Day 34 - Coeur d'Alene
Into the Spokane Valley:
Waking up in Wallace led to an all to familiar sight: A flat rear tire. In its defense, it literally had seven patches on the tire itself. Any one of them could be partial. I did have a spare, but that spare was also a tire that had been damaged. It had a bit of a slash across the side which is why I decided to replace it wholesale.
I thought that it would be best to trade out this patch riddled monstrosity for a less weathered tube and so I went through and patched the small gash and then inflated it to test. It seemed to hold pressure just fine and so I threw it into the wheel.
I had noted that my derailleur hanger was bent the day before — the derailleur is the weird little arm at the back of the bike that helps selecting gears. This was causing me to not be able to access my top gear, and frequently causing my chain to slip off in bottom gear, or skip from gear to gear.
So I took my wrench and attempted to bend it back. What you need to know is that the hanger is a piece of softer, sacrificial metal that is meant to fail so that if the derailleur is impacted something important isn’t bent instead. It’s a bolt on piece of metal that simply holds the mechanism. I could see the clear bend in this and so I pulled against the bend. I heard a sickening snap and the hanger seemed to have broken off.
Nearly in panic I looked more closely and it became clear that the damage, while not great, hadn’t impacted the frame whatsoever. I had stripped one of the two small bolts holding the hanger into the frame. I simply swapped the position of the two bolts and reinstalled it. It wasn't ideal, but it solved the problem and the hanger was back in place but still bent. Something that would need solving later.
After fully getting the wheel reinstalled I went back to other tasks necessary to get on the road. Packing things, taking my meds, checking the weather. When I came back to the bike the tire was flat again. I was nonplussed.
Each time I have to pump these tires up it takes a considerable effort after my large pump broke, something like thirty minutes of work to get it to a reasonable pressure level.
Frustrated, I pulled the wheel off again and this time throughly checked the other, seven-times-patched tube and found no reason as to why it deflated. I couldn’t feel air loss, it felt like it was holding pressure. So I went ahead and reinstalled it. I figured at best the leak was slow enough I could ride if I just over pressured the tire.
That meant more time pumping than I could stand. So I planned on getting it good enough to ride gently but go to a gas station and get it filled up the rest of the way using the ubiquitous free air pumps I had seen since North Dakota. Getting the tire to that point took another ten minutes and then I was out the door to the Conoco station down the street.
I searched around it but found no pump. The lady behind the counter indicated that the other gas station across the small town had one. So I slow rolled to the other station and came upon the pump line on the exterior. The tube sat there, limp, sans head. It was inoperable.
I went in and asked about it with the clerk and she indicated there was a tire place down the road that was likely just opening that I might try. So I trucked down the road and found a woman going through the process of starting the day as I walked in. I explained the situation and she told me to come over to the bay where a young guy came out and inflated my 20psi tube to 43psi at my behest.
By the time I got back to the motel and fully packed it was nearly 9:00. So I figured I may as well get breakfast as the day was already far more delayed than I had hoped. Part of that was also trying to wait until 10am so I could check the local Ebike rental place and see if I could get a fully new innertube.
So I settled into the Brooks Hotel restaurant and had a breakfast of pancakes and eggs. Before leaving I called my wife and we talked for a bit. Eventually it was near enough to 10am to move over to the rental agency.
When I arrived there was a sign that said “by appointment only”, and I called the number to no response. This was yet another dead end and delay, and my frustration was increasing. I just wanted a tube to have some sense of security going over the mountain pass that was ahead.
At just after 10 am I departed in earnest, heading back to the Coeur d’Alene trail system.
Thankfully the trail remained an asphalt surface, and I frequently looked back to check the state of my back tire. It wasn’t apparently losing any pressure and so I rode onward.
The morning was still reasonably cool, but the temperature was projected to top 89 later in the afternoon. The trail remained pleasant and largely sloped downwards, following the track of the creek.
As the valley started to open up, it became considerably more populated. I passed through a few towns and many trail users as I went. At one point I saw a man with panniers on his bike sitting next to it. As I pulled up I asked if he needed any tools, but he seemed to be deep in conversation on the phone. So I gave him his space and moved on.
Down the road was exactly what I had hoped to see: A bike shop directly adjacent to the trail. I stopped in and purchased a replacement tube to be used in a pinch. This took perhaps three minutes, and as I exited the building the rider with panniers pulled up.
His name is John and much to my surprise he was also one of the Warrior Expeditions riders, like Frank, the rider I met before Missoula. We talked for a bit about his journey and our common connection. He was stopping in to get some tools and refreshment. One of the bike shop owners indicated that Frank had been by not long before. So I said my goodbyes and biked on in the hopes of meeting up with Frank along the way.
I rode through the rest of the small town and back into more open countryside between the mountains. Crossing over the river and making perhaps 20mph down the grade.
Turning a bend I saw a figure ahead on a bike with panniers and I sped up to meet them. I recognized the rider and pulled in behind him just as we went under I-90 and shouted “You know I-90 is up there.” Making a joke about how he had stuck to I-90 for most of his journey.
Frank turned back to see me and it was a happy greeting from both of us. I was overjoyed to see him again.
For the next 10 miles we rode side by side, telling stories, talking about life and generally just being the sort of trail buddies we hadn’t had the whole ride. It was absolutely a highlight for me. This being Frank’s first ride across we talked about the sorts of frustrations and surprises that only a fellow rider could understand. Frustrations with roads, and flats and the emotional mess that touring often leaves you in.
We stopped a few times to take some pictures of the scenery, and I showed Frank my trick of throwing objects in the foreground to improve the composition after he remarked he just couldn’t capture the scale of what it felt like to be in these places. I pointed to a flower and told him to put that in the foreground and get the mountain behind. He took a photo and exclaimed it was the best he had taken all trip. We both laughed.
As we talked about routes I realized I hadn’t been listening to my cues, and a turn off the path was up ahead for me. Frank was continuing on towards Plummer at the other head of the path we were on, but I was headed over Fourth of July pass, taking a more northerly tack towards Coeur d’Alene. He suggested we pull over and I look at my map to make sure I hadn’t overshot. I pulled it up and hilariously, the exact crossroads we had stopped at was my turn.
We embraced and shared contact info. I was sad that I couldn’t continue on with Frank, but it just wasn’t in the cards. I wished him well and we departed each other's company. Perhaps not forever… I have a feeling Frank will do this sort of thing again, and I know I will. Maybe… well, let’s just leave it as a maybe with the understanding that we all get the deeper context.
Looking back at the map showed me that this crossroad was also the last reasonable place I could gain some charge before attempting Fourth of July Pass into the Spokane valley. So I stopped at the bar and grill that resided there. I plugged in the bike into an outlet I found on the outside but it wasn’t working. However I noted some string lights which were powered with a plug end, and so that served. I figured it wouldn’t charge as quickly due to the voltage drop, but it was better than nothing.
I ate a light lunch of a BLT and salad, foregoing something heavier as I already had a large meal earlier and for whatever reason my body on this trip just isn’t demanding calories like it had in the past. After eating I sat for a while editing pictures while the bike charged. After about an hour I departed again.
As you’ve heard before… after a meal you try to go to the bathroom. Sometimes things happen, sometimes they don’t. This was a don’t and I knew I would probably regret it, but I soldiered onwards.
True to my expectations, the motion started to break something loose and the sounds and pains of an impending incident were brewing. I started to ponder how and where I might fix the issue. Do I knock on a door and ask if I can detonate some poor person’s bathroom? The thought was wildly unappealing to me and so I continued, hoping.
Up the road there was a junction with I-90 that I was slowing moving towards up a hill. When you’re sliding into first… playing in my head. Frantically I hope beyond hope that this junction leads to some kind of services, looking for the signs that indicate gas or food.
I didn’t initially see them, but then they came into view. Not only was there a gas station there were two. Blessedly I arrived to a Conoco with no line to the bathroom and was able to… uh… remediate the situation.
Now the only urgency ahead of me was summiting the Fourth of July Pass.
I turned onto I-90 and began the process of riding upwards.
I find it a perplexing illusion that when summiting a mountain the terrain often visually seems to indicate you are descending, and so there is this very real feeling that the resistance felt in pedalling against the incline is incomprehensible. Based on sight alone, I should be going fast, but the resistance doesn’t match what you see. It’s only when the grade gets significant can you really visually understand what the slope is doing. It’s almost like looking at one of those wire cubes spinning on a thread. If you blink, it seems to spin one way, and then in a moment it will seem to reverse direction.
I can’t explain this visual confusion, but I’ve experienced it on each of the different passes I’ve summited. When the grade is upwards but gentle, especially with turns it very much looks like a downwards slope. So like many things I don’t understand, I did a little research.
The effect is called the geographical slope illusion and results from a few different things:
Lack of apparent horizon because it’s obscurred by the terrain. The horizon being the biggest cue to changes in slope.
A mismatch between the expected perpendicularity of visual elements within your field of view. For example, if trees grow perpendicular to their surface they can make it seem that there is an apparent discrepancy in slope.
A mismatch between the undulating terrain and the slope of the road surface.
This effect is apparently well known and is a real perceptual mismatch.
Anyway… back to riding:
Climbing up the pass was complicated, yet again by road construction. I saw the road closed sign ahead and the lane shift, but again ignored it. I continued on the shoulder upwards. Eventually concrete hoardings separated me from the freshly layed tarmac to my left. A huge skid-steer was bringing another hoarding down for placement. The man inside pulled adjacent to me and we discussed the pass ahead.
He let me know they were spraying asphalt sealant on the section I was on, and he preferred that I was on the main stripe of tarmac. He offered to help me get my bike over the hoardings onto the main surface, but since I had only gone up about 100ft from their start, I said I’d come around.
I passed multiple different groups of workers on my way up, waving to all of them in their slackjawed glory, as if seeing a fat guy with reflective glasses, riding a fat tire bike with whitewall tires and a baby trailer full of crap up a mountain on an unfinished interstate is not entirely normal.
The summit came and went, and eventually I was over and into the Spokane valley and had pulled off the interstate as it drove past Coeur d’Alene lake towards the city itself. I took this path because it presented a shortcut to a mixed use trail that would greatly reduce the elevation I would need to overcome. After the fourth of July pass there was another 1,500 foot bluff I would otherwise need to mount and I wanted to avoid as much of that as possible. This alternate route instead snaked around the small gorges of created by the headlands that I-90 simply cut across. The overall elevation gain on this path was perhaps 500ft instead.
On my winding path I passed by different aspects of the burgeoning valley. Construction, and farming, and human life in general.
Eventually the climb up began, and it was much more laborious than I had hoped. The day was now as hot as it would get, I was hungry and almost spent from the climb over Fourth of July. So when I turned a bend and saw a difficult section I gritted my teeth and put power into the pedals.
And then I felt a shift under one of my feet. I could see the spindle of my right pedal, the metal rod on which it rotates, sticking out in a way it absolutely should not. I had ignored noises that I knew was a failing bearing in the pedal for the last week or so. Clicking, and high pitched squeaks. I just assumed I would be able to make it to a shop before a complete failure occurred.
I rode on the best I could.
This really was a climb up a legitimate second mountain after the first pass, and from the top I got some decent views of the lake itself.
Coeur d’Alene lake is a remnant of a geological cataclysm that recorded human history simply has no real context to describe, and to understand it requires understanding the event that caused it to exist.
Firstly, we know that the rockies and the valley systems that permiate them were all a result of the forces caused by plates crashing into each other. However this area also has a strike-slip character — which is to say an area where the plates don’t slide one over the other, but rather, largely they slide past each other. That’s lead to the deep ravines in this area surrounded by high bluffs and mountains.
When the last ice age occurred the giant sheets of ice that dominated this northern region had a lobe that descended into the Clark Fork River watershed. At some point this lobe, and perhaps a wall of some 2000ft thick and thousands of feet high fully blocked the flow of the watershed, damming a significant volume of water over thousands of years. This volume overall was thousands of feet deep, and many thousands of square miles in area. A volume that likely overtops the volume of both Lake Erie and Lake Superior combined.
Eventually this dam became weakened at its floating base to the point that a single event that spanned perhaps 48hrs total released more than 500 cubic miles of the volume of water within this basin. This is the largest known volume of flood water to ever have occurred. For my North Carolinian readers, we have recent context to understand the great power of large volumes of water contained within the confines of a mountain valley, but even the massive event that hurricane Helene brought, which scoured the mountain rivers, and fundamentally changed the geography was many thousands of times smaller than this release.
This fundamentally changed the landscape of many of the valley systems I have ridden through, washing out entire mountain sides, creating high valley systems that didn’t exist before, and shaping the terrain in ways that can’t be described by the more normal forces that drive geology in this region.
This deeply shaped the terrain here, causing abberations like dry waterfalls, and great pits and ampitheaters, and even the carved out buttes and canyons that exist in central Washington. Coeur d’Alene is central to this story, because some of the scour from this flood was deposited in the deep ravines that existed here from fault processes, damming up the watershed and leading to the creation of the lake itself.
It’s important to note that this single event was anything but singular. It likely happened 40-100 more times over some 15,000 years. The reason for that is that the ice wall would reform and dam up the valley again and again, leading to the same sorts of releases. So when you hear about the Missoula Lake Flood, it’s a series of floods of enormous power that shaped the land of Montana, Idaho, Washington and Oregon, leaving unusual features like the lake before me behind.
Turning away from the lake took me on a stiff descent as the roadway turned into a hard packed dirt track. This was the signal that I was close to the cut-through that would save me considerable toil. And give the fact that Coeur d’Alene was still 9 miles off and I had two bars of battery remaining, I really couldn’t deal with more climbing.
The route took me into a private neighborhood. And on my map it showed a dirt footpath of perhaps 200ft that I would need to portage across. My pedal though was getting progressively worse.
At the bottom of the ravine I met up with the dirt pathway I was to take. I didn’t take a picture of it at the time because at that moment my pedal literally fell off the spindle entirely.
It was ridable but not ideal. Then I looked up at the cut-through that I was to take. A 20ft near vertical climb up the side of an embankment on a foot path, followed by heavily wooded and flatter areas beyond. I knew this wasn’t feasible. To take it would mean a very difficult portage. To go back would necessitate more than 1000ft of climbing on a failing battery and body, with a nearly unusable right crank arm.
It was time to beg for help. So I awkwardly approached what looked like a 2 million dollar home and knocked. A young woman answered and I explained the situation and asked if there was any way they could use the pickup truck in the drive to take me to the bike shop not 9 miles up the road. She declined because the truck wasn’t theirs, and she was there with her kids. However she allowed me to plug in at the garage of the house I presume they were renting for vacationing while I called the shop.
I called the closest bike shop and the guy over the phone absorbed my story and understood it was just too difficult to get to them. He asked for the address and said he would be there soon.
It took perhaps 20 minutes, and a truck showed up and a guy popped out and basically took the reigns getting the bike and trailer into the truck. I felt like a child, but he seemed very understanding. So we loaded into his truck and went on to the shop. The route he took was the route I would have had to taken and it was clear that it was effectively another mountain pass and so I was glad for the transport.
When we arrived at the shop I unloaded the bike and he quickly joined me. We discussed options and I just went with some mid-grade replacement pedals which he quickly installed.
His name is Mike. I thought I got a picture of him, but apparently it didn’t go through. He and the rest of the shop were super welcoming and made me feel at ease. I asked for a shop sticker to place on the bike and they obliged. $60 later, and about 15 minutes and I was out the door yet again.
As I was taking pictures of the bike assuring friends and family on Facebook that all was well again a random black and white spotted bunny hopped on by. There is no way this isn't some person’s pet, but I didn’t know it would be worth the effort to try and intervene. However I took it as strange sign. Spokane was at this point just 40 miles away, the end almost literally in sight, and there at the end was my friend, Kevin… who owns pet bunnies.
It just seemed like a weird bit of serendipity and I took it that everything would end well.
This was my final motel stay, and I trucked towards the Super 8 that was to recieve me, worrying constantly that my battery would fail, but at the same time with the full confidence that I had the muscle power to soldier on even if it did.
With one flashing bar I pulled into the parking lot. I had made sure during my reservation process to ask for a lower floor room to accommodate the bike. However when I got inside the clerk tried to give me an upper floor room saying “You can look at your bike from the window.” I was firm but polite, that no, I wouldn’t be leaving my multiple thousand dollar bike outside in a sketchy neighborhood. I demanded what I had been promised.
So I got my lower floor room and moved on with life.
Setting the bike up to charge I went out and got some dinner and settled in for the night. Around 10pm I got the strong craving for a McDonalds mango smoothy, and so walked about a mile to go get one. Spotting this hilariously bad sign along the way.
One more riding day. Just one.
Maybe I’ll get some of those ice cream pizza sticks before I go though…