A Hole in the Wind by David Goodrich

Author:David Goodrich
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pegasus Books
Published: 2017-04-12T04:00:00+00:00

13

COLORADO: THE FORESTS OF CAMERON PASS

A hole in the mountains notched the skyline ahead. On a June morning I leaned the bike up against the Colorado Route 14 sign. The gateway to the Rockies, Cache la Poudre River Canyon—Poudre Canyon to the locals—opened up out of the plains. French trappers had named it back in the 1700s during an early winter snowstorm, when they needed a place to stash their barrels of gunpowder (poudre) for the spring. The snow would be waiting for me a bit higher up, at the head of the canyon, Cameron Pass. Starting at an elevation of a mile, I had another vertical mile to climb with a loaded bike, complete with clothes, camping gear, food, and water. At 10,276 feet, Cameron would be the apex of the ride to Oregon.

In many ways, the ride in the Colorado Rockies had a homecoming feel to it. During college, I had taken time off for a three-week backpacking trip into these mountains as part of the Colorado Outward Bound School. Somewhere in my head, the summer high-altitude choreography of bright blue skies and violent midafternoon storms was still around. The ridgeline sequence of quaking aspen followed by ponderosa and lodgepole pine was familiar.

But things had changed in forty years. Like most of the United States, and the world for that matter, the Rockies have experienced a steady warming. There were many swings about the long-term trend, and this year was one of them. Record winter snows had formed extensive snowpack in the mountains, and the passes had only recently opened up. The snowmelt off the Front Range of the Rockies had led to flooding far out onto the flatlands that spring, with rivers carrying a pulse of melted snow toward the Mississippi and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico. Paradoxically the swollen rivers were flowing right through the drought of Kansas. I was more than ready to get out of the hot winds of the Great Plains and tackle the mountains.

By the time I had reached Poudre Canyon, I had been on the road solo for seven weeks. Each day started without a windshield or a roof, readying for what the skies would throw down. For a cyclist, the major obstacles are electrical storms and wind, and neither of these was insurmountable. With well-tested legs and lungs acclimatized to the altitude, I considered myself well prepared for the climb.

But the day before had been a new kind of obstacle. Echoes of the conversation in Boulder with Ravi’s wife, Rochelle, were nagging at me. Maybe it was the power of suggestion or maybe she had a sixth sense, but two days after our talk I found myself walking out of the Fort Collins hospital with a pocket full of antibiotics for a UTI. Symptoms were modest, but I had no idea of medical facilities up in the high country where I was headed.

Thus an unscheduled rest day came to pass. It gave me another chance to check out a college-town

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.