by Jill Homer
Then, in what felt like seconds later, I heard noises again. This time, I was much more alert. My head was no longer swimming. I could actually hear specific details in the muffled sounds, such as zippers zipping and water pouring. I opened my bivy sack and sat up. The sky was still thickly dark, and spattered in stars. Frigid air swirled around my skin, causing me to involuntarily gasp. A light-blue layer of frost shimmered on the picnic table beneath a bright moon; the temperature was either at freezing or only barely above. I turned around to see the same dark figure I had seen in my earlier dream, still packing up a bicycle. I pushed my watch, which worked that time. It was 5:30 a.m.
I lay back down and pulled the warm covers around me. “That’s definitely Pete,” I thought. “And he’s leaving now. I should get up, at least go say hi. If I pack up quickly, maybe I could even ride with him for a while.”
The voice of rationality laughed at me. “You couldn’t keep up with him for a half mile. It’s way before your awake time and anyway, it’s freezing. You don’t want to get up.”
The voice was right. I didn’t want to get up. And yet, saying hello to Pete was pretty much everything I had wanted the entire day before. But something held me in stillness on the ground. Maybe it was the cold, or the early hour, or just simple embarrassment about walking up to him with my scarecrow hair and two-day stink and saying something as monumentally inconsequential as “hi.” Pete was going on to do great things and the last thing I needed to do was get in his way. I closed my eyes and listened as his bicycle coasted by, with a whir of wind and rattle of bike parts that faded quickly into the cold night, and then it was gone
Chapter Nineteen
Stunner Pass
I woke up to a re-energizing wash of sunlight, but it was too late. I was alone again.
“Would it really have been so bad to get up at 5:30?” I grumbled as I stuffed chocolate-covered espresso beans in my mouth. “I kept the pace with the home-building bikers yesterday; I certainly could have kept up with Pete for an hour or so today.”
I sighed. The morning pierced my senses with crisp beauty and I longed to share it with somebody. Pete’s company during the ride down the mountain would have been a welcome break from the solitude. Why did I have to be so lazy and slow?
I started down the canyon, which in daylight revealed itself as a place fully entrenched in the Southwestern desert. Smooth, sienna-hued cliffs carved a boxy corridor, and the pink sand was dotted with rabbit brush and yucca plants. The canyon opened into a wide plateau. The route followed a narrow jeep trail that had been dramatically rippled by erosion. I giggled as my bike plummeted into a deep trench and shot back out the other side, sometimes grabbing a few inches of exhilarating air before plunging into the next trench. Where the road wasn’t laced in a roller coaster of dirt mounds, it was piled with boulders. But I wasn’t about to halt a millimeter of momentum, so instead of finessing my bicycle around the rocks, I bounced directly over them at top speed. It was a reckless way to ride, given my mounting fatigue and loaded bike with all of its awkward extra weight. Only sheer luck kept me from crashing, but I never toppled over. I crossed the narrow headwaters of the Rio Grande and rolled into Del Norte with a huge smile on my face.
It was only 9 a.m. and I wasn’t hungry or tired. I felt too good to stop. But remembering the five-dollar bill the bicycle tourist in Poncha Springs had asked me to deliver, I pulled out my maps and looked up the address for Gary and Patti Blakley.
The Blakleys were regular fixtures on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route, listed on the maps as people willing to providing food and shelter to bicycle tourists. They also were Tour Divide fans, and had a reputation for meticulously tracking racers’ progress and catering to all of their needs. Patti found me before I had even arrived at the house and waved me down. I hopped off my bike and followed her down the street. She called in her husband, Gary, to let him know I had arrived in Del Norte. She handed me a giant cup of sweet tea and heated up homemade pizza and peach pie. Gary, a thin man with short, silver hair, paused on the other side of the sliding glass door and took a long look at my bike.
“Interesting set-up you have there,” he said as he walked in the door and settled down at the kitchen table. “Frame looks pretty solid, and seems everyone has those frame bags these days. But what’s up with the flat pedals?”
“Well,” I said, hesitating before I launched into my long frostbite story. “Those are actually my favorite parts on the entire bike.” Then I told him why. My toes had bothered me continuously during my summer training, I said, but as soon as I dumped the clipless pretension, the toe pain faded as well. I hadn’t had a single foot problem on the Divide.
“I like that you do what you gotta do,” he said. “That’s one of only a few bikes of any serious Divide racer that I’ve seen without clipless pedals. But good, solid set-up. A good way to go a long way on a budget.”
I handed Gary the five-dollar bill and told him it was from the tourist I had met 150 miles back. Gary flipped open his laptop computer to recite the latest race standings. Matt Lee was going to probably win the race later that day, he told me. Cricket had just called in from Hartsel to drop out of the race. Deanna hadn’t been heard from in days, and was still back in Wyoming. There was a good chance I was the only woman left riding in the Tour Divide. I told Gary about Pete and asked if he had seen him. Gary shook his head.
“Matt told me Pete was doing an ITT this year,” Gary said. “Pete dropped in to visit us in past years, but maybe he’s behind schedule this year.”
“I don’t think he’s behind schedule,” I said. “I don’t know the time he’s making exactly but Mike told me he was flying, and he’s probably planning to ramp it up in New Mexico. Pete’s just a man on a mission, that‘s all.”
By the time I ate heaping portions of pizza and pie, drank a third glass of tea, finished my grocery shopping, and made a few calls, 9 a.m. turned to 11:30 a.m. I announced I really needed to hit the road, and Patti offered to ride with me the first few miles out of town.
“Where are you headed tonight?” Patti asked.
“I was hoping to get beyond Platoro,” I said. “But now I’m not sure. This next pass is monstrous, nearly 12,000 feet. It’s probably going to take me most of the day to do it.”
“We’re about 7,800 feet here,” Patti said. “Yeah, it’s a healthy climb. It’s not gradual like those railroad-grade passes before here, either. Indiana Pass is steep and the surface is pretty loose. And it’s so late in the day now. You’re likely to hit storms up high. Hard to say right now. The weather looks good, but you can see the thunderheads building over those mountains. Indiana Pass is right on the Divide. It’s hard to escape the rain up there.”
“I know all about the rain,” I said. “I haven’t been able to escape it at all, really, this entire trip. I’ve been rained on nearly every single day.”
“Well, I’d be careful if it hits up high,” Patti said. “You probably shouldn’t plan on going beyond Platoro tonight. There’s not much beyond there.”
“I’ll see how it goes,” I said. “If it’s raining, I’ll definitely stay in Platoro.”
Patti turned around near the dead end of the paved road, and I joined the steep, loose gravel to begin the daunting task of gaining 4,000 feet in twenty-five miles, followed by twenty-five more miles of rolling terrain that didn’t lose much elevation overall. A cursory glance at my maps warned me that as many as 7,000 feet of climbing waited on the grind into Platoro. But I had done at least that much the day before without daytime fatigue, so I felt confident that section of the route wouldn’t be so bad.
As Patti promised, the road took the direct route up the mountain, cutting up fifteen-percent grades on gravel so loose that my rear wheel often just slipped and stopped. I hopped off the bike, walked to a less steep section, and rode until the wheel slipped out again. Keeping my butt planted in the saddle added traction to the wheel, but too much climbing in the saddle made my Achilles tendons scream
. It was a brand new source of pain.
Before my GPS even registered 11,000 feet, my energy level had plummeted. My back ached and my legs pumped acid. The sensation was very similar to the discomfort I had felt in the Great Divide Basin but hadn’t really noticed since. I couldn’t pedal hard without aggravating my heels, so I spun low-gear circles until my rear tire lost traction. I wavered and wheezed. I could almost feel my fuel gauge hovering over “E” as my eyes blinked heavily and the sleep monster sang lullabies in the early afternoon. I forced Sour Patch Kids down my throat, but they did nothing. This wasn’t a fuel problem; it was a power problem. I had a full tank and a failing engine.
I rolled over the 11,957-foot summit in a daze. Despite promises from both my maps and GPS that I was at the top, Indiana Pass hardly registered as a summit. It snaked along a talus-coated saddle, dropping ever so slightly into a small bowl before climbing to a new saddle nearly as high. I had become accustomed to sweeping views of valleys on the other side of large passes, but Indiana Pass was simply a doorway into a massive, tightly clustered mountain range. This high point on the Great Divide Mountain Bike Route was merely the base of 13,000- and 14,000-foot giants.
I continued along the rolling pass, feeling a little more energetic as the climbing became less sustained. I dropped and climbed a series of steep drainages, battling up another big pitch toward a place called Summitville. The ghost town, once the highest incorporated community in the state of Colorado, was now nothing more than an abandoned Superfund site. The toxic remnants of the old mine manifested in gravel-buried tailings ponds and scarred yellow hillsides — not the kind of place that entices a person to linger. Farther up the mountain, I passed the collapsed and wind-ravaged buildings of the old town site. One sun-bleached log cabin had been snapped clean in two. Rotten lumber and bricks were strewn across the talus, and most of the homes lay in twisted heaps, as though they had been demolished by a tornado rather than the slow decay of time. The only intact building was a large, two-story wooden structure high on the hillside. It loomed over the rest of the town, cast in an ominous shadow. Behind it, a massive thunderhead rose from the barren horizon. The cloud was just one shade lighter than black, so opaque that it plunged the ghost town into an eerie twilight. The cloud surged over the Continental Divide, quickly consuming the sky.
As fast as the storm arrived, streaks of lightning began to rip through the inky darkness. A few distant booms set off a cacophony of thunder and electricity, so frequent and intense that nearby rocks rattled. I took large gulps of panic. I was well above timberline, and the collapsed buildings around me hardly counted as places to seek shelter from an electric storm. Even the intact building on the hill looked like it could come down at any moment, and was not easily accessible. I was at nearly 12,000 feet, the tallest thing on a broad talus heap with nowhere to hide.
In front of me, far beyond the massive storm, I saw a thin strip of blue sky. I rode toward it, knowing my only real option was to go farther down the road and pray that I dropped off the summit soon. The storm enveloped me in fog, until I could see little more than the dark pebbles under my wheels, and vague flashes of light tearing through the gray curtain. But I could hear the storm with clattering clarity, and metallic thunder drove me into a frenzy. Out of seemingly nothing I found an explosion of power, fueled by adrenaline and blind purpose.
The clouds began to lift but the road continued climbing. Lightning blasted all around me and I wondered out loud how this road could still possibly be below 12,000 feet. The maps must have been wrong, I thought. The road seemed like it was going to keep gaining elevation until I was the only thing left for the lightning to hit. Light sprinkles started to fall from the sky, quickly growing to large droplets and then to hard sheets of rain. The precipitation became so thick and cold I was convinced it was sleet. After fifteen minutes of terror, I finally began dropping with downpour, down from the talus and into the relative safety of tree cover. The lightning fell back but the rain followed, dredging up an uncomfortable chill that even panic couldn’t mask.
I was drenched to the core by the time I finally stopped to put on my rain gear. It didn’t seem to matter. The hard falling rain was going to saturate my clothing no matter what I did. But at least the rain layer would help block the brutal wind-chill of the descent. I put on every piece of clothing I had with me save for one dry base layer. Stopping to deal with my clothes left me so chilled that I was shivering violently by the time I remounted by bicycle.
The road continued to plummet downhill, the rain continued to fall hard, and the chill deepened. Even with all of my clothing on, my body produced only a candle flicker of heat. I occasionally jumped off my bike to try to run with it, just to work up some spark of warmth, but my adrenaline rush had long since flared out and I hardly had the energy to even stagger down the road. I drifted into the early throes of hypothermia. My lips, fingers, and toes went numb. My vision blurred and sometimes doubled. I shivered so uncontrollably that I sometimes jerked my bike randomly in awkward directions, or clumsily wended into turns so wide I almost shot clean off the road. Since I only had a down sleeping bag and bivy sack as immediate shelter, I felt a growing concern for my safety. I’d had mild hypothermia enough times before to know that it’s self-perpetuating. If I kept doing what I was doing, it only stood to get worse until my body ceased to function. I tried to comfort myself with promises that Platoro couldn’t be far, it couldn’t be far now.
But even the bottom of the descent never seemed to come. I had been trembling on top of my bike for what felt like an agonizing eternity when I passed a police car. The car’s presence confused me. The traffic I had seen since Del Norte amounted to two trucks and a handful of ATVs. It had been the least populated pass I had crossed in Colorado. A few feet down from the patrol car, a police officer stood outside in the rain, talking to two people draped in brown ponchos. “Great,” I thought. “This must mean I’m close to town.”
“Hey!” the police officer yelled as I rode past. “Are you alone?”
“I’m alone!” I yelled back. “There’s no one else behind me.”
A few minutes later, I caught up to two ambulances, inching their way down the rough road. With half-frozen fingers I could not feel, I squeeze on the brakes until I slowed to their speed, five miles per hour. “Must have been an ATV accident,” I thought. I rode my brakes behind the ambulances as they negotiated the narrow and rutted road at a pace that could only be described as painful. The awkwardly large vehicles filled up both sides of the narrow road; the thin strips of gravel on both sides didn’t provide much room to pass, and it didn’t seem ethical to try. The worst thing I could do was hit a blind rut and slam into an ambulance, thereby adding to the emergency they were obviously already dealing with.
So I waited. And coasted. And shivered. My frustration boiled up but did nothing to keep me warm. “Can’t they tell I’m in my own emergency back here?” I grumbled beneath clenched teeth. “God, I’m going to pass out from hypothermia behind an ambulance.”
Finally, the road dipped into a clearing. It forked and the ambulances turned left. I could see from my maps that I needed to turn right, and my heart sang. I was free! The vehicles slowed to a stop and I veered past them, finally pedaling again toward the last small pass of the day when a voice called out, “Hey! Are you with this biker?”
I turned around and walked my bike toward the first ambulance driver’s open window. “Wait,” I said with an air of alarm, “There’s a biker in this ambulance?”
The driver nodded slowly.
“You mean like a cyclist?”
The driver nodded again.
“Who is it?”
He shook his head. “Sorry. I can’t tell you.”
My shivering immediately ceased, as though gripped by cold hands of dread. All of the blood drained out of my head and I felt a thick lump of bile gurgle up from my stomach. “Is it Pete Basinger?” I said in almost a whisper.
The driver just nodded
again.
A chilled shock of fear shot through my newly empty veins. “Oh, oh no, no,” I squeaked. “Is he okay?”
“He’s responsive,” the driver said. “He’s talking to us.”
“What happened?”
“He was hit by a truck pulling a horse trailer. Head-on.”
“A head-on collision?” I stammered. “With a truck? How fast? Is he going to be okay? Do you know what’s wrong?”
The ambulance driver shook his head. “We have him stabilized and we’re trying to call in to see if we can land a helicopter in here.”
“Where are you taking him?” I said. “Can you tell me where you’re taking him?”
“Not sure,” the driver said. He leaned over to a man who had stepped out of the second vehicle and mumbled a few things I didn’t hear. Then he turned back to me. “Do you want to talk to him?”
“Um, I probably should just let you guys go,” I said.
“We’re not in a hurry right now,” the driver said. “Either way we have to wait to see whether we can get him out of here.”
The second man directed me toward his ambulance. I passed the trailer being towed by the first ambulance. In the back, wedged behind a four-wheeler, was the twisted wreckage of a red bicycle, pummeled and gouged with sickening violence. Inside the ambulance, two EMTs sitting next to a stretcher smiled weakly as I opened the door. Pete lay on the stretcher, his entire body covered by a sheet and his head mounted inside an elaborate metal cage that prevented him from moving. His long eyelashes pointed directly at the ceiling; his eyes were fixed and dark. He had several small cuts on his face. Beyond that, there were no signs of injury, but based on the complete covering of his body, the use of that head contraption and the singular severity of a head-on-collision with a truck, I knew his injuries must be serious, possibly grave. I took off my hat and held it like a wet rag, wincing as the icy water trickled down my wrists. The shivering that had momentarily stopped as I talked to the driver came back with powerful force, and it was everything I could do to suppress the urge to rattle like a paint can. I took several deep breaths. “Hey Pete,” I said, startled by the shakiness in my own voice.