Two Wheels on my Wagon
TWO WHEELS ON MY WAGON
A Bicycle Adventure
in the Wild West
Paul Howard
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Epub ISBN: 9781780570631
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Copyright © Paul Howard, 2010
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The moral right of the author has been asserted
First published in Great Britain in 2010 by
MAINSTREAM PUBLISHING COMPANY
(EDINBURGH) LTD
7 Albany Street
Edinburgh EH1 3UG
ISBN 9781845965617
No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any other means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who wishes to quote brief passages in connection with a review written for insertion in a magazine, newspaper or broadcast
This book is a work of non-fiction based on the life, experiences and recollections of the author. The author has stated to the publishers that, except in such respects not affecting the substantial accuracy of the work, the contents of this book are true
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
TO M, B, T AND F
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
SUSSEX
Chapter 1 Seduction
Chapter 2 A series of unfortunate events
CANADA
Chapter 3 The bear necessities
Chapter 4 A horseshoe for luck
Chapter 5 Bringing up the rear
Chapter 6 Where the wild things are
MONTANA
Chapter 7 Breakfast with Dolly Parton
Chapter 8 Swan Lake
Chapter 9 A river runs through it
Chapter 10 Three kinds of psychopath
Chapter 11 Signs of life
Chapter 12 Singing in the rain
Chapter 13 Here’s mud in your eye
Chapter 14 This is not Peru
Chapter 15 Leaving Montana
IDAHO AND WYOMING
Chapter 16 No room at the inn
Chapter 17 Down the Green River
Chapter 18 Encounter with a cowboy
Chapter 19 Across the Basin
Chapter 20 Saved by a siren
COLORADO
Chapter 21 Moscow calling
Chapter 22 Eat, sleep and be grumpy
Chapter 23 I wandered lonely as a cloud
Chapter 24 Cannibal adventure!
Chapter 25 It’s all downhill from here
NEW MEXICO
Chapter 26 Independence Day
Chapter 27 Through the rainbow
Chapter 28 Losing my innocence in Wal-Mart
Chapter 29 Pie Town
Chapter 30 Geronimo!
Chapter 31 The fall
Chapter 32 Satisfaction
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
There are many people who helped me participate in and complete the Tour Divide, not least the people I met and rode with on the way, and of whom there are too many to name individually. You know who you are, and I hope this book goes some way to repaying the debt of gratitude I owe.
There are also several people to whom I wish to express particular thanks: to Rod Lambert – Seaford’s very own Mr Cycles – for his support, enthusiasm and lessons in bike maintenance; to Eddie Start of Open Spaces in Brighton for his fund of useful advice about life in the wilds and the best kit to take.
Thanks also to Tony Harris at ATB Sales, distributors of Marin Bikes, Ian Young at Zyro, distributors of Camelbak and Altura products, and Dain Zaffke at WTB, manufacturers of Nanoraptor tyres.
I would neither have trained nor enjoyed all the riding as much as I did without the company on many rides of Ian Craig. I could still be stuck in Silver City were it not for the generosity of its cycling community in general and Barin Beard in particular.
I would like to thank all those behind the Tour Divide, especially those who made it possible for family and friends to follow the race with such enthusiasm (and to those same family and friends for their virtual support, which had very real benefits). Particular mention must also go to Matthew Lee, who found time while organising the event and preparing his own ride to guide me from novice mountain biker to Tour Divide finisher.
Finally, thank you to Catherine, Molly, Benjamin, Thomas and Freddie. I’ll only do it again if one (or more) of you wants to come with me.
SUSSEX
CHAPTER 1
SEDUCTION
It seemed like a good idea at the time, though the context no doubt had a lot to do with it. Driven to despair by a prolonged stint at a grey job in a grey office in one of London’s greyer suburbs, I eventually sought refuge via the virtual distraction of the Internet. After extensive and disconsolate searching through the inevitable chaff, I finally found something to fire my imagination.
That something was a news story on a cycling website about the inaugural edition of the world’s longest mountain bike race. The Tour Divide was just about to start in Banff in Canada, and would take those bold or foolish enough to have signed up nearly 2,800 miles down the spine of the Rockies to the Mexico border.
Curiosity quickly became obsession as the race itself unfurled. Although physically still very much trapped in my mundane surroundings, I was transported vicariously to the magnificent Rocky Mountains. The story of sixteen cyclists attempting to ride such a long distance off-road, to a high point of nearly 12,000 feet and with an overall altitude gain the equivalent of scaling Mount Everest seven times, was compelling. The bears, rattlesnakes, tarantulas and mosquitoes all encountered en route merely added to the drama.
It quickly became clear the story was as much one of survival as victory. Unlike the Tour de France, there were no entry criteria and no entry fee. Nor was there any prize money. There were also no defined stages to keep racers together. Riders soon became strung out over several US states. Half dropped out, not always those near the back of the field. More notable still, there was no backup or external support allowed, other than that which could be found along the route. Everybody started together in Banff, and everybody had to try and reach the same remote border post in the New Mexico desert by following the same route along the Continental Divide, but apart from that they were on their own, often quite literally.
It had everything life in an office in London didn’t. I had emails and deadlines. It had solitude and timelessness. I had crowded commuter trains and a horizon broken only by shopping malls and office blocks. It had cycling and it had mountains, thousands upon thousands of them. It fulfilled all the requirements of the essential equation of Albert Einstein’s ground-breaking theory of cycling relativity: E=(mc)2. Enjoyment = (mountains × cycling) squared.
‘I thought of it while riding my bike,’ the great man had said after his eureka moment.
He also said: ‘Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving.’
Full of useful tips, that Einstein. Not wanting to contradict such a profound thinker, I decided to take his equation to heart. The Tour Divide had seduced me.
While I had been happy to be tempted when sitting in a London office at a safe distance from the badlands and the b
ears, a sense of guilt at having had my head turned was the overwhelming emotion when, six months later, I had bought a plane ticket and registered my intended participation. For a start, there was the small matter of not having a mountain bike. Indeed, I’d never owned a mountain bike.
The fact they had two wheels and two pedals like the road bikes I was used to was some reassurance. Yet this carried little weight in the face of my previously ambiguous experience of actually riding off-road, which amounted, as far as I could recall, to two fairly disturbing misadventures. The first came in the form of somehow becoming trapped in a bone-dry canyon in France. An hour-long lunchtime ride turned into a seven-hour survival epic as I ran out of water under a Provençal sun and ended up climbing first down and then up two twenty-foot rock walls – with a bike. The second was slightly less alarming – it was in Sussex on the South Downs – and largely involved lots of cursing at the discomfort induced by such an inefficient means of progress over bumpy ground. Nevertheless, it culminated in a silent vow never to become a mountain biker. Neither had whetted my appetite for more.
Then there were the not insubstantial reservations expressed by family and friends. Most involved questioning my sanity, which was not a particularly unusual activity. Novelty came in the form of encouragement – of a sort – from Chris Boardman.
‘I really hope the adventure goes well for you. You are, of course, raving mad.’
To be considered mad by friends and family was one thing. To be considered mad by an Olympic gold medallist and Tour de France yellow jersey wearer was another level of compliment entirely.
Thus reassured, I made tentative steps towards securing a bike. A good bike, if possible. With the rider – me – possessing uncertain psychological and physical competence, an effective pedalling machine was clearly a prerequisite for success. But how would I recognise a bike good enough to cycle 2,800 miles in less than a month?
The answer came from Mr Cycles. Although strictly speaking this was the name of a shop in Seaford, rather than its proprietor, Rod, the two quickly became interchangeable. After much discussion, most of which I could only pretend to understand, I was provided with a Marin Nail Trail 29er. Marin, I was told, was the manufacturer, and Nail Trail was the name of the bike. ‘29er’, however, had me lost.
‘It means it’s got bigger wheels,’ Mr Cycles explained.
I must have looked even blanker than usual.
‘They’ll make you go faster.’
It seemed unlikely, but it was a straw I was happy to clutch at, especially when confronted with the opaque vocabulary of my few mountain biking acquaintances.
‘If you want me to school you bro’ we’ll go out, throw down a few shapes off a booter and see if we can’t stick some sick lines,’ said Dom, a friend from the office in which I had discovered the Tour Divide.
He meant well, I was sure, though exactly what he meant I had no idea. By way of reassurance, Cool Dom then said something about ‘berms’. This succeeded not in enlightening me but in making me think of Inspector Clouseau’s attempts to single-handedly destroy the established tenets of English pronunciation.
‘Not now, Kato, I ’ave fallen onto my berm . . .’
This might not be an accurate interpretation of the mountain biking vernacular, but it was certainly an accurate description of the occasionally unbalanced start to my career as an off-road rider. In fact, my first few rides involved a very convincing, if unwitting, impression of the hapless Clouseau were he to have been transferred from his 2CV to two wheels and a rocky path. Several potentially humiliating tumbles were only not humiliating because of the absence of an audience. Lying inelegantly in a clump of nettles, however, was humiliating whether the incident became a public affair or not. Still, seduction is a mysterious business. In spite of all the perfectly good reasons for not participating, not least of which were the nettles, Einstein and the Tour Divide had won me over. Whether it was a good idea or not, I had decided to give it a go.
CHAPTER 2
A SERIES OF UNFORTUNATE EVENTS
Even once I had come to some sort of accord with my bike to try and avoid our causing each other mutual harm, misadventures in training were numerous.
Shortly after Easter, I decided that an attempt should be made to ride the South Downs Way in one day. Such a ride was locally perceived as the very acme of achievement, but a comparison between the South Downs and the Rockies quickly demonstrated the apparent futility of this gesture.
In purely geographical terms the difference was clear enough. The Rockies measure 3,000 miles in length; the South Downs 100 miles. The high point of the Rockies is 14,440 feet, on the imposing Mount Elbert in Colorado. In contrast, Butser Hill measures just 891 feet, a mere one sixteenth of the size. I could find no records of anyone having suffered from altitude sickness on Butser Hill.
The differences in climate are equally stark. The average minimum temperature in January in Steamboat Springs, roughly halfway along the route, is –17°C. The average high in July is +28°C. In Brighton in Sussex, the figures are +3°C and +16°C respectively. Steamboat averages 183 inches of snow per year. Brighton has no records. The extremes regularly recorded at each end of my intended ride were even more marked.
Then came wildlife. The list of dangerous creatures that inhabit the mountains of North America is enough to send shivers down even David Attenborough’s spine: bears (black and brown, or grizzlies as they are more commonly known), mountain lions, wolves, moose, snakes, scorpions, tarantulas . . . In Sussex, the most dangerous animals I was likely to encounter were mad cows.
And, sorry as I was to say it, inconsiderate fellow travellers. The threat from this latter category should not be dismissed lightly. Sunny weekends, I learnt, attracted cyclists to the Downs like flies to a cow pat, often with behaviour to match. So intent were these weekend warriors on demonstrating their belief that they were Lance Armstrong’s real rivals that common civility was dispensed with. Shutting gates? Not for them. Thanking others for holding gates open? A waste of breath . . . Failing to forewarn other cyclists or walkers of their impending arrival? What’s it got to do with them anyway . . . I soon discovered that the only possible way to deal with such rudeness was to help already puce faces turn pucer by being ostentatiously altruistic in my own interactions with them; it helped, too, to overtake such misanthropes between gates and to repeat the dose at the next obstacle.
That most mild-mannered of figures, the rambler, was often little better. Quite why it was necessary to export road rage onto the nation’s bridleways, when cars should long since have been forgotten, was a mystery. Yet the mere sight of a cyclist was enough to drive some pedestrians into a frenzy; they couldn’t all be London cabbies with a personal vendetta induced by the provocative antics of cycle couriers. Other variations on the same theme included those who isolated themselves from the world around them with an iPod and headphones. Their being oblivious to others was OK; my unwittingly startling them out of their esoteric trance by passing them on a bike was not.
Even for those not cocooned in their own little world, interaction with cyclists was frequently antagonistic. It may have drawn mockery from youths gathered at bus stops, but I had fitted a bicycle bell to alert people to my presence. It generated a nice, tinkly sort of noise, designed to be a friendly compromise between no warning at all and something that might be considered too strident (such as an air-horn, or a cry of ‘Get out of my bloody way, you day-dreaming path-hoggers’). Responses varied. Those a little hard of hearing, or too deeply engaged in conversation, were often oblivious to my tinkling. ‘Why don’t you have a bell? You should let people know you’re coming . . .’ they’d say, affronted at what they perceived to be my intentional impersonation of a stealth mountain biker.
Then there were those whose hearing was clearly more acute.
‘You don’t need to ring a bell, I knew you were there . . .’ they’d declaim, affronted at what they perceived to be my impersonation of a juggernaut. I must
confess to having at times dreamt longingly of a processional chariot with which to crush them, but managed to resist the temptation to turn my bicycle into one.
Nevertheless, with the start of the Tour Divide now less than two months away and the height of my off-road riding accomplishments so far having been a handful of three-hour rides, the South Downs it was going to have to be. Something – anything – had to be done, and they had the distinct virtue of being right on my doorstep.
Accordingly, one misty morning in April, Ian, a cycling friend, and I rode out of Winchester, intent on reaching Eastbourne by nightfall. Actually, intent implies a degree of earnest endeavour that was curiously lacking. We ambled through the dappled, early morning shade of the trees so characteristic of the western Downs and, while most continued to slumber, admired West Sussex at its finest. The greys and blues of the first hour slowly became infinite shades of green and gold as the mist dissipated. By Old Winchester Hill we were bathed in glorious sunshine. We were also lost, but even this couldn’t wake us from our torpor. Less surprisingly, nor could the sausage rolls and pasties that I consumed, much to Ian’s consternation, at the Queen Elizabeth Country Park as we crossed the A3.
Such lethargy was exacerbated by obstacles not entirely of our own making. At the pub on top of Devil’s Dyke, it took over half an hour to accomplish the seemingly straightforward tasks of buying and consuming a pint of Coke and using the facilities, of which we could only find one and for which there was a considerable queue. I waited impatiently, all the while conscious that, hopping around in my cycling shoes on the tiled floor, I sounded like a demented tap dancer. Those in the queue with me, fresh from an afternoon of inactivity and alcohol consumption, clearly agreed that I was at least demented.
At last we were inspired to make a concerted effort to recoup lost time. Past Jack and Jill windmills we tried to raise our pace, but it was too little, too late. At nearly 6 p.m. at Ditchling Beacon the game was up. Stymied by impending darkness and seduced by the delightful picnic provided by Camilla, a friend of Ian’s, that was designed to fuel our final push, we conceded defeat. To console ourselves, we drank tea and ate malt loaf, pouring honey into each other’s ears and telling ourselves our achievements were still considerable. Nevertheless, by the time I returned to Hurstpierpoint, I had ridden scarcely 80 miles in more than 12 hours. I had also suffered noticeable sunburn on my south-facing right arm, hardly a promising portent for the deserts of New Mexico, should I ever make it that far.