It was hard to get out of the warm sleeping bag this morning, but up at 5 AM getting packed up.
5:58am, packed up hitting the road nice brisk cool morning.
7:54 AM I have 18.4 miles in, beautiful morning, no wind. I would knock on wood but there’s not around only sage brush and rock.
It’s amazing how much better a bike rolls when it’s not rolling into the win. Have a bit of a headache, didn’t sleep too well last night, couldn’t get comfortable on the air mattress and I’m a bit hungry—no food—I’ve got another maybe 20 miles to go before I get to a town and will hopefully be able to have a good breakfast and plan the rest of my day.
It was a bit cloudy last night but there were a lot of stars in the sky, so I hope I have gotten a pretty good night laps of the milkey way. I will see later when I have time to review it on the go Pro.
Mosquitoes everywhere this morning. When I stop they swarm so I’m gonna try not to stop too much.
8:34 AM I’m 25.2 miles in and still a beautiful morning, very light wind plowing at my back—thank goodness. Making good time. I must’ve crossed the continental divide again sometime this morning because the stream I camped by last night was running east. I’m passing streams now running west. On the main highways there’s usually a sign to indicate crossing the divide, but on the backroads I’m traveling nobody there’s nothing. Many times I’ve come to splits in the road and even four way intersections and no directional signs at all. You’d better know where your going out here. Nothings going to tell you.
9:45 AM at 41 miles and made it a Boulder Wyoming—stopped at the Phillips 66 station having a bottle of Ness quick double chocolate milk and a bottle of pure leaf lemon tea with some snacks. That should hold me over until I get to Pinedale which is about 12 or 14 miles away. The wind picked up at about mile 35–hit me in the face again—got caught in a small storm, but didn’t last long.
11:15 AM made it to Pinedale. Having lunch consisting of two asiago bagels with cream cheese, orange juice, two diet Pepsis, and a strawberry, banana, and blueberry smoothie. Gonna rest here at the café for a little bit and figure out what I’m gonna do the rest of the day.
Called two places about 30 and 35 miles from where I am that our private homes that host bicyclist doing the Great Divide—for a fee, of course :-). One of them said they have Covid in the house and wasn’t hosting anyone and the other I got no answer. So if I keep going today, my only option is to camp out in a primitive campsite again tonight and I just don’t want to do that.
I need a shower, I need to get cleaned up, I need to get recharged, I’ve had a tough past few days. I also need to recharge all my electronics—battery pack is almost dead. So, I checked into the Sundance Motel here in Pinedale and I’ll spend this afternoon getting cleaned up, recovering, and getting the stuff on my bike organized again.
When I took down camp this morning my tent and rain fly on the tent we’re both still wet, but I didn’t want to wait till sunrise for it to get dried out. That would’ve been at least another two hours. So I packed it up wet which I don’t like to do. I now have it hanging in the closet here in the hotel room drying out. I’m getting everything organized on my bike again so I know where things are. Cleaning up my bike a bit and oiling the chain and other moving parts, I’ve been neglecting maintenance on it for a while. I’ve got myself cleaned up. I feel human again. I may go out in a little bit and see if I can find a laundromat. It would be good just to wash everything I have in a washing machine versus a sink.
My plan is to make it to Coulter Bay in the next two days. That’s about 150 miles with a lot of climbing, but I can do that at least if not further. The weather forecast for the next two days looks good.
Once I get to Coulter Bay then I’ll have about 850 miles or so to the border. So I’m estimating about 10 days, maybe nine. My goal was to finish on the 15th, this will have me on track to finish just before that. But more importantly, once I get to Coulter Bay I’ll just be a short shot from getting out of this hell hole windtunnel called Wyoming. As a sidenote, on my Trans Am trip four years ago I spent the night in Coulter Bay at the foot of the Tetons. It was a cold night camping but a spectacular location. If you haven’t seen the Tetons, you need to. There are every bit as awesome, in my opinion as the Grand Canyon.
Signing off after getting this posted for a little recovery.
And by the way, the night labs didn’t come out well. Great shots of the clouds moving before it got dark, but there was still a lot of cloud cover so nothing but darkness after dark. Oh well, maybe next time.
Pics:
https://www.dropbox.com/sh/f2y92huut4tiz1r/AACqprzurSjUZ3VSkaXNZlhNa?dl=0
