To Hell And Bike

Tyrie Jenkins, my sister-in-law, rode another few miles until she found an open country store. She rode back, uphill, to the rest and led them to the safety of hot coffee and gas heat. Their ride was over.

"I couldn't make my fingers work," Tyrie said. "I had to stick my dripping chin over the counter and ask the woman to unbuckle my helmet."

Weathering the Ride

The rest of us crossed that highway onto a dirt road. The mud there was even thicker, and some of the puddles were shin-deep on the down stroke. It took two hours to go about two miles. That put us roughly halfway to our cabin. Daylight, if that's the right word for the milky gruel that filled the sky, was fading fast. It was time for our own bailout.

"Hey, don't mention it," said Jim Roth as we hefted our bikes from the back of his white pickup. He stayed well back as we wrangled the muddy messes to the ground. We hadn't been able to chat during the glorious, 13-mile freezing lift he'd given us to within a thousand yards of our cabin. "I've been in similar situations. You have to have respect for the weather up here, or it will kill you."

We found our little sanctuary, a wooden hut in a pine grove. We cleaned our bikes as well as we could, fired up the stove and verbally danced around the topic of surrender. The map called for almost 35 miles the next day, 1,800 feet of climbing.

"I think we should pack it in," Les finally said. It hung in the air. Any kind of agreement, a muttered "Me, too," would have seconded the motion and tipped it into consensus. But there was silence. Finally, George said, "Well, let's see what the morning brings."

We didn't know it until later, but the storm we'd endured had killed someone that day. A hunter died of exposure in our same mountains.

Shifting Gears

Morning brought clear skies but icy, icy air. We decided to ride a few miles and see how it went.

The level road was easy, but at the first climb, I realized I couldn't shift. The derailleur was frozen, stuck in the middle gear of yesterday's last mile. (Later I would learn from one of the hut journals how to thaw a frozen gear: Pee on it). Everyone had the same problem. Les was stuck in low, which was agony on the flats. Sarah, a 20-year resident of the tropics, was clearly freezing and miserable. Five miles in, they turned back.

And then there were two.

George and I settled into a rhythm and surprised ourselves by cracking the 20-mile mark by lunchtime. But the sleet came back for another run. When a gray Ram Charger pulled abreast of us, I was climbing at half-a-mile an hour with frosted eyeglasses.

"I can't let you go on," said the driver, a twenty-something Coloradan in a Nike cap. His black Labrador forced a laughing head through the window. I looked down and saw what they saw, a couple of pipe-cleaner legs covered in ice and mud. "My daddy always said, there's a thin line between tough and foolish," the man said. His was a philosophy of aphorisms. "You're right on that line, aren't you?