I’ve been in Wyoming for a couple of days now, which isn’t helping matters. It’s the kind of place where you can see the road stretching out in front of you for miles, which is spectacular in a different way to the other places I’ve been, though not bad in itself. As you can imagine though, it’s a landscape where the wind just blows straight across the plains. Thankfully it seems to have dropped a little for tomorrow, but for the last three days I’ve been riding either into or across winds between about 20 and 50mph. To give you an idea, on not particularly hilly terrain with no wind, I probably average about 17mph. The last 20 miles yesterday was on exactly that kind of terrain, but straight into the wind, and I averaged about 7mph.
Anyway, I’m going to try and speed through about three weeks in one entry here, because I’ve slipped about four weeks behind. Ooops.
Descending makes climbing entirely worthwhile. I think my favourite descent of the whole trip was down into Durango. Ten miles downhill through a sweeping canyon. Straight into a huge cloud of flies that were buzzing around the traffic lights at the bottom where you turn into town. Never did find out what had died, but I did get lots of sympathetic looks from the people in cars as they rolled up their windows. The downside was that I had to go back up the exact same hill to get out of town again three days later.
The reason I was turning back on myself was to visit Mesa Verde National Park. Whereas most National Parks were created to celebrate great natural landmarks, Mesa Verde is dedicated to human achievements. About 800 years ago the “Ancient” Puebloans (I’m not sure something 800 years old is ancient, but there you go), began building their dwellings on natural shelves formed part way down cliffs. Often the only way to get to and from them was to just climb straight up and down to the cliff top or valley floor. The ruins themselves were interesting enough, but certainly didn’t want comparison to the Mayan ruins in Central America or the great temples of Ancient Egypt. What made it worth the visit was the setting.
I very nearly didn’t get there at all. One of the people I met in Colorado told me they pretty much have three seasons. Winter, spring and road works. When I turned off the main road to head into the park there was a sign saying that the road into the park was being resurfaced and that it wasn’t suitable for bikes. I had a chat with the ranger at the gate and we figured it would probably be ok. The advantage of having a touring bike like mine, as opposed to a full road bike, is that the slightly chunkier tyres can cope with a bit of gravel and bumpy surfaces. Getting into the park involved about a 15 mile ride and a couple of thousand feet of climbing. The lower surface was gravel, whilst from about 4 miles onwards they’d just ripped the top surface off the road leaving just a ridged underlayer. On the way back down, I honestly thought my arms were going to fall off the bike was bouncing around that much.
From there I rode up into the mountains proper for the first time where I met Jeff, a college professor, and Kevin, one of his students who were riding coast to coast over their summer break. We all ended up staying at newly opened hotel in a little town called Rico, which was basically a big old house that where each bedroom was let separately. It even had a little kitchen we could use. Sort of a cross between a hotel and a hostel. The lovely lady who owned it let the others stay for free in return for creating a facebook page for the hotel.
The next morning I climbed up over 10,000ft to go over my first proper mountain pass. I’m not quite sure how to describe it the feeling when I got to the top. I’d done most of the climbing the previous day and probably only left myself with about 10 miles and about 1,500ft to climb, but it was still a slog up through a long, narrow valley with endless banks of evergreens lining the sides. Then, all of a sudden, the landscape just opened up and I was on the edge of a grassy plateau ringed by jagged snow capped peaks. The sweat (and very nearly tears, but they were avoided by venting out loud and quite a bit of swearing) was absolutely worth it.
Aside from the scenery and sense of satisfaction, by far the biggest reward from climbing is that you have to come down the other side. That day was actually my second longest of the trip so far, as I topped 100 miles. I stopped for lunch part way down in a little town called Telluride, which in the winter is a very popular ski resort. It’s in what’s called a box canyon, which basically means that you can only get in at one end. It’s your archetypal tourist honey pot. Beautiful with lots to do and correspondingly expensive.
Because the town itself is in a canyon, it’s expansion is limited, so they’ve built a big ski resort up in the mountains above the town to house the many visitors in winter (and quite a few in summer by the looks of things). The two areas are connected by means of a cable car, with the actual ski area in the middle, and I got the cable car up with my bike, so that I could ride see the resort and ride down the hill again. Man, did I regret it. The resort itself looked like someone had taken seen a picture of a little Swiss alpine town and turned it into a pavilion at EPCOT (anyone who’s been there will know the kind of thing I mean), then taken a photo of that and expanded it into a full resort. On top of that the whole place was just a maze and it took me half an hour of riding up and down fake landscaped hills to find my way back to the main road. At least I got to do the 1,000ft descent back down to the valley bottom again.
From there it was mostly downhill and once I dropped back below about 7,000ft the terrain just shifted back from alpine forest to high desert.
As my odometer ticked over to 100miles for the day I arrived in Montrose, which has a population of about 12,000 making it the biggest town for 100s of miles. Enjoying a return to civilisation, I decided to take a day off. It also gave me a chance to go to the cinema and watch Toy Story 3 (awesome!).
About my only big disappointment of the trip was that getting a train from California to Eastern Utah meant I missed the Grand Canyon and Canyonlands National Parks. Because of this, I put slogged my way up an incredibly steep 10mile climb to the somewhat long-windedly named Black Canyon of the Gunnison National Park. I’m so glad I did. I was just sweeping down a hill into the park expecting the canyon to be a bit further on when all of a sudden it was right there in my face. Queue me shouting out loud. Much to the amusement of the girl stood at the side of the road surveying visitors. The photos I’ve got really don’t do justice to the steepness and depth of the thing.
That night I ended up stuck in a motel that was rather more expensive than I’d have liked, because I happened to arrive in Gunnison (the town, rather than the National Park) at about 8pm on the day that the cycling Tour of Colorado also finished there. The only room left was in a motel just outside of town and they knew it, so were price gouging. I managed to negotiate them down, but at least it gave me somewhere nice to watch England getting thrashed by Germany the following morning!
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