Distance: 160.98km
Time: 5h29m22s
Avg Spd: 29.3km/hr
Climbing: 652m
My first century! And in a respectable time, despite more mechanical issues.
Around 64km yesterday, Karel broke a spoke. Not sure how, but it happened. The day after Brandon broke a spoke. And they have the same wheelset. Thankfully we knew approximately what to do to get him riding again. We just tied off the broken spoke, and attempted to re-true the wheel to allow us to limp back to camp. We decided it wasn't safe to ride at over 30km/hr, so our nice, long day of downhill riding that we would have done around 40km/hr was a little slower than we hoped.
We did have some excitement getting our day underway. The rain storm we had on Friday night (the first rain in eight months) was apparently hard enough to do some damage to the local highway. As we were preparing to ride after breakfast, our tour manager reigned everyone in and told us that NM-491 had washed out, and it was impassable. The only detour would have been a 160 mile day, instead of a 100 mile day - not an option for us. Instantly the mood in camp deflated. Everyone had been nervously looking forward to our longest day yet, and were not happy at having to put it off, even though we could have easily spent another day at the beautiful Rehoboth Christian School.
Five minutes later, we got word from a State Trooper that the road was actually passable by bikes, and although the highway was closed to traffic, they would allow us to walk our bikes across the sketch section. I've never seen people so excited to ride 100 miles! The added bonus of the highway being closed meant we had virtually no traffic the entire ride!
I rode again with Brandon & Karel - the "Top Guns."
The road was washed out at a big culvert intended to divert the flash flood waters from the nearby hills under the highway. It looked to me that because the area was under construction, the culvert hadn't been properly backfilled, and a 3-foot long section of road sluffed out for virtually the entire width of the road. By the time we arrived, the contractor had most of it filled in, and it was quite safe to pass by bike.
The road into Shiprock, was rolling hills. We would summit a rise only to see a brief descent followed again by a hill at the horizon line. There are all sorts of rock formations around town, that are apparently remnants of volcanic action. As gorgeous as it is, we faced some tough head-winds for the final 20 miles of the ride. After a full day of riding, I was grateful for my fellow riding buddies and being able to draft off of them.
The town of Shiprock is named after one of the rock formations just outside of town. Turns out I only snapped a picture of it in the background of our campsite for today... you can see it just to the left of the Bethel Christian Reformed Church sign.
Last night was a late-night laundry run and played some cards while we waited.
Today is a day of rest. My team was on sweep, so we prepped a great breakfast (under the direction of the amazing kitchen staff) of french toast and bacon. (There may or may not be an awesome picture of Adam and I with our meals after we finished cooing.) We joined the local church for their morning service, and took some time to organize some our baskets. Now we are sitting in McDonalds using the slowest Wi-Fi ever. (Be grateful for the pictures today, as they each took 3 minutes to load!)
Our new route for the week is posted on the Sea to Sea website. It won't be as hard as Wolf-Creek Pass, but it will be a tough week of climbing.
No comments:
Post a Comment