Be Brave, Be Strong: A Journey Across the Great Divide by Homer Jill

Author:Homer, Jill [Homer, Jill]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Arctic Glass Press
Published: 2011-05-04T22:00:00+00:00

Chapter Fourteen

Heart of Wyoming

The first pass of the day approached 10,000 feet. A stiff blanket of last winter’s snow draped down from granite pinnacles and stretched over open alpine meadows. Deciduous tree branches remained bare in late June. Even the air tasted different in Wyoming, with a cold crispness that masked sweet hints of decay, like a walk-in refrigerator in a butcher’s shop.

The terrain on Togwotee Pass was similar to Richmond Pass — a calm, gradual climb that took Divide riders to their highest elevations yet, continued down the mountain on a smooth road, and then inexplicably veered off the main route into a nearly impassable mess of snow fields, rocky obstacles, and difficult navigation. But I had enjoyed Richmond Pass, so I didn’t feel grumpy when the maps told me I had to turn off the perfectly good, paved surface of Highway 26 and hoist my bicycle up a three-foot-high wall that of snow that covered the alleged Brooks Lake access road, which had been buried since the previous autumn.

I lifted my bike to the top of the snowfield. A single set of footprints and wheel tracks dug a narrow trench down the center of the slushy surface. I wheeled my bike into the tracks and stepped into the footprints. It wasn’t much, but I was grateful that a trail had been broken since the previous day’s melt stripped away all signs of prior passersby. The tracks allowed me to not only walk more easily, but they helped keep my feet dry.

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said out loud, figuring there was a fair chance he wasn’t too far in front of me, although I had started late that morning.

I walked for about a mile when the snowfield started to break up, revealing the dirt below. Saturated with a season’s worth of snowmelt, the road was thickly coated in mud the color and consistency of melted chocolate ice cream. I planted one foot on the mud and slid forward. The slimy surface grabbed my feet and pulled me butt-first into the soup. Growling with frustration, I righted the bike and shoe-skied toward the next island of snow.

As the road descended, the snow patches grew shorter, the mud patches longer, and the slimy soup started to solidify and clump up. The consistency took on the properties of wet cornstarch — that gooey substance used by science teachers to entertain children because it looks like liquid and even drips like liquid, but instantly solidifies to a clay-like hardness under any kind of pressure. The Brooks Lake Road was liquid cornstarch, glistening in the sunlight and clinging to my shoes and wheels until both became stuck in place. I took off my bike gloves and used my fingers to scrape away the clumps wedged between the frame and tires. But I couldn’t wheel my bike more than a few feet before it locked up with mud again. The adobe clumps were taking on reinforcement from dead pine needles, and the mass was rapidly hardening to the impenetrable density of a solid brick.

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