66.02 mi / 5:42:51 time / 11.5 mph avg. / 25.5 mph max. / 2292 ft. climbing
Staying at East Fork BLM Campground

I was wrong about the Wind Gods yesterday. They weren’t repaying their debts, they were loaning me free wind, and today, they wanted to be paid back. The first section of the day was admittedly a 1000 foot climb over a pass, but I had 25 miles to do it in, so that doesn’t sound too bad. But it took me three hours of riding, at an average speed of 8.5 mph. Oh boy was it brutal. Even when I was headed straight toward a mountain to the north of me, the wind was still blowing fiercely out of the north. Where was it coming from? Straight out of the mountain?

On the way I passed Mt. Borah, the highest point in Idaho, although I’m not exactly sure which one it was (there are a lot of 12,000+ ft. peaks in the area). I’m guessing it was the one I could see some trickles of ice on. It’s interesting that I’ve come within a few miles of the highest points in the states of Illinois, Iowa, South Dakota, and Idaho. I don’t really count Montana, and I’ll be going pretty close to Mt. Hood, which must be the highest point in Oregon. That just leaves Wyoming, which must have the Tetons for the high point. Maybe I should have went there instead of spending an extra day in Yellowstone!

Once I crested that stupid pass, then it was a long downhill towards Challis. The wind must have lightened a little, because I didn’t have to push that hard on the downhill to maintain a decent speed. At one point I went through the surprising Grand View Canyon for a mile or two, which is a really narrow, straight-walled rocky canyon. I guess a river must have run through it at one point, but now there’s just a road. And a lot of graffiti on the rocks, which is weird, because it’s kind of in the middle of nowhere.

Once through the canyon, I could see Challis from miles and miles away. It sits in a big flat valley, completely surrounded by a ring of mountains. Luckily the gas station at the intersection of US 93 and ID 75 (where I would be turning from northwest to southwest) had deli sandwiches (another roast beef that was almost identical to the one in Arco!) and enough groceries so I didn’t have to do the couple extra miles out of my way north to town.

Then I turned southwest and headed up the Salmon River. That meant climbing again, but now I had the wind with me, so it was pretty easy. The entrance to the valley was the narrowest, steepest-walled river valley that I’ve been in (excepting the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, which doesn’t actually have a road running through the bottom). There was a sign telling me to watch out for bighorn sheep on the road, but unfortunately I didn’t see any. Eventually the valley widened, and, as usual, the farmers and ranchers took advantage of every bit of flat ground to create unnatural plots of green in the near-desert conditions.

Hmm, have you noticed that I picked up Backpacker Magazine’s Global Warming Issue yesterday? It basically goes on and on about how all our National Parks are doomed. All the glaciers are going to disappear, and the forests are going to get all crappy. I saw a lot of evidence of mountain pine beetle leaving huge stands of pine trees gray and dead in both the Bighorns and Yellowstone…I don’t know if those particular instances were global-warming fueled (the beetle is infesting much broader areas as temperatures increase), but they sure didn’t look pretty. So if all the stuff I’m writing about and taking pictures of sounds interesting to you, go see it now, before it’s gone!

It seems like just about everyone I’ve talked to in the last few days, including the campground host tonight, has said “Portland? That’s a long way to go!” when I tell them that I’m riding from Chicago to Portland. They seem to completely miss the fact that Chicago to Idaho is over twice as far. I can only guess that it’s because Portland is close enough so they have a fair idea how far away it is, whereas Chicago is some nebulous area in who-the-hell-knows-where.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 9th, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under bike. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.