by Guy Martin
I found it a bit difficult to pace myself on the first day. The temperature felt in the mid-20s and it was perfect biking weather. I was ten hours in and thought I was doing alright. I had one book with me, Cycling the Great Divide: From Canada to Mexico on North America’s Premier Long-Distance Mountain Bike Route by Michael McCoy. It’s aimed at touring cyclists, not the more hardcore Tour Divide riders, but the information crosses over. It has detailed maps of the trails and day-by-day breakdowns of what to expect, where to get food and where to camp, but because it’s aimed at tourists enjoying themselves, not masochists trying to break themselves, the route is spread over 70 days. I still wanted to do it in less than 20. And I had to do it in under 22 days if I didn’t want to miss my flight.
From everything I’d read about the race I knew that if I got to Butts Cabin, which is about 180 miles in, on the first night, I was doing alright, and I reckoned I might get there. I was cycling in absolutely beautiful countryside, past Spray Lakes Reservoir and Canyon Dam. I made my first crossing of the Continental Divide, which gives the route and the race its name.
The Continental Divide is the crooked line running through North America that divides the continent into two drainage areas. It runs from Alaska, through Canada, mainland USA and into Mexico and beyond. On one side all the rivers run to the Atlantic Ocean (or the Gulf of Mexico), and on the other they run to the Pacific. The Continental Divide follows the Rocky Mountains, which was why I, and all the other Tour Divide riders, had the equivalent of seven Everests’ worth of climbing between Banff and Antelope Wells.
I climbed up to 6,443 feet at Elk Pass and followed the Elk River. I went through the town of Sparwood, British Columbia. If I had been following the suggested daily mileages in my guidebook, I’d have been at the end of day five already, but I hadn’t even stopped to eat. I changed that in Sparwood, pulling up at a petrol station with a shop attached to it and loading up with cinnamon rolls, doughnuts, full-fat milk and Gatorade.
I was following my Garmin, and the trail was fairly obvious a lot of the time, but because I hadn’t downloaded the USA map background on to my device it just showed a line, and me as a dot on it. It didn’t show any other references like lakes, rivers or mountains, so it wasn’t always totally clear. The whole route was marked out using 10,000 waypoints, so at times the detail wasn’t that fine, but I’d thought I’d be alright. I should’ve spent the money on the US map to load into it.
I knew that I shouldn’t ride until I couldn’t pedal any more before deciding to stop for the night. I was only 20 miles, if that, from Butts Cabin, and anyone who is going to do the winning is always at Butts Cabin on the first night. But by that point I was thinking to myself that I was in such a beautiful country, and I’d already seen so much memorable stuff, that I was just going to ride the Tour Divide and not race it. I wouldn’t hang about, but I wouldn’t kill myself to try to get close to a record time.
I stopped at 11 o’clock at the end of the first day. I’d covered 165 miles, about 16 per cent of the overall route, and it had been an easy enough day to start off with. There had been a little bit of tarmac road, but it was mainly off-road on broad gravel tracks with plenty of climbing, much more than I was used to. There had been nothing daft and I was averaging 13 to 14 mph, which was some going for a bike that weighed 25 kilograms with all my kit on it.
Day one was over and I was loving it. I’d been soft for too long. Nothing was going to be soft for the next 18 days.
CHAPTER 11
Locking the door to keep the bears out
I LAY DOWN at the side of the trail, on the Flathead Pass, for the first night’s rest of my Tour Divide. The altitude of the pass is 5,900 feet, which was bugger all compared to some of the passes and summits I was going to cycle over, but there are 5,280 feet in a mile so I was well over a mile above sea level. As a comparison, the summit of Britain’s highest mountain, Ben Nevis, is 4,406 feet.
The guidebook said I was on the Grizzly Bear Highway, in an area of Canada that has ‘the largest population of inland grizzlies on the North American Continent’. Those in the know say to make as much noise as possible so you don’t sneak up on the furry fellas and startle them. Cougars, wolves, and all the deer, elk and moose, which the carnivores eat, call this area home, too.
The closest I got to a bear was something like ten metres, when a young ’un walked across the trail in front of me on the Richmond Pass, in Montana. That’s when you’re most at risk, because the mothers will do anything to protect their cubs if they feel threatened or frightened. When I saw the cub, I tensed up, wondering what was following, so I reached around to my rucksack, grabbed my whistle and blew like hell.
I also saw moose, wild horses, wild dogs, skunks, raccoons and loads of pronghorns. They’re like deer that spring on all fours to get around. I must have seen a thousand of them.
The book also said that I was in the last major valley in southern Canada to be completely uninhabited. The Tour Divide used to take a different route, through more towns and on more tarmac, but it was changed to this wilder one. As I went to sleep every night, the whistle and bear spray that Sharon had bought me from GO Outdoors was right next to my head. The thought of being eaten in my sleep wasn’t enough to keep me awake, and I slept until the alarm went off at 3.30. It was still dark, but I had my head torch on while I packed all my sleeping stuff back on the bike. I was ready to go at 4.30, and I was about 90 miles from the border with America.
Within only a few miles the bike path had been washed away by a landslide, so I had to scramble down the loose rocks and wade along the river. Next was a 12-mile climb past Butts Cabin over Cabin Pass, then up a tough-as-hell slog over Galton Pass. There was snow on the top and it pissed it down. My muscles felt OK, but I had a slight twinge in my left Achilles. It wasn’t a problem, but I could feel it, and I was hoping it wouldn’t develop into anything.
The descent was fast as hell: rough, wild and a full 3,000 feet to the border crossing at Roosville. I was there before midday and wet through. The rain and snow hadn’t bothered me, though. Biking to work in Grimsby through the winter had stood me in good stead.
When I reached the American border, the customs officer told me I had the wrong visa. I had a work visa, and he asked, ‘Are you working?’ He wasn’t the chattiest. I said I was riding my bike. I could’ve told him I was researching this book, but I wasn’t thinking. I had to buy a tourist visa and it only cost $6, but still …
Now I was in Montana, biking the ten miles to Eureka where I filled my face in a Subway, the first food I hadn’t carried myself since breakfast in Banff, over 260 miles ago. I didn’t go looking for the Subway, but I was in there without a second thought.
Out of Eureka it really began to dawn on me that, even though I was heading south, as the crow flies, the trails were so winding that I was heading north for decent stretches.
It was beautiful out there and I loved riding my bike so much, on my own, just the crunch of tyres on the gravel, that I’d keep plugging away until it got dark. I’d have an idea of where I wanted to get to, and as it got closer to 11 o’clock I’d start thinking harder about it. But you can’t take anything for granted on the Tour Divide. It’s a tough route, hard on the body and bike. Earlier in the day the bearings in my pedal collapsed, and the part of the pedal that was clipped to my shoe came off the spindle that was fastened to the crank arm. All that was left was a metal spindle smaller than your little finger. There was no way of fixing it, but, if I was lucky, I could line up the remains of the pedal on my shoe with the spindle, and that made it a bit easier, but it wasn’t right. And I was soaked to the skin.
Later that night I was pedalling down a mountain pass in the dark when my pedal shot off for the second time and I lost the part that clipped to my shoe. Oh, bloody hell. It was God knows how many miles to the next town, where there might not even be a bike shop. These clip-in pedals, designed to fasten to special cycling shoes, are only the size of a Ritz Cracker. I must have
spent an hour scanning down the slopes with my head torch trying to find a bit of pedal to help me get by. It was only the end of the second day. I didn’t know if my ankle being slightly out of line, and full of metalwork, was causing the bearings in my pedals to wear quicker, but I had tried to account for it with the angle of the clip on my shoe. I must have been doing something wrong, as it should’ve lasted longer than this. So now I had one good pedal and one slippery plastic sole trying, and failing, to grip on a finger of polished metal.
I’d read that this area was so remote that the wildlife folk who deal with such things relocate the hooligan grizzly bears – the ones that are too antisocial to live anywhere else – out here. I’d forgotten about this by the time I thought it would be the perfect place for my second night’s rest stop.
I slept in campsite bogs at Tuchuk Campground, locking the door to keep the bears out. I got there late, so I didn’t bother paying, and the campsite was deserted anyway. The loo was in a wooden cabin shed and it was a proper porcelain toilet, but you shat straight into a septic tank, not a sewer system. It didn’t stink, or if it did I couldn’t catch a whiff of it with my bad sense of smell, but it was warm in there. I don’t know if that’s to do with the chemical reaction of the shite decomposing. I was soaking wet so I was just happy for a bit of warmth. The lights were on in the bog all night and I couldn’t sleep, so I put my head torch on, found the master switch outside and flicked it off, then went back in, locked the door and got my head down.
I set my alarm for 3.30 most mornings, and this one was no different. My pedal was still knackered, so I went over Whitefish Divide without a bloody pedal, which made it feel a lot harder than it should have. The surface was mainly gravel, with some tarmac early on. It was steep in places, and there were times, in the valleys, when I was nearly deafened by nearby running water. It didn’t help that I went ten miles in the wrong direction.
I got over the top of the 5,300-foot pass and into Whitefish, and went looking for a bike shop. In the end I’d had to ride over 75 miles with a broken right pedal. I found a bike shop, the Glacier Cyclery, that had everything I needed. I found out later that it had been voted one of the best bike shops in America. There was a bloke outside the shop, another customer, and it turned out that he knew my mate Gary, and he knew all about Dirt Quake. He was a cool dude, a motorcycle journalist or worked in magazines or summat, and he knew who I was. He was riding east to west on mountain-bike trails, with me heading north to south, and we meet at that exact moment. It was a coincidence, but then I know a lot of people who know a lot of people.
I was travelling so light that I had to borrow a tool to change the pedals from the shop. The Glacier Cyclery was ready for the Tour Divide and knew that the leaders of the race would be coming through on Sunday and Monday, so they were going to stay open.
I bought some Crankbrothers pedals, the same as the ones I set off with, and some fingerless gloves. I’d only packed winter gloves, because I thought I was hard and I didn’t need anything on my hands for padding except when it got freezing, but I was wrong. The trails were so rough my hands were getting a battering. Usually, I ride with just the heel of my hand on the bars, not my fingers wrapped around the grip. My hands can put up with a lot, but that part of my palm was already sore and beginning to blister, after only two days, and I’d had to change my riding position to compensate for it. I bought some energy bars too, packed up, filled my face and set off.
Before Whitefish the going was very mountainous and forested, but it flattened out after it for 30-odd miles, though I messed up and rode ten miles out of my way. There were two trails next to each other, and I thought I was on the correct one. It looked like I was on the right route on the Garmin screen too, but the trails started separating and I realised I was on the wrong path and had to double back.
The next decent-sized place was Ferndale. I stopped for pizza and a tub of ice cream. I sat outside, on a red-hot early evening, thinking, This is it, this is ace. The bloke from the shop came out for a fag, and we had a yarn. He asked where I was going and I told him Mexico. He started telling me about his life, how he’d moved a bit out of town because it was cheaper. He went back in the shop and came out with a yellow beer cooler – I think they call them a coozie, a little foam rubber jacket you slip your can or bottle in to keep it cold. It had the shop’s name, Ferndale Market, printed on it. He wished me luck and I kept hold of the cooler, but I didn’t know when I’d ever use it. I didn’t take a spare pair of socks because I was thinking about every ounce of weight, but I carried that all the way.
I used to think Americans were very American, and that everything was a willy-waving contest: What do you do for a living? What car have you got? Trying to put you in a box before they’ve hardly met you. But this trip totally changed my opinion. Americans are the politest, nicest people. Before this, one of the few sniffs I’d got of Americans not being the kind of people I’d pigeonholed them as was when I went to Portland in 2015 to meet Matt Markstaller to discuss the Triumph land speed record attempt. That was the first time I’d seen real America, not tourist America. A few folk at Pikes Peak were on a wavelength too, but it was at a race so there was some willy-waving. Even when I went on a ten-day road trip in a rented camper van with my mates, when we were all in our mid-twenties, driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco and then to Las Vegas, it was all very touristy with the kind of people that confirmed the stereotype I had of them.
Out of Ferndale I was riding along the side of Swan Lake and then the little rivers that are called creeks out here. I was near Fatty Creek, at ten at night, when I called it a day. I slept out on a bit of flat ground in the wilderness. I didn’t have a tent, but I had my self-inflating roll mat, which was only about an inch thick but gave good insulation from the cold ground and provided a bit of padding. I climbed into my sleeping bag and bivvy bag, which goes over the sleeping bag as an extra layer of insulation.
That night the roll mat got punctured by a stone and was useless. I ended up carrying it for a couple of more days, thinking it would at least do something, even if it wasn’t giving any padding, but then I chucked it. I had at least two weeks of sleeping rough to go, and I didn’t even have a roll mat any more.
The coldest parts of the whole Tour Divide were the Montana mountain passes. At some points the snow was piled 10-foot high at the side of the trails.
I’d thought dead hard about how to pack the bike for the trip. All the luggage I had was made by a company called Apidura. The bag under my handlebars held my sleeping department: roll mat (until I punctured it), sleeping bag, bivvy bag and woolly hat, which I slept in so I didn’t lose all my body heat out of my head. This pack had an elasticated string pocket on the back, so it also became the food department, where I stored my cinnamon buns, doughnuts, protein bodybuilder bars or apple pies – anything I could buy at each stop.
The Garmin GPS and lights were fastened to the bars. I had ‘tri’ bars – triathlon bars – which are long, forward-facing add-ons. They bolt either side of the steering stem and have cups for your elbows, so when you hold on to the bars you get into a more aerodynamic position, with your hands stretched ahead of you, back curved and head low. I didn’t fit them to be more aerodynamic, but just so I had different riding positions. If I had an ache, I could move my body into a different position to try to ease it.
My head torch stretched over the bars. The front-wheel dynamo would charge anything with a USB socket, which included my Garmin, lights, SPOT Tracker and head torch.
A little, soft bag hung from the bars, with all the stuff I needed quick access to: sun cream, sunglasses, salt tablets for my drinks, water-purification tablets and mosquito spray.
There was a small top-tube pack at the stem, which had in there Mick the lucky paddy that Sharon had given me as a good-luck charm, and a tool that allowed me to change gear when the gear shifter stopped working, but I’ll come to that later. I’d put more energy bars in there, when I had them. Petrol statio
ns sold them – Clif bars, MET-Rx bars, owt like that.
In the triangle of the frame, hung from the top tube, I had another narrow bag. It was split down the middle, and the right section was packed with spare brake pads, shoe cleats and shoe-cleat screws, and a chain; gear cables, inners and outers; chain oil; chain tools, and a Swiss army knife. I would end up going through three sets of brake pads and three sets of shoe cleats on the Tour Divide.
On the left-hand side I had my titanium spork – knife, fork and spoon, all in one, which I used for eating big pots of fruit that I bought from petrol stations – and vitamins and ibuprofen. I ate all the vitamins, but I didn’t take one painkiller. I had more water-purification tablets, diarrhoea tablets – which I didn’t use – elastic bands – useful for fastening stuff that broke to the bike – and cable ties.
The final pack was under my seat. In there were my winter leggings or summer shorts, depending on which I was wearing, and summer or winter socks, again, depending which I had on. I had a proper cycling rain jacket, which I needed every morning, and a really lightweight rain jacket that I didn’t sweat too much in, to use during the day to stop me getting sunburnt. The winter leggings had better arse padding, so about a week from the end, when I got near New Mexico, I made them into shorts with my Swiss army knife, so I could wear them in the heat. I also had my CamelBak rucksack that had the guidebook and passport in it, and SPOT Tracker attached to it.
The bike frame had three bottle cages, but the big bottle in the bottom one just held bodybuilder protein powder that I’d mix into my water to help me recover a bit overnight. I never bought bottled water, but I’d put the purification tablets in everything, even if I filled up from a tap, otherwise it tasted like a swimming pool. At the end of every day, if I had the opportunity, I’d buy full-fat milk. That was me – everything I needed for 20 days on the road.