Greetings from NYC (after ending my ride in Seattle),
While I didn't maintain a blog during my journey this past summer, I think my photos tell much of the story, so please check them out, and I'd appreciate any feedback.
In all I rode 3,400 miles, beginning with a four-day solo warmup from Ft. Collins to Leadville, CO, then joining 2,000 other folks on the week-long Bicycle Tour of Colorado (BTC) beginning and ending in Gunnison and traveling south into New Mexico, crossing and re-crossing the Continental Divide. From there my friends Carol, Steve, and Larry drove me southeast, dropping me off in the Oklahoma Panhandle, and I rode northwest through Kansas, Nebraska, Wyoming (across the Big Horns and through Yellowstone), Montana, Idaho, Oregon, and Washington - a 37-day solo ride. Along the way I soaked up a lot of history, beginning with a visit to the No Man's Land Historical Museum located on the campus of Oklahoma Panhandle State University (OPSU) in Hopewell, OK ...
... where I learned about the origin of the panhandle as a "Neutral Strip" of territory for 40 years, until 1890; and there was also an exhibition detailing the region's experience in the 1930s as the epicenter of the Dust Bowl.
For more photos that I took while visiting the museum, visit this address:
http://picasaweb.google.com/cjshuttleworth/DustBowlEtc#
Also early in my travels, I stopped in Dodge City, Kansas, known as the "Buffalo Capital of the World" until the buffalo were gone and then the "Wickedest Little City in America" when it was the endpoint of the Western Trail driving Longhorn cattle north from Texas and Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson served as local lawmen. (There's not much to recommend Dodge City now; there's a statue of Wyatt Earp one block from Gunsmoke Street, and a liquor store named after him with a convenient drive-up window ...)
Dodge City was also on the Santa Fe Trail; west of town was an historic site where wagon wheel ruts are still visible. And as I traveled north and west, I followed other historic routes, especially the Oregon Trail from Nebraska to Wyoming and again while crossing Oregon; the Bozeman Trail in Wyoming and Montana; and the Lewis and Clark route in Montana, Idaho, and Oregon.
While traveling alone, I was happy to ride all day, from 7:00 a.m. or so until 4:00 p.m. or later, so while not breaking any speed records, I averaged 90+ miles per day except for the week in Idaho when I rode along with a group of foreign cyclists who were following Adventure Cycling's Transamerica route west. Meanwhile the weather was consistently pleasant: I love the dry air of the West, and while the Eastern Seaboard sweltered, I enjoyed temperatures that were cooler than I was used to. Since 2006 triple-digit days have been frequent; this year a lot of mornings were downright cold, especially in Colorado - in Creede (elevation 8500 ft.) it dropped below freezing and I woke to find ice in my tent from condensation. And rarely did afternoon temperatures rise above the 80s. The one exception was in Hell's Canyon, but that's why it has its name ...
What made the ride difficult this year was the wind - stronger than usual and, as I wast traveling west, nearly always against me. Again, there were exceptions. In Kansas the wind was southerly so I rode north as much as possible. The day I left Dodge City, when I was forced to ride west, the southerly crosswind was so strong that it took nearly three hours to travel 24 miles from Dighton to Ness City; but from there, turning northward, the tailwind blew me up to Oakley - 45 miles in two and a half hours, listening to the grass hiss as I sailed across the prairie.
It was a 143-mile day, averaging 15.1 mph. Compare that to the day I rode from Cody, Wyoming to Yellowstone in an all-day headwind that was the most relentless I ever faced, averaging 7.3 mph and spending near nine hours in the saddle to cover 64 miles. I was proud of myself that day for keeping my composure; besides the wind it was lovely day, comfortably warm and sunny, and so while I rode I just tooled along, making what progress I could and reminding myself "If bicycle travel were easy, everyone would be out here; this is part of the experience." People sympathized, and commiserated. One couple with a pair of bikes strapped to their car stopped to offer their condolences, knowing what I was going through. And when I stopped in a small grocery store - the only one for 50 miles - a guy buying gas paid the cashier for my soda.
Here's the weird part: while taking photos that day, at one point I looked skyward waiting for a cumulus cloud to pass by the sun, and its puffy whiteness against the rich blue of the sky was so dramatic that I snapped a picture. It was the only time I've ever done that - aimed my camera lens directly upward; and looking at the photo now, were I religious, I could Biblically interpret the diabolical winds I faced. Do you see what I see?
One other evil element I encountered this year was the aggressive and vitriolic anti-Obama sentiment, the public display of which seemingly supplanting the attacks on abortion rights that littered the landscape throughout the Heartland before we had a black president. Here's one sign I edited out of the slideshow:
I encountered such signs from Colorado to Idaho, as well as bumper stickers and even a license plate on an over-sized pickup declaring "Obama" an acronym for "One Big-Ass Mistake America." The shift in focus led me to see to a link between the issues. At its core, it seems to me now, the Middle American right-to-life movement is motivated by a deep-seated, perhaps unconscious racism, wanting to salvage every incipient white as a bulwark against the rising tide of people of color. Here's a Kansas sign circa 2009 not in evidence this year and seemingly outmoded when there are bigger fish to fry:
I'll let the rest of my photographs speak for themselves.
-Charlie
