June 9th—from baking in the desert to soaking in the mountains
As you could tell from Sarah’s post, I have the best wife ever. She prepared an amazing amount of food for me, washed my clothes, fully re-supplied me with everything I’ll need for the next stretch, AND brought my biking buddy out. It was SO good to see her, and gave me a huge morale boost. I love that woman.
Sarah cooked a big breakfast for us in the morning and Eric and I set out around 8:45 or so. The plan for the next few days is to try and average 75-80 per day to make it to Salida on the 13th, where Sarah and an Airbnb (and my first zero day… trail speak for a day off the bike and zero miles) will be waiting.
We made it about 82 miles yesterday (the 9th) with just under 6k feet of climbing. It was a drastic scenery change from what I’ve experienced in the desert so far—high alpine environment with water and creeks everywhere. It was a VERY welcomed change, and it’s amazing how much better everything is when it’s 20 degrees cooler.
We cruised along at a pretty good clip yesterday, and made it up to around 10,500 feet when it started thundering. We decided to risk not putting on the rain gear, and ended up getting poured/hailed on for a bit and were absolutely soaked. It was actually quite pleasant, until we started heading downhill—then the rain suits and puffy jackets came out quickly. It’s so wild to go from baking in the sun at 5000 feet one day to shivering in the rain at 10000 feet the next. Gotta love the Divide.
We passed a Swiss gal named Sonia who’d originally been riding with Brent, my 70-year old Canadian friend from a few days ago, and also bumped into two cyclists heading south on the trail. They raced the Tour Divide last year and made it to the New Mexico line, so were out finishing their ride.
We’d hoped to make it to Bode’s (a classic gem of a gas station/restaurant) in Abiquiu around lunch, but the descent off of Polvadera Mesa turned out to be significantly rougher than we anticipated, and took us 3 hours instead of 1. Still a fun ride, just much more of a technical mountain bike descent than cruising down a well maintained gravel road.
We pulled into Bode’s yesterday right around 4, literally minutes before it started absolutely pouring rain again. We had a big dinner of chicken nuggets, Fritos, green chile cheeseburgers and key lime pie, and once the rain died down a bit we donned our rain gear (full Sitka for me) and rode towards El Rito.
We pushed into the national forest just past el rito, and made camp on the side of the road at the first flat spot we could find. Not the most picturesque spot, but we were spent and it did the trick.
It’s drizzling as I write this from the tent this morning with more rain in the forecast, so it should make for an interesting couple of days.
Thankfully, we have another round of cheeseburgers and nuggets from Bode’s in our packs for lunch today!