The climb through the foothills up to a high arid plateau above 8,000 feet proved daunting but we were ultimately successful at keeping on plan and are now well into Colorado with beautiful views of the dazzling white Rockies all around us.
After a short flat ride after leaving our lodge, we turned into the mountains and had a fifteen mile steep climb with winds not at our backs for a change. They strengthened throughout the day and by mid-afternoon there were 40 mph gusts. The last 13 miles were straight south, and the increasing winds were out of the west. Gusts caught our panniers and tried to push us around, so as Chris said when we got to town, “I feel like I’ve been wrestling all afternoon”.
The same increasing winds out of the southwest are forecast tomorrow – so more wrestling (or bronc riding which came to mind to me during one hairy stretch) is possible tomorrow – but we know and trust our bikes and will try to get an earlier start before the wind builds.
It was bittersweet to leave Wyoming today. We’ve been through many states on this cross continental trek but Chris and I agree we’ve never been treated as well. Literally every interaction we had in Wyoming over a week of riding was a positive one, and we are so grateful to our two snow angels, who, though they were most certainly on their way to some planned destination, helped us get out of snowstorms before things turned dire.
There’s a backstory here: When I was a young boy growing up in the New York City metro area, I became fascinated with Wyoming and tried to convince my parents to move us all there. I was ten or so and would write to the Wyoming Chamber of Commerce and such, who would send me lots of brochures and such, with which I would try to engage my father in conversations about moving our family to Wyoming. It made so much sense to me: on the one hand lots and lots of people in a small place, on the other hand almost no people in a very large place. The brochures stacked up and the conversations hit a dead end when my father asked me what he would do for a living in Wyoming – a tough question for a ten-year-old to answer.
But the place had always seemed magical and wonderfully foreign to me, and our experience riding our bikes through it this last week did nothing to dim the magic for me. It was a wonderful week there full of interactions with gracious and considerate people!
