Day 30 - the road to Drummond

How it started…

I’m going to start the post with this image because it encapsulates my initial feelings towards this day. Just a full on dumpster fire that had me so far out of my normal “it is what it is” or “you chose this” zen, that I felt like I was being pranked by the universe.

I had looked at the weather reports the night before and decided than an early start was necessary to avoid as much of the afternoon winds as possible. 12-14mph headwinds predicted. No. Friggin. Thanks. So I set the alarm for 5:30am

Don’t have pity on me for that, I usually wake naturally with the sun at 6:30, so it wasn’t a huge stretch. By 6:00am I was dressed, packed and ready to leave. Until I looked down and and the absolute worst tire to go flat, was not just flat but like… profoundly so. To the point that the bead around the tire itself was popped off the rim.

So I turned on the TV knowing I was in for the long haul and flipped the bike upside down to dismount the wheel. Unhook the power. Dismount the bolts. Remove the tow hitch. Remove the torque arm. Prize the wheel free, getting my hands and shirt filthy in the process.

Now comes the process of running my hand along the inside of the tire after taking it fully off to find the tiny prick of silver that caused the issue. I have to give it to the Tuffy liner, it did its level best to prevent the puncture of the inner tube… but like half an inch of wire had pushed its way into the tire and was bent over by the liner. I pulled it free and then set to work inflating the tire to try to find the puncture.

This involves pumping a significant volume of air into the tube and then slowly running my hand over the tube about a half inch away from its surface until I feel the gentle breeze. From there I started looking for pin pricks, and testing to see if when I spotted one if it was the puncture or just some speck of dust. Tapping it with a finger and feeling if the air flow stops is usually good enough. So I go through this process and find a single pinprick and patch it.

Then you slightly deflate the tube and insert it back into the tire off the rim. From here I have to snake the Tuffy liner in behind the tube. It's like trying to brush another person’s teeth from behind them. It’s the worst. There is this gigantic, floppy fruit roll-up kind of thing you have to force behind the tube, it’s going everywhere, fighting you, slides when you don’t want it to, wont move when you do. It’s a sysiphean task.

However as I’m maneuvering this wriggling tapeworm around I feel something sharp pass by my hand. The wire had bulged out the liner and actually been able to punch through. If I didn’t catch this issue it would certainly lead to another flat. So it was sorted and after 40 minutes the tire was back on the bike, inflated as best I could get it and I was beginning to leave.

It still felt super squishy, which isn’t normal, but I was in a rush so I likely didn’t inflate it enough.

I slow rode it to the Travel Center and went to the McDonalds to get some breakfast. I walked in and immediately noped TF out. The line was 15 people deep, and having watched the previous evening as some lady waited 45 minutes for her meal, I wasn’t about to deal with all that.

So I went over to the convenience side of the center and got a biscuit out of their fridge with the intent to warm that up. Somebody call Harriet the spy because I’ve got a task for her: the curious case of the missing microwave. I looked around the store for two minutes and couldn’t find one. OK, whatever. I ring up and get back to my bike and then pull it around the rear of the center and fill the rear tire up with air until it is quite firm.

I’ll eat the biscuit later. It’s now 8:00am and I desperately want to shake the dust off my feet from this town. So I toddle down the road.

About 3 miles outside of town it’s time to do the perfunctory stop to apply sunscreen, rip off my modesty shorts and grab a bite.

So do all that, except when I pull the biscuit out It is frozen rock solid. Fine. I eat a breakfast of nekot wafers and a pack of Welches fruit snacks. The kind of calories that will evaporate in less than an hour.

Ok, hold up.. “Modesty shorts”, you’re probably thinking. Yeah. Modesty Shorts. We all know bike shorts are… revealing. I really do not enjoy being around others with all the contours of my… situation for all to see. So I throw on some bicycle shorts any time I go into a place where people are at and then will rip them off when Im comfortably out of town. I don’t bike in them because they wad up in the crotch and lead to serious saddle sores.

Hangry, sweaty, and just expecting the day to continue in this vein, I mount up and move on.

The frontage road out of Rocker was hilly, and had deep horizontal fissures in it that I knew were going to cause damage if I continued on it. So I got on the interstate instead and started cranking out miles. Like three of them.

Going up a hill I start to get that swoopy feeling in the bike’s motions that indicate something is up. So I dismount and find that the back tire which was rock solid a mere six miles back is now almost flat.

Again the bike goes upside down, but this time with the rush of traffic going 80+ not 12 feet away. Again I pull off the wheel and get the innertube out. Feeling that small change in the air current is very difficult when the air currents are constantly changing because an 18 wheeler just shot past leaving a humongous wake. So it took a while to find another pinhole, mere inches from the original I had already sealed.

I patched this and undertook the process of remounting and inflating the wheel. I almost tossed the Tuffy liner at this point but thought better of it. I hadn’t had a flat in 400 miles on that tire.

I looked up at the sky and shouted “ANYTHING ELSE?!!?” In my frustration. And then quickly recentered myself, praying a prayer I’ve prayed before “Just show me the joy today.”

It was now 9:30 and I very much felt like the day was shot, and at best I would only make it to my bail out location, Deer Lodge, around 33 miles total.

Then as I come off of the interstate onto a different frontage road I spotted it:

A grass fire was quickly spreading next to the Interstate. I got a safe distance and called the emergency line. After what seemed like an eternity the operator picked up and I informed her of the situation, of which she had already been informed. Trucks were on their way.

It’s funny the things that cause your reset button to get mashed. This was it for me that day. Realizing that in all my difficulties, I wouldn’t have to deal with potentially having my house burned down was sobering. I paused for a short while and then rode on.

Hey, Cracker!

No… that’s the name of the tiny town the frontage road passed through. Another blighted grouping of structures that might have served a purpose once, but looked long from being a place anyone would want to live.

Now before you get to feeling some sort of way the name doesn’t derive from anything untoward — rather it’s kind of a local inside joke smothered in lore.

Cracker got it’s name when two prospectors tucked their lunch of crackers and cheese under a rock nearby while surveying the area. They planned to return later, but as their lead on a mineral vein started to strengthen they followed along and eventually forgot their lunch entirely. Not until later when they were reviewing their survey maps did they recall that the initial signs of the vein started near their abandoned crackers. And so they named it the “Cracker lead”, and locals took it from there. The lake, the town all took on the shortened reference to a lost lunch of Crackers.

Anyway, this dumb cracker did a bad route plan that I knew when making it was likely up for some hijinks. I routed along the frontage road, but then noted that all of a sudden there was strange kink, and a transition to dirt on the plan. My logical side said plan another route. My full speed ahead side said YOLO and went with it…

Well, in the real world the road actually did end. Thank God that some enterprising youngster decided to break down the barbed wire fence and establish very loose, sandy portage around the highway overpass.

After only a few minutes of struggling to push the bike through this nonsense, and with shoes filled with fine, chalky sand I made it back to the bones of the Frontage road. It looked as if it had been left to go wild.

“You chose this” rang through my head and I smiled while pedalling through this mess of a road, and I smiled. My poor spirits from the hassles of the early morning had been burnt away.

The valley system opened up with great mountain views to either side, and as I took the northward turn after Cracker the winds were astonishingly in my favor. I was making 22mph across the now smooth frontage road.

To my left Mt. Powell loomed. A great mass of Igneous Batholith formed through the same actions that formed much of the Rockies — deep forces causing the uplift of great slabs of cooled magma. This is no volcano though it could be easily mistaken for the remnants of one. The great bowl at its center, reminiscent of a crater is actually the origin point of a long melted glacier, and the mountain and surrounding regions show this history of glacial carving.

In the unincorporated town of Warm Springs I passed the Montana State Hospital. Built in 1877 it is the only surviving publicly operate psychiatric hospital facility in Montana. At one time housing more than 1900 patients. It is is also the site of over 3200 gravestones, marked only by number due to the stigma surrounding mental conditions at its inception and peak in the 1950s. In part this is to preserve anonymity of those who died here and records are kept. These are not unmarked, anonymous graves, they are simply not marked for the public.

The closest actual town is Deer Lodge, another 10 or so miles down the road.

The miles went by quickly, and even though I got a late start I was certain I would hit my midpoint before 1pm.

I passed through another small unincorporated area called Race Track. The only notable structure was a bar with what looked like a greenhouse perched on top with a couch and a telescope within. As if some boozy hedge wizard resided there.

Eventually I reached Deer Lodge at around 12:30pm and started looking for a place to eat. As I biked down the main street I was greeted by a historic prison, turned into a tourist trap. I say this as a person who has been to Alcatraz, I find it a morbid and somewhat toxic fascination in the commercialization of a place that stripped the dignity of so many, and helped perpetuate a form of defacto, legal slavery.

The prison itself had its own farm but often prisoners were lent out to ranchers and farmers in the region as a source of unpaid labor for which the Warden and others received kickbacks. That isn’t to say that the inmates didn’t prefer such work. The prison itself was wildly overcrowded throughout much of its time in operation. Having the capacity for 200-300, frequently filled to greater than 600 inmates, often tripled up in dilapidated cells without running water or heat during harsh winters.

This paired with authoritarian wardens who would arbitrarily assign prized work duties lead to a riot in 1959 in which a deputy warden was captured by two inmates and then murdered after unlocking the armory. Eventually the riot was put down when the National Guard stormed the prison. The inmates that sparked the riot committed suicide before they could be killed or captured.

This lead to systematic reforms within the prison system in Montana, but moreso it brought scrutiny that eventually lead to the closing of the prison in 1979, at which point it was converted to a national historic site.

My deep disgust for the manner in which America chooses to incarcerate at absurdly higher rates than any other developed nation, paired with our punitive mentality genuinely sickens me. Our system almost ensures recidivism by released inmates and does nothing to rehabilitate or reacclimate them to society. Rather they have been historically used as a source of legal slave labor through the loophole provided in the 13th amendment:

"Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction."

Historically this system was used to criminalize the existence of certain groups — predominately blacks in the south, and for the purposes of suppressing their right to vote, and to perpetuate defacto slavery to the benefit of the corrupt power brokers.

In our history we have made certain compromises to allow a greater good to be served. The thirteenth amendment is a fundamentally compromised amendment, that while it codified a stance against slavery, it also provided a loophole for its continuation.

Anyway. So I found a subway down the road and sat and ate while the bike charged to full. At 3:30pm I left from Deer Lodge.

The wind, as predicted, had reversed direction and was blowing 12+ mph obliquely into me. Evenso I was making 19mph across the frontage road north. My spirits were high, and I knew that I was likely to hit my objective of Drummond, thirty miles up the road by around 7pm.

Then came the westward turn. Now the full brunt of the wind was hitting me and my pace slowed to 12mph. I watched as my battery lost bars at a steady pace. The headwind starting to degrade my morale.

There was a necessary stretch of Interstate miles in which I put on some music to get my pace up. Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing In the Name of” came on and suddenly a pace of 15mph became 24, and for a short stretch I was reminded of how strong my legs have become. Most days I pedal at a pace to have some reserve — I’m running a marathon, not a sprint. Even at this pace I knew I had more to give. If I wanted to go flat out I'm sure that even with a 14mph headwind I could have made 32 or more.

I eventually pulled off the interstate onto another frontage road with 10 miles to go and less than 33% of my battery remaining, burnt out and frazzled I literally lay flat on the grass, gulping down water to keep up with the heat. It’s amazing how comfortable ground can be when you are thoroughly spent. I laid there for perhaps 15 minutes, recovering my resolve to continue forwards. I knew the last 10 miles would be the most difficult, and my battery was likely to fail before reaching my destination.

I popped up and took a few pictures before departing. Headwinds or not, the views were stunning.

I struggled against the wind and hills, but maintained a solid pace, at times up to 16mph. Three bars. Two bars. One bar.

Drummond loomed a mile ahead. And a Cenex gas station on the outskirts.

Another community in decline that seems to have better days behind it. Multiple storefronts closed and decaying, the rusting hulks of long abandoned machinery littering fields adjacent. There once were two motels, now there is a single motel, but it is full of permanent residents. So I pulled to the local campgrounds and found electrics, water, and a portapotty. All I would need.

I ate the rest of my sub from subway under a picnic shelter after setting up my tent.

Dusk came on an hour later and I tucked myself into bed, in a deep calorie deficit for the day, nearly 5,000 calories in the hole, but surprisingly not terribly hungry.

Exhausted I passed out. And that ended riding day 30.