Two Wheels on my Wagon

by Paul Howard

  I clambered back over the banks of snow marked by my solitary tyre tracks. Each pedal stroke was a further reminder of my folly. Surely I should be back on the route by now? I read and re-read the route description. It could just as well have been written in Chinese.

  Then the silence of the forest was broken by a noise. It was the rhythmic throb of a rescue helicopter. Clearly, somebody back home had observed my plight and sent a message to the powers that be that I needed a little assistance. Oh, the wonders of modern technology.

  The noise grew louder. I scanned the skies above but to no avail. Distracted, I was suddenly alarmed to be nearly run over. It turned out not to be a virtual rescue, but a typical Montana family on a quad bike outing. I tried to conceal my disappointment.

  Once stopped, my new potential saviours unwittingly did a passable impression of the Three Bears of nursery rhyme fame: great big papa bear; equally great big mama bear; and surly, be-hooded adolescent bear.

  ‘How ya doing?’ said papa bear.

  ‘I’m fine, but I’m a bit lost,’ I replied.

  ‘Where ya headed?’

  I managed to stop myself saying Mexico.

  ‘Basin, but I need to make sure I go past the old Hattie Ferguson and Morning Glory mines.’

  I couldn’t have fallen upon better guides. Surly, be-hooded adolescent bear obligingly unfolded the map and papa bear did the explaining. Mama bear nodded approvingly.

  ‘We’ve just moved out to the country from Helena and we’re out exploring ourselves. Last time we came up this way we got lost too, it’s a maze of tracks and trails. Anyways, let’s see.’

  On his immensely detailed map he quickly determined where we were. I was about quarter of a mile short of my original route, where it would be a simple question of turning left to get back on track. I thanked them profusely. They insisted it was nothing worthy of praise. I persisted embarrassingly – a week in the wilderness does nothing for social etiquette.

  Surly, be-hooded adolescent bear asked where I was headed after Basin. I said Butte, then added, rather hesitantly, Mexico. If I managed to stop getting lost, that was.

  ‘Wow, that’s some trip,’ he replied, his face lighting up.

  I explained about the race. His enthusiasm was contagious. I vowed to stop judging youthful Montanans by their dress sense.

  ‘It sure is nice to see ya here in Montana,’ said papa bear as our ways parted.

  The rest of the descent to Basin was straightforward. After a welcome lunch at the town’s only restaurant, I enjoyed the dubious pleasure of riding roughly parallel to Interstate 15 on a ‘non-maintained cattle access trail’ for the next hour. The sky had turned a menacing, uniform grey. An old, unlit railway tunnel dated 1911 offered fleeting intrigue, but the landscape scars of mine works were as nothing compared to the despoliation created by miles upon miles of motorway.

  Next came a paved road that ran right alongside the Interstate. Eight-axle trucks thundered past a mere stone’s throw away. At least I had a headwind to distract me; at least I wasn’t on the Interstate.

  I had spoken too soon. It was there, in the route description, in black and white, and not in Chinese: the last 6 miles of the day would be the other side of the barrier on the Interstate itself. I pictured myself riding down the M23 at home. It was ridiculous; there was no choice.

  Mercifully, only the first third of a mile was uphill. After that I began to pick up speed. And more speed. The descent was straight and long. I adopted an aerodynamic tuck and freewheeled down the hard shoulder at 40 mph. Lorries found it difficult to overtake. I toyed with the idea of playing chicken into the intersection with Interstate 90. It was quite thrilling; thrilling enough to distract me from the view of distant snow-clad mountains to my right and Our Lady of the Rockies, a 90-foot statue of the Virgin Mary, to my left.

  At last the fun was over. I had scarcely turned off when I saw the sign I had been looking for: ‘The Outdoorsman’.

  Butte’s pre-eminent bike shop, The Outdoorsman had further enhanced its reputation among Tour Divide racers by tracking participants’ progress on the website and affording moral as well as practical support. It was also owned and run by Rob Leipheimer, the brother of Levi Leipheimer, the second most famous and successful of current US cyclists.

  ‘You must be Paul from England,’ said Rob.

  ‘You must be the famous Mr Leipheimer,’ I replied, instantly cursing my sieve-like memory. For much of the previous three hours I had contentedly distracted myself from the monotony of my surroundings by pretending to be Henry Stanley, the culmination of which artifice was going to be my uttering the immortal line: ‘Mr Leipheimer, I presume.’ Now I had blown my big moment. Still, Rob didn’t seem to mind the slip.

  ‘Are you staying here the night? We own the hotel next door, and there’s a discounted rate for Tour Dividers.’

  It was an easy decision.

  ‘Have you seen anyone else today?’ I asked, with little hope of a positive response.

  ‘Sure, we’ve had a few groups through.’

  My heart leapt.

  ‘There were a few through this morning, and then two guys who left about an hour ago . . .’

  ‘They’ve gone already?’

  I silently cursed this morning’s navigational lapse.

  ‘. . . and one guy who’s in the hotel.’

  I might not have actually given Rob a hug, but it’s difficult to be entirely sure. While he continued to clean and service my bike, I hastily checked in.

  ‘Apparently you’ve got a guy by the name of Steve McGuire staying with you,’ I said. ‘You’ll have noticed him – he’ll have been as smelly and funnily dressed as I am. Could you tell me his room number?’

  ‘I’m afraid I couldn’t do that, sir,’ smiled the receptionist.

  Why not? Had I forgotten to say please?

  ‘We can’t give out room numbers of guests,’ she explained, still smiling.

  I was allowed – obliged – to cycle down the motorway, but privacy laws were seemingly going to prevent me from preserving my sanity. Then I had a brilliant idea (in ordinary circumstances it probably wouldn’t have merited the description ‘brilliant’, but context was everything).

  ‘Please could you let Steve know which room I’m in?’

  I repeated the ‘please’, just in case.

  ‘Sure thing!’

  I had hardly entered my room when the phone rang. It was Steve. He was in a room three doors away. A few seconds later there was a knock at the door.

  ‘Paul?’

  ‘Steve! Come in. Boy, am I glad to see you!’

  After more than 100 hours of solitude, I had a riding companion.

  CHAPTER 12

  SINGING IN THE RAIN

  DAY 9

  Steve McGuire proved the perfect cycling companion. In some ways that came as little surprise as he had already proved himself the perfect post-ride conversation companion and the perfect breakfast companion.

  The previous night, as befitted his status as a professor of contemporary story-telling, Steve had entertained me royally with a brief account of his adventures thus far. These included not only getting lost in the same place as I had yesterday, but also having to spend the night camping rough as a result. Getting lost around midday had been one thing; getting lost at midnight with only an inadequate sleeping bag to provide protection from the cold and the critters alike had been quite another.

  After that, neither of us had had the energy to be particularly sociable, but it mattered not. The simple presence of another Tour Divide rider in the same hotel was sufficient. It was like the desire to ensure the continuing presence of endangered species – tigers and lions, for example. You didn’t need to be able to see them; just knowing they were still around was enough. Having said that, I realised that I used to feel the same way about bears. For the past week, not being able to see them but knowing they were around had become the problem.

  There were no bears in the outskirts of Bu
tte. Instead, there were miserable car drivers and antagonistic youths. The sight of a Lycra-clad cyclist clip-clopping his way to the Safeway’s over the road from the hotel was too much to resist. In less than 100 yards I was greeted with various manifestations of contemptuous indifference and a volley of insults hurled from a car window. It looked for one slightly alarming moment that the car’s occupants were about to disembark en masse, but no doubt my menacing demeanour dissuaded them. That or the fact the traffic lights turned to green and they went from antagonists to objects of opprobrium from other drivers in short order.

  Safeway’s had nothing to compare to the deli section of Van’s, so I resorted to the neighbouring sandwich shop. I thought my luck was in when I found them selling family portions of lasagne the size of a tabloid newspaper.

  ‘I’ll take one of those, please,’ I requested.

  ‘You have to heat them up at home.’

  Something about my attire, or possibly my accent, must have suggested this was unlikely. I was grateful for the warning.

  ‘Could you not heat one up for me?’ I asked.

  After all, there was a microwave on the back wall.

  ‘I’m not from round here so I can’t heat one up myself,’ I added, a touch unnecessarily.

  ‘We’re not allowed to do that.’

  It was clear there was little point in pursuing the argument.

  ‘And I suppose your pizzas are the same?’

  ‘Yep.’

  At least there was no ambiguity. I settled for sandwiches instead. Heated sandwiches, as it turned out. It started to rain. Back at the hotel I walked past a microwave on the way to my room.

  At five the next morning Steve and I helped ourselves to waffles at the self-service breakfast counter. Not long after 5.30 a.m. we were en route. In an encouraging start, particularly in the light of our recent track record, we then managed to get lost within sight of the hotel. This time, however, it only took five minutes – and the help of the hotel concierge – to rectify the situation. We skirted downtown Butte with no further mishap, and headed through the skeleton suburbs of a town that less than a century ago had had more than 100,000 occupants but now was home to only just over 30,000.

  It was a cold and grey morning. Rain threatened, then arrived. We stopped to don overgarments. Alone it would have been miserable, but the conversation was as easy as the riding along paved roads.

  Steve, I discovered, was a youthful-looking quinquagenarian, married with two boys and living in Iowa, of which he was quite proud.

  ‘How do you like our new president?’ he asked.

  Aware of the deeply divisive nature of US politics, and unwilling to aggravate a companion with whom I hoped to spend the next few weeks, I ventured that he was widely perceived as an improvement on his predecessor. I need not have been so coy. Steve was an enthusiast. It was the Iowa caucuses, he reminded me, that had turned Barack Obama from a possible to probable presidential candidate.

  Steve also had some considerable pedigree as a cyclist and adventurer. He was a veteran of the Iditabike, the cycling equivalent of the great Alaskan winter husky-sled adventure, the Iditarod. He had also ridden to Iowa from Alaska, ridden the Trans-Iowa mountain bike race, and ridden around Iceland on a tandem, offering the stoker seat to anyone capable of telling a decent story.

  As a devotee of winter cycling, he had also had the misfortune to encounter, on three separate occasions, unfortunate souls in peril in the frozen Iowa River; more impressively still he had had the courage to dive in and rescue them, the latest occasion being the previous winter when he had come across a car crash. I felt I was in safe hands.

  After an hour we left the metalled roads behind and began climbing on familiar gravel. We passed under an imposing trestle bridge, another reminder of the area’s past links with extractive industries.

  To our right should have been views across Butte to Berkeley Pit, the erstwhile ‘richest hill on earth’, an open pit mine from which sufficient copper had been extracted to leave a hole 1 mile wide and 1,600 foot deep. In fact, the hole didn’t last long for as soon as the mining stopped, the pumps were switched off and it began to fill with water. Or rather, what passes for water when it has a pH of 2.5 and is laced with arsenic, cadmium and zinc, among other contaminants.

  Instead, there were neither views nor any other distractions to occupy us on the climb up to another crossing of the Continental Divide. Only rain and trees. And a slippery road surface that was the cycling equivalent of walking on snow sufficiently frozen on the surface to bear your weight 90 per cent of the time but which, one random step in every ten, gave way, plunging you into the powder beneath and depriving you of any momentum.

  In spite of the effort required to maintain forward progress, a deep chill had begun to set in. At the top, we stopped to don more layers. It was raining heavily enough to make it essential to find shelter before overclothes could be removed safely; being wet inside as well as out would have been a serious mistake. We spotted a forest service toilet block.

  ‘Welcome to the Montana Hilton,’ said Steve.

  The title seemed a touch grand. We were confronted with nothing more spectacular than a prefabricated outhouse, consisting of a small porch and a 5 foot by 5 foot cubicle, all sitting over a pungent faecal broth. I expressed my reservations.

  ‘You obviously haven’t had the pleasure of sleeping in one of them,’ Steve explained.

  It turned out that the previous night had not been Steve’s only rough sleeping experience. He had also been caught out in a storm of such severity that the only way to survive the night with any degree of comfort, or indeed at all, had been to seek shelter inside just such a cubicle.

  ‘All the “activity” below meant I was nice and warm.’

  I was glad it was still early enough in the morning for such an eventuality to seem unlikely today.

  The rain came down more heavily still. It was like a bad day in the Lake District. I said as much to Steve. His enthusiasm for a riding trip in the UK dropped visibly. Mud splashed everywhere, penetrating eyes and nose and mouth and ears. Tyres gripped less and less, adding an extra frisson of excitement. With visibility already impaired by the meteorological conditions, progress was treacherous.

  The long descent counteracted the warming effect of our extra layers. Our feet and hands had the good fortune to succumb early to the cold and turned numb; the rest of our bodies could still feel the discomfort. Eventually, as the gradient eased, we realised the route was going to pass under the Interstate. The resultant tunnel was full of muddy puddles and noise and detritus from the cars passing overhead. It was delightful.

  We shivered convivially and took stock. The good news was that we were now confronted with another major climb on which we could reasonably hope to generate some heat. The bad news was that it took us up to nearly 8,000 feet on the exposed upper reaches of Mount Fleecer. Worse, the subsequent descent had grown to assume legendary status on the Tour Divide.

  ‘This will be difficult to comprehend until you confront it, but it’s true that the descent from Fleecer is the toughest hill to negotiate on the entire Great Divide – and that includes the uphills,’ said Michael McCoy in Cycling the Great Divide, the official guidebook of the route.

  It also suggested that abandoning the trail and zigzagging through the scrub might be the better option, an assessment that had presumably been made in favourable conditions.

  Accordingly, it was with some trepidation that we ventured once more into the wind and rain. For an hour the gradient maintained a satisfactory balance between effort expended and heat generated. Then we came out of the woods onto the broad, exposed shoulder of the mountain. The wind and rain were windier and rainier, though they now had the decency to be driving us in the right direction across the sodden moonscape. It would no doubt have seemed a charming flower meadow in more clement conditions. As it was, attempting to avoid the bogs with bike or feet was a wholly gratuitous effort.

  After 20 minu
tes of uphill bike-dragging we turned a corner and started, tentatively, to descend. Half a mile of cautious weaving between shrubs later and we were beginning to wonder what all the fuss had been about. But that was to reckon without the fact we were on a convex slope. Slowly, ever so slowly, the true, precipitous nature of the descent still to come revealed itself. By the time we fully realised what we were in for it was impossible to do anything but continue. So continue we did, slithering and sliding our way down the muddy, shaley, shrubby hillside. The few bits of bike and body that had not already become damp or covered in mud gave up their rearguard effort. Clumps of sage offered temporary anchor holds. Clods of earth and stone disappeared down the slope below. Yet, miraculously, neither bicycles nor riders followed suit.

  Eventually the gradient became such that we could first walk with our bikes, then ride them. We grinned maniacally at each other and cycled at a furious pace down the ensuing trail as if recently escaped from prison. Near hysteria at our survival had induced recklessness. Foot-deep puddles and rocky stream crossings were treated with disdain.

  The rain and wind continued their assault. We ignored them. We had no choice. Some time later, it was impossible to tell exactly how long, we arrived where we knew we would have to arrive as long as we managed to keep pedalling. We later learned that this minuscule collection of buildings at the roadside, the only settlement for miles around, was called Wise River, but at the time the name was irrelevant. Only the fact that it had a restaurant with an open door was important. It had taken six and a half hours to cover 52 miles, 11 of which had been on paved roads.

  No sooner had we prised open the doors of the Wise River Club with hands frozen into claws than we were greeted like long-lost friends. It turned out that the owner, Tom, an escapee from Scotland, thought we were long-lost friends. The fact that we were not, readily verifiable once we had peeled off our outer layers and wiped the mud from our faces, did not seem to concern him.