Day 48: Riding The Storm

We doubled back to last night’s place in Walden for breakfast, which came with the bonus of wifi, so I caught up on some overdue blogging before setting out on what would end up a seventy-mile day. It wasn’t long into the ride before I realised we’d be dodging storms yet again — clouds pillowing up dark and fast above us, looking uglier by the minute.

This thing chased me like the black smoke of LOST

Things didn’t turn properly ugly until we reached the Wyoming state line. I set the camera up, waited for Terry to catch up and snap the picture, and the rain started falling the instant the shutter went. I put my head down and rode hard, determined to outrun the worst of it, and caught only the storm’s outer edge before pulling off the road and hiding under my tent. Terry arrived soaked through a little while later, just as the rain finally let up.

State No.7 Yeeeeehaaaaaaw!

On the edge.

Trail Mix disaster at the worst possible time.

The storm kept teasing us the whole way into Riverside — every time I glanced back it looked like it was swallowing Terry whole. We stopped there to eat and fell in with a group of eastbounders who told us about the hot springs waiting in Saratoga, our destination for the night. Unlike the ones back in Hot Sulphur Springs, these, mercifully, were free.

The last twenty miles into Saratoga passed under calmer skies, and once we arrived we followed the signs to the town’s Hobo Pool. The springs sat right alongside the municipal swimming pool — a fancier-looking section by the river was already full, so we settled for the standard end instead. Easing in took a good few minutes, ankle to knee to waist before I finally submerged, and Wyoming, it turns out, has no shortage of this kind of geothermal generosity — Yellowstone, the most famous of them, was still about a week up the road. The heat was almost too much, and once I was fully in, my whole body buzzed with it. I boiled for around ten minutes before retreating, thoroughly rejuvenated, to the showers.

We found the lakeside campground in town for three-fifty each. My tent, still damp from doubling as a storm shield that morning, went up in a nearby tree to dry while Terry cooked pasta with pesto. The sunset over the lake was one of the finest of the trip, and I watched the whole thing sink below the horizon before turning in wearing very nearly every piece of clothing I owned — determined not to repeat the last time we’d camped this high up.