Two Wheels on my Wagon (9 page)

Sensing the effort that was to come, Rick decided to stop for a breather. Just as he did so, Cadet arrived, now reunited with his sunglasses. He had clearly been cycling well and was full of Texan good humour, providing a timely fillip in the midday sun. We had now descended to only a little over 4,000 feet, lower than the start in Banff, and the temperature reflected this.

‘I just knew I had to git rid of some stuff, and since I did I been a-cruisin',' he enthused from under the brim of his sun hat, scarcely seeming to have broken sweat.

I explained that weather like this in Yorkshire occurred only once every ten years at most.

‘This ain't hot,' he smiled. ‘This is just a little appetiser for real desert heat.'

His promise that I would enjoy New Mexico's dry heat rang a little hollow.

The road up Cabin Pass began under dense tree cover and in considerable humidity. Chewy sweets from my back pocket and sweat from my brow offered a reprisal of last night's sweet'n'sour. Gradually, the tree cover reduced and the spectacular, snow-rimmed crest of Inverted Ridge mountain came into sight on the left. The purity of the air intensified the sun's rays. Near the top I realised I could see a mirage – a cyclist riding and then walking ahead of me. In fact, it wasn't a mirage, it was Deanna. She had clearly survived her night alone in the wild.

As I panted my way up to her it became apparent that, while I had discarded all but the clothing strictly necessary to maintain my decency (even in the wilds one must have standards), Deanna was wearing considerably more: waterproof overtrousers and a windproof smock, with several more layers hidden underneath.

‘Aren't you hot?' I spluttered.

‘I'm just fine,' she smiled serenely. ‘It's only 92 degrees on my bicycle computer.'

I felt strangely reassured – at least I wasn't making it up. The gradient eased and we exchanged photo-taking opportunities.

‘Do you mind if I ask why you're riding that bike?'

‘Everyone asks, it's not a problem. I just like it. It's awesome. It's so simple, and I can get a really good rhythm on the flat on it. It stops me from going too fast, which is great for endurance rides.'

‘But what about the hills?

‘I just get to 4 mph and then stop. I can push the bike almost as quickly as that anyway.'

And about as quickly as you can ride with all your fancy gears, she might have added after our experience the previous morning on Elk Pass.

‘But you can't even freewheel downhill,' I persisted.

‘No, and I broke off my front brake before the start in Banff so I only have the back brake. I get to do some awesome skids.'

In spite of this chastening exchange, I was beginning to feel confident that the day would end successfully. The only remaining concern was the heat. We had begun to descend the other side of the pass, a descent in which I came to resemble even further a lobster in a pot as the cooking water surrounding it came slowly to the boil. When it became clear that the turn up the Wigwam valley would lead to another upstream slog, without the beneficial cooling effects of a significant gain in altitude, I decided to take action.

After the success thus far of having asked the fates to let me see one bear – at a safe distance – and no more, I ventured to make another Faustian pact. This time, I decided to ask for some cooling rain. The fluffy clouds ahead looked promising, if I could make it there before heat exhaustion set in. I should have known better.

I was on my own again. The smothering humidity continued to build, and my yearning for refreshment from the heavens grew. Yet it was quite clear that I had become like a moth drawn to a flame. No sooner had I made my compact with the devil than the clouds ahead had transformed seamlessly from visions of cuddliness into bastions of battleship grey. Worse, they had now adopted the terrifyingly familiar shape of an anvil, on which it was obvious Thor was about to beat out his particular form of devastation. The only question was when. Far away, on the other side of the valley, I saw a teepee; then I realised that in this valley, of all places, it must have been a genuine wigwam.

An hour later and the full folly of my deal was brought home to me. Even though I had been expecting it, the first thunderclap caught me by surprise. The lightning must have been lost in the clouds above, which was a sort of reassurance. I wobbled precariously in the aftermath of the blow. It would have looked comical had there been anyone to see me. At the same moment, the rain began to hammer down as heavy and as stinging as hail. Exposed muscles were instantly tetanised. It was already too late to cover up.

As a distraction, after the next lightning flash I counted the seconds like an excited schoolboy. In fact, I counted them like an over-excited schoolboy. After reaching a count of five, I consoled myself with the announcement, to nobody in particular, that things were OK – the storm was 5 miles away. Then it dawned on me that five seconds should actually represent one mile. One mile seemed a little close for comfort.

The storm intensified. Lightning and thunder began to follow in such quick succession that associating the two became impossible. My debate about its proximity had been resolved unfavourably. I was uncertain what to do. Conventional wisdom at home said don't stand under trees, of which there were plenty, even if the temptation was great. Yet being out in the open, riding across the gashes made by areas of clearcut, seemed counter-intuitive. The reality was that I was deluding myself into thinking I had a choice.

Eventually, the rain eased and the thunderous soundtrack grew more distant. I stopped to warm up – oh, irony – and realised I was at the beginning of the ‘connector' section between forest roads. The only information it had been possible to glean about this much-vaunted connector before the race came in the form of an entry on the Tour Divide website by Bill and Kathy Love, who had pioneered the route:

‘The connector was very nice – pretty easy-to-follow blazed trail along the river bottom with a quick grunt at the end. We saw a moose calf nursing from its mom along the river.'

‘Nice' did not seem a particularly apposite description. A solitary piece of blue tape and a tree branch laid across the main track marked the point at which it was now necessary to disappear into the undergrowth, an undergrowth made freshly sodden and even more foreboding than usual by the recent downpour. The track was indeed visible, and occasionally rideable – between the recently created areas of bog – but ‘nice' implied a pleasantness which, in my slightly frazzled state of mind, I could not discern.

Pushing through the puddles and shivering through my bear whistle, I noticed only slowly how the ‘trail' was being squeezed between the river and its imposing embankment. This, it turned out, was the ‘quick grunt' at the end. It looked neither quick, nor a mere grunt. Instead, after the passage of nearly 40 pairs of feet and bikes as well as the recent downpour, ahead lay a loose, shale rake that climbed steeply up a precipitous slope. The occasional twisted tree trunk and associated glistening roots added an extra frisson to the task ahead.

With little enthusiasm for retracing my steps, and unsure that I could even if I wanted to, I started to climb; slither and slip might have been a better description if it were possible to do so uphill. Initially I pushed the bike, although it soon became necessary to take advantage of the leverage afforded by hanging on to surrounding trees and haul it after me. Climbing over the bike on such a precipice was a delicate manoeuvre. I drew some succour from the fact it was unlikely that a fall would result in a direct plunge into the river below. Becoming impaled on a tree branch on the journey down was a much more likely fate.

After ten minutes of such ‘grunting' I emerged into what for all the world appeared to be a large car park. This was the terminus of the day's final forest service road. I sat down to regain my composure, then remembered that the others were still to come. It was 6 p.m. and I was keen for the day to come to an end, but my long-suppressed conscience finally decided now was the time to make its annual appearance. I remembered the enormous weight of Rick's bike and belongings; I remembered that Deanna had still been wearing espadrilles, which I couldn't imagine offered the best traction on the ground I had just covered. Fuelled by a disproportionate sense of noble endeavour, I armed myself with a stick with which to beat off an army of grizzlies, laid down the bike and retraced my steps.

Within half an hour this unlikely good Samaritan act had run its course and my more natural desire for self-preservation had kicked in. I invented a plethora of perfectly good reasons for not waiting any longer: they were all together and would, collectively, be able to cope with what I had now decided was a simple muddy bank; even better, they had all had the eminently sensible idea of abandoning the whole endeavour and found another route to civilisation; more bleakly, they had already been eaten by bears and there was no point in my adding to their number. In reality I was cold and hungry and wanted to go home; even somebody else's home would have done. I returned to the car park and gloomily contemplated the track ahead.

The trail began to climb. At first this was tolerable as it generated some heat and the mileage already accumulated on my computer made it clear the end was in sight. Assuming whatever ascent I now faced would be mirrored by a descent, I could expect little more than a couple of miles of uphill. I would be in the US in less than an hour.

An hour and half later, after fighting my way over two vast piles of avalanche debris – stones, mud, snow and trees – I was still climbing into the wilderness. I laboriously pursued a large male elk up the track ahead of me. In other circumstances this dogged invasion of his personal space might have seemed reckless, but I was in such miserable spirits it could have been a bear or a pack of wolves and I wouldn't have desisted. After the mileage at which I had expected to reach the border had passed, I resorted to profanities.

Just as I had exhausted my not inconsiderable repertoire of Anglo-Saxon curses and diversified into French, two cyclists came round the bend in front of me. I was stunned into silence. They smiled knowingly.

‘We've just ridden out to see the “connector”,' one said.

‘It's awful,' I replied.

‘We know, everybody has been talking about it on the race website.'

My two cheery friends then told me the good news that I was virtually at the top of the climb, and that the ensuing 10-mile descent was, in the vernacular that had come to dominate the race, ‘awesome'.

‘There's lots of bear scat,' added one.

Perhaps they noticed my disquiet, or perhaps they had simply remembered my earlier torrent of expletives.

‘Anyhow, you don't need to worry about bears, you'll be hauling ass down there.'

I wasn't entirely sure what he meant, but I knew that it implied speed. He was right. I left the top of Galton Pass at 8.22 p.m. Only 23 minutes later, at a quarter to nine precisely, I arrived at the Port of Roosville border post some 10.5 miles away, an average of 27.5 mph (including two miles of flat road covered at a meagre 16 mph). In spite of the gathering gloom and the switchback nature of the trail, the maximum speed recorded on my bicycle computer was 37.5 mph.

At the border post I was almost hysterical with delight after my thrilling descent and safe return to civilisation (calling Roosville civilised was a clear indication of my reduced mental state rather than an accurate description of the place itself). As a rule, however, US border guards don't seem to warm to semi-delirious, exceptionally smelly cyclists. This was no exception.

Nevertheless, by 9 p.m. I had become a legitimate visitor to the USA; at 9.45 p.m., just as dusk turned to night, and more than 16 hours after I had left Sparwood, I arrived on the fringes of Eureka. Scarcely had a town been more appropriately named.