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