July 12, 2016
An unfortunately brief nap
Day Forty-Two: Hill City, South Dakota to Sturgis, South Dakota
Hill City’s elevation is over 5,000 feet, so it was no surprise that it was cool this morning, and I put on my jacket. After talking to a recumbent cyclist in the motel parking lot, we rode a few hundred feet and got back on the George S. Mickelson Trail.
We climbed for a while, then did a long, fun descent. This section of the trail was away from the highway, and there was some shade, which was nice. We rode through some tunnels and then stopped for a while in the ghost town of Mystic, where we talked to a friendly old man for a while. The conversation inevitably turned to our tires, a subject which continues to fascinate roughly half the people that we meet.
Later, as we followed the trail to the Rochford area, Joy got ahead of me, and as I passed an older couple walking on the trail, the lady shouted out “She left you behind!” Slightly embarrassed by my laziness, I sped up and caught Joy, and we stopped for a few minutes. While we were talking, a group of teenage boys rode toward us in a reckless manner. “There’s 50 of us!” one of them shouted. “Lucky us,” muttered Joy. These were boy scouts, apparently earning their merit badges in bicycling, which (among other things) requires a boy scout to do a fifty-mile bike ride.
We stopped at a trailhead soon after that, and sat around until more boy scouts showed up to eat their sack lunches. Before we left, one boy excitedly yelled “We just rode 50 miles!” His more clued-in friend informed him that they had actually only ridden 22.5 miles, and were at the halfway point. The first boy seemed crestfallen to hear this. Even though I laughed at this exchange, I felt kind of bad for the first kid, because I often underestimate distances on bike rides myself.
The trailhead was only a half mile or so down the road from the tiny community of Rochford (population 25), so we decided to ride over and check it out. This was a fortunate decision, because Rochford contains The Rochford Mall, a snack shop that contained, among other things, ice cream and pizza. We spent about an hour there, eating and talking to a friendly South Dakota family who were riding their bikes on the Mickelson Trail. I enjoyed an unfortunately brief nap after eating 3/4 of a large pizza, before Joy woke me up and told me we had to get going, since it was noon and we had only done about 20 miles. Oh well.
The next hours were pleasant enough, as we continued climbing until we reached the highest point of the Mickelson Trail: 6,240 feet.
Not long after that, we exited the trail onto a gravel road. We had decided not to follow the trail all the way to its endpoint at Deadwood, but instead follow a route that Joy had devised, which would take us via quiet gravel and paved backroads to Sturgis. The Mickelson Trail had been a steady 4% grade, but the first climb on the gravel road was a lot steeper than that, reminiscent of some of the roads in New Mexico and Colorado. (I was surprised and annoyed by this climb, because we needed to drop almost 3,000 feet to get to Sturgis, but as it turned out, most of that descent was in the last four miles.)
There was virtually no traffic on Joy’s route to Sturgis, an undoubtedly huge improvement over the obvious alternative of riding the busy US highway 14 from Deadwood. It was late afternoon when we arrived at the outskirts of the town, famous for its annual motorcycle rally which, incredibly, attracts hundreds of thousands of people every August. We stopped first at a gas station / Arby’s, where I ate one bite of a disgusting sandwich before handing it to Joy to finish, and then started calling motels. Sturgis was a shockingly expensive place to stay, even a month before the motorcycle rally. There was only one sub-$100 motel in town, but I rejected it as just too depressing, and we checked into the surprisingly nice Super 8 instead.
We each did our respective chores (laundry for me, food shopping for Joy), then we went to bed at a reasonable hour, as usual. It was about 180 miles to the next town with anything much at all, the state capital Pierre, which, I had learned earlier today, is pronounced “peer.”
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Today's ride: 66 miles (106 km)
Total: 1,659 miles (2,670 km)
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