I thought I had experienced the most technical descent on the ride out of Helena, but ohhh boy was I wrong. The steep, never-ending climb up Fleecer Ridge yesterday and the subsequent mile-long screamer down the face made me think of climbing Half Dome in Yosemite National Park. Except that there, you have steel cables to pull yourself along whereas yesterday on Fleecer Ridge I had zero cables to hold on to for support and I had to maneuver a 70 lb squirrely thing on wheels. I thought that bike was going to kill me yesterday- I thought I might just keel over and have a heart attack from the exertion of pedaling up the stupidly steep ascent, and on the descent- as I jogged alongside my bike it felt like Woman vs Gravity. It is a tough call who won, as there were plenty of scrambles and frantic moments but in the end I got down the ridge with my bike and I kept the rubber side down the whole way. I should mention that the ridge was so gorgeous that I stopped dead in my tracks once I crested the top of the beast. Peering down into the valley I felt like a kid striding into Disneyland for the first time. The trail improved once I got off the ridge, but I was still dodging rocks the size of peanut butter jars and at one point I questioned whether I was on the trail or a riverbed. Anything goes on the Great Divide in terms of riding surfaces. Some suspension on the frame would have been nice.
Chilling. The calm before the storm (that is, the storm of rocks and the heat wave making steep Fleecer Ridge even more difficult)
I've been alone for 3 nights now, and I really count my alone-ness by the nights because that's when I am most painfully aware of being by myself. The first night, I didn't sleep at all. My feet froze into icicles partway through the night despite my thick Giro wool socks, but there was something else besides the cold that was preventing me from falling asleep. There was a heavy weight in my stomach that someone drunk was going to pull up beside my tent in the dead of night and throw me into the back of their truck (unlikely), or that a hungry grizzly would lumber over, lured by the scent of my warm body, and try to take a nibble out of my calf (same low probability, I hope). Rationally, I knew that neither of these would happen. I had swung my food over a high branch far from my tent, and it looked like no one would be bothering me. I was the only person in the entire campsite, which apparently the USFS decided to stop maintaining. There was no water, toilet paper, trash cans, or sign of any maintenance. It was kind of cool- just these picnic tables and fire rings overgrown with grasses and signs of human life here and there- a flattened soup can in a fire ring, a cigarette butt under a picnic table- people had camped here at some point in the not-so-distant past.
My second night alone, I didn't sleep either, but the heavy weight of fear in my stomach was replaced with over 200 mg of caffeine consumed roughly 4 hours before I went to bed. I stopped in Butte on my way to camp where I drank 24 oz of iced tea and some sort of blended coffee drink at a cafe that seduced me with its wifi and the fact that it was the old jailhouse. Notable about Butte is its scarred surface from decades of mining, the infamous Berkeley Pit, which is filling with toxic liquids just like Berkeley, CA fills with fog in the summertime minus the toxicity (okay, some, with smog from the Bay Area), and the BEST MUSEUM EVER which I might not I found if it werent for my wrong turn. A wrong turn can end up being a right turn I learned, as I missed my first cue of the entire trip and had to figure out an alternate way to get into Butte. I took a dirt road that paralleled the interstate so I knew I was headed in the right direction, and it popped me out at the "World Musuem of Mining and Hell's Roaring Gulch". I found myself in a replica mining town- complete with an underground mining shaft you could walk into and a Legion of the Knights of Pythagorias. The historic town had storefronts you could peer into, and the museum itself had a history of Montana mining and a specatcular minerals exhibit. I love rocks. And Butte is awesome too- contrary to what my Great Divide guidebook and countless conversations had lead me to believe.
Butte, mining giant
My third night alone (last night), I slept! Woohoo! I am getting more comfortable with the idea that bears are unlikely to attack me, as are strangers in the wilderness, and should either do so I have a can of unused bear spray except for .002 g that Ben sprayed on me accidentally back in Canada because he "wanted to see how it works". To be fair, he hadn't directed the spray at me, and it makes sense to practice using it before a bear is on your doorstep. And now I know that the spray is in fact debilitating. I also think I slept well last night because it was relatively warm out, in fact I think it's colder out right now at 8am than it was during the night. My fingers are going a little numb as I type this, but if you notice, I'm doing a great job of typing my "a"s and "s"s which means that my left pinky finger is improving! While in Helena, my amazing host (the one and only Colleen Casey)gave me a little bag of vitatmin B-12 pills since she thinks I might have a defficiency in this vitamin that is responsible for maintaining a healthy nervous system. Anything to rebuild my nerves in my hand, which went numb a little less than a week ago from riding 60 mile over the bumpiest trail with an improperly angled handlebar grip that pinched my nerve.
So things are looking up- there are 2 cyclists riding the Divide up the trail ahead of me who I met in Helena and was planning to ride with, but on our first day of riding together I had to stop and adjust my pack and told them to keep going. I haven't seen them since, but we exchanged numers and every now and then I get a text reporting where they are camping. I also can see their tracks in the dirt, which is more comforting than I would have ever expected, knowing that I am on the right track, and hot on their heels. Yet another reason why dirt is better than pavement ;)