June 30, 2016
“Are you a mountain man again, Mr. Grizzly?”
Day Thirty: Salida, Colorado to Hartsel Springs Ranch
I kinda hated to leave Salida, which was my favorite town of this trip. I had over-indulged and eaten way, way too much yesterday, which led to what I will call “stomach trouble” that I suffered from all day. And it was going to be a long day, with no services for the roughly fifty miles between Salida and the tiny community of Hartsel, which, I remembered from my big coast-to-coast bike trip ten years ago, consisted of a bar and restaurant and not much else.
After a couple of miles of pavement leaving town, we got on a steep, winding dirt road that, at least for the first several miles, was alright but not especially scenic. For some reason I was surprised by the steepness of the road, despite the multiple Great Divide accounts I’d read describing the grade. Maybe it seemed worse because I’d grown soft and fat on my day off in Salida.
About 2/3 of the way up the mountain I had to make the first of the day’s several trips into the woods to attend to an urgent personal matter, something I hadn’t had to resort to for a while. “Are you a mountain man again, Mr. Grizzly?” my not-annoying-at-all wife asked when I returned from my visit to the woods. Early in the trip when I was growing the beard I had jokingly asked Joy to call me “Grizzly”, after the lavishly-bearded “Grizzly Adams” character in a movie from decades ago, and from then on she had occasionally called me “Mr. Grizzly”, something that I didn’t like, but tolerated.
We finally got to the top of the climb, descended down a more narrow dirt road, and then rode into a giant open basin. After fording a creek, which required us to remove all my panniers and carry them, and the bike, across the water, we saw a couple of racers. One of them didn’t slow down at all as he shouted “How many miles to Salida?!” After I answered, “21”, Joy said “That man needs a hamburger!”
The basin was very scenic, but after a few hours we rode into a less pretty area that was marred by tiny, fenced-in lots, upon which people had haphazardly parked small trailers, boats, etc. There were many, many “subdivision road” kinda signs next to dirt roads that led off to nowhere (except for the occasional trailer), and we speculated that someone had planned for a massive development that never worked out, and these lots were now being sold cheaply to people who could not afford to actually build houses on the sites. Around this time we were annoyed by an increase in fast-moving pickup trucks that threw up dust as they sped by. Back in New Mexico, this didn’t happen much; drivers often slowed down when they saw us, so as not to coat us with dirt. Frankly, this section had a pretty redneck feeling to it.
Mid-afternoon we exited the dirt road and turned onto a paved Colorado highway, part of the TransAmerica Trail, which led us in a few miles to Hartsel, a small village that I’d visited back in 2006 on the bike. We walked into what appeared to be the only open business, a grimy bar and restaurant, and talked to a couple of dudes riding the TransAmerica route east-to-west. Joy ordered some food, but all I felt like eating was a piece of pie, which the bartender, who was avidly discussing some sort of global conspiracy theory with a couple of locals, told me was apple, but was, when I received it, clearly PEACH pie. Despite the false advertising, I ate it without complaint, since it was pretty good.
We enjoyed talking to the young guy doing the TransAmerica Trail, who, in very unconventional fashion, was riding a naked road bike and carrying everything in large bag on his back. He had some interesting ideas about bike touring. For example, he told us that when he was finished for the day, he sometimes just found a section of road with a guardrail, and went to bed on the ground on the other side of the guardrail because it was “usually pretty flat over there.” I literally cannot imagine a place less conducive to sleep, but then I’m 50 years old, not 22 like that guy.
Our map said that Hartsel allowed camping in their town park, but when I asked the conspiracy-theorist bartender about that he flatly stated that “Those maps contain some serious misrepresentations”, and pointed to a small patch of unappealing ground near the highway that was apparently the designated cyclist camping area in Hartsel. No way were we camping there (although a young, female solo rider who had arrived earlier was bravely planning to do it.) Instead we rode a couple of miles off-route to a ranch / lodge, where I negotiated a pretty good cash discount on a fancy room in the large, nearly-empty place. (The only other guest was an extremely interesting older man named Floyd, a tree expert who told us about his job “inventorying” forests, an occupation we had never heard of.)
There was no food at the lodge, so we ate some snacks for dinner. Tomorrow we had another high (11,000+ foot) pass to ride up and over, and the forecast was for rain.
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Today's ride: 50 miles (80 km)
Total: 999 miles (1,608 km)
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4 months ago