PowerCycle

07/14 Never in my life have I seen so much wildlife in one place! There were moose, mountain goats, mountain sheep, caribou, elk, deer and a beaver. And all of this was in the last 20 miles of my ride today. Just an amazing place. Some of the pictures didn’t turn out that well, especially of the sheep jumping along the side of the cliffs. They were so far away and they are also almost the same color as the rock. Those actually might hve been Stone Sheep but I’ll have to look that up. The scenery was spectacular too.

No problems with water or food but the park manager at Stone Mountain (Peter?) gave me 3 bottles of water when he saw me eye-balling the water pump there. It’s funny how some pumps have signs saying boil the water for 5 minutes and some say 15 minutes. You have to wonder about those 15 minute ones.

I cheated today. For about 6 miles my bike and I sat in the back of a pickup truck as it hauled us down the dusty road. The truck was a pilot vehicle that leads cars/trucks through construction areas. They weren’t letting any bicycles through so I had to take the ride. The six miles won’t show up on my chart thing below since I use the bike computer to track mileage. This was the first time I’ve had to lift my bike up anything higher than a step before. I almost threw my back out lifting it into the back of the pickup. The girl driving couldn’t help because she was 5 months pregnant.

At the Tetsa River Park Lodge I used their wifi connection to get the number for a bike shop in Whitehorse. I called them up and Pierre is going to order me 2 new Kevlar Schawbe tires. It’s about a 10 day ride away from here but it sounded like there’s some risk in them taking longer than that to get to his shop. It would be great if my not-long-for-this-world Continental Touring Plus would hold out that long but I don’t think it’s going to happen. I spent a good part of the day sweet talking it and telling it how powerful and reliable it is hoping that will help. I’m preparing for the inevitable sudden loss of air though. It would be nice to think my tire problems are behind me now that I have 2 on the way but I don’t think that spare I have is going to survive for long if the Touring Plus fails. I’m hoping I can pick up something else in one the small towns I’ll be passing through.

Ran into John and Eddie (www.anchoragefororphans.com) at Tetsa River Park yesterday and saw them off and on throughout the day as they head up the road toward Fairbanks and then down to Anchorage. They are riding a tandem bicycle with a trailer on the back and boy can they haul ass down the road (and its not because the solar panel they mounted on the back is powering a motor). Going uphill I could probably keep up but on the flats or going downhill they were out of sight before I knew it. We split the campsite here at Toad River and tomorrow they’ll be continuing on with their 80-90 mile days. Great guys. They stayed at or rode through the same places I’ve been so it was cool to hear what they thought. They even stayed at the crazy closed down RV Park in Prophet River. The massive tarp in one of the pictures is what they sleep under. Oh to be young and invincible again.

This is probably the nicest tent campground I’ve stayed at on my trip. The grassy tent area has water, electric (under a roof so I can charge batteries at night) and a sink. Good showers close by too. In the lake behind my tent I’ve seen 2 adult moose and a baby moose. I can hear them out there now tromping around in the water. I didn’t realize it before but they eat the grass/weeds growing on the bottom of the lake. I saw one of them with it’s head underwater for at least a couple minutes. I was shocked to see how tall they are too. I’ll have to look this up but the one I saw by the road must have been at least 7 or 8 feet tall at the shoulders.

My poor infected foot hasn’t rotted off yet but it doesn’t look any better and fortunately any worse either. I’ll keep cleaning it and changing bandaids as often as I can.

GPX Track

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 15th, 2009 at 11:39 am and is filed under Leg 1. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.