Divided And United

Breakfast in Whitefish was a mixture of sadness and pleasure in roughly equal measure. I ordered monstrous pancakes and, with what I considered real cunning, worked a well into the middle of the stack deep enough to hold a proper pool of maple syrup for dunking. Appetites satisfied, it was time to ride, and this was where Flavia split from us.

Thankfully the evening ahead was just what my spirits needed. Rather fittingly, on the day I said goodbye to one riding partner, I was reunited with another: Cooper, from the TransAm, was driving home to Minneapolis and stopped through — I’d stayed with his sister Elsie back then, which felt like a lifetime ago. It reminded me that this summer I had already caught up with Wim and Joe as well; not a bad record for keeping hold of people met on the road.

Coop met us at a bar in Poulsen with his friend Alan, and we had a great night on beer and pizza, mostly spent catching up and laughing hard over old stories from Virginia and Kentucky.

We said our goodbyes to Coop and Alan, who joked about the long, easy mileage waiting for them in the car. Eal and I left town on a wonderful bike path that ran for a good twenty miles before narrowing into a road carrying heavy traffic. The mountain range on our left held the eye the whole way, and I couldn’t help thinking about the mountain bikers out there somewhere, riding the Divide along its spine — mad enterprise.

Another flat found me about fifteen miles before Missoula, the usual small sharp stone working its way through rubber and kevlar. The tyre was worn enough that it needed replacing outright, and luckily Missoula has something like six bike shops. Once in town we made straight for the Adventure Cycling office, where we were given the warmest of welcomes: a full tour of the new building, our photograph taken for the hall of fame, and a long chat with co-founder Greg Siple, who eventually weighed our loaded bikes on his fish-hook scale. Both came out almost identical, at eighty-eight pounds apiece. Greg also arranged for us to appear on the local college radio show, One for the Road, on our rest day.

That evening my phone chose to melt itself in my hand, so after dropping the bikes at a shop we walked several miles to a repair place, which pronounced it beyond saving. They had a decent stock of second-hand handsets, though, and I came away with a replacement that would take my SIM card. The radio show that night was great fun — we talked travel and the trip and even got to pick some music. Kevin the DJ joined us in a bar afterwards to swap more stories; he had covered plenty of ground of his own.

Car bonnet tripod…

Incredible bike path.

Missoula is a fine town, and Saturday morning meant a farmers market right outside the Adventure Cycling headquarters. But it was time to get back on the road, with a steady, gentle climb up to Lolo Pass ahead of us. I knew it was gentle because I had ridden this stretch before on the TransAm, and was glad of the chance to ride it again. Early headwinds gave way once we were in among the mountains, and it was beautiful forest riding all the way up to the pass, which also marks the Idaho state line and the crossing into the Pacific time zone. An hour gained, we dropped down the other side for ten glorious, fast miles to our camp for the night behind the small store at the Lochsa Lodge. A fellow Brit called Richard, heading the other way, joined us there, and we shared a few beers in the lodge bar after a campstove dinner.

Let’s go Idaho!

Breakfast at the Lochsa Lodge the next morning was every bit as good as I remembered it. The view from the window was a little more troubling: forest fires had been bad in the area recently, and Highway 12, which would carry us all day, had nearly been closed the day before when the active fire came within a quarter mile of the road.

I set out first, knowing we had a gently downhill ninety-mile day ahead with very limited services. Forty-five miles in I stopped for the first time as the smoke began stinging my eyes and settling on my chest. A woman leaving the lodge had told me it would be bad for fifteen miles and then clear, which is why I kept riding through it for so long, but it never quite let up. It wasn’t until around twenty-five miles before Kooskia that the air felt clean again. Every stitch of my clothing smelled as though it had spent the day hanging over a coal fire. Eal and I finally synced up just before Kooskia and pitched our tents under a small park shelter — I remembered from an earlier trip that the sprinklers there lay hidden everywhere, so the grass was off limits for the night.

That is thick smoke, not fog…

Finally leaving the smoke behind.

Kooskia