Day 23 - To Custer MT

Don’t be stupid, Stupid…

Hey, I’m about to show you a picture of my bike from last night. Let’s play a game of “Can you spot what’s wrong”?

Here you go:

Did you catch the problem?

No?

Ok. Let’s zooooom in there…

“What’s that” you say? Oh nothing important just the port for my charger, which is absolutely not plugged into that port meaning my bike is sitting there not charging… overnight.

That’s right folks. I woke up this morning to the stunning effect of my own stupidity. Normally the first thing I do when I get to shelter is to plug in the bike. My philosopy is ABC — “Always Be Charging”.

While it’s understandable, It’s still a huge mistake on my part. But when I get into the motel at 1pm my only concern was literally just sleep. Throughout the rest of the evening after I woke up my brain didn’t think to remind me that the bike wasn’t charging — Why should it, it’s always the first thing I attend to.

Well this little failure meant that a 6:30am leaving time turned into an 11am leaving time.

There are multiple reasons why this is not preferred. One is heat, another is that winds intensify as the day heats up, and a third is that it makes for a much longer day on the road. The second point would only be helpful if I had tailwinds, which the forecast made very clear I would be having lateral or headwinds.

So at 11am, even though the battery wasn’t fully topped off I left for a 50+ mile stretch. At least there is a town, Hysham, half way between the start and finish.

Leaving the motel it was already 80 degrees with a projected high of 93 today, and winds were very much pointed straight at my face.

Hey, “You chose this” though… so strap in and get to it.

So I rode out of Forsyth with buildings on one side and short sheer cliffs on the other. Being in the flood plains at this point there are a few things to note. The density and type of tree cover has signficantly changed again. By and large there are two different tree types dominating the valley floor: Short pines and Large white oaks. It very much reminds me of the Sonoma region of California or the areas leading up through the middle of Colorado.

Today is a nonstop, slow climb up the gradient of the river valley. Overall its about 600ft over 50 miles, but again punctuated by short bursts of hills and buttes, but to a much lesser extent than yesterday. Thankfully that’s because old Highway 10 (which I think I’ve been off and on since Detroit Lakes) sticks to the lowlands, whereas the Interstate just plows over Buttes and hills irrespective of the elevation changes.

I have also noted that in these cut cliffs there are many smoothed sections indicating consistent high power errosion events: Likely thousand year flooding events. I would hazard to say it could be from wind, but the smoothed parts are always low on the cliff faces.

Leaving the Forsyth area It was clear my legs have returned for the most part as I was able to keep a respectable pace of 17mph until the headwinds hit me in earnest, in which case my top speeds declined to around 14mph.

Honestly the only thing making it difficult going today is pain in my butt. It’s lead me to start to make small changes in my seat height and angle to alleviate the pressure on my right side, where I have an exacerbated open sore I’m trying to heal. I grimace in pain about once every 10 minutes raising off of the seat to reposition. This pain is reminding me of my first tour and it’s a shame because I strove very hard not to repeat that particular agony. Largely my seat has been good, but once a problem starts it has a tendency to cascade.

At this point I’m considering iodine to try to dry it out and get that area to callous as my standard go-to methods that work with chafing just aren’t working. Fabric bandaids generally work really well when you pull off the padding and just put them over a raw region because it stabilizes the are, lets it breathe, and allows healing to occur without reinjury. This injury is just in such an odd location that bandages wad up and make the rubbing worse. If you’ve ever had a cut on the web between fingers, you understand the issue, the area is just too mobile and awkward to bandage well.

Anyway, enough about that…

Occasionally I would need to mount a butte, and the terrain above the river level is so fundamentally different in its chracter. Wide, treeless expanses baked by the sun and arid as yo might imagine. It’s quite literally the American Savannah — and a plaque I passed by nodded to that fact. When Lewis and Clarke passed through on their way back from the coast they noted the abundance of Bison and Elk in these grassy hills occasionally seeing herds that would span as far as the eye could see.

This is a testament to just how effective we were at removing those creatures from the landscape. The only thing that moves out here now are grasshoppers, birds, and the occasional prairie dog.

Currently, as I write this, I’m resting in Hysham and it has been a difficult ride for the last 12 miles, nearly draining my battery and body entirely. My second set of miles is ahead and I’m looking forward to a change in direction from a pure West to a Southwest course in the evening as that will help to reduce the effect of these headwinds.

I’m going to charge until 4:30 or 5pm and then set out again. The first set of 25 took 2.5hrs and I expect the same from the second set. So I will likely roll into Custer around 7 or 8pm. I don’t love nights like that, but sometimes they are necessary.

From Hysham to Custer:

As I’ve expressed before there is an increasing discomfort being in the saddle that only time off of it can hope to heal. It has frankly made my disposition within this beautiful landscape foul to the point that I am so inwardly focused I miss amazing vistas or simply pass by what I know is a good composition because of that discomfort.

I had already committed to make miles to Custer because there was a motel there and I’d booked a room. I knew that these 25 miles would be difficult, but I genuinely had no idea how.

I crossed the river for the first time about four miles outside of Hysham and stopped to take a few pictures of the surrounds on the bridge. Swallows were afrenzy about the bridge catching insects, darting to and fro. This is a common sight near any bridge over water or land in this area, and Try as I might to capture the feeling of it, all my photographs fall far short. At times it feels like being in the center of a tornado made of birds.

Crossing into the bottomland on the opposite shore the winds were less in opposition to my forward progress but they were still fighting me. I was on a strip of well maintained asphalt that wend its way through stunning farmlands filled with corn, wheat, alfalfa and hay grass. It very much reminded me of the bucolic greenery of North Dakota, though this was surrounded on both sides by stunning yellow buttes.

As the road hugged these cliff faces I got to inspect their bizarre character. Their sandstone layerse worn smooth, with holes and arches. And at this point I started to doubt my previous conclusions that this was purely water erosion.

First we need to understand that this is soft, pourous sandstone. This porous nature is important because the rock will absorb salt laden water from different sources and it’s the salt that’s the primary driver of the sort of erosion we see. As the water evaporates from the rocks it leaves the salts it brought into the interior of the rock. As the water is driven off salt crystals form and grow, putting immense pressure on the interior of these rocks, causing them to flake in unusual ways.

Wind driven sand then polishes the sharp edges over time leaving the stunning and strane features.

These cliffs also make an amazing natural habitat for the swallows I referenced before. Using mud, grass and saliva these swallows build nests under the overhangs of these cliff faces.

While beautiful, eventually the ride turned sour — moreso than it had been due to headwinds and pains.

I was greeted with what I can only describe as The Road to Hell. It was packed gravel and dirt, sprayed with some form of oil or tar. I’ve been over such surfaces before, but this particular road had washboard ruts that went as deep as two inches in places, and there was no pattern to their rutting. It was painful and rattling to the point that parts started to come loose on my bike. The nut holding the crossbard for the roof of my trailer is now somewhere in the Montana wilderness. The ties that I used to secure the aluminum frame shook loose. My left crank arm (pedal) needed to be tightened over and over and over.

The only redeeming quality to this road versus the interstate was that it was largely flat.

And then before me I saw it climb, incomprehensibly, almost straight up a bluff. I looked to the left and there was clear bottomland that the road could have easily shot across. At this point I had made 5 miles in one hour due to the state of the road and my battery had one flashing bar out of ten bars remaining. Powering up this hill meant the battery, or my legs would give out.

So I got off and pushed the bike up the hill. It took the better part of 30 minutes to go up about 300ft of vertical ascent. I had to take frequent breaks as my heartrate was skyrocketing from activity and poor hydration.

This was the moment. The Moment. Up until this point in the trip I had an indominable drive to push foward, that there wa hope and meaning in making miles. That if nothing else “I chose this” was enough to lift my spirits and return me to my zen.

Not now. My zen was gone. I shouted at the top of my lungs “FUCK THIS ROAD!!!!” I wanted off the ride. Even with all this beauty around me I couldn’t appreciate it because my circumstances felt that bad.

Felt that bad. And yet life continued around me. The sky was a mix of clouds and rays. The temperature was pleasant.

With a festering hatred for my circumstances I ground onward, trying to save battery where I could, over this god-awful washboard, teeth-rattling nonsense.

Finally I pulled over to rest my hands and ass and lost it. It wasn’t a Job style “Curse God and die”, but it was close. I had it out, moreso with my bad feelings than with God. I told him directly “I need you to show me whatever it is you need to show me. Right now I’m not having a good time. I can’t even appreciate this place.”

I was immediately reminded of my first trip, when in Rawlins, Wyoming I had a similar breakdown. My bicycle had flipped over in high winds and broken a cyclocomputer. It was trivial in the grand scope, just like this road was trivial. But it was the breaking point.

I remembered that after having that experience, crying in a Library writing that I was coming home, and yet by the end of my blogging having realized it was going to be OK that I landed on this: “Whatever happens next, I’m going to stop Bitching, moaning and complaining, and make miles.”

The experience I had then and the one I had on the side of the worst road I’ve ever experienced are parallels. I felt the anger wash off of me. I reiterated “I’m just going to make miles.”

And then I looked to my right and saw this:

My pains are insignificant. My frustrations are momentary.

Realizing that again gave me whatever I needed to keep going. Battery flashing.

Somehow I made it the five last miles to Custer without losing power, and without any further incidents. In fact I got there 10 minutes before the kitchen at the bar closed. So I ordered a meal and then got my stuff into my room and came back and enjoyed a needed bite and a beer.

It was ok. I was ok.

God help me to see the beauty every day, no matter how bad the day.