May 23, 2002

distances in km.

May 23, 2002

Idaho!

I’m happy to report that Montana has been triathled!

Whew! Another long one – my second near century (100 mile bike ride) in a four days. 151 km today in 10.5 hours. I woke up at 7:00 am to 3 inches of fresh snow on the ground! While guests at the GH Guesthouse Hotel I stayed at in Dillon were scrapping their windshields, and warming up their cars, I was taking full advantage of my free breakfast. I was on the road by 8:00 am wearing almost every single stitch of clothing I brought.

The countryside is getting much prettier and vehicular traffic on my interstate is slowly disappearing. I saw plenty of wildlife today: A moose, about a thousand whitetail deer, a fox, bison, vultures eating something really big and dead, and two really cool birds that I have never seen before. One had a black nose cone painted on its nose like a cruise missile, and the other looked like a stork. I was lucky to catch most of the wild life including the two mystery birds in the following photo. If you recognize these birds, please let me know what they are. As soon as you see the photo, I am certain that it will be obvious to some of you.

I spent almost the entire day climbing all 6800 feet of Molina pass to cross the continental divide for the second time this trip. (I know what you want to know – yes, I did).

I made a quick stop for food and water at Lima, Montana on the way up. Like Lima’s sister city in Peru, it’s way up in the clouds – probably the highest elevation town in the state of Montana. And check out Bill Briggs for Sheriff. Does this guy look like he should be Sheriff of a small Montana town or what? I’m coming back so I can vote for him.

At about 3:00 pm, I finally reached the top which is also the Idaho state border. I celebrated reaching Idaho by putting my Canadian flag on the trike and eating my dingdongs that I picked up in Lima.

Shortly after descending down into Idaho, the mountains suddenly disappeared and I was in the plains! It was really strange – not foothills, no gradual fading of the mountains. I rounded a corner and I was on this great flat plateau where I could see forever. It was a really strange feeling spending the last week being surrounded by mountains on all sides of me to suddenly be in the flat and open parries.

I’m afraid my running on this trip might be done. My right ankle/tibia is really sore right now. I can bearly walk on it and I’m afraid if I run any more I may risk my performance in Ironman on June 8. So, I’ll rest it for a couple of days, and we’ll see how it feels. If it’s better in a couple of days, I’ll do a short 10k run, and if that goes OK, I’ll add no more than 10k of running per day until Provo. It’s unfortunate because I really enjoy a running break in the middle of a cycling day – it really tends to break the monotony of the constant spinning.