DAY ONE
It is highly inadvisable to begin a bike tour on Labor Day. This is doubly so if you happen to live up in the Rocky Mountains, where the hordes of gray-haired vacationers driving mammoth RVs cannot be avoided due to the dearth of roads the United States government has seen fit to pave over high mountain passes.
Basically, the realities of Labor Day are entirely at odds with what one needs to experience on the first day of a bike tour. Specifically, one needs some sort of affirmation from nature that the decision to haul oneself and oneself’s camping gear over 11,000 foot passes for six days straight was somehow based in sound and rational logic, not sheer madness cloaked in old-fashioned, All-American poor planning.
We started out in Poncha Springs for reasons that are far too boring and inconsequential to get into here. The important thing is that our decision to start in Poncha Springs was one element in what people who are wholly responsible for dire situations and colossal fuck-ups like to refer to as “a perfect storm” - that is, any confluence of more than two factors that work against the success of a given plan. The idea is to make the hopeless situation (that is primarily the fault of the person who is mired in said situation) appear to be the act of an angry and irrational god.
The best example of this would be the book (and film) The Perfect Storm, wherein several fishermen from northern Massachusetts, in an act of desperation, set out to fishing grounds in some of the most hazardous waters in the world right around the time the weather in that area was gearing up to be its usually horrible self. That’s not how the producers would have you summarize the story, but it also happens to be the most accurate way to do it.
Anyways, the other elements of our perfect storm were a comically inaccurate map provided for bicyclists by the Colorado Department of Transportation, my shockingly low level of reading comprehension when interpreting said map and my decision to attempt this bike tour with my ten-speed Japanese road bike.*
The result of this was a rather sizable gap between expectations and reality. Instead of a leisurely first day with the comfort of four-plus feet of shoulder (as the map assured us) and no major climbs (as I somehow missed the 11,361 foot Monarch Pass on the map), we were faced with miles of six percent grade on nonexistent shoulders and near-constant brushes with death via confused and slow-to-react Shriners piloting four-ton death machines. Those whose synapses were still firing fast enough to comprehend both Rush Limbaugh and the world around them might have witnessed a certain twentysomething wearing a neon green Jeonbuk Hyundai Motors jersey (Pride of Motherfucking Asia!) totally throwing a two-year-old’s bitch fit on the side of the road.
In conclusion, it is not okay, under any circumstances, for a human being to either own or operate a recreational vehicle.
That is, if they had managed to witness such sartorial and behavioral excellence before they crested Monarch Pass and continued west. After the crest, the mood brightened considerably, only to be occasionally darkened by the occasional sustained gust of wind from directly out west. The idea came to eventually right down a sort of journal of what transpired on the trip as mile after mile passed and we neared Gunnison, a city that you have never visited and most likely never will.
We ended the first day of riding through insane traffic over beautiful mountains with a few beers with a fellow biker we met on the road who just so happened to grow up right down the street from where 19centuryman was born. After hearing the story of our day, he left us with, “Just so you know, the second day of a tour is always the worst.”
*Roughly eleven speeds too few, one might say.
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