Wind, Wyoming & Lots of National Parks

With my body in a rather worse state than when I’d arrived and feeling very much in need of more sleep, I begrudgingly left Boulder to ride back up into the Rocky Mountains. Estes Park is known as the “gateway” to Rocky Mountain National Park, which, being right by the gate, I guess it is. Very much a tourist town it was a shortish ride, but substantial climb. Maybe it was an omen for how the next few weeks were going to go, but within about 20 miles I was dealing with my second puncture of the trip. Instead of the parking lot of a fast food restaurant, as the first had been, this time I was fixing it in the baking sun on the side of a twisty mountain road.

I’d actually planned to ride much further that day to make up for leaving Boulder a day late, but, by the time I fell into Estes midafternoon, it was pretty clear I wasn’t going any further that day. Maybe it had something to do with the hangover.

I was hoping to ride up into the Park the next morning, but as soon as I stuck my head outside it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. Some pretty imposing dark clouds had taken up station barely above the sides of the valley I was in and completely obscured the huge peaks of the National Park. I popped down to the local bike shop for a new spare inner tube and some advice from the locals, which was basically to go back to bed and forget about riding anywhere. I think I ended up ordering takeaway pizza, because from 11am it just lashed it down for hours.

The next morning things looked a good deal better, but I arrived at the park entrance to be told that the road through was closed for the foreseeable future, whilst they cleared the snow and ice that had been left over from the previous day’s storms and the corresponding low overnight temperatures. Panicked at the thought of losing another day (not sure why now), I was just plotting alternative routes, trying to get mobile phone reception to call the friends I’d been staying with over the weekend and talking to Rangers about what conditions would be like if they managed to open the road. I was just about to ride back into town to make a phone call, when one of the Rangers I’d been talking to stuck his head round the door to say “oh actually, the road’s open now. It’ll all be fine.” So off I went.

(Random aside, because the conductor on the train I’m on just created the word “detraining” to mean getting off the train)

The climb into the national park took me to the highest point of the whole trip, at over 12,000ft. Once I got above 11,000ft, I was up in the clouds and visibility started to deteriorate.

In the end it just became unsafe to ride. Visibility dropped to about 20 yards and, although I did have lights, cars were coming up behind me with a speed difference of 15-20mph, which didn’t leave them a lot of reaction time. There was no sign of the fog lifting, so I decided to start hitching. Amazingly some cars still didn’t have their lights on and they really were completely invisible until they were almost upon me. One very nice family did stop, but their estate car was already crammed with two parents, three kids and all their luggage. They offered to try and slide my bike across the top of it all, which would have left one end hanging over the kids heads, but it was dangerous to try and do it where we were. I turned round and rode back down to the previous lay-by, where I got a lift in seconds from a retired couple.

I stayed with them to the summit through snowstorms, lightening and roadwork, before parting company for the ride down. Even with three layers and gloves on, I had to stop every couple of miles to warm my hands up before they froze to the brake levers. There was a lot of water on the road as well and I really missed the mudguards on my old bike.

To try and get back on track, I made the following day the longest of the trip at 110 miles. It felt so nice not to have mountains to climb that riding was easy and I left Colorado for Wyoming. This also took me back onto a route followed by cyclists riding coast to coast, and camping that night I met a couple of very nice Dutch ladies who I would see a number of times over the next few days.

We joked about the fact that there seemed to have been an inch wide crack across the road shoulder every 10 yards for the previous 30 miles, each of which had a similar affect to a small speed bump. Little did we know, riding conditions were about to get a lot tougher. The next day was a 60 mile ride across the rolling Wyoming plains, which were pretty exposed to the 30+mph wind blowing in from the west (gust up to 50mph I was told!). The last 20 miles of the day, my route turned due west, straight into the teeth of the wind, and I think it ended up taking me about 3 hours when just over 1 would have been more normal given the road. When I caught up with them again a couple of days later, I heard that the Dutch ladies had been blown off the road a couple of times by the cross winds earlier in the day and hadn't even tried to ride into it. They just got a lift. Wish I’d done the same to be honest. At least with hills you know that there must a corresponding descent somewhere along the line. The wind just saps your energy with nothing in return. I had a day off the next day to watch the world cup final, because there simply wasn’t anywhere but my hotel room that I thought I’d be able to guarantee finding it.

Certainly not in my next point of call, Jeffrey City. This is another one of those places that is a city by name, whilst failing to meet pretty much any other reasonable definition. I was told there was a campsite there and a motel, as well as a bar that was run by a lady who didn’t like cyclists very much. On arriving I decided that was probably charitable. The motel did exist, but it looked like none of the rooms had been rented out in some time. There was a note on the door of the office to say that, if you wanted a room, you needed to go see so-and-so at the liquor store, which was also looked like it hadn't been open in some time. The campsite, then, was just a patch of ground next to a little shack with some benches in. In truth, it would have been perfectly fine, were it not for the fact that Jeffrey City is quite near a river and has quite a sizeable problem with mosquitoes. If you were outside, as soon as you stopped moving, they descended on you.

That left the bar. And when I say left the bar, I mean it. It was the only business in town that appeared to be operating. What I’d been told about it on the other hand, was complete junk. The lady who ran the place was absolutely lovely and looked after me very well. I stayed and chatted to her and the other people who came in all evening (one even drove home and back to get me a can of bug spray). From them I got the other side of what I’d heard about the place from cyclists. Here was a story about a bunch of tourists coming through, complaining about the lack of facilities in the town (as though it is the fault of the people in the bar), complaining about the lack of food choice and that they didn’t have the TV on ESPN. Treating the locals like dirt, because they couldn’t understand why anyone would want to live in a town like that. To said locals, the bar was like a little community centre. It was about the only place in town with wifi. Several people left their laptops there and they’d get together to play games online. When groups of outsiders turn up and just start whinging, I guess it is pretty understandable that they don’t get a great reception.

Three more days riding (still into the wind, still miserable) took me up to the Togwotee Pass across the Continental Divide again and down towards the Tetons. I’d been told tales of these imposing mountains, which appear to just rise straight up out of the ground, all jagged edges and spiky peaks, but I’d kind of written them off as “just another chain of mountains.” Of which I’d seen plenty. Wow was I wrong!

I stayed there for a night on a cute little campsite before riding up into Yellowstone National Park the following day. Where the Tetons far exceeded my expectations, Yellowstone was a bit more of a meh. Don’t get me wrong, sheer range and unusualness of the geological features make it impressive, but I guess when it comes to this kind thing I like being smacked in the face by the scale of it. Yellowstone was more of a “we’ve got this, and this, and this, and this, and this...,” but unfortunately the place is huge and I didn’t have time to see it all.

Still I thought you’d all appreciate a video I took of Old Faithful erupting. It's difficult to gauge scale, but all that is going on about 150 metres away.