The Ol’ Dusty Trail: Part Two
By Dakota Jones
Over the next two weeks I set out to see what could be done on my bike. I have a cyclocross bike, which I soon found out means that a whole lot can be done on my bike. I like to think that my bike is basically a more lightweight version of the first mountain bikes. So in addition to moving fast on pavement, I can also ride on dirt roads, even gravelly and washboarded ones. Even some trails are within my bike’s grasp, as I showed at Montana’s Big Sky resort while covering the Rut 50k with iRunfar.com. To get to my post at the final aid station, from which point I would send out updates on top runners, I needed to be at the top of one of the ski lifts. So I took my fully rigid cross bike up the cat tracks that wound through the ski area. These are bumpy dirt roads that give access to major points on the mountain for snowcats and maintenance vehicles, and my bike handled them just fine. I even outstripped a mountain biker on the descent (although he might have had a flat.) By early September, halfway through the non-running sentence handed down by the doctors, I was really getting into the whole bike thing.
So that left only one option. Since with my busted foot I couldn’t run either the Rut or Spain’s killer Ultra Pirineu, nor could I go to Iceland for a Salomon, my schedule was wide open. So I biked home. From Big Sky resort in southern Montana to Durango, in southwestern Colorado. I figured I needed an adventure and I’d always wanted to try bike touring. Plus, the September weather was perfect — warm days, cool nights and far fewer cars on the road now that summer was officially over. I figured I could do it in a week or ten days.
Lacking panniers, or even a rack over my rear wheel, I instead tied my sleeping bag under my seat with an old tube and my ¾-length sleeping pad under the frame with my mom’s bootlaces (sorry mom.) I then put everything else that I could think of into this new 22L Salomon pack called the S-Lab Peak Ultra. It’s designed for lightweight backpacking, but wasn’t that basically what I was doing? Lightweight backpacking, but on a bike, and on roads instead of trails. I took with me enough gear to stay alive, though maybe not enough to be comfortable, and in the early afternoon of September 7 I started off down the road from Big Sky, wearing a 15-pound bright blue backpack and a sheepish grin. A cool wind blew down from the north.
I finally had a purpose again. Even if my entire direction in life was a physical one, that was good enough after nearly a month of aimless wandering. I set my sights on Durango, 900 miles away by my route, and started pedaling.
Having run long-distance races for several years, I was curious to see what, if any, similarities exist between that sport and long-distance bike-riding. Within three days I had pinpointed a few similarities, and some striking differences as well. Long-distance bike riding, like long-distance running, is really a matter of just putting one foot in front of the other. When considered in terms of the entire project (100 miles on foot or 900 miles on bike), the scale is crushing and overwhelming. But when you simply focus on putting one foot in front of the other, all day long, every day, you realize after some time that you’re really making progress, that this goal might actually be possible. When I was in Montana, Colorado seemed more like an abstract concept than a real place. I knew how long it takes to drive between the two places, and that knowledge was combined with this concept I have that you can’t really experience anything or truly feel a place by driving through it. Having driven to Montana and back twice in my life, I nevertheless felt like I knew nothing of the terrain in between my stops. This was a rather negative way to think, and I spent my first night huddled in West Yellowstone contending with a dark lonesome nothingness that pressed in from all sides. Even the second night, 110 miles further on and in the north end of the Wind River mountains, I clutched to my book with the desperate grip of the fearful. I love mountains and open spaces, and I need to be alone often. But I love them when they are a choice, and the first few nights of any expedition can be a struggle to come to terms with that choice. My sense of self radiated outward in the great Western space until it vanished over the horizons. But I still had a direction.
Movement is a form of distraction which I embraced early on this trip. In the morning cold of my third day I topped the highest point I would reach in Wyoming — Togwotee Pass in the the Wind River mountains. This was the first landmark to make me think I might be making some real progress. I descended down the other side in a blaze of wonder. The landscape in northern Wyoming is extraordinary. The varied textures of prairie, woodland and alpine coalesce in a unique blend of geography that has set this place apart for centuries. One of the first areas in the West to be explored by white men, and fabulously beautiful though it may be for parts of the year, it nevertheless remains one of the wildest areas in the lower 48 due to a combination of difficulties such as aridity, high winds and extreme winter cold. This is, of course, why I love it so much, and I sang aloud as I descended the pass, knowing that the only people around me for miles were locked up in the infrequent vehicles that passed by in both directions.
The first town I reached after the pass was Dubois, Wyoming. I knew the place was small, and when I passed the sign announcing the town I could see only a gas station, tackle shop and an old restaurant. I rode past all this, thinking surely there would be a grocery store or somewhere to get food. But there was nothing. So I turned around, thinking, “well, there sure ain’t much to Dubois….” I went into the gas station and got a pile of food to eat for lunch and to bring with me for the rest of the day. When I stepped up to the register I heard someone say my name. Looking around, I saw that one of the employees knew me.
“Hey!” he said brightly. “It’s Chris. I’m Tony Krupicka’s brother in law.”
I could hardly believe the coincidence. As I shook his hand I remembered that, yeah, Tony had mentioned his sister and her husband live somewhere in central Wyoming, he’d visited them before. And in fact I had met Chris and Katrina at Leadville in 2012, when Chris ran the race. Turns out, he owns that gas station in Dubois. The coincidence seemed amazing to me, and even more so when I left the gas station and rode past the next hill to find that Dubois is actually a real town with shops and hotels and grocery stores and a high school. If I had known that, I never would have stopped in the gas station. But for whatever reason I did, and there I met a friend on the road. As I passed through town I stopped at Katrina’s coffee shop too (they pretty much have the tourist market cornered in Dubois) to say hi. Then, bolstered by the goodwill of old friends, I rode on into the prairie.
That chance meeting was only the beginning of what eventually came to define my bike tour. Now that I’m done I can tally up the miles ridden each day or the style that I camped in or the food I ate or the number of days the whole trip took, but what really stands out are the people I met. Something was different about this bike trip from any other type of travelling I have done in my life. For some reason I was approachable, or interesting, or maybe just a curiosity. But whatever the case, people talked to me. People I had never met before, who I’ll never see again, came up to say hi, to ask questions, to just chat awhile. My most distinct memories of the trip are of those instances when I met someone new. Drinking a root beer in the shade in Muddy Gap, Wyoming, with the open prairie spread out before me, I talked with a guy about my age from Casper (where I was born) who told me that he was working to decontaminate mine waste on rural farms. A 71-year-old man on the Colorado border told me about the fancy bike he got from Germany as he celebrated his birthday by riding from Jackson to Colorado Springs. An art professor in Gunnison told me without ego that just that very morning he had realized he could draw anything he wanted, and do it well, while an 8-year-old boy in Lake City told me about the song the church had sung when his dad died and the way it made his mother cry. Even the clearly-insane homeless man in the mountains above Silverton who ranted at me while I changed a flat about religion, the cops, land-use rights, weapons, prison and The Righteous made me feel good. I find that I get upset sometimes when I think about some of the bad things humans have done collectively, like the way we have degraded the environment or perpetrated wars on ourselves. But on this trip I was struck with the realization that people are unique and opinionated and intelligent and very different when you get to know them on a personal level. For the first time in my life I was able to get to know a lot of these very-different people on a personal level which has largely escaped my orbit until now. It was a surreal experience, to be honest. I felt almost as if I were in a movie.
The word “travel” has more than one meaning these days. The straight-up literal meaning is to move from one place to another. “I travelled from Taco Bell to the liquor cabinet,” I might have said a month ago. But “travel” can also have a connotation of something much more than just transportation. Travelling is a concept that has been promoted for centuries as a way of gaining experience in life by seeing other places and cultures, experiencing challenges and fears and stepping outside of one’s comfort zone in the pursuit of personal growth. The idea of travelling is almost synonymous with adventure, and indeed nowadays people feel the need to specify when they’re referring to the second type of travelling by using the phrase “adventure travel.” Someone could “travel” to Des Moines and back for a three-day business trip without really “travelling” at all, in the old romantic sense. But if they were to walk across Mongolia or sail the west coast of Africa, well, that would be pretty adventurous. Even just walking to Des Moines would be an adventure. I guess the difference could come down to the focus on the experience. If you’re just trying to get from one place to another, you’re not “travelling.” But if the whole purpose of the trip is the movement between points A and B, which really sort of stand as arbitrary markers to give the journey starting and ending points, then you would be really travelling in the best sense of the word.
Since I was young I have dreamed of travelling. And since I was eighteen I have had some pretty astonishing opportunities to go all over the world for running and climbing. I have been on five continents and in at least twelve foreign countries, meeting hundreds of wonderful people along the way and participating in some pretty wild-ass events. But until I rode my bike from Montana to Colorado, I never felt like I was truly “travelling” in the old authentic style. I struggled to meet people and I spent too much money that ultimately insulated me from the places I was in. But on the bike trip, even though I had the benefit of a bicycle and modern roads, I still felt that I was following in the conceptual wakes of the real legendary travellers, guys like Eric Shipton or Roald Amundsen who used to set out into the true unknown simply for the challenge and adventure. Though the circumstances, means and scale were (vastly) different for my trip than for men like them, the spirit was the same: to choose a place to go and a means of getting there, and to set off with just a minimum of gear and knowledge. What comes of it will come. The rewards of taking an authentic style vindicated the time and the effort required to accomplish the task. I have never felt more inspired to try something new than now.
I never finished my bike trip, though. On the penultimate day I blew out the sidewall of my front tire while cruising down a dirt road above Silverton, and the closest bike shop was in Durango. I was forced to cut the trip short and get a ride home. But being curtailed felt symbolic. I wasn’t finished biking on that trip, but even if I had reached Durango I wouldn’t have been finished. I’ll be a long-distance runner for the rest of my life, but I don’t think I’ll ever be finished biking now either. I have a lot more Travelling to do yet.
