by Jill Homer
But I tried not to be grumpy. They were doing good. I was the selfish one. I just wanted to be away from the tourist towns, away from the crowds, where I could climb back into the sweeping, lonely mountains that had drawn all of us there in the first place. But the breast cancer walk stretched all the way from Frisco to Breckenridge, an eight-mile span clogged the entire way with more than a thousand pedestrians. It took me nearly ninety minutes to cover a span of the route that should have only consumed about a half hour, for no other reason than the presence of too many people. Even through my frustration, I had to chuckle. You get anything and everything on the Divide.
Freed back to the road, I sprinted past the expensive bistros and luxury boutiques of Breckenridge without even stopping. Several groups of cyclists flanked me as I started up the road to Boreas Pass, but the heavy crowding thinned as the road surface turned to gravel, then narrowed, reaching ever higher. Clean, bronzed, and chiseled athletes flew by on their mountain bikes, slowing only long enough to say, “Damn, that’s a lot of gear isn’t it?” as they passed. Then it would be my turn to pass a L.L. Bean-attired couple out for a Sunday morning biking date. “What are you carrying in all those bags?” they asked as I churned by.
Above timberline, the open country revealed long pace lines of mountain bike racers in training. Amid 13,000-foot-high, talus-coated slopes, they looked like ants marching up a sandy hill. The elevation was gratifying. Before that day I had yet to climb above 10,000 feet on the Divide, and suddenly I was lifted beyond 11,000 feet. Having grown up a fair distance from the Colorado high country, I could still count all the places I had ever visited above 11,000 feet — the high peaks of the Wasatch Range, Mount Whitney, Deseret Peak, King’s Peak, the Tushars, the southwestern San Juan Mountains, and Mount Borah. All of these had been mountain summits sought through the grunt of long hikes and hard scrambles. But Boreas Pass rolled gentle and wide, and suddenly I was at its summit, elevation 11,400, drinking in the satisfaction of thin air.
Groups of cyclists scattered over the wide saddle. There was an old train station that looked like it had been converted to some kind of tourist trap, mercifully closed on Sunday. The cyclists ate big lunches and chatted loudly and made more comments about my strangely loaded bicycle as I passed. They would spend a little more time up there, drinking in the success of a cresting a hard day’s ride or finishing up another great training session before turning around to coast back to Breckenridge. I continued forward down the deserted side of the mountain, on a much rougher but emptier road that allowed me to truly fly.
The first big pass of the day had been conquered and physically, it had hardly even touched me. The swelling had abated in my left knee and left behind a relatively benign bruise. My angry knee finally felt pacified. The soreness in my legs had melted away; my back finally steeled against its continuously bent-over position. It had only taken me 1,700 miles, but I seemed to have found the “cruise control” button on my bike. I stuffed down Sour Patch Kids and smiled. I had become a Great Divide machine.
As I crossed the high plain below the pass, thunderstorms moved in. With the road stretching in a straight line for miles in front of me, I spent long minutes observing the sky. I watched the black clouds rumble past. I could see their path and speed, and guessed, often correctly, where I was going to get hit and for how long. I mechanically applied my rain gear and continued nonplussed through the driving rain, knowing it wouldn’t last long enough to ruin the road.
Then I was hit by hail. It fell heavy and hard, pelting my rain jacket with loud thumps until a marble-sized hailstone hammered my helmet. Still nonplussed, I calmly dismounted my bicycle and squatted in the ditch next to the road, burying my head between my knees until the hailstorm moved along.
I crossed the Arkansas River, having returned to the east side of the Continental Divide on Boreas Pass. In the riverside town of Hartsel, I met several different groups of bicycle tourists. I ate my lunch with a vehicle-supported group that was riding across the country to raise money for affordable housing. There were more than twenty riders, all on sleek road bikes with minimal gear. They had vans to carry all their camping gear and ate three square meals a day. Their lunch was a gourmet spread of cold cuts, fruit, vegetables, and bread, which they didn’t offer to share with me as I munched on a package of peanut butter crackers. They weren’t so confused by the amount of gear I had on my bike, but they couldn’t understand why I would ride a cross-country tour on a mountain bike. I tried to explain to them that I needed a bike that could handle boulders, ruts, and non-maintained trails. I needed shocks to absorb the harsh battering from backwoods gravel roads, and big tires to float on top of mud and sand. The touring cyclists nodded, but I suspected my descriptions were mostly lost on them.
“That thing just looks heavy,” one young man said as he took another bite of a thick turkey sandwich loaded with fresh vegetables. I ate another cracker and nodded. “It is.”
Even though I had already eaten a decent lunch, I couldn’t bypass the general store in town, with its whimsical out-of-commission phone booth and promise of ice cream. I ate my dessert out front beneath a light drizzle with a couple of independent touring cyclists.
“How far do you travel each day?” one asked.
“Oh, I average about a hundred miles,” I said. “As few as fifty, as many as 140. But mileage isn’t what kills you in this race, it’s the climbing. In fact, you get to the point where you hardly notice the miles. And then, of course, there are the conditions. Once you’ve done a couple of miles in wheel-sucking mud, only then will you understand that a 4,000-foot climb is nothing.”
The independent tourists, who rode beefy slick-tire hybrid bikes with bulging saddle bags, seemed a little more inclined to understand the point I was trying to make. I was basically doing the same thing they were, but on a scale that only when I actually set out on the Divide could I even begin to understand. I had once crossed the country during a fairly casual road tour, riding 3,200 miles in sixty-five days. That tour from Salt Lake City to Syracuse, New York, which I rode with Geoff in 2003, was difficult, strenuous and daunting. I suffered my fair share, but it was nothing like the Tour Divide. The Tour Divide takes cyclists to the extreme edges of bicycle touring, the edges where life becomes agonizing, unrelenting, and impossible, and then spins them around 180 degrees into a world of absolute bliss, ease, and joy. I had skirted one edge. I was about to enter the other.
I left the world of humans in Hartsel and started up an unnamed pass in a nondescript part of central Colorado. The high mountain plain pulled me effortlessly forward like a trickle of water, even though I was gaining elevation. A gentle breeze blew, so light I couldn’t discern its direction. I crested a small saddle and dropped into another plain. The thunderheads thinned and broke apart, revealing the cerulean sky beyond. Sunbeams illuminated the horizon like distant spotlights, heralding the beginning of a great show.
Life on a bicycle is so simple. You eat, sleep, and ride, then rinse and repeat. On the high mountain plain, it was so easy to slough away all of the rest of it, the little things that add up, the injuries and the heat, the logistics and the repairs, the hunger and the fatigue, the distress about not having enough companionship and then having too much. These problems were all human failings, the outside world creeping in. Firmly locked in cruise control, I only needed to understand the fine mechanics of pedaling my bike. I pedaled my bike, and everything else fell into place, had purpose, and made sense. It was so simple. This was the end point of all of life’s struggles, serenity in motion. I eat, sleep, and ride — therefore, I live.
I crested the last saddle of the day and for the first time in quite a while, hit the brakes. For a minute or so I stared directly ahead, genuinely trying to ascertain whether the landscape in front of me was real or whether I had perhaps spent a bit too long inside of my own head. The road plummeted down a red-cliff canyon lined with sapphire blue juniper trees and delicate pinions. Beyond its walls, I saw a great va
lley more than 7,000 feet below the towering spires of 14,000-foot monsters. Sunbeams escaped from breaks in the dark clouds and cast the amber valley in stark shadows, like burns in a slab of wood.
Beautiful would be the typical word to describe the scene, but it would never suffice. Stunning and spectacular, those were words to describe how the landscape affected me, but I was only a speck amid a universe of rock and river and sky. I finally settled on the word I was looking for as “grace,” because only by leaps of hope and faith can a person cross the threshold of the comfortable and the mundane to places so intense that they pierce the soul.
I pushed off the ground and launched down the saddle, falling, falling, falling into a paradise of sandstone and granite, blurred to soft perfection by the wind-driven tears in my eyes. Within thirty minutes I had reached the valley, coasting easily into the town of Salida. I had crossed three passes and ridden 115 miles that day, and I wasn’t sure I had felt a single one. I felt as fresh and alive as I would after a full night of sleep. I rolled up to a Mexican food restaurant splashed with bright colors that shimmered in the light of sunset, finally willing to allow that maybe, just maybe, the hard part really was behind me.
Chapter Eighteen
Untouchable
I had become an expert on small-town convenience stores. Even independently owned service stations, buried in the most remote regions of the west, all had a near-identical selection of products laid out in a nearly identical way. Their organization was both simple and highly effective, designed for the maximum obtainment of junk food.
I walked into the Salida 7-Eleven with single-minded purpose, knowing I would not pass another significantly populated town on the route for more than 150 miles. I walked down the first aisle, also known as the candy bar aisle, and selected four king-sized Snickers bars — which not only boasted 500 calories each, but were also usually the most popular and therefore freshest items on the shelf. I then grabbed four pairs of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups, prone to melting but probably okay in the high mountain air. The next aisle, the salty snack aisle, held my Corn Nuts, regular nuts, and packages of crackers. The next aisle, the specialty candy aisle, was my favorite. It was here that I was treated to the widest and most thrilling range of selection that can only be found in gummy snacks. I was partial to Sour Patch Kids, but I liked to mix it up with gummy bears and sour worms and sometimes something florescent and obnoxious and full of artificially flavored and chemically colored high-fructose corn syrup. 7-Eleven also carried chocolate-covered espresso beans, a special treat for the mornings I anticipated waking up in a sleeping bag. In the “regular food” aisle, I usually picked up tuna packets and the occasional energy bar. The refrigerated shelves along the outer edge of the store held my orange juice and liters of Pepsi and yogurt and never-ending search for wax-coated balls of cheese. I finished with an extra-large cup of coffee and a quick browse of the gourmet cases in front of the store, where I could obtain 600-calorie “homemade” brownies and the cinnamon roll I planned to eat for breakfast before heading out. Then I’d walk to the counter and dump 10,000 calories — about two days’ worth of food — in front of the startled clerk.
“Um, did you find everything you needed?” she asked.
“Oh yes,” I said.
The clerk in Salida was more bold than most, and she smiled wryly. “Having a little celebration are we?” she asked.
I smiled back. If I was more bold, or a better actress, I would have launched into a long sob story about how my husband just cheated on me and I didn’t want to be in the world any more so I was just going to eat my way into a sugar coma. If I had been even bolder than that, I might have just told her the truth, but instead I said, “Ah, I’m just stocking up.”
“Okay then,” she said as she slid a heart attack’s worth of survival food into a plastic bag. “Have a nice day.”
I got another late start in Salida, which I had no excuse for, but the amazing energy I that powered me to Salida carried into the new day. Five miles outside of town, I remembered that I forgot to pick up a pair of sunglasses, having lost a pair the day before, after losing several other individual pairs in unknown spots scattered across the Great Divide. In all, I would lose seven pairs of sunglasses on the Great Divide, but I never fret too much about it because sunglasses, like Sour Patch Kids, were only a convenience store away. I stopped in Poncha Springs, where a man wearing a bicycle helmet stood chatting on a pay phone out front. Propped next to him was a mountain bike bulging with panniers. Given the remote location, I knew he had to be riding the Divide, so I waited until he hung up the phone and walked up to say hello.
The man told me he started in Mexico and was riding the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route north, so he had already crossed paths with most of the Tour Divide racers in front of me. He said having ridden across New Mexico, he couldn’t even fathom the pace of the leaders, but I seemed to be moving at a more reasonable clip. He handed me a $5 bill and asked me if I would deliver it to a couple in Del Norte. “We went out for tamales and I never paid them back,” he said. “But if you call them up, I’m sure they’ll give you something to eat, so there’s something in it for you.”
I folded the bill into my wallet. “I’ll try to remember,” I said. “But I can’t promise I’ll be lucid when I get there.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You have I think three passes before Del Norte, big ones. Are you going to try to get there tonight?”
I shook my head. “Even if I had actually gotten an early start, which as you can see it’s none too early, it wasn’t all that likely. No, I’ll probably camp somewhere before Del Norte and head in tomorrow morning or early afternoon.”
“Yeah, I went through Del Norte three days ago,” he said. “But it’s been a pretty relaxed trip. These passes in Colorado look monstrous, but they’re all on fairly smooth railroad grades and they’re not too bad. What you gotta watch out for is New Mexico. Those mountains don’t look like much on the maps, but I’m telling you, New Mexico will bring you to your knees.”
I nodded vigorously but didn’t feel the sting of his warning. Sure, New Mexico was full of bumps, but in the grand scope of things it was, as the saying goes, “all downhill.”
We shook hands and turned in opposite directions. I pedaled up the canyon toward Marshall Pass. The descent into Salida had dropped me all the way down to 7,000 feet elevation and I had to climb back up to close to 11,000 again, but I tried not to let the scope of the task scare me. The morning was bright and warm and my legs felt inexplicably strong. I had a feedbag full of fresh junk food and a camera clasped in my right hand. The old railroad bed snaked lazily up the mountainside, providing nearly free passage to the pinnacles in the sky. Everything was going my way. I was untouchable.
About a thousand feet below the pass, an oncoming vehicle approached on the narrow road. It slowed as it pulled up beside me and I groaned. I expected questions and I was in too good of a mood to explain my brutal race to another inquisitive local. The window rolled down and a familiar face smiled back at me. I laughed out loud at the surprising recognition. The man and I had met once before, very briefly, but I knew of him quite well. Mike Curiak was an avid mountain biker and wheel builder who live in Grand Junction, Colorado, which was located several hours northwest of Marshall Pass. I had read extensively about Mike’s various exploits and successes via the tight-knit ultra-endurance cycling community of the Internet, but the reason I had met him was because we crossed paths in McGrath, Alaska, in March 2008. Mike had been racing and riding the Iditarod Trail since the mid-1990s and still holds the northern route record to Nome. He had held the McGrath record as well until Pete Basinger surpassed it in 2007. Mike had mostly given up racing, but he still traveled north every year to tour the Iditarod Trail on an expedition-loaded snow bike. When I met Mike in 2008, he had just arrived in McGrath with a broken tent and stove during his latest trek to Nome. We locked eyes just as I was being whisked away to the airport after finishing my own ride the da
y before.
“Do you think you’ll head back out there soon?” were the only words I said to him as he stood in the front room in his long johns.
“The future is uncertain,” was all he had said to me before I nodded goodbye and ducked into the minus-twenty-degree morning.
Now the future had arrived, on a warm day in June 2009, and our paths had collided again in the middle of nowhere that was central Colorado. I grinned. “What are you doing in this part of the world?” I asked.
“Actually,” he said, “I’m here to surprise Pete.”
“Pete? Pete Basinger? Really?”
Mike nodded.
“So he is riding the Great Divide this year?” I asked. “I had heard rumors he was out there, but he’s been like a phantom on the trail. I wasn’t even sure if they were true.”
“He wanted to keep it on the down-low,” Mike said. “Wanted to do it without all of the hype and noise.”
“Right,” I said. I knew Mike was referring directly to the Tour Divide, a race that was essentially the unwanted stepchild of the Great Divide Race, which Mike helped start in 2004. That inaugural year, Mike recruited a handful of mountain bike racers to join him on the epic race from Montana to Mexico. They aimed to break a record established in 1999 by the grandfather of ultra-endurance mountain bike racing, John Stamstad. One of those racers was Matt Lee, who would eventually fracture away from the Great Divide Race and start the Tour Divide in 2008. Another inaugural Great Divide Race participant was Pete Basinger, a young cyclist from Alaska who didn’t have much more than the Iditarod Trail on his race resume. Pete and Mike battled for the lead the entire distance, before Mike finally snatched it away from Pete in the far southern miles of New Mexico, finishing a heartbreaking twenty minutes ahead of Pete at the end of a sixteen-day race. Mike held the border-to-border Great Divide Mountain Bike Route record until 2007, when Jay Petervary surpassed it by finishing in fifteen days and change. John Nobile took it from Jay in 2008.