good.

The wide open rangeland gave way to stands of cottonwoods and other deciduous trees with smaller farmsteads that reminded me a bit of Vermont. The Uinta Mountains loomed up from Utah in the south, including Kings Peak, the highest point in the state. I was rueful at the sight because I’d wanted to climb the mountain that summer, but plans never solidified.

Now, at summer’s end, Kings wore a formidable white crown of snow, perhaps the top 2,000 feet of the 13,000-foot mountain.

It was a reminder that winter was behind me at every step. In the weeks ahead, no doubt the snow would march lower and lower down the mountains until it finally seized the roads and blocked me from going any further.

Nothing says rural American like a fading flag mural by the tracks

The same precipitation that lent the Uinta Mountains their dazzling patina had also completely soaked the land that I was biking over. Every mile or so, I would go by some minor stream, frothing brown with runoff.

The convenience store clerk in Manila had warned me that the road was closed the day before due to flooding. I was lucky enough to get through unobstructed, though I saw road damage in a couple of places.

After the farmland, I enjoyed a long downhill into a vast basin. The landscape was almost Martian. Miles of empty wastes lead up to the foothills of the mountains, populated by the tall buttes of bentonite clay and orange sandstone. An occasional county road or lonely oil derrick were all that would evince a human presence.

I was grateful that it wasn’t actually raining right then, even if the air was still heavy with cold moisture. Only a couple of days before I had finished my rafting season with a rainy four-day trip that left fond memories of numb hands and clutching myself for warmth each night. The same soggy weather patterns were responsible for the major flooding in Northern Colorado that had made national headlines.

Why were the Rockies so drenched right now? I blame it all on Global Weirding: unpredictable climate patterns linked directly to the cowboys driving past me in their jacked up pickups, belching greenhouse gasses into the Wyoming sky.

The town of Mountain View was pretty quiet on a Sunday. I showed up a little before noon and took a quick jaunt down Main Street just to see if there was anything worth seeing. Most of the businesses were closed up. Nearby however, there was a Maverik gas station and convenience store, which provided me with a bathroom and a convenient faucet for filling bottles. I splurged on a box of greasy potato wedges that I ate outside, shivering by a picnic table.

Coming back into civilization is one thing when you have a place to stay, shower off and get into dry clothes. When you are just pushing through, there are fewer comforts. It is easy to become self-conscious when you see people looking at your tattered appearance, the fact that you carry a bag into the store with you or are filling up water bottles. The feeling is that you don’t belong.

 I dug my atlas out from the recesses of the pack and plotted my course to the northwest. It looked like the most direct route took me toward Kemmerer, Wyoming and on to Fossil Butte National Monument. In the little research that I’d done before the trip, I’d learned that while the monument itself is off limits to camping, a lot of the land surrounding it belongs to the Bureau of Land Management, and is fair game. How exciting to think that I might actually camp legally that night.

Back on the bike, I rolled north out of town toward the rolling plains. I went under Interstate 80 with the semis and other vehicles cutting across the country on their east-west trajectory. The artery of United States commerce was soon just a thin gray line in the distance, a filament of asphalt winding over the expanse of sage and cheat grass.

The only thing as vast as the miles of emptiness around me was the sky above it. In the northeast corner of that firmament, I saw tall ominous clouds bearing down on me like Star Destroyers. The dark bands of rain I saw beneath those clouds and the groans of thunder meant that I would soon be in for a cold, miserable time. There was one wild hope, however.  If I peddled my ass off, maybe, just maybe I would get to the north of the system before it rolled across my path.

I started cranking.

The clouds continued their inexorable march in my direction. No way I can beat them, I thought. Might as well just accept fate. I kept peddling anyway, flying over miles of plains and taking advantage of a long downward slope. Then I barreled through a tiny town by the railroad tracks and puffed my way to the top of a steep uphill.

I looked back at the storm. The hard work had put me far enough so that that it would miss me.

The effort was worth it, but for the next miles I was whipped. There was always another damn hill to climb. Soon, I just leaned my bike against a road post and ate a bunch of food to replenish my stores. The long break helped some, but I didn’t have nearly the get-up-and-go that I’d had earlier. The quiet country road I’d been peddling led to a busier state highway leading into Kemmerer. The fact that the road was going slightly uphill was something that I’d probably never notice from behind the wheel of an auto. On a bicycle, it was all I thought about.

I could have biked into Kemmerer and paid tribute to the birthplace of J.C. Penney, but opted to follow a highway that took a more direct route to Fossil Butte. The decision shaved two miles off my course, but it also mean that I wouldn’t get to refill my water bottles at a gas station and would have to wait until I got to the national monument the next day.

I knew I was going to drain my water cooking dinner that night, but decided that it was worth it to save the extra distance — not only for the sake of my legs, but also because I wanted some extra time to find a good campsite before it got dark.

I peddled down an onramp to a divided highway, peddling in the brake down lane as the trucks flew by. The land was similar to what I had camped in the night before with tall barbed-wire fences and wide open expanses where it would be difficult to pitch a tent without attracting attention. Angry signs warned that the land beyond the fence was state property. Violators would be prosecuted.

Moon and clouds above my tentsite

At last, I found a small Bureau of Land Management interpretive area with a tunnel that lead to land on the other side of the train tracks. Here was the legal camping I'd been looking for.

I wheeled my bike through some thick muck beneath the bridge and hid it in some brush. Legal or not, I prefer a discrete campsite so I trudged my gear up a steep hill where I would be out of sight from any passerby. With more ominous clouds on the horizon, I quickly began to set up my tent.

Tent poles! Where the hell were the tent poles?

 I desperately began to search through my gear, though in my heart I already knew where they were. They were some 75 miles back in a rancher’s field just north of the Utah border. At last, I remembered.

Eastbound Union Pacific train coming out of westbound sunset

The Big Climb: Out From Utah, Into Wyoming.

Capt. Jackass and the Flaming Gorge Reservoir

The cold, gray morning hours were exactly what I needed to wake up feeling uninspired.

The night’s rains had slipped past my cheap rain fly, successfully dampening about a third of my sleeping bag. The tent was a claustrophobic, dripping place, but right then I preferred it to whatever lay outside. Finally, I wriggled my way outside and flopped onto wet clay. 

There was my bike, flopped on its side in the mud. There was the desolated plain of ATV tracks and scrubby juniper that I'd camped in. The low clouds overhead looked like they would be happy to dump some more water on me if they felt like it.

I packed up my gear slowly and with little enthusiasm. I lashed my backpack onto the backboard under a waterproof nylon then hoisted the dry bag behind it.

“Don’t fall.” I told the bike.

The handlebars bucked left and right as I wheeled my bad idea over the dirt ruts toward the pavement. I felt some resistance coming from the back wheel. It was the brake pad. Sonofabitch.

I eased the bike down on its side and used my Allen wrench to let out a little more slack in the mechanism. It took time because the bolt was already pretty stripped. For a while, it looked like I wouldn’t be able to loosen it at all. Besides, this was usually the kind of thing where I just made things worse. Maybe I would just have to peddle back to the bike shop with my tail between my legs. Maybe I would just go back to the car and call off the trip, which had been half-baked from the start.

 But no! After the appropriate amount of turning and threatening the bike, I got the bolt loose enough to pull the cable and guestimate the right distance between the bike pads and the tire. I righted the beast and wheeled it again. It seemed to go OK now, and when I squeezed the brake I found it clenched the tire acceptably.

I put grundle to the seat and started for the pass.

The first quarter-mile was on a downhill. Enjoy it now, I thought. I tried to keep as much momentum up as possible before I took the 90-degree turn onto Highway 191. Within a minute, I was barely managing five miles an hour against the steep grade. I shifted to low gear, forcing my legs to turn the peddles over as my lungs burned for oxygen and my heart pounded in my head.

Each of the many switchbacks in the road took me approximately one lifetime to climb. Every decade or so, I rolled by another dash in the passing lane. A steady drizzle froze my hands to the bars, while I roasted underneath my rain jacket.

Sounds pretty crappy, right?

I didn’t mention that this must have been RV Clusterfuck Day in Utah. Every minute several of these mcmansions on wheels roared up from behind me and flew by in a wash of fumes and destabilizing wind. Also, I was lucky if I had more than 18-inches of breakdown lane at the edge of the road. Not much of a margin for error. It was worse considering that many of the drivers weren’t very interested in moving over.

All the weight on the back of the bike meant that it had a strong tendency to swerve, a tendency that was especially strong on the uphill. Then some retirees in their Wilderness Advantage RV would barrel past, bringing me within inches of a speeding wall of deadly metal. I would clutch the handlebars in desperation, praying that my wheels wouldn’t swerve left. Each vehicle left a vacuum behind it that yanked at my bike toward the center of the road and oblivion.

Finally, the vehicle would pass and I would puff out the breath I’d been holding in. An instant later, Death would get a second swipe at me when the inevitable pickup truck or motorboat pulling behind the first unit flew by.

The road got steeper I was strained to the utmost keeping my bike upright and moving in a straight line. The sound of another engine coming up from behind was like the wasp buzzing in your ear while you’re trying to haul a filing cabinet up a flight of stairs.

Something told me that the driver wasn’t about to make room. The engine grew louder. It sounded like it was headed right for me.

I veered off the road just before the monstrous trailer flew past at top speed. The bike bucked like it was going to veer left, but I fell over instead. I got up shaking with adrenaline. The driver barreled on oblivious, disappearing into the mists above.

This wasn’t working at all.

I looked at my set up, trying to think of something I could change to make things safer.

Finally, I unstrapped my drybag from the backboard and put my arms through the shoulder straps to wear it like a backpack. I didn’t relish the extra weight on my shoulders, but figured that taking some of the weight off the back of the bike would help with stability and steering.

When I got going again, I found the weight put an uncomfortable strain on my back, but I also felt more in control of the bike than I had before.

My heart went like a jackhammer as the wheels slowly carried me up the switchbacks. The fog got soupier; ghostly stands of aspen appeared as shadows in the mist.

I heard a series of moans and bellows from somewhere up above: a cattle herd. The river of bovines clomped along a soggy ridge while cowboys on horses shouted them along. So there was something out there that felt worse than I did.

The long climb topped out at a small rest area. I wheeled over to the outhouse and leaned my bike against it, taking shelter from the drizzle beneath a tiny overhang. The bellowing and clomping of the cattle stayed my ears like a weary dirge. The cowboys guided the sorry lot of them right up to the edge of the rest area and then started herding them across the road. One calf had other ideas and broke out of line, stumbling for the fields. A couple of cowboys spurred their horses and rounded him up.

It must have taken about 15 minutes for the herd to make it across the highway with traffic stopped on either side. Finally, an ATV at the rear ushered the last of the animals across the road. It was time I got going as well.

I peddled slowly out of the parking lot and back onto the road. The bike began to accelerate. I was going downhill! How sweet it was to move without doing work! Soon I was whipping at over 20 miles an hour and freezing cold with the sweat from the last hours evaporating in the wind. The sensation didn’t last. In less than a mile, the road went up again and I was back to working my weary legs against the mountains.

The top of the pass was at 8,422 feet in the midst of a lodgepole pine forest. I had climbed just about 4,000 feet from where I’d started that morning. Now, I could enjoy a long downhill on the way to Flaming Gorge — or would have enjoyed it if not for the icy rain. I flew down the wet pavement, squinting against drops of water and trying hard not to wipe out on the turns.

I turned left just before the Flaming Gorge Dam so that I could follow the west shore of the reservoir on the way to Manila, Utah. The town, which sits just south of the Wyoming border, was another 28 miles ahead. My downhill lasted for a couple more miles and then I was going up again. The road never seemed to flatten. First, I would be sweating as I pumped the bike against gravity, immediately after I would be shivering in the wind on the next downhill. 

I took a quick break at Moose Pond to eat lunch and took what warmth I could from a feeble sun breaking through the clouds.

And we go down again

Not long after I got on my bike there was blue sky and the mercury was climbing. Soon it was like any other hot, sunny, summer day. The landscape became dry again as well. The lodgepole forest gave way to fields of sage and desiccated mesas. I forced my way up a series of massive hills, until I finally came to an overlook. The Flaming Gorge Reservoir lay below, with its dark blue water framed by desert cliffs.

The bike and I flew down a series of switchbacks, losing at least a 1,000 feet in just a couple minutes. It was funny to think that it would have taken me a good chunk of an hour to cover the same distance had I been going in the other direction.

Of course, right after my break, I started into another massive climb. The veins bulged out of my neck as I struggled to keep my momentum. A pack of motorcycles came thundering down the other way. One of them gave me a thumb’s up. I was glad I was doing something crazy enough to be worth noticing.

At the top of the hill, the desert landscape gave way to green, irrigated farm plots. The town of Manilla lay just a few miles ahead, but it took a monumental amount of energy just to drag myself that far.

The sight of a puny gas station convenience store on Main Street was like oasis in the Sahara. I filled my canteens up at a faucet outside and shoved my face with Oreos and Fig Newtons that I bought within.

“Are you ill in the head?” the woman behind the register asked when I told her I was biking from Utah to the Pacific Northwest.

I peddled out of town with rubber legs on an uphill grade. There was a KOA campground nearby. Tempting. If I just paid out the $25, I wouldn’t have to worry about finding a tent site on the rangeland up ahead, most of which was bound to be private property, with few places to hide from well-armed ranch owners.

Still, I was only another four miles to the Wyoming border and I was determined to wake up in the next state, if only to prove to myself that I was making progress. I peddled on.

Dark clouds had gathered in the northeast by the time I crossed the state line. I watched the dark bands of rain with trepidation. Normally, I would expect bad weather to come from the west of me, but this was marching right for me. I needed to get the tent up, pronto.

The problem was that all the land that I could see was wide-open ranch land, within view of the road and the ranch houses up above. Wyomingites are not famous for their love of trespassers.

Tall barbed wire fences cut the land off from the road. It was a super fence with sturdy wire mesh on the bottom and strands of barbs at chest-height. Usually, I see fences that are just three parallel wires and are pretty easy to duck through. This stuff was going to be a challenge.

I peddled furiously for a couple miles, looking for a break somewhere. All I saw were empty plains and the unbroken fenceline. The clouds marched closer. Finally, I saw a small gulley behind a clump of trees: 10 square feet of land where no one would be able to see me. It looked like I’d have to hop the fence after all.

I dismounted and lay my bike behind some sage. Then I tossed my drysack over the fence. Getting myself over was a little more challenging. I climbed the mesh and then grabbed hold of one of the posts for support when I swung my leg over the top. The operation brought my crotch within an inch of the wire skewers. Finally, I landed gracelessly on the other side and went down into the gulley.

Cow shit everywhere. I pitched my tent away from the center of the gulley in the hopes that it would be out of the path of any run off from the storm. If I moved five feet to the left or right, I would be in clear view of the ranch house nearby. I still worried that someone might find my bike near the road so I went back and heaved it onto my side of the fence.

I ran back to the tent and zipped myself into my sleeping bag. Two minutes later it started raining like all hell.

Is there a place anywhere in this view where I won't get shot?

Saturday, September 14, 2013 — about 69 miles