by Jill Homer
“Give this five more years and it’ll be indistinguishable from anywhere else in the forest,” I said. “The wheels of forty cyclists aren’t enough to maintain a trail.”
We beat through the spruce bushes and quickly reached the snowfield. In the fading light, I squinted across the mountain. The route seemed to cut directly into the steep slope, but the snowpack stretched over it in a perfect 45-degree angle before dropping off a near-vertical cliff. The only way through it was a line of deep-set footprints. I could see what John meant about sliding off the mountain. If the temperature was below freezing and the snow surface froze, there would be absolutely no way to safely cross it without crampons and an ice ax. At 9 p.m., the temperature was already in the low forties and dropping.
John plunged into the tracks left by other racers. “Snow’s still soft,” he said. “And this helps. It’s pretty hard to find the way down so I’m hoping those who came before managed to.”
“Well, if we don’t find their bodies, we’ll know they did,” I said. I followed John through the tracks, pushing my bike through the rigid slush and occasionally punching through the snow to my thighs. The precipice loomed mere inches to my left, and I prayed I wouldn’t lose my balance because I wasn’t sure I’d be able to arrest a fall. Beyond that, pushing my bike through thigh-deep snow was hard work, and I started overheating rapidly. John stopped often to call back to me in a jittery voice that told me he was more worried about his own chilled state than he was about my pace.
“Go on ahead if you need to,” I called out. “I’ll be fine.”
“We need to find the route together,” John called back. “Once it starts dropping down; it’s impossible to see in the snow. You’ll see.”
Nearly an hour and perhaps a mile later, I could see what he meant. The intuitive direction of the route disappeared into a clump of trees, and below us was a less deadly but still rather steep, declining snowfield.
“I think the road normally switchbacks down that,” John said. “We should probably just cut directly down.”
“I say we keep following the tracks,” I said, even though the majority did seem to veer in the wrong direction, and there were several in different directions. “If lose them, then we’ll know it’s time to turn back.”
We snaked down the slope just as the last hints of twilight disappeared and engulfed the mountain in pitch darkness. John, in his single-minded forward march, surged away from me. Minutes later, I could only pick out a half dozen footprints through the snow, and I vowed not to lose track of the fading evidence of those who came before. When I finally joined John on what appeared to be a muddy road, I felt a sweep of relief.
“It’s not over yet,” John said. “This road is still terrible for a ways. Steep drops. Big gullies. And there’s still plenty of snow. You have to be careful.” His teeth chattered as he spoke.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m really cold,” he said. “It’s hard for me to keep up my body heat at this pace.”
“Yeah, Geoff used to tell me the same thing,” I said. “My heart rate would be 150 and his would be beating less than a hundred at my rate of speed. He could never stay warm.”
“I’m just going to keep Seeley Lake on my mind,” John said. “We should be there within the hour.”
The road was everything John promised it would be, studded with large spruce trees, rocks, hard snow, and sudden drops into deep trenches. John descended quickly and I white-knuckled my handlebars, feathered the brakes and fought back terror in an effort to keep up with him. The phantom world disappeared in front of us, buzzing through the narrow beam of our headlamps like flies in front of a projector. Soon the road smoothed out, becoming wider as we dropped ever faster, with mud flinging in our faces and frigid air burning our lungs. Even I started to feel the chill, and I pitied John, who I figured must be a popsicle at that point. But I couldn’t help but smile wide. Richmond Peak wasn’t so high. The snow slope wasn’t so bad. It was a beautiful adventure, and this descent was its sweeping reward.
By the time we dropped into Seeley Lake, it was after midnight. The entire town stood still in darkness and silence.
“Crap,” I said. “It looks all closed up.”
John’s face fell into a wild-eyed look of panic. He sprinted in front of me toward the first motel. By the time I caught up to John, he was practically pressed against the locked door of the front office, hand repeatedly pushing a button beneath a sign that read, “Night Bell.”
“Please come downstairs, please come downstairs,” he chanted as his teeth chattered audibly.
“John, if we can’t get a room, what are you going to do? You don’t have a sleeping bag.”
“We’ll have to keep going to Ovando,” he said.
“Ovando!” I cried. “John, it’s like thirty more miles from here, and it’s after midnight. I don’t have that much mileage in me tonight. I’ve been exhausted all day. I need sleep.”
“We won’t think about that yet,” he said. “They’ll come downstairs. They will.”
After several teeth-chattering minutes, a woman appeared at the door. John gave her an endearing if pathetic smile, and without even a handful of words, she had a key in her hands and was enthusiastically directing us toward a room. John rushed in the door and collapsed on the bed. “Warm!” he exclaimed. “Shower!”
The woman moved to close the door and I asked her if there was a bar in town where we might be able to buy a meal at that time of night.
“They’re all closed,” she said. “But give me a sec; I’ll see what I can do.”
She walked away. I had no idea what she meant, until she returned several minutes later with a big Tupperware bowl in her hands.
“It’s the tuna noodle casserole we had for dinner,” she said. “There’s not a ton left, but you can have all of it.”
“Wow! Thanks!” I said, and smiled wide. “You know, this is going to be my first hot meal on the Divide!” She smiled back even though she had no idea what I meant by that statement, nor did she realize just how much that casserole meant to me. I stuck it in the microwave, and by the time John emerged from the shower looking relieved, I presented him with a heaping spoonful of the ultimate prize.
“No way! There’s food?”
“Courtesy the night clerk at this amazing establishment,” I said. “Not only was she not pissed we woke her up, she gave us her leftovers.”
John took a bite and grinned. “This is my favorite place on the entire Divide!”
I grinned. It had been a long, physically taxing day that started on the wrong side of the bed, continued on a roller coaster of remote forest and grizzly bears, climaxed on a treacherous snow-covered peak and ended with hot casserole. Even though I had been so annoyed earlier in the day about John’s grand plan, I had to agree with him. “Mine too,” I said.
Chapter Eleven
Raising Montana
“Maybe we should take an easy day,” John said as we rolled away from Seeley Lake, pedaling back up the road we had descended off route late the previous night.
“What were you thinking?” I asked.
“Lincoln is only sixty-five miles from here, with one small pass. Beyond that, there’s really only Helena. That’s about 120 miles, but there are a lot of big passes between here and there.”
“Sixty-five miles,” I said, frowning. That was an unconscionably short day this early in a race. I had been tired the day before, but felt strongly refreshed after food and sleep and a relaxed morning. Still, I didn’t want to commit to Helena, which was too far away for a 10 a.m. start. John’s inability to stay anywhere besides a town irked me, as did his insistence to start a day knowing exactly where it was going to end. But my only other choice was to leave him behind in Lincoln and continue on to some halfway point in the woods. Even though he often took an all-knowing stance toward the rhetorical questions I liked to ask, and even though he had this annoying habit of spinning effortlessly beside me and chatting far
too cheerfully as I labored up climbs, I had grown fond of John’s company.
“So I guess you surging ahead isn’t going to happen at this point?” I asked.
“It’s out of the question now,” John said. “My knee is still bothering me. It’s better than it was in Eureka, but it still hurts. And I’m too far behind the leaders. They’re probably south of Butte by now.”
“So where do you think you’ll drop out?” I asked. “I’m guessing Helena has an airport.”
“I could get a flight out in Helena,” he agreed. “Butte is good, too. I’ll play it by ear. I already have the vacation time, and it has been a lot of fun touring with you.”
I felt a renewed surge of anxiety about the possibility of a complete lack of solo time on the Divide. “How long do you want to keep touring?” I said weakly. “Not until the end?”
“No, not until the end,” John said. “I don’t have that much vacation time.”
We rolled through Ovando around lunchtime, but did not stop for a meal despite our shortened schedule. John preferred to eat on the bike, stuffing down energy bars and swigs of florescent orange recovery drink as I munched on almonds and Sour Patch Kids. The convenience store food filled the same caloric deficits as real food, but not the same emotional holes. Eating on the bike was always a joyless chore, a thankless task that required stuffing fistfuls of chewy, processed food between perpetual efforts to steer around rocks and loose patches of gravel. I was beginning to miss plates and forks and actually observing what I was consuming before it went into my mouth.
“We’ll eat a good meal in Lincoln,” John promised. “You’ll like it there. It’s nice.”
We arrived in Lincoln before 4 p.m., after leaving Seeley Lake at 10 a.m. I felt guilty about our short day, and a little bit restless, but a restaurant sign advertising pasta and fresh salads sounded a siren call that John was all too happy to oblige. We found a hotel that promised hot tubs, and checked in even after the clerk told us the hot tubs were closed. Four o’clock was a bit early for dinner, so we killed some time lounging at a gas station. I wavered for a few minutes at the soda fountain. Back home, I was a voracious Diet Pepsi drinker, absolutely addicted to the crisp texture and lightly sweet flavor of the calorie-free soda. On the Divide, I had begrudgingly switched back to regular soda to help fill an ever-growing calorie deficit. But in Lincoln, with only sixty-five miles and one relatively easy pass behind me, I nudged the plastic cup beneath the Diet Pepsi dispenser. I savored the nutritionally useless soda with surprising revelry, a rush of warmth, and the instant relief of my favorite comfort food.
At the gas station, a large man wearing a cycling jersey and a tiny pair of jogging shorts that did little to hide anything sauntered out of the gas station’s adjacent casino. I recognized him as the Italian I had ridden with for a short time on the first day. He introduced himself as Dario, a name I recognized as belonging to a man who had also ridden in the 2008 Iditarod Trail Invitational. During that year’s race, he reached McGrath about a day before I did and set out toward to Nome, but ran out of water and ended up begging a ride off a snowmobiler with the Iditarod Dog Sled Race. I didn’t need to relay any of these connections to him, however. Dario recognized me instantly. Everyone did. I was the girl.
“Hallo Jill,” he said.
“How are you, Dario?” I asked.
“I am good, very good,” he said. He pointed to his backside. “Sore, but good.”
“Are you staying here tonight?”
“Yes, we stay here for now,” he said. “But we leave midnight.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Really, midnight? Ambitious.”
“Yes.” He smiled and nodded, lingered for a few more seconds in a stiff silence and then walked away.
“Damn, midnight,” I said. “Eight hours of rest and gone, darkness be damned. I guess we’re still up there with the real racers.”
“You’re really not doing too badly,” John said.
“It’s weird not to know where anyone is in this race,” I said. “And we have no way to find out. Last year, when Geoff was racing the Divide, I knew everything that was going on, almost down to the minute, just based on call-ins and a little bit of tracking. Now I’m actually on the Divide, and for all I know, the winner has already crossed the Mexican border.”
“I can promise you they haven’t,” John said. “Last year, when you were blogging the Great Divide Race, I would call my friends back home and have them tell me what you had written, so I could keep track of where Geoff and David were. After they dropped out, I was far out in front for the rest of the GDR, so there was no real need to check in anymore.”
We ate our big meal and fresh salad at the restaurant, took a leisurely walk around town and settled into our beds before it was even dark outside. I started tapping out a blog post on my handheld e-mail device.
“We should get up early,” John said as he carefully laid out the articles of clothing he had washed in the shower and dried with some of the six extra towels he always requested from the front desk. “We had a good rest today. I think we should try to make it to Butte tomorrow.”
“Whatever you say,” I replied lazily.
“It’s 130 miles,” John said. “And six passes. Lots of difficult logging roads. It’s going to be a big day.”
“So 6 a.m. wake-up then?”
“I’d say five,” John replied. “You’ll see. This is likely going to be your longest day of the entire Tour Divide.”
Five o’clock was indeed well before dawn, and I was slow to start moving in the early morning. I lingered too long in the aisles at the gas station and insisted on consuming a breakfast burrito, coffee and orange juice before I consented to continuing down the route.
I had already become a connoisseur of Divide sunsets, but the morning’s sunrise dawned with more spectacular streaks of light and color washes than any sky I had seen yet. We motored along farm roads beside pink-drenched pastures as an impenetrable fortress of purple mountains loomed in front of us. I whipped out my camera and took a long series of images of John and his far-reaching shadow as I sang out loud the words from a Kodak film commercial that I remembered from my childhood: “These are the moments, don’t let them pass you by ... those Kodak moments, don’t let them pass you by.” John laughed and made his best effort at a funny face, which looked more like a grimacing smile. Still, I could tell the good mood was mutual.
John and I approached the wall of mountains, which revealed their weakness in yet another side-cut road switch-backing up the steep slope. “I’m beginning to notice this pattern about Montana,” I said. “It’s all climb, drop, climb, drop. Nothing is flat here.”
“That’s what makes Montana the hardest state,” John said. “And the best.”
Stemple Pass was every bit as steep as the mountains threatened, gaining 2,000 feet in about seven miles. John waited for me at the top, which I reached long after the chill and color of the morning had faded to warm, direct light. “Well, there’s one down,” John said as I rubbed my eyes, which were still blurry with sleep, and slathered my arms with sunscreen. “And it’s our first Continental Divide crossing. You should take a picture.”
“We crossed the Divide back in Canada, remember?” I said. “Elk Pass. On the first day. But, yeah, first U.S. crossing. Which side are we on now?”
“I think we’re on the Atlantic side,” John said. “Believe me, after a few more of these, you’re going to completely lose track.”
I looked down at a tiny gurgle of a stream, no wider than a large pencil. “So you’re trying to get to the Mississippi,” I said to the water as John started pedaling down a nearly level grade. “Good luck with that.”
Divide crossing number two came less than twenty miles later, over another broad, rolling pass about 6,500 feet high. The next crest, Priest Pass, elevation 5,994, rolled us back to the Mississippi side of the Divide a mere ten miles later. There was little relief in the continuous grade; even at five or six miles per hour, m
y legs burned with the searing acid that my muscles usually reserved for a dead sprint. The hard sun hovered in a cloudless sky. I applied another layer of sunscreen over a smear of sweat and dirt, which combined to form a salty, gritty paste across my skin.
We dropped into Helena at about 2 p.m. Cars streamed beside us at speeds that felt disorienting after a long morning of pedaling through forests where we had been more likely to meet a black bear than a human. John and I rode directly to a large grocery store. I rushed inside, almost squealing with delight as I filled a basket with strawberries, oranges, carrots, yogurt, wheat bread, and tuna for lunch. After I amassed my treats, I begrudgingly picked up the necessary chocolate, almonds, gummy bears and Sour Patch Kids I would need for the rest of the day.
“Why is it that healthy food tastes so delicious on the Divide while junk food tastes so crappy?” I mused as John and I devoured large piles of groceries out in front of the store.
“Obviously, nutrition,” John said. “But it’s also about indulgence and having things you normally can’t have. You need a lot of calories to keep going, and you don’t want it to weigh very much, so you have to carry junk food. But, wow, I just bought a sixty-calorie peach that weighs an entire pound, and it is delicious.”
We finished our lunch and rode toward Helena’s main bike shop. My gloves, which were nearly new when I started the race less than a week earlier, had disintegrated to little more than shreds of fabric held together by sunscreen-dirt paste, and I hoped to replace them. John wanted to buy lube and spare spokes. Inside, covered in a thick layer of dirt and holding tattered gloves, I was met with a surprisingly cool reception from the employees of a mountain town shop that seemed to cater only to high-end road cyclists. Two other Divide racers, Cricket and a man named Jeremy, were also holed up in the cramped store, waiting miserably for badly needed repair service that did not seem to be coming.